War on Terror and War on Drugs actually a war on individual civil liberties. And for this [and the bloated defense/intelligence pork fest] we borrow one trillion a year?
Events like the one in the above video have been far too common in the police response to Occupy protests across the country. I do believe that Occupy Wall Street is at a tipping point, and that it must grow beyond and evolve away from the tent city occupations, but this police response is absurd and excessive.
Arrests exceeding 250 people followed protests in New York City yesterday. All across the country, cops are cracking down on protesters with force. I may be a critic of Occupy Wall Street, but the police are public servants, and public servants have no business treating the public this way.
William Ury is on a campaign to mark the path, which will run through several countries of the Middle East, an whose route will follow in the footsteps of the patriarch Abraham.
By Moshe Gilad
HAARETZ.com, 16 November 2011
EXTRACT:
The Abraham Path, which is now being marked, begins in Haran and meanders its way to the city Gaziantep. From there, it continues southward, crosses the border into Syria and wends its way to Aleppo. The path then moves south, passing through Damascus before crossing the border into the kingdom of Jordan and the city Amman. At that point it crosses over to Jericho in the Palestinian Authority, and then to Nablus, Jerusalem and Hebron, where Abraham was buried. Additional offshoots of the path follow Abraham's journeys through Iraq and Israel.
. . . . .
Click on Image to Enlarge
The route is approximately 1,200 kilometers long. The Harvard team is aware that very few people will ever hike its entire length, but in a telephone interview with Haaretz, Ury clarifies that the intent is to create among visitors to the Middle East a profound cultural experience and a familiarization with the local culture, the residents, the landscapes and the regional tradition. “Hospitality is one of the greatest legacies that our culture received from Abraham,” he says, “and when you hike or drive along the path, you feel it every day, in the best possible way.”
A tool for conflict resolution
Ury himself has twice travelled the entire route, from Haran to Hebron, and his travels have left in him a deep impression, he says. His great expertise is conflict and crisis resolution. Development of the Abraham Path is, in his opinion, a tool for resolution of the prolonged crisis in the Middle East.
For entities around the globe, identifying potential fraud and corruption activities in large volumes of data has historically been difficult and quite costly. More often than not, the rich insights within that data may be difficult to identify by traditional means and remain hidden.
Against this backdrop, practitioners are turning to visual analytic tools and techniques. Graphically representing and exploring data can bring clarity to executives’ concerns and to performance improvement opportunities.
Visual analytics tools and techniques, including social networking diagrams, link analysis, geospatial analysis and tree maps, can help to focus investigations on particular activities and connect disparate pieces of information to form a cohesive story. Entities should consider equipping their personnel to employ these techniques to meet the growing challenge of reducing corruption, fraud, waste and abuse in the enterprise.
Download the PDF below to learn more. Two versions are provided to accommodate your viewing preferences: a standard version for printing and a screen version for reading on your computer or mobile device.
Phi Beta Iota: This is not new–they are roughly fifteen years behind Dr. Bert Little, who pioneered this work for the Department of Agriculture, virtually eradicating crop insurance fraud ($4 million invested stopped $80 million a year in fraud). Dr. Little received a Golden Candle Award at OSS '94 and continues to do extraordinary detection of corruption with clever computing across the Texas A&M University System.
It is difficult for any intelligent moral citizen to stand by and watch their country self-destruct. Between the ideological idiots on the extreme right and the mere idiots on the extreme left, America is in a pickle. Elsewhere I have posited a solution for 2012.
Here I am obliged, from a sense of duty to the Republic that has been betrayed by our serving flag officers and senior executives, to point to and then demolish a book that is beneath contempt among real professionals, but all the rage among the loosely-educated and macho-shit crowd–this sadly includes a number of ranking Special Operations Force (SOF) officers that should know better. It came out in early 2010 and crap from this book is now making the rounds among the wing-nuts of the right and the uniformed officers that have never actually done any form of successful clandestine intelligence or counterintelligence. I refer to Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama is Inviting the Next Attack.
Here is a copy of the garbage that is circulating now via email among military officers:
Some background on this old report…..this conference has been going on for some time, fluctuates between Garmisch and Moscow…The US has offered to host it but has been consistently turned down. China showed up two years ago and the next conference (2012) is scheduled to be in Beijing…..if the US cannot, with is efforts in technological development, host a cyber conference it is indicative of what the rest of the world thinks of us….
As Washington airs plans for a new “cyber command,” a top Russian official discusses the threat of cyberweapons.
Phi Beta Iota: The lack of intelligence and integrity in the US Government is chillingly deep, especially within the US secret intelligence, and nowhere more irresponsible than within the National Security Agency/US Cyber-Command – both oxymorons. The Chinese are all over NSA and Cyber is not a Command.
From Oakland, California to New York City, the police, ordered by politicians, have smashed through Occupy encampments. Noted for their rigorous non-violence and orderly arrangements – tents with medical assistance, legal aid, libraries, media relations and sanitation controls – the Occupy protestors are being shoved out of their public places all over the country.
The Mayor of Oakland admitted to the BBC in an interview that mayors, police and other security officials have been in contact with each other regarding how to deal with the removal of the protestors, including an 18 mayor conference call she participated in recently.
The police power is always the first response to a mobilized citizen action that refuses to go away. Even a protest against corporate greed and governmental complicity shattering the economy and millions of livelihoods, which has widespread support by the American people, faces police intervention.
