Category: Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

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Geo-Engineering: Be Very Afraid — Atrocities Advance

07 Other Atrocities, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, IO Impotency, Key Players, Policies, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Real Time, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
John Vidal

Geo-engineering: green versus greed in the race to cool the planet

Critics fear that manipulating weather patterns could have a calamitous effect on poorer countries

The Observer,

Phi Beta Iota:  This really excellent article is highly recommended along with a look at the only book in English out just now, Geo-Engineering Climate Change: Environmental Necessity or Pandora's Box?.  The fragmentation of knowledge, the corruption of governments and industry, and the abuse of secrecy to conceal the real dimensions of earthquake and tsunami creating technologies–High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program or HAARP being one set–all suggest that precautionary science has been set aside, and catastrophic initiatives are being undertaken on a foundation of very inadequate understanding.  This is the kind of global challenge and response that should be within the purview of a Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2) Centre that can be relied upon to produce “The Virgin Truth.”

 

Safety Copy Below the Line

Continue reading “Geo-Engineering: Be Very Afraid — Atrocities Advance”

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A Case for NOT Reducing Federal Debt?

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, True Cost
Chuck Spinney Recommends...

Can the US Have an Expansionary Fiscal Contraction?

All  … the attached essay was written by Simon Johnson, Ronald Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship, MIT Sloan School of Management; Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics; and co-founder of Baseline Scenario.  Johnson used to be Chief Economist of IMF and is, IMO, one of the sanest voices in economics. It summarizes his recent testimony to the Joint Economic Commitee of Congress.  The question is — Should we reduce federal debt to slow the build up of private debt?  He lays out 4 reasons why such a contractionary fiscal policy will create even worse problems.

Click on Image to Enlarge

His penultimate paragraph places the real issue — who is going to pay for the liquidation of the private bubble (see chart below, which I compiled from Fed. Reserve data) into context (the red typing is mine to clarify the ambiguity in his double use of debt).  Also, I urge you to read his testimony (you can download it from the link indicated below) — it is more detailed and he has a brief discussion about how the cost of the financial meltdown (looming private debt liquidations — particularly the bubbles of debt in the financial and household sectors — which Fig 2 shows has not really begun to bite) are being shifted to the middle class.  Note, the rise in the light gray area in Figure 1 is the spike in federal debt that has taken place since the meltdown.

Chuck

The Baseline Scenario

What happened to the global economy and what we can do about it

Could The US Have An “Expansionary Fiscal Contraction”?

By Simon Johnson.  My full written testimony to Tuesday’s hearing of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress is available here.

The US has a large budget deficit and a debt-to-GDP ratio that, in most projections, continues to rise over time.  Some House and Senate Republicans are arguing strongly that this situation calls for large and immediate cuts to government spending, for example as part of any agreement to increase the federal government’s debt ceiling.

The Joint Economic Committee of Congress held a hearing on Tuesday to discuss whether such spending cuts would be “contractionary” or “expansionary” for the economy in the short-run.  My assessment, after participating as a witness at the hearing, is that large immediate spending cuts would tend to slow the economy (a webcast of the hearing is here).

Read full posting….

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David Brooks Doth Protest–Not Nearly Enough!

07 Other Atrocities, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Policies, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
DefDog Recommends....

Pundit Under Protest

By

New York Times, June 13, 2011

I’ll be writing a lot about the presidential election over the next 16 months, but at the outset I would just like to remark that I’m opining on this whole campaign under protest. I’m registering a protest because for someone of my Hamiltonian/National Greatness perspective, the two parties contesting this election are unusually pathetic. Their programs are unusually unimaginative. Their policies are unusually incommensurate to the problem at hand.

The election is happening during a downturn in the economic cycle, but the core issue is the accumulation of deeper structural problems that this recession has exposed — unsustainable levels of debt, an inability to generate middle-class incomes, a dysfunctional political system, the steady growth of special-interest sinecures and the gradual loss of national vitality.

The number of business start-ups per capita has been falling steadily for the past three decades. Workers’ share of national income has been declining since 1983. Male wages have been stagnant for about 40 years. The American working class — those without a college degree — is being decimated, economically and socially. In 1960, for example, 83 percent of those in the working class were married. Now only 48 percent are.

Read complete article–devastating, but not nearly enough so…..

See Also:

Seven Promises to America–Who Will Do This?

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Bio-War via Food: US Attacking Germany/Europe?

Commerce, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Technologies

Forensic evidence emerges that European e.coli superbug was bioengineered to produce human fatalities

Monday, June 06, 2011
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com

EXTRACT:

Although the actual process is more complicated than this, the upshot is that creating a strain of e.coli that's resistant to eight classes of antibiotics requires repeated, sustained expose to those antibiotics. It is virtually impossible to imagine how this could happen all by itself in the natural world. For example, if this bacteria originated in the food (as we've been told), then where did it acquire all this antibiotic resistance given the fact that antibiotics are not used in vegetables?

When considering the genetic evidence that now confronts us, it is difficult to imagine how this could happen “in the wild.” While resistance to a single antibiotic is common, the creation of a strain of e.coli that's resistant to eight different classes of antibiotics — in combination — simply defies the laws of genetic permutation and combination in the wild. Simply put, this superbug e.coli strain could not have been created in the wild. And that leaves only one explanation for where it really came from: the lab.

Read full article…

Tip of the Hat to the Gold Warriors from Asia….

Comment from another of the Gold Warriors in Asia:

The laboratory engineering of the e.coli bacteria so that it will kill humans fits perfectly into the scenario I described in an earlier email. Germany, Spain and farmers in other EU countries were humiliated and lost many millions in produce and labor. Therefore it fits into a scenario where the EU is being weakened. The primary beneficiary is the USA. Therefore the Pharmacological/Chemical cartel in the USA probably did the engineering, and the purpose is to further weaken the EU at a time when the dollar is dying (or already dead).  Notice how all the major news media is talking about thhe Euro collapsing and the EU fragmenting, when they really should be talking about the USZ dollar being dead and America survives on a life-support system of fraud, lying, military interventions, and Ponzi schemes at the top banks.Comment and See Also Below the Line.

Continue reading “Bio-War via Food: US Attacking Germany/Europe?”

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Doc Searls on user-driven democracy

07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Computer/online security, Corporations, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Cyberscams, malware, spam, Government, InfoOps (IO), IO Sense-Making, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Privacy, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Technologies, Tools
Jon Lebkowsky Bio

Doc Searls on user-driven democracy

by jonl

Speaking at the 2011 Personal Democracy Forum, Doc talks about how power relationships work in markets vs how they should  and could work. Markets are conversations, and they should be symmetrical conversations. Note his bit about how the language of marketing parallels the language of slavery….and the part where all their cookies end up giving them 50% completely wrong information.

Doc is the co-author of the Clue-Train Manifesto.

Direct Link to Personal Democracy Video

See Also:

48 Recordings on Tap from Personal Democracy 2011

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TED: John Perry Barlow on Collective Consciousness

02 Diplomacy, 03 Economy, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Augmented Reality, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Officers Call, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Technologies, TED Videos
John Perry Barlow

TEDxMarin – John Perry Barlow – The Right to Know

16:56

Phi Beta Iota: This is classic Barlow, totally new fresh look, a moving and deeply engaging personal monologue on where we are, where we are going.

“Thought is not a noun to be owned, it is a verb, an action.”

“Copyright is the wrong model for monetizing thinking.”

See Also:

Electronic Frontier Foundation

1992 Barlow (US) Information Wants to Be Free

Review: The Virtual Community–Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier

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How IGNORING Warnings on Off-Shoring Killed USA

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Sense-Making, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Chuck Spinney Recommends...

Nobel Laureate: Globalism Has Been Ruinous for Americans

How Offshoring Has Destroyed the Economy

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, Counterpunch, 31 May 2011

These are discouraging times, but once in a blue moon a bit of hope appears. I am pleased to report on the bit of hope delivered in March of 2011 by Michael Spence, a Nobel prize-winning  economist, assisted by Sandile Hlatshwayo, a researcher at New York University. The two economists have taken a careful empirical look at jobs offshoring and concluded that it has ruined the income and employment prospects for most Americans.

To add to the amazement, their research report, “The Evolving Structure of the American Economy and the Employment Challenge,” was published by the very establishment Council on Foreign Relations.

For a decade I have warned that US corporations, pressed by Wall Street and large retailers such as Wal-Mart, to move offshore their production for US consumer markets, were simultaneously moving offshore US GDP, US tax base, US consumer income, and irreplaceable career opportunities for American citizens.

Among the serious consequences of offshoring are

  • the dismantling of the ladders of upward mobility that made the US an “opportunity society,”
  • an extraordinary worsening of the income distribution, and
  • large trade and federal budget deficits that cannot be closed by normal means. These deficits now threaten the US dollar’s role as world reserve currency.

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota: Everything killing the USA today was properly briefed to the  Senate and the White House in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's.  The missing ingredient was INTEGRITY on the part of the listeners.  Intelligence without integrity is irrelevant; integrity without intelligence is dangerously uninformed.