Journal: Out of Touch with Reality III

Chuck Spinney Sends… America’s diplomatic recipe for winning the hearts and minds of “furriners” in the 21st Century: Mix –  Blind unreasoning fear with the Domestic politics of privatizing embassy protection and the Domestic politics of huge construction contracts into neat grand-strategic soufflé, then bake it in the domestic political-economic oven of heated by the coals of the …

Worth a Look: Dark Mission–The Secret History of NASA

Recommended Review for a Re-Framing of NASA This review is from the perspective of a former NASA Manned Spaceflight Controller, so it is more technical than expository. I first encountered Hoagland’s claims through the NASA Technical Alert Briefing viewed by many controllers at the Johnson Space Center in 1989-90, found his claims creditable, and then …

Journal: Electronic Voting Fraud, Failure, & Foolishness

Sequoia Voting Systems hacks self in foot by Mokurai Tue Oct 20, 2009 Sequoia Voting Systems has inadvertently released the SQL (Structured Query Language) code for its voting databases. The existence of such code appears to violate Federal voting law. Read the announcement after the jump, just as received on the Open Voting Consortium mailing …

Review: The Secret Sentry–The Untold History of the National Security Agency

by Matthew M. Aid. Bloomsbury, 423 pp., $30.00 REVIEW BY James Bamford The New York Review of Books (5 November 2009) Pre-released in The Huffington Post (Full Review Here) Bamford on Detail, Steele on Impact–Solid Five Stars October 17, 2009 Phi Beta Iota: James Bamford is without peer in his understanding of the NSA. He …