SchwartzReport: Lies, More Lies, Still More Lies, Then Some More Lies…

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government
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When your government lies to you over and over, as is the case in the U.S. today, the result is a loss of faith in the institutions of the state. I saw this happening in the old Soviet Union. People openly talked about how nothing the government said could be trusted. At the time it struck me as a very dangerous trend. Now it is happening here. This statement by the National Institute on Drug Abuse is an exa! mple. It is deceitful and dishonest in intent, and in fact, and the Obama Administration should be ashamed of itself. The lying that is coming out of the administration on in everything from national security to Marijuana is a disgrace. Click through to see some a very good compendium of actual facts.

Federal Drug Agency Denies Marijuana Is Less Toxic Than Alcohol
ROBIN WILKEY – The Huffington Post

This is a very serious issue that is getting almost no coverage in corporate media. Given its implications this is quite revealing of the state of American media. I have been digging into this for the past couple of weeks, and I am still unclear whether articles like this are alarmist, or an accurate representation of! what is going on. But one thing is clear, this is a major issue and appears to be a critical step in the rise of the Non-geographical corporate State's acquisition of power.   A world without democracy, ruled by a technocratic elite serving the interests of US and global capital – protecting “investor rights” against national laws and regulations – is now being created in secret negotiations over free-trade treaties, one of which, the TransPacific Parnership (TPP), may be sewn up this fall. Can popular will stop it?

NAFTA on Steroids: The TransPacific Partnership and Global Neoliberalism
CLIFF DURAND, Research Associate, Center for Global Justice and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Morgan State – Truthout

One of the more interesting trends going on right now as the decision by the Millenials to abandon Christianity. I think this is happening because the Theocratic Right lives in a realm of fantasy that Millenials can see is utterly bogus — 6,000 year old Earth, inerrant Bible, Creationism, and Clima! te Denierism.

Hemant Mehta on Rising Atheism Among Millenials: ‘It’s not That Christianity Is Unpopular, It’s That It’s Untrue
GEORGE CHIDI – The Raw Story

Here is some good news about the anti-GMO movement with which I am in complete agreement (See my esssay, The Great Experiment: Genetically Modified Organisms, Scientific Integrity, and National Wellness.)

Big Food Stocks and Anti-GMO Sentiment: The Right to Choose Movement Gains Strength
MINYANVILLE – NASDAQ

NIGHTWATCH: Sanctioning the Pakistani Training Schools for Suicide Terrorists

09 Terrorism
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US-Pakistan: The US Treasury on Tuesday set economic sanctions on a Pakistan Islamic school it branded a ‘terrorist training center' supporting al-Qaida and the Taliban. The Treasury said the Ganj madrassah in Peshawar was being used as a training and recruiting base by two militant groups, as well as the radical Lashkar-e-Taiba blamed for the November 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people.

Special comment: NightWatch has observed during the last 12 years that anti-terrorist initiatives have seldom targeted recruitment and indoctrination of youth in the processes of terrorism. The main thrust has been on decapitation, which is never a permanent solution to terrorism, and on total destruction of terrorist groups which is always impossible.

Attacks on the reproductive systems of Islamic terrorism require pressure on madrassahs and specific rabble-rousing imams in order to dissuade Muslim kids from embracing violent jihad. The reproductive subsystems of a terrorist organization are always poorly protected and, thus, vulnerable to disruption at low cost. This self-evident truth seems to have been lost on Western counter-terror targeteers and analysts.

Numerous attacks in Afghanistan, for example, have been executed with the assistance and resources of jihadis trained at madrassahs in Pakistan. A madrassah in Multan, Pakistan, for years has maintained connections with several madrassahs in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, for the purpose of supplying suicide bombers and violent jihadis, according to published Afghan police interrogation reports. Suicide bombings in Afghanistan tend to be an international enterprise, invariably rooted in Pakistan.

Little attention has been paid to disrupting the reproductive/recruitment building blocks of violent jihadism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Madrassahs in the heart of Pakistan are at least as anti-American as those in Peshawar, but receive little attention. Those in Peshawar always have links to the more prosperous mosque communities in eastern Pakistan. Sanctions on a madrassah in Peshawar are a good start , but only a start.

Neutering a living system by disrupting its ability to regenerate and to reproduce is a permanent solution to an infection, such as terrorism. Bravo for the US Treasury Department; it needs to do more quickly.

Stephen E. Arnold: Google — A Losing Battle for Relevance

IO Impotency, IO Technologies
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Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

Google: A Losing Battle for Relevance

I wrote a feature for Beyond Search which summarized the relevance problems for the query “ocr programs.” You can find that article at http://goo.gl/aBDjyI. The main point is that an average user would find links to crapware, flawed software, or irrelevant information. But Google was not the only offender. Bing and Yandex returned results almost as frustrating to me as Google’s output.

You may know that indexing the Web is expensive, technically challenging, and filled with pitfalls. Over the years, Web indexing systems which depend on advertising to pay the bills have walked a knife edge. On one side, are spoofers who want to exploit free visibility in a search results list. On the other side are purists like me who expect a search and retrieval system to return results which are objective and conform to standard tests such as those for precision and recall.

The Web indexes try to balance the two sides while calculating furiously how to keep traffic up, revenues growing, and massaging the two sides to remain faithful to Google. For those looking for free visibility, Google wants to offer an advertising option in the event that a site drops or disappears from a results list. For the inner librarians, Google has to insist that results are indeed relevant to the users.

I am okay with distorted results. I am okay with the search engine optimization folks who charge large sums to spoof Google. I am okay with librarians who grouse about the lack of date filtering and advanced search operations. I am pretty much okay with the state of search.

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4th Media: Latin America Condemns US Espionage at United Nations Security Council

Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, IO Deeds of War
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4th media croppedLatin America Condemns US Espionage at United Nations Security Council

Posted: 19 Aug 2013 12:01 AM PDT

 “The United States appears to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.” Simon Bolivar Throughout the day, on August 6, President Cristina Fernandez Kirchner of Argentina chaired a historic United Nations Security Council meeting that revealed a seismic shift in geopolitical consciousness and incipient strength. The agenda of Security […]

Winslow Wheeler: Don Vandergriff’s “The Path to Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs,” second edition

Officers Call
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Winslow Wheeler
Winslow Wheeler

Major Don Vandergriff (USA, ret.) has released the second–expanded and updated–edition of his critical analysis of the Army's officer corps, The Path to Victory: America's Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs.

The book explains why and how the Army's leadership has simultaneously designed itself for bureaucratic success and leadership failure in battle.  It is important reading, I believe, for any who want to understand of one of the most important problems that decays America's armed forces from within–and from the top.

The new second edition has a forward by Col. Douglas Macgregor (USA, ret.).  It reads in part:

Addressing the first edition in 2006, one of the reviews at Amazon.com provides some useful comments, especially in retrospective:

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Berto Jongman: US Military SATCOM Vulnerabilities

IO Impotency, Military
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Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

The Future of MILSATCOM

This report argues that the US's military satellite communication systems (MILSATCOM) are becoming increasingly vulnerable to physical, electronic and cyber-attacks by those who reject the idea that space should be a conflict-free domain. Given these threats and the specter of reduced budgets, the report thus suggests that the US might want to improve the passive defense, disaggregation and dispersement capabilities of its MILSATCOM systems.

Author: Todd Harrison    Series: CSBA Studies

Berto Jongman: Detained in the U.S.: Filmmaker Laura Poitras Held, Questioned Some 40 Times at U.S. Airports

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, DHS, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War
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Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Detained in the U.S.: Filmmaker Laura Poitras Held, Questioned Some 40 Times at U.S. Airports

The Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Laura Poitras discusses how she has been repeatedly detained and questioned by federal agents whenever she enters the United States. Poitras said the interrogations began after she began working on her documentary, “My Country, My Country,” about post-invasion Iraq. Her most recent film, “The Oath,” was about Yemen and Guantánamo and follows the lives of two past associates of Osama bin Laden. She estimates she has been detained approximately 40 times and has had her laptop, cellphone and personal belongings repeatedly searched. Tonight she is leading a surveillance teach-in at the Whitney Museum in New York City with our other guests, computer security researcher and government target Jacob Appelbaum and National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney. Poiras is currently at work on a film about post-9/11 America. This interview is part of a 5-part special on growing state surveillance.. Click here to see segment 1, 3, 4 and 5. [includes rush transcript]

Transcript [Also Available as Video]

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are William Binney, who was technical director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group. He worked with the NSA for almost 40 years, National Security Agency. We’re also joined by Laura Poitras, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker, and Jacob Appelbaum, a computer security researcher.

You two have something in common with each other. You—every time you come into the United States by plane, you are stopped, you are searched, you are interrogated. Laura Poitras, tell us about your experience. Your latest one?

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