Public Intelligence Blog – Page 2288 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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Available Now!

A Collection of Essays
Edited by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

The Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh was asked what we need to do to save our world.

“What we most need to do,” he replied,

“is to hear within us the sound of the earth crying.”

Our present ecological crisis is the greatest man-made disaster this planet has ever faced—its accelerating climate change, species depletion, pollution and acidification of the oceans. A central but rarely addressed aspect of this crisis is our forgetfulness of the sacred nature of creation, and how this affects our relationship to the environment. There is a pressing need to articulate a spiritual response to this ecological crisis. This is vital and necessary if we are to help bring the world as a living whole back into balance.

Contributors include: Chief Oren Lyons, Thich Nhat Hanh, Sandra Ingerman, Joanna Macy, Sister Miriam MacGillis, Satish Kumar, Vandana Shiva, Fr. Richard Rohr, Bill Plotkin, Jules Cashford, Wendell Berry, Winona LaDuke, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Brian Swimme, and others.

2013/07/07

Patrick Meier: Using Twitter to Analyze Secular vs. Islamist Polarization in Egypt in Real-Time

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial

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Using Twitter to Analyze Secular vs. Islamist Polarization in Egypt in Real-Time

Large-scale events leave an unquestionable mark on social media. This was true of Hurricane Sandy, for example, and is also true of the widespread protests in Egypt this week. On Wednesday, the Egyptian Military responded to the large-scale demonstrations against President Morsi by removing him from power. Can Twitter provide early warning signals of growing political tension in Egypt and elsewhere? My QCRI colleagues Ingmar Weber & Kiran Garimella and Al-Jazeera colleague Alaa Batayneh have been closely monitoring (PDF) these upheavals via Twitter since January 2013. Specifically, they developed a Political Polarization Index that provides early warning signals for increased social tensions and violence. The analysis & graphs below include the very latest data and I will keep updating this post with new data over the next 24 hours.

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2013/07/072013/07/07

Chuck Spinney: Be Very Afraid — Obama Kept the Debt He Promised to Write Down and Now Pressure is On for Governments to Sell the Commonwealth Piece by Piece

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude

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From the Bubble Economy to Debt Deflation and Privatization

Michael Hudson, Counterpunch, 2013-07-05

The Federal Reserve’s QE3 has flooded the stock and bond markets with low-interest liquidity that makes it profitable for speculators to borrow cheap and make arbitrage gains buying stocks and bonds yielding higher dividends or interest. In principle, one could borrow at 0.15 percent (one sixth of one percent) and buy up stocks, bonds and real estate throughout the world, collecting the yield differential as arbitrage. Nearly all the $800 billion of QE2 went abroad, mainly to the BRICS for high-yielding bonds (headed by Brazil’s 11% and Australia’s 5+%), with the currency inflow for this carry trade providing a foreign-exchange bonus as well.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Be Very Afraid — Obama Kept the Debt He Promised to Write Down and Now Pressure is On for Governments to Sell the Commonwealth Piece by Piece”

2013/07/072013/07/07

Marcus Aurelius: NSA Rejecting All US Citizen FOIA Requests — While FISA Court, Which Has No Jurisdiction Domestically, Goes Stasi

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Law Enforcement, Military

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Daily Kos: NSA Rejecting Every FOIA Request Made by U.S. Citizens

NYT: In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers Of N.S.A.

Rickard Falkvinge: Sweden Works for NSA Which Works for Israel, Against Russia and Also Europe?

Snowden Interview: NSA ‘In Bed Together with the Germans'

2013/07/072013/07/07

Marcus Aurelius: Blame Congress and Obama for Military Disarray — Never Mind Secretary of Defense and Four Dishonest Services…

Corruption, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military

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This seems like a relatively simple question. For different reasons, both POTUS and Congress apaprently seek to break the military. POTUS' view, arguably rooted in anticolonialism, focuses on reducing the US, to include the military, to the status of the Third World, while in Congressional (read: Tea Party) minds, the military is the principal cash cow and thus acceptable/desirable collateral damage in the pell-mell races for (1) “deficit reduction” and (2) some strange version of a “peace dividend” to reallocate dollars from “makers” to “takers.” Sooner or later, the chickens will come home to roost, another Task Force Smith will occur, etc.

Aviation Week & Space Technology, July 7, 2013 , Pg. 14

Up Front

Searching For Straight Answers

Why do Obama and Congress refuse to help the Pentagon plan for budget cuts?

By Joseph Anselmo

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: Blame Congress and Obama for Military Disarray — Never Mind Secretary of Defense and Four Dishonest Services…”

2013/07/072013/07/07

Rickard Falkvinge: Sweden Works for NSA Which Works for Israel, Against Russia and Also Europe?

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Military

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Documents: Sweden Wiretapping Russia’s International Traffic For The NSA

Privacy: Earlier documents put in context with recent revelations show that Sweden has been systematically wiretapping Russia on behalf of the United States. This is clear after putting a number of previous questionable agreements and developments in context today. The question that remains is what Sweden gets in return.

Sweden and Israeli Agent of Influence Sign Surveillance Agreement — Sweden and Israeli in US Cover Sign Agreement

EXTRACT:

Putting it all together, Sweden is wiretapping Russia for the NSA, and has been doing so since the FRA law took effect in Sweden. The FRA agency is continuously wiretapping Russia based on the agreement signed in April, 2007, and sharing the data with the NSA.

In this context, it is no coincidence that Sweden and the UK, as the only two European countries, recently chose to block EU investigations into U.S. wiretapping of European officials and industries.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Rickard Falkvinge: Sweden Works for NSA Which Works for Israel, Against Russia and Also Europe?”

2013/07/072013/07/07

Berto Jongman: Did Israel Bypass Russians with Submarine Missile Attack on Syria Last Night?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards

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Did an Israeli Dolphin submarine just bypass the Russian S-300 batteries in Syria ?

Editor’s Note…

Semi-official reports in the recent 36 hours describe a mysterious blast in a Syrian arms depot in the city of Latakia ,located well within the Allawite enclave in North Western Syria. FSA sources claimed responsibility for the blast, but western observes cast doubts on these claims due to the geographical and tactical constraints. According to some estimations the blasts were caused by missiles arriving from the western direction, that is from the Mediterranean sea. This would suggest that if the Israelis are behind this event, they may have used an undetectable maritime platform, like the Dolphin class submarine, to bypass the recently deployed S-300 air defense systems, operated in Syria by Russian teams. Sea skimming cruise missiles are hard to detect, likewise submarine-borne naval commandos conducting nocturnal raids on enemy ports. If so, this would indicate a decision to refrain from risking a confrontation with the Russian military which would surely break out in case of a direct attack on the S-300 batteries. There is no ‘smoking gun’ to support this version yet,but the refusal of Israeli official to comment on this event may suggest a repetition of the standard mode of operation used during the IAF bombing raids on Hezbollah targets and biochemical facilities in Damascus in the recent year: maintaining two-fold plausible deniability which enables both governments (of Israel and Syria) to limit armed clashes to the clandestine level in order to avoid the unpredictable results of a full scale war .

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