Public Intelligence Blog – Page 2519 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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FEMA camp bill resurfaces in Congress

Published on Feb 12, 2013

In the US, natural disasters have caused the US government to declare national emergencies. Now, an old bill has resurfaced in Congress that allows the government to implement at least six military installations to house US citizens when a national emergency is declared. The National Emergency Centers Act or HR 645 gives the Federal Emergency Management Agency power over the camps and before the bill was shot down due to the broad language and the fears of unchecked government power, but can this bill ever pass? Bob English, civil liberties activist and blogger, sounds off on the issue.

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Phi Beta Iota: Buried in the six minutes is the key point — regardless of intentions, this furthers the idea that centralized solutions funded by money that is borrowed or printed, are the solution. It is a good initiative in theory, but in practice it is distant from localized resilience. Think Katrina or Sandy to understand how inept FEMA is with what it already has. The bill leaves open the use of the military as internment overseers — with the National Guard now known to be recruiting internment staff for each of the ten FEMA districts.

2013/02/13

SchwartzReport: US Prisons Up 790% Since 1980, GMO Hidden Virus, Good News on Solar Energy Windows

01 Agriculture, 05 Energy, 09 Justice

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Federal Prison Population Spiked 790 Percent Since 1980
NICOLE FLATOW – Think Progress -Justice

Safety Group Blows Lid on ‘Secret Virus’ Hidden in GMO Crops
ANTHONY GUCCIARDI – Nation of Change

Colourful ‘Solar Glass' Means Entire Buildings Can Generate Clean Power
ADAM VAUGHAN – The Guardian (U.K.)

2013/02/122013/02/12

Mongoose: Lt Chris Dorner, USNR (RIP)

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Law Enforcement

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Source: Body found in rubble of burned cabin

BIG BEAR, Calif. (AP) — The extraordinary manhunt for the former Los Angeles police officer suspected of three murders converged Tuesday on a mountain cabin where he was believed to have barricaded himself inside, engaged in a shootout that killed a deputy and then never emerged as the home went up in flames.

A single gunshot was heard from within, and a charred body was found inside.

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2013/02/122013/02/12

John Steiner: What Democracy Lost in 2012

Civil Society, Corruption, Government

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What Democracy Lost in 2012

No matter the outcome, big money and voter suppression crippled the election. This is no way to run the world’s oldest democracy.

Bob Moser

American Prospert, January 28, 2013

Last November 7, a syndicated cartoon made the rounds in progressive circles. Drawn by Signe Wilkinson, it showed a battered, bruised, patched-up Uncle Sam defiantly flexing his biceps and flashing the dazed grin of a fighter who’d survived a vicious knockdown and prevailed in 15 rounds. The caption, “Democracy Wins,” became a popular meme amid the liberal euphoria that broke out on election night. President Barack Obama had been re-elected, Karl Rove had been embarrassed on national television, and the Sheldon Adelsons and National Rifle Associations of the world had thrown hundreds of millions of dollars down the toilet. Voter suppression had not kept blacks and Latinos from the polls. Citizens United had not done its worst. Democracy had been tried and tested, and emerged banged up but miraculously intact.

Liberals had earned their moment of giddiness. But the assumption that “democracy won” because Obama won and Democrats carried the U.S. Senate is flat wrong. Dangerously wrong. Democracy, already in a weakened state, suffered serious defeats in 2012. The battle to win it back will be long, fierce, and uphill.

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2013/02/12

Mongoose: NASA Notices Middle East Water Loss — Israeli Theft of Water from Arab Aquifers Not Mentioned

12 Water

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Counterintelligence really has to broaden its mandate. A unified Arab water intelligence and counterintelligence authority would be most interesting!

Alarming water loss in Middle East, NASA study says

DOHA, Qatar – A NASA study found that an amount of freshwater almost the size of the Dead Sea has been lost in parts of the Middle East due to poor management, increased demands for groundwater and the effects of a 2007 drought.

The study, to be published Friday in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, examined data over seven years from 2003 from a pair of gravity-measuring satellites. Researchers found freshwater reserves in parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates river basins had lost 117 million acre feet of its total stored freshwater.

About 60 percent of the loss resulted from pumping underground reservoirs for ground water and another fifth due to impacts of the drought including declining snow packs.

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2013/02/122013/02/13

Stuart Umpleby: US Making Strategic Mistake in Science and Management Education — Robert Steele Connects to OSA, OSE, & M4IS2

Advanced Cyber/IO

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RM 130212 Cybernetics Management and Security Policy

I think the U.S. may be on the verge of making an important strategic mistake in science and in management education. Here are three stories to illustrate the historical background.

1. The Macy Foundation conferences in 1948-1953 led to founding the field of cybernetics. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy_conferences The Am. Society for Cybernetics was founded in 1964, about 50 years ago, at the Cosmos Club on Mass. Ave. There was some government money, perhaps CIA, behind it. A man named Jack Ford, who worked at the CIA, was involved. At the time there was concern about a “cybernetics gap” with the Soviet Union. Recall JFK's “missile gap” during the 1960 campaign. At the time the Soviets thought cybernetics would tell them how to manage their centrally planned economy. About this time Soviet Cybernetics Review was created to translate key Russian articles into English and make them available to US scientists. As late as the early 1980s, when I first went to Moscow, I was asked privately by one scientist if prices were set by a big computer in the basement of the Dept. of Commerce. For a history of Soviet cybernetics, see Slava Gerovitch From Newspeak to Cyberspeak. Although some courses and research centers in cybernetics were set up on university campuses, such as the Bio. Computer Lab at the U of Ill., on the whole cybernetics was widely discussed but did not take root as a separate discipline in the US. Also, cybernetics needed support from the govt. Research was funded mostly by AFOSR and ONR. The Mansfield Amendment unintentionally ended support for fundamental cybernetics research in the US and greatly boosted research on the electronic battlefield and robotics. See http://www.gwu.edu/~umpleby/recent_papers/2003_Heinz_von_Foerster_and_Mansfield_Amendment.pdf

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2013/02/12

Yoda: BIll Moyers & Others US Internet Access Slow, Costly, Unfair

Autonomous Internet, Commerce, Corruption, Government

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Dark, the Force is, in Washington DC.

Bill Moyers: Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair

>Americans are getting bilked for second class internet access.

BILL MOYERS: You’ve heard me before quote one of my mentors who told his students that “news is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity.” That’s why two books are rattling the cages of powerful people who would rather you not read them. Here’s the first one. Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age by Susan Crawford. Read it and you’ll understand why we Americans are paying much more for internet access than people in many other countries and getting much less in return. That, despite the fact that our very own academics and engineers, working with our very own Defense Department, invented the internet in the first place.

EXTRACT (Susan CVrawford)

What's happened is that these enormous telecommunications companies, Comcast and Time Warner on the wired side, Verizon and AT&T on the wireless side, have divided up markets, put themselves in the position where they're subject to no competition and no oversight from any regulatory authority. And they're charging us a lot for internet access and giving us second class access. This is a lot like the electrification story from the beginning of the 20th century.

. . . . . . . .

BILL MOYERS: In here you call it the digital divide. Describe that to me.

SUSAN CRAWFORD: Well, here's the problem. For 19 million Americans, many in rural areas, you can't get access to a high speed connection at any price, it's just not there. For a third of Americans, they don't subscribe often because it's too expensive. So the rich are getting gouged, the poor are very often left out. And this means that we're creating yet again two Americas and deepening inequality through this communications inequality.

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