Public Intelligence Blog – Page 2582 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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Meet the four-legged robot being housebroken by the US military

If you thought a soldier's best friend was a weapon, try again. Meet LS3 (Legged Squad Support System) — the four-legged machine being developed for military use by engineering firm, Boston Dynamics. The outfit designed the not-so-cuddly contraption (aka AlphaDog) under contract by DARPA to work as an aid alongside US troops. BD has been advancing this particular beast for more than two years, which has already proved it can carry up to 400 pounds of gear for about 20 miles without refueling. Just a few months ago, the robot was upgraded to jog at about 5MPH over rugged terrain to up the ante even further — an improvement over its slower-moving and noisy predecessor.   Prior collaborations between the two have spawned unique projects like Cheetah (a robot purposed to run as similarly as possible to the animal it's named after) and Atlas (a human-like droid that walks and climbs walls).

Fast forward to the present with AlphaDog now back in the spotlight, BD is ready to show off some newly engineered tricks. These latest alterations stem from two weeks of real world testing in the woods of central Virginia, demonstrating a number of improvements to its autonomy and maneuverability, including the ability to recover from a pretty substantial roll. What's more, DARPA's also shown off how the robot can respond to voice commands as well as what it calls “Leader Follow” decision making. By doing so, the loyal companion itself determines how best to trail its human counterpart. All that and some sounds to keep you up at night are in the video below.

Read full article with video option.

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: DARPA DOG Expensive Idiocy”

2012/12/232013/01/15

Review: Saucers, Swastikas and Psyops: A History of A Breakaway Civilization: Hidden Aerospace Technologies and Psychological Operations

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Censorship & Denial of Access, Complexity & Catastrophe, Complexity & Resilience, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Country/Regional, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), History, Information Operations, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Justice (Failure, Reform), Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Science & Politics of Science, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

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Jospeh P. Farrell

5.0 out of 5 stars This is an Information Operations / Counterintelligence Hidden Gem, December 23, 2012

The cover does this book a dis-service. This is a SERIOUS book that should be used in serious courses of instruction for both Information Operations (IO) and Counterintelligence (CI). The book lacks an index, a terrible mistake on the part of the publisher, but I have to say the notes are world-class and this book earns my intuitive respect quickly.

This book is a bit rough but I put it at a solid five stars and even considered six (my top ten percent across 1800+ books) because this book does something extraordinary:

01 It makes the case for UFOs being a terrestial Information Operations (IO) Psychological Operation (PSYOP — never plural).

02 It connects US underground tunnel civilization (a possible explanation for the Pentagon's missing 2.3 trillion) and advanced technologies including “Nazi physics” versus “Jewish physics”

03 It connects the Rockefeller-Morgan Nazi-philes, Latin America, Switzerland, the Bank of International Settlements, and the drug cartels — in other words, this is also an excellent reading for Counterintelligence (CI).

I draw two major insights from this book:

Continue reading “Review: Saucers, Swastikas and Psyops: A History of A Breakaway Civilization: Hidden Aerospace Technologies and Psychological Operations”

2012/12/222012/12/22

Review: The Code for Global Ethics: Ten Humanist Principles

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Future, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Spiritual), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

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Rodrique Tremblay

5.0 out of 5 stars Humanist Manifesto Slams Religions, Foundation for Reflection, December 22, 2012

I bought this book on the recommendation of Pierre Cloutier in Quebec, and very deliberately as the first book to read on 22 December 2012 as Epoch B begins (see graphic above with book cover).

Across the entire book are what I now call E to the 5th: Empathy, Ethics, Ecology, Education, and Evolution. The bottom line of the book is clear: abandon religions as selective (and generally exclusionary) arbiters of morality, each severely hypocritical in having one morality for insiders and another for “others” (infidels, shiksas, whatever the name, moral disengagement is the rule and genocide is often the result).

When addressing really important books, I read the notes, bibliography, and index first. The notes are a second book — these are not normal cryptic notes, each note is a short exposition, and any reading of the book is incomplete without a reading of the notes. The bibliography is extraordinary, and my attention was immediately drawn to the authors honored with three or more books being cited: Karen Armstrong, Mario Bunge, Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, A.C. Graylink, Robert Ingersoll, Immanuel Kant, Hans Kung, Paul Kurtz, John Rawls, Peter Singer, Baruch SPinoza, E. O. Wilson, and Robert Wright. Among them Kurtz, Singer, and Wright are central. Roughly 1,000 books are listed by title in the bibliography.

Continue reading “Review: The Code for Global Ethics: Ten Humanist Principles”

2012/12/222012/12/22

Review: The Volunteer The Incredible True Story of an Israeli Spy on the Trail of International Terrorists

4 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

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Michael Ross and Jonathan Kay

4.0 out of 5 stars 50% Authentic, 25% Disinformation, 25% Unwitting, December 22, 2012

For those that do not know my background, I am a former clandestine case officer (spy) who has published widely on the craft of intelligence.

I received this book as a gift from the author, whom I have met, and whose talents in creating non-official cover and in teaching naive Americans how to create unofficial cover (something CIA cannot do), I believe in.

The book is 50% authentic and for that reason alone I recommend it be required reading for those being trained in the clandestine service. Although sometimes tedious, the level of detail that is provided is for me fully satisfactory and useful as a “drill” for appreciating the nature of a life under cover.

The emphasis on creating cover and sticking to cover even if you are certain you are going to die or be sent to a secret jail to rot for all eternity, is the key take-away from this book — with happy endings for those that stick to their cover.

Mossad is different from the clumsier Western services that live immunity rather than cover. Mossad is much more about direct action, from street-level surveillance and orientation photographs of specific human and organizational and potential sabotage targets, to placing beacons on ships smuggling arms so they can be sunk by unmarked aircraft or an Israeli submarine, or explosives on a car known to be enroute to a terrorist leader.

The observations on how the CIA and FBI cannot work together, even in counter-terrorism, are useful confirmation that little has changed since 9/11. The book first published in 2007, was updated in 2011.

From a counterintelligence perspective, the book provides a wonderfully clear picture of how long and how hard it would be to penetrate the Mossad with a false flag volunteer under control from the age of 18.

Continue reading “Review: The Volunteer The Incredible True Story of an Israeli Spy on the Trail of International Terrorists”

2012/12/222012/12/22

Chuck Spinney: The Patraeus Myth & the Pentagon’s Big Lie

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Media, Military

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Herewith is a stunning series of reports by Gareth Porter, one of the very best investigative journalists in America. Not only does he show how King David created the myth of his success and became naked in the process, he puts the failures of the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan into a definitive perspective. But perhaps most importantly, at least to my thinking, Gareth also expose the emptiness of real lesson learned by the US military from its failure in Vietnam … namely how protect the institution from criticism by manipulating and controlling the narrative of failing wars and a breakdown of leadership by capturing the thinking and imagination of the press. This manipulation was evident in the uncritical coverage of the First Gulf War, but the superficial appearance of success in those wars masked the rot embedded (pun intended) in the “lesson learned.” Thanks to Gareth, it is now clear to anyone who makes an effort to study this report.

Chuck Spinney

All 4 Parts: How Petraeus Created the Myth of His Success

By Gareth Porter

Truthout, Tuesday, 27 November 2012 17:43

Part 1: How the Myth Began – Petraeus in Mosul

Part 2: How Petraeus Quietly Stoked the Fires of Sectarian War Without Getting Burned

Part 3: Petraeus Rising: Managing the “War of Perceptions” in Iraq

Part 4 True Believer: Petraeus and the Mythology of Afghanistan

Final paragraph:

The Petraeus Legacy: Conscious and Unconscious Falsehoods

David Petraeus always demonstrated political agility in his management of the “war of perceptions” in Iraq and Iran, gravitating to story lines that would create an image of success even though the larger picture still looked uncertain, if not unfavorable.

But in Afghanistan, the Petraeus strategy did have the same effect as it had in Iraq. He was never able to show that the Taliban insurgency had been brought under control. As Lt. Col. Danny Davis, who returned from his second tour in Afghanistan in late 2011 after having traveled more than 9,000 miles around the country, reported in an 84-page assessment, the level of Taliban attacks in 2011 was still at or above the 2009 levels that had prompted US officials to fear that the war was being lost.

Davis charged that Petraeus' March 2011 report to Congress was “misleading, significantly skewed or completely inaccurate.” Davis presented a classified version of his report to a bipartisan group of Senators and House members that cited dozens of classified documents in support of his charge. And in a telling reflection of Petraeus' failure of to make a credible case, The New York Times covered Davis' critique in a front page story in January 2012. The only question about his attack on Petraeus' claims was whether Petraeus was knowingly lying or saying what he chose to believe.

The record of Petraeus' command in Afghanistan – especially the case of the Taliban impostor – suggests that his public posture on the progress of his command combined claims he knew were untrue with some that he actually believed were true. His need to maintain the image he had so artfully created had led him to believe increasingly his own myth.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: The Patraeus Myth & the Pentagon's Big Lie”

2012/12/222012/12/22

SchwartzReport: Lack of Integrity in the US Media – On Murdoch & Petraeus

Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Media

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Why the US media ignored Murdoch's brazen bid to hijack the presidency

Did the Washington Post and others underplay the story through fear of the News Corp chairman, or simply tin-eared judgment?

Carl Bernstein

The Guardian, Thursday 20 December 2012

So now we have it: what appears to be hard, irrefutable evidence of Rupert Murdoch‘s ultimate and most audacious attempt – thwarted, thankfully, by circumstance – to hijack America's democratic institutions on a scale equal to his success in kidnapping and corrupting the essential democratic institutions of Great Britain through money, influence and wholesale abuse of the privileges of a free press.

In the American instance, Murdoch's goal seems to have been nothing less than using his media empire – notably Fox News – to stealthily recruit, bankroll and support the presidential candidacy of General David Petraeus in the 2012 election.

Read rest of article.

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: Lack of Integrity in the US Media – On Murdoch & Petraeus”

2012/12/222012/12/22

SchwartzReport: Fake Images Impacting on Humans

Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Media

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How fake images change our memory and behaviour

Rose Eveleth

BBC, 13 December 2012

Doctored images can affect what we eat, how we vote and even our childhood recollections. The question scientists are asking is why there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

The year was a memorable one – looking back at the unforgettable images over the past 12 months, you might think of apocalyptic-looking clouds over Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy, or Mitt Romney’s children mistakenly standing in a line spelling out the word “MONEY”, or even the winning US Powerball lottery ticket that became the most shared picture on Facebook. There’s only one problem. All these images are fake.

It would be fine if we could dismiss these images as a fleeting joke, an amusing but harmless tidbit shared among our friends and followers, if it weren’t for the fact that our minds appear to have a curious but fundamental glitch. People tend to think of their memories as a transcript, a rough history of events from some early age until the very moment they are experiencing. But human memory is far more like a desert mirage than a transcript – as we recall the past we are really just making meaning out of the flickering patterns of sights, smells and sounds we think we remember.

Read full article with examples of doctored images.