Public Intelligence Blog

John Steiner

Check out the video the mining industry never expected you to see:

http://www.getup.org.au/minersmediaplan

You simply have to see this video to believe it.

This week mining billionaire Gina Rinehart became the largest shareholder in Fairfax, having already bought a stake in Channel Ten. But this new video reveals this move is bigger than one woman’s ambition – it’s part of a coordinated and very deliberate strategy, with climate skeptic ‘Lord’ Monkton seen here advising a room full of mining executives on how the industry must gain control of Australia’s media.

Can you help share this video so all Australians understand what’s really going on in the mining industry?

http://www.getup.org.au/minersmediaplan

We’ve seen what happened in the USA when coordinated, super-wealthy corporate interests set about deliberately reshaping the media landscape to suit their agendas. It’s bad news for democracy and it’s bad news for the issues we care about. And while this most recent purchase was a brazen move, it’s hardly the first time a mining industry executive has used their vast wealth to push an agenda.

Last year, Rinehart helped set up a new lobby group calling for a special ‘Northern Economic Zone’ demanding lower tax, government concessions and cheap migrant labor from Asia. She helped bankroll the campaign against Government efforts to ask the mining industry to pay their fair share of tax through the Mining Super Profits tax and she’s been actively sponsoring prominent climate skeptics like Monckton, Ian Plimer and Andrew Bolt, who got his own TV show weeks after she invested in Channel Ten.

Phi Beta Iota:  The Internet, the schools, and how the general public is informed are the battleground for 21st century peace and prosperity.  All are rotten to the core right now, but all signs point to a global public rebellion that is insistent on getting back to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

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Note: this book will NOT be available free online.  Pre-orders are offered by Amazon at a $5 discount.

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth, & Trust

Truth, lies and Afghanistan

How military leaders have let us down

LT. COL. DANIEL L. DAVIS

Armed Forces Journal,

I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.

. . . . . . . .

Tell The Truth

When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging our nation into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe it to the nation and to the uniformed members to be candid — graphically, if necessary — in telling them what’s at stake and how expensive potential success is likely to be. U.S. citizens and their elected representatives can decide if the risk to blood and treasure is worth it.

Likewise when having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and American people the unvarnished truth and let the people decide what course of action to choose. That is the very essence of civilian control of the military. The American people deserve better than what they’ve gotten from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of years. Simply telling the truth would be a good start. AFJ

Read full article.

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Marcus Aurelius: Col Paul Yingling, Departing

DEADLY SPIN: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans

Since Wendell Potter walked away from his executive position at a top health insurance company in May of 2008, he has worked tirelessly as an outspoken critic of corporate PR and the distortion and fear manufactured by America’s health insurance industry. It is a PR juggernaut that is bankrolled by millions of dollars, rivaling lobbying budgets and underwriting many “non-partisan” grassroots organizations. How would Potter know? He wrote many of the industry’s talking points himself.

Source

DefDog

A Battle the President Can’t Win

His decision on Catholic charities makes Romney’s big gaffe look trivial.

What a faux pas, how inept, how removed from the essential realities of America. Yes, I’m referring to President Obama. But let’s do Mitt Romney first.

. . . . . .

EXTRACT:

But the big political news of the week isn’t Mr. Romney’s gaffe, or even his victory in Florida. The big story took place in Washington. That’s where a bomb went off that not many in the political class heard, or understood.

But President Obama just may have lost the election.

The president signed off on a Health and Human Services ruling that says that under ObamaCare, Catholic institutions—including charities, hospitals and schools—will be required by law, for the first time ever, to provide and pay for insurance coverage that includes contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization procedures. If they do not, they will face ruinous fines in the millions of dollars. Or they can always go out of business.

In other words, the Catholic Church was told this week that its institutions can’t be Catholic anymore.

Read full article.

Marcus Aurelius

House Armed  Services Committee (HASC)

Impact Assessment

Executive Summary

Impact Assessment

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Powering Down: A decline in U.S. military might could upend the world order

Phi Beta Iota:  NOBODY is doing fact-based evaluations.  Senator Sam Nunn’s words remain unheeded–there is no credible holistic threat assessment; there is no credible holistic strategy; there is no credible holistic force structure; and there are no credible holistic acquisition plans for actually getting to what should be a 450-ship Navy, a long-haul Air Force, A-10′s long overdue for transfer to Army Aviation, and a Marine Corps that stops trying to be expeditionary everything and focuses instead on helping the US Navy create a 450-ship Navy as we have been advocating for over a decade.

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Search: maritime piracy charts + RECAP

Richard Wright

Integrity? We don’t need no stinkin’integrity!

Precision Munitions Lessen Need for Close Air Support Plane: Schwartz Answers the A-10 Question

PENTAGON: One of the longest-running debates between the Air Force and the Army centers on close air support. Historically, the Air Force hates supplying CAS and doesn’t like buying or maintaining the planes that do it. But the white scarf boys wouldn’t let the Army do the job either, since it involved fixed-wing aircraft and shooting and that’s what the Air Force does.

So when the Air Force announced it was scrapping a large chunk of the current A-10 Warthog fleet and the pilots who go with it — five squadrons worth — the Pentagon’s back channels quickly filled with disgusted comments about how “there goes the Air Force again.” Every time they need to cut money from the budget the first thing they do is cut the A-10s, which have provided superb close air support ever since they started flying in the mid-70s, critics said. Two things make the A-10 especially fine at CAS: its amazing 30mmm cannon which can destroy a tank with ease; and the titanium bucket within which the pilot sits. The armored aircraft provides pilots with great protection, allowing them to be almost cavalier as they operate in dangerously kinetic environments.

Read the rest of this entry »

Berto Jongman

The Iran War: Who will decide?

By Amir Oren

Ha’aretz, 5 February 2012

The War of Independence, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the Iran War. That’s the sequence Defense Minister Ehud Barak laid out at the Herzliya Conference on Thursday in a speech on Israel’s fateful decision.

All for the better, it has been suggested, that behind the wheel as successor to David Ben-Gurion in 1948, Levi Eshkol in 1967 and Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan in 1973 is military leader Barak and his assistant on prime ministerial matters, Benjamin Netanyahu. Barak has been quoted as saying, ignoring the law and the cabinet, that “at the end of the day, when the military command looks up, it sees us – the minister of defense and the prime minister. When we look up, we see nothing but the sky above us.”

The immunity zone that Iran is constantly moving closer towards is meant to limit the possibility of a strike against its fortified and dispersed nuclear infrastructure. The Israeli argument is a global innovation in the theoretical justification for preemptive wars. The intended victim usually strikes preemptively when hostile preparations to act are discovered.

The precedents of Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007 teach us that the desire for wider security margins made Israel attack while a nuclear capability was still being acquired. Barak’s comments suggest an argument for acting even earlier, at the phase of developing a capability to acquire a capability.

Read the rest of this entry »

Berto Jongman

Terrorist Attack Map Shows Terrorism ‘Hot Spots’ Across U.S.

Can science predict where terrorists will strike? Not quite. But researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the University of Massachusetts, Boston (UMB) have created a detailed map of where terrorism attacks have occurred since 1970 – and it reveals some big surprises.

The map’s accompanying study, conducted at the UMD’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), found that while certain areas (those surrounding Manhattan and Los Angeles, for example) have endured as terror ‘hot spots’ throughout the study, others have come and go. In the 2000s, for example, there has been a higher-than-average rate of attacks in Maricopa County, AZ, Phoenix’s county. King County, WA, on the other hand, was a terror hot spot in the 1970s and 1980s, but has been largely quiet since.

Click on Image to Enlarge

The START researchers called 65 of the nation’s 3,143 counties hot spots, although that only means that these counties experienced higher than the national average of 6 attacks from 1970-2008.

The study, which looked at all 3,143 U.S. counties, also found that terrorism hot spots and motivations have changed dramatically from decade to decade. Where do terrorists come from? In the last decade, many politicians have conjured the image of Islamic fundamentalists from the Middle East. But in the 1970s, many attacks classified as ‘terrorist’ came from left-wing groups in Berkeley, San Francisco and surrounding areas.

The research showed a strong association between the county in which a terrorist attack occurred and its motivation. “For example,” a University of Maryland statement notes, “Lubbock County, Texas, only experienced extreme right-wing terrorism while the Bronx, New York, only experienced extreme left-wing terrorism.”

Similarly, particular ideologies’ inclination to terrorist attacks varied over the years.

“The 1970s were dominated by extreme left-wing terrorist attacks,” co-author Bianca Bersani, assistant professor of sociology at UMB, said. “Far left-wing terrorism in the U.S. is almost entirely limited to the 1970s with few events in the 1980s and virtually no events after that.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, domestic left-wing terrorism overwhelmingly took place in the San Francisco Bay area during the Vietnam War.

Other interesting findings include the fact that “religiously motivated attacks occurred predominantly in the 1980s, extreme right-wing terrorism was concentrated in the 1990s and single issue attacks ['e.g., anti-abortion, anti-Catholic, anti-nuclear, anti-Castro'] were dispersed across the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.”

The researchers hope that the insights from the study can be used to determine the relationship between terrorism and ordinary crime, which has historically been much easier to predict.

300 Million Talons...

Our naked, obese, rather retarded Emperor is “outed.”

Is US democracy being bought and sold?

How corporations, unions and political action committees are shaping the candidate pool.

Read full article with many video and other links.

See Also:

Review: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

DefDog

Example of the state of USGOV systems….

Anonymous gain access to FBI and Scotland Yard hacking call

BBC news, 3 February 2012

Hacking network Anonymous has released a recording of a conference call between the FBI and UK police in which they discuss efforts against hacking.

The call, said to have taken place last month, covers the tracking of Anonymous and similar groups, dates of planned arrests and evidence details.

Anonymous also published an email, apparently from the FBI, showing the email addresses of call participants.

The FBI confirmed the intercept and said it was hunting those responsible.

The loose collective Anonymous have targeted a number of big institutions in recent years

“The information was intended for law enforcement officers only and was illegally obtained. A criminal investigation is under way to identify and hold accountable those responsible,” it said in a statement.

London’s Metropolitan Police’s central e-crime unit said the matter was being investigated but that no operational risks had been identified.

A comment on one of the Twitter accounts linked to Anonymous, AnonymousIRC, said: “The FBI might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now.”

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  This is too funny for words.  Hackers and Phi Beta Iota have been very clear for over 20 years that most law enforcement systems are easy to hack into, especially now that they are all digital and controlled by a server where no one has had the brains to change the factory installed root password.  What is really happening now is that government incomtence in security is being “outed.”  CIA has worked overseas for decades, pretending to be clandestine when in fact all case officers have been known to local liaison.  Similarly, government “security” is an oxymoron.  On the one hand, it does not exist, and on the other we are spending tens of billions on the well-intentioned but ignorant threatics of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) and the world’s most expensive coffee klatch, the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC).  This is what you end up with when a government of arrogant “experts” and even more arrogant politicians refuse to listen to both insider iconoclasts and outsider “loyal opposition” minds that actually know what they are talking about and see these things 20 years before the “leaders” at the top, who are really nothing more than clerks fighting for budget share, without a strategic bone in their bodies.

1994 Sounding the Alarm on Cyber-Security

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