Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Greeks Bank Run; Lines Form at ATMs; Nearly $1 Billion Withdrawn in Past Week

Without a government for the last eleven days, and amid mainstream discussion of a Euro Zone exit, the Greek people are realizing that the economic and political system as they know it is rapidly descending into chaos.

With massive jobless rates that have forced many into bartering to survive, and facing credit destruction across the entirety of the country that has led to shortages of critical supplies like life saving medicines, those with any money left at national banks are taking the desperate step of withdrawing as much of their savings as they can from a banking system on its last leg.

This is what it looks like when a populace plagued with uncertainty finally loses trust in the credibility of their country’s leadership and financial system.

Anxious Greeks have withdrawn as much as 700 million euros ($893 million) from the nation’s banks since the inconclusive May 6 election, President Karolos Papoulias told party leaders yesterday, according to a transcript of the meeting posted on the presidency’s website today. Papoulias said he got the information from the head of the Bank of Greece, the central bank, George Provopoulos, according to the transcript.

Via Zero Hedge

As has been said before, Greece is the canary in the coal mine.

The debt has piled up across Europe and the United States. Like the Greeks, Americans will soon hit a breaking point from which there will be no return. When it does finally happen you can be assured that your local ATM’s and banks will be inundated with panicked depositors attempting to take possession of as much of their money as possible.

But once the lines start forming it will be too late. Banks will have no choice but to limit withdrawals and close their doors (even to safe deposit box owners), because they will not have enough cash on hand to meet demand.

The choice is simple: Either prepare now and have physical assets in your possession, or join the crowds and hope the government will come up with a solution to the massive outflows that will ensue when the bank run begins.

SOURCE: SHTFPLAN.COM

NIGHTWATCH

Greece: For the record. A blog of the Financial Times published details of the Greek government’s efforts to increase tax collection in compliance with EU and IMF directives. The government tied unpaid property taxes to current electricity bills for households and businesses. So many Greeks stopped paying both but received electricity because of a ruling that a cutoff would be illegal. The power company and the government folded.

The number of non-payments was sufficiently large that the main power company nearly collapsed, requiring a government bailout to keep it “afloat.” One commentator opined that the new drachma will be IOUs, as the currency of the street so that Greece can retain the euro as the currency of the bankers. That suggests that the grey economy might get its own currency.

Comment:  The government hoped to raise nearly Euros 2 billion in back taxes. The program backfired.

Phi Beta Iota:  The five economies are:

A.  Financial terrorist banks with government complicity and corruption

B.  Normal businesses being legal while still using all methods to avoid taxation, externalizing at least 50% of the “true cost” (water, child labor, fuel, toxins, tax avoidance, obesity health costs, etc.)  to the public

C.  The new gray economy of IOUs, barter, and survival at the individual level

D.  System D, mostly an immigrant entrepreneurial economy that is off the books in every possible way

E.  Traditional crime, petty and organized, that now looks more like System D than real crime–in the face of massive government idiocy and corruption, everything else looks much more rational and “legal” than it did before.

Here is what you were looking for, and more, which is why we always have a human in the loop on the machine search strings.  There are of course pathologies galore in requirements definition, collection management, collection at every level, processing (largely non-existent), budgets, consumer relations, and public/political positioning.

Graphic: Analytic Pathologies Map

See Also:

Graphic: Analytic Pathology Layers

Graphic: Information Pathologies

ARTICLE:  1989 Al Gray (US) on Global Intelligence Challenges

ARTICLE: 1992 AIJ Fall ‘New Paradigm” and Avoiding Future Failures

BRIEFING:  2002 FAILURE of 20th Century Intelligence

Graphics on Getting it Right (CIA & DIA Cannot Handle Any of This):

Graphic: Analytic Tool-Kit in the Cloud (CATALYST II)

Graphic: Balance Matters

Graphic: Holistic Analysis*

Graphic: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) 102 (Right Way)

Graphic: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) J-2 Central

Graphic: Information Commons & Eight Tribes

Graphic: Information Operations (IO) Cube

Graphic: Intelligence Maturity Scale

* Energy is the central enabler for positive progress.  This chart can also be seen with corruption in the center, corruption (lack of integrity) is the central obstacle to creating a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for all.

Briefings on Getting it Right:

2004 COLLECTION: Know Who Knows

2004 ANALYSIS: All-Source Analysis, Making Magic

2004 PROCESSING: Make the Most of What You Know

2004 NEW RULES for the New Craft of Intelligence

2009 DoD OSINT Leadership and Staff Briefings

The Bottom Line:  Integrity Lost

Journal: Politics & Intelligence–Partners Only When Integrity is Central to Both

Journal: Reflections on Integrity UPDATED + Integrity RECAP

DefDog

The power of OPEN *.  You might think that the media would be doing this, but one would be wrong….they are content to be spoon fed lies, more lies, and damn lies…..it takes the public to pull back the curtain and expose what is really going on….that may be a reason the IC doesn’t like Open Source, it would continually show their inefficiencies…..

Blogger Shines Light on U.S. Shadow War in East Africa

David Axe

WIRED, 15 May 2012

An innocuous-seeming U.S. Air Force press release. A serendipitous satellite image in Google Earth. Snapshots from a photographer on assignment at a Spanish air base. The crash of an Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bomber in the United Arab Emirates. These are some of the fragments of information that Italian aviation blogger David Cenciotti has assembled to reveal the best picture yet of the Pentagon’s secretive war in the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa.

In a series of blog posts over the past two weeks, Cenciotti has described in unprecedented detail the powerful aerial force helping wage Washington’s hush-hush campaign of air strikes, naval bombardments and commando raids along the western edge of the Indian Ocean, including
terror hot spots Yemen and Somalia. Cenciotti outlined the deployment of eight F-15Es from their home base in Idaho to the international air and naval outpost at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, north of Somalia.

. . . . . . . . .

But arguably the most interesting vessels in the area are also the least flashy. Lewis and Clark-class supply ships, normally used to carry fuel and cargo, have also been used as Afloat Forward Staging Bases — in essence, seaborne military camps for housing Special Forces and launching helicopters and small boats. The ships can be configured with makeshift jails for holding captured pirates and, in theory, terror suspects.

Read full article with many links.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Source

YARC YARC

Scientists: Viruses Could Power Electronics

Tuesday, 15 May 2012, 7:12 PM EDT

(NewsCore) – Scientists have developed a technique to generate power with harmless viruses that convert mechanical energy into electricity.

The breakthrough could mean that one day, we might be able to charge our cell phones with paper-thin generators that harvest electricity from the vibrations of everyday tasks such as shutting a door or climbing stairs, the scientists said.

“More research is needed, but our work is a promising first step toward the development of personal power generators, actuators for use in nano-devices, and other devices based on viral electronics,” said Seung-Wuk Lee, a scientist at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

The device works by harnessing the piezoelectric properties of the M13 bacteriophage, a virus that only attacks bacteria and is benign to people.

Piezoelectricity is electricity resulting from accumulation of a charge in a solid in response to pressure and is the basis for items like electric cigarette lighters and push-start propane barbecues.

“We’re now working on ways to improve on this proof-of-principle demonstration,” Lee added. “Because the tools of biotechnology enable large-scale production of genetically modified viruses, piezoelectric materials based on viruses could offer a simple route to novel microelectronics in the future.”

Read more: Berkeley Lab

Berto Jongman

AIPAC Resolution Demanding War With Iran On House Floor Tomorrow

Ibrahim al-Asiri: The Body Bomb Menace

The Comfort Zone: Two Walking Wounded from Doctors without Borders

The Zen Leader: 10 Ways to Go From Barely Managing to Leading Fearlessly

Unacknowledged Deaths: Civilian Casualties in NATO’s Air Campaign in Libya

UNODC and OSCE hold joint conference on use of explosives by terrorists

Who? Who?

This interview overall undoubtedly has misconceptions, self-inflated bravado, gross exaggerations and so forth, but if the last statement he utters is true about people coming to them, even to a significantly lesser degree than he indicates, the world-ruling elites might be quaking ever-so-slightly, but involuntarily, in their boots. And much more so if indeed insiders are giving Anonymous the “keys to the kingdom,” the passwords into it.

Insider tells why Anonymous ‘might well be the most powerful organization on Earth

EXTRACT:

Q. What’s next for Anonymous?

A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems. The five-star general (and) the Secretary of Defence who sit in the cushy plush offices at the top of the Pentagon don’t run anything anymore. It’s the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that. The fact he had the 250,000 cables that were released effectively cut the power of the U.S. State Department in half. The Afghan war diaries and the Iran war diaries effectively cut the political clout of the U.S. Department of Defence in half. All because of one guy who had enough balls to slip a CD in an envelope and mail it to somebody. Now people are leaking to Anonymous and they’re not coming to us with this document or that document or a CD, they’re coming to us with keys to the kingdom, they’re giving us the passwords and usernames to whole secure databases that we now have free reign over. … The world needs to be concerned.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  01  Any system built by humans can be hacked by humans.  02  A system’s security is heavily dependent on the legitimacy of the system owner in the eyes of those using the system.

See Also:

Journal: Reflections on Integrity UPDATED + Integrity RECAP

The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century

Who? Who?

WATCH THIS. 12 year old Canadian girl on banksters and debt

This little girl is simply amazing. She must have some pretty awesome parents. In a concise and clear way she explains the problem of national debt in language that anyone can understand.

VIDEO (5:26) from GodLike Productions

Phi Beta Iota:  Going viral, and rightly so.

See Also:

Matt Taibbi: GRIFTOPIA – RECAP

John Steiner

Why Won’t They Listen? ‘The Righteous Mind,’ by Jonathan Haidt

REVIEW By WILLIAM SALETANPublished:

NY Times Review of Books, March 23, 2012

You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong.

This isn’t an accusation from the right. It’s a friendly warning from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. In “The ­Righteous Mind,” Haidt seeks to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature. Like other psychologists who have ventured into political coaching, such as George Lakoff and Drew Westen, Haidt argues that people are fundamentally intuitive, not rational. If you want to persuade others, you have to appeal to their sentiments. But Haidt is looking for more than victory. He’s looking for wisdom. That’s what makes “The Righteous Mind” well worth reading. Politics isn’t just about ­manipulating people who disagree with you. It’s about learning from them.

Haidt seems to delight in mischief. Drawing on ethnography, evolutionary theory and experimental psychology, he sets out to trash the modern faith in reason. In Haidt’s retelling, all the fools, foils and villains of intellectual history are recast as heroes. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who notoriously said reason was fit only to be “the slave of the passions,” was largely correct. E. O. Wilson, the ecologist who was branded a fascist for stressing the biological origins of human behavior, has been vindicated by the study of moral emotions. Even Glaucon, the cynic in Plato’s “Republic” who told Socrates that people would behave ethically only if they thought they were being watched, was “the guy who got it right.”

To the question many people ask about politics — Why doesn’t the other side listen to reason? — Haidt replies: We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided. The funniest and most painful illustrations are Haidt’s transcripts of interviews about bizarre scenarios. Is it wrong to have sex with a dead chicken? How about with your sister? Is it O.K. to defecate in a urinal? If your dog dies, why not eat it? Under interrogation, most subjects in psychology experiments agree these things are wrong. But none can explain why.

Read rest of review.

Amazon Page: The Righteous Mind

Amazon Page

Mark Dery

Bad Thoughts, Great Book March 27, 2012

By Supervert<

I find it impossible to discuss Mark Dery’s I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts in anything other than the first person. The book speaks so eloquently of its time that, uncannily, I can’t help but feel it speaks of me. So many of my own interests and obsessions rise from its pages — death, deviance, intellect. I recognize my iTunes library in Dery’s tours de force on David Bowie and Lady Gaga. I recognize my bookshelf in Dery’s essay on Amok Books, whose productions were once textbooks in the éducation sentimentale of the counterculture. I recognize my own rhetorical strategies in the move Dery makes in “Toe Fou,” updating George Bataille’s meditation on the big toe by riffing on a picture of Madonna’s bare feet. Weirdest of all, I recognize what I thought was my own obscure fondness for “invisible literature” in Dery’s essay on the New York Academy of Medicine Library — a place I too have plundered in quiet hours of mad and horrible research. Was I sitting across the table from you, Mark? I feel as though you, like Baudelaire, have addressed your book to “mon semblable, mon frère.”

How is it that Dery is able to produce this uncanny feeling of identification? You get the sense that, while the rest of us were living the zeitgeist, Dery was holding a stethoscope to its heart. His essays are EKGs showing that our pulse goes haywire in the presence of extremes — perversion, violence, satanism. In an introduction, Dery declares that it is “the writer’s job” to “think bad thoughts”: “to wander footloose through the mind’s labyrinth, following the thread of any idea that reels you in, no matter how arcane or depraved, obscene or blasphemous, untouchably controversial, irreducibly complex, or preposterous on its face.” All of us take in these abominations as they play across our flatscreens and iPhones, but Dery’s distinction is to really think about them — reflect on them, contextualize them, pursue their logic to sometimes unpalatable consequences. “The writer’s job,” he means to say, “is to transform ‘bad thoughts’ into good ones — insights and observations — through a process of examination.” Will this thankless job now compel Dery to go in search of even worse thoughts? Perhaps the worst of all lies in the realization that there are so many bad thoughts, an inexhaustible supply, yet to be confronted.

Vote and/or Comment on Review

Flagged by Jon Lebkowsky in Mark Dery dances the apocalypso

I’m leading a two-week asynchronous discussion with erudite author and culture critic Mark Dery, whose provocative essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts has been turning my head on its axle. At the moment, we’re discussing apocalypse:

I *do* think we live in times of chaos and complexity, when society is “far from equilibrium,” as
scientists who study dynamical systems like to say. Steven Pinker’s claim, in _The Better Angels of Our Nature_, that violence is on the decline notwithstanding, most peoples’ experience of the wider world—which is to say, as a funhouse-mirror reflection in the media—seems to be as a growingly out-of-control place. Ideological extremism and lockstep partisanship are monkeywrenching the American political system—an article by Ezra Klein in the March 19 _New Yorker_ notes that ideological “rigidity has made American democracy much more difficult to manage”; the culture wars are reaching a boiling point, ginned up by backroom dealmakers like the Koch brothers, whose real agenda is simply to create the most deregulated, tax-free landscape in which to Do the Lord’s Work; and Angry White Guys are stockpiling guns and training their crosshairs on scapegoats, post-traumatically stressed by a black man in the Oval Office, the demographic rise of the nonwhite population, the sea change in households where women earn more than men, and the econopocalypse.

But if you’re shopping for apocalypses, the rough beast right around the bend is Envirogeddon. Come of the middle of the 21st century, we—at least, those of us who can’t afford a climate-controlled biosphere lush with hydroponic greenery and an artesian well guarded by a private army—are going to be living in one of Ballard’s disaster novels. Global Weirding, as climate scientists call it, is *the* pressing issue of the near future, and I have every confidence my friends on the right will bury their heads in the sand, on that issue, until the sand superheats and turns to glass.

If you’re not a member of the WELL but want to submit a comment or question, just scroll to the bottom of the page and look for: Nonmember: Submit a comment or question. That links to a form that, when submitted, will send your comment or question to someone at the WELL who can add it to this discussion.