dirty double-00 promised so much and delivered so little...,

HuffPo |  A government psychologist who helped craft policies central to the CIA’s torture program is now advising an FBI-led interrogation project, according to a series of emails revealed in a new independent report.

The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group is the Obama administration’s response to the now-defunct CIA effort. Its members are dispatched to question terror suspects. Dr. Susan Brandon leads the HIG’s research committee, which studies and recommends the most effective methods of noncoercive interrogation. 

But as a Bush White House official, the new report says, Brandon helped that administration base the legality of the CIA’s interrogation techniques -- now widely denounced as torture -- on the assessments of psychologists present during the interrogations.

“Susan Brandon ... played a central role in the development of the 2005 [Psychological Ethics and National Security] policy,” states the report, which examined the complicity of psychologists in the CIA’s torture program. The language that Brandon helped write, the report says, has served to protect former torturers and their superiors from prosecution.

The report, titled "All The President’s Psychologists," was released last week on the heels of a separate inquiry examining the potential complicity of the American Psychological Association (APA) in the torture program. The latest investigation came from a group of university-affiliated psychologists, other medical professionals and human rights investigators.

Emails from the mid-2000s, cited in the report, tie Brandon to CIA contract psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, masterminds of the torture program. She had personal contact with them at a conference she arranged in 2003 and, according to emails, appears to have been in regular contact with their CIA supervisor. The extent of Brandon’s knowledge about Mitchell and Jessen’s activities at the time is unknown, though she is included on an email that discusses them as “doing special things to special people in special places.”

"What we see is associations. And the associations with the apparent supervisor of Mitchell and Jessen at each step of the process over a period of three years,” said Nathaniel Raymond, one of the report's co-authors and a program director with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. “The issue here is not about what she thinks about torture; the issue is about what she did in the past to knowingly or unknowingly create a legal heat shield for the president using the ethics of the APA. That’s the issue. This is not a question of torture. It’s a question of alleged corruption."

sistah.soldya ducking questions on how influence peddling made clinton richest ex-preznit OF ALL TIME!!!

BostonGlobe |  An unprecedented ethics promise that played a pivotal role in helping Hillary Rodham Clinton win confirmation as secretary of state, soothing senators’ concerns about conflicts of interests with Clinton family charities, was uniformly bypassed by the biggest of the philanthropies involved.

The Clinton Health Access Initiative never submitted information on any foreign donations to State Department lawyers for review during Clinton’s tenure from 2009 to 2013, Maura Daley, the organization’s spokeswoman, acknowledged to the Globe this week. She said the charity deemed it unnecessary, except in one case that she described as an “oversight.”

During that time, grants from foreign governments increased by tens of millions of dollars to the Boston-based organization.

Daley’s acknowledgement was the first by the charity of the broad scope of its apparent failures to fulfill the spirit of a crucial political pledge made by the Clinton family and their charities. The health initiative has previously acknowledged failing only to disclose the identity of its contributors, another requirement under the agreement.

The failures make the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which is headquartered on Dorchester Avenue in South Boston, and goes by the acronym CHAI, a prominent symbol of the broken political promise and subsequent lack of accountability underlying the charity-related controversies that are dogging Clinton as she embarks on her campaign for president.

The charity defended the lack of some disclosures on the grounds that the donations in question were simply passed through the charity to fund an existing project. Previously, it has acknowledged that mistakes were made. But loopoholes and legalistic explanations about what new foreign donations should be excluded from disclosure were not publicly discussed in the initial deal. In 2009, the incoming Obama administration, Clinton, and then-Senator John F. Kerry all publicly touted the Clinton charities’ “memorandum of understanding’’ as a guarantee that transparency and public scrutiny would be brought to bear on activities that posed any potential conflicts of interest with State Department business.

“Transparency is critically important here, obviously, because it allows the American people, the media, and those of us here in Congress . . . to be able to judge for ourselves that no conflicts — real or apparent — exist,’’ Kerry said during a Senate floor speech on Jan. 21, 2009.

The memorandum, which did not outline a penalty for failing to comply, was signed in December 2008 by Valerie Jarrett, co-chairwoman of the Obama transition team, and Bruce Lindsey, a longtime Clinton aide who at the time was CEO of the Clinton Foundation and sits on the board of the CHAI.

Jarrett and Lindsey declined to be interviewed about CHAI’s repeated failures to disclose major increases in foreign grants.

The White House and the State Department also declined to take a firm stand on the apparent violations of the agreement.

without torture prosecutions america can't claim to be a nation of laws...,

LATimes |  There’s a lot to be appalled about in the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s CIA torture report -- and yes, what the CIA did was torture. Beyond the atrocious physical abuse of detainees, the report details the agency’s incompetence -- it doesn’t know how many people it detained -- and its willful efforts to hide its misdeeds by lying to the president and Congress and maintaining a disinformation campaign with the media.

As others have noted, the conduct by the CIA and some of its contractors was inhumane and disgusting, regardless of whether they thought they were covered by Bush administration attorney John Yoo's legal rationalization. Much has been made that in the end, the “intelligence” the agents squeezed out of their victims was of little value, which makes a point of painful irony but obscures the darker reality. Even if the CIA had tortured a morsel of useful information out of someone, they still resorted to indefensible practices.

Imagine what the U.S. reaction -- from government officials to everyday people -- would be if we learned that agents of another country had grabbed people from outside its borders, spirited them away to clandestine chambers in third countries, and tortured them. Special forces would be deployed. The United Nations Security Council would convene. Sanctions would be imposed amid talk of isolating a rogue nation from the civilized world.

But because it was the U.S., it's likely nothing will happen despite calls for prosecutions. The Justice Department, which has already passed on prosecutions once, affirmed Tuesday that it will not reopen investigations into possible illegal acts committed by CIA agents and officials, or the people hired by them (yes, the U.S. even outsources torture).

If it is true that we are at war with terrorist organizations, then how is it not a war crime when U.S. agents take prisoners to secret complexes, deprive them of sleep, force them to stand on broken feet, manacle their hands above their heads, and “feed” them rectally?

Torture is illegal. Letting those responsible for such inhumane acts slip away without being brought to justice compounds the crime. We like to think of ourselves as a nation governed by laws, but to shrug off torture by agents of our own government tells the world that we not only find the crimes inconsequential, but we’ve turned off the international beacon of justice.

The Times editorial board read the report for what it is: An indictment:

e.o. wilson on bishop dawkins...,

independent |  “We just corrected a mistake made originally by Hamilton and then repeated by a number of people, myself included,” he says.

Wilson argues that multilevel selection – both at the level of individuals and groups – has led to the creation of eusociality in ants and humans. In the simplest terms, individuals who co-operate together in groups achieve more and enhance the survival of their group, while selfish individualism does not, even in terms of Hamilton’s inclusive fitness and kin selection.

“Within groups, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals but in the selection of other traits of individuals that are interactive with other individuals – social traits – then groups of altruists defeat groups of selfish individuals,” Wilson explains. “In a nutshell, individual selection favours what we call sin and group selection favours virtue.”  But for many evolutionary biologists, this is demonstrably untrue, at least in animals. For the past 40 years or more, biology students have been taught that natural selection works on the level of genes. Richard Dawkins was the first to articulate this approach to a mass audience, arguing that individuals and their bodies are mere vehicles or “gene machines” for carrying genes through one generation to the next.

Two years after the 2010 Nature paper, Dawkins wrote a scathing review in Prospect magazine of Wilson’s support for group selection which Dawkins dismissively labelled “a bland, unfocused ecumenicalism”.

Natural selection without kin selection is like Euclid without Pythagoras, wrote Dawkins. “Wilson is, in effect, striding around with a ruler, measuring triangles to see whether Pythagoras got it right,” he said. “For Wilson not to acknowledge that he speaks for himself against the great majority of his professional colleagues is – it pains me to say this of a lifelong hero – an act of wanton arrogance.”

Although Wilson has much to be arrogant about, few who have met him would accuse him of it. But the criticism must have hurt, and Wilson was evidently still feeling stung by it when writing his latest book, in which he rather waspishly describes Dawkins, a distinguished Fellow of the Royal Society and retired Oxford professor, as an “eloquent science journalist”.

“What else is he? I mean journalism is a high and influential profession. But he’s not a scientist, he’s never done scientific research. My definition of a scientist is that you can complete the following sentence: ‘he or she has shown that…’,” Wilson says.

“I don’t want to go on about this because he and I were friends. There is no debate between us because he’s not in the arena. I’m sorry he’s so upset. He could have distinguished himself by looking at the evidence, that’s what most science journalists do. When a journalist named Dawkins wrote a review in Prospect urging people not to read my book, I thought the last time I heard something like that I think it came from an 18th-century bishop.”

the ebola epidemic in West Africa has U.S. biowarfare programs written all over it.

washingtonsblog |  WASHINGTON’S BLOG: You said recently that laboratories in West Africa run by the Centers for Disease Control and Tulane University are doing bioweapons research.  What documentary evidence do you have of that?

You mentioned that a map produced by the CDC shows where the laboratories are located on the West Coast of Africa?

DR. FRANCIS BOYLE:  Yes. They’ve got one in Monrovia [the capital of Ebola-stricken Liberia] … one in Kenema, Sierra Leone [the third largest city in the Ebola-hotzone nation], which was shut down this summer because the government there believed that it was the Tulane vaccines which had set this whole thing off.

And then they have another one in Guinea, where the first case [of Ebola] was reported.

All of these are labs which do this offensive/defensive biowarfare work. 

And Fort Detrick’s USAMRIID [the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases] has also been over there. So it’s clear what’s been going on there.

CDC has a long history of doing biowarfare work. I have them doing biowarfare work for the Pentagon in Sierra Leone as early 1988.

WASHINGTON’S BLOG:   And how do you know that? Have you seen official documents?

DR. FRANCIS BOYLE:  An official government document: the Biological Defense Research Program, May 1988.  I analyzed it in my book, Biowarfare and Terrorism.

It’s clear that [the U.S. bioweapons researchers] were using Liberia to try to circumvent the Biological Weapons Convention.  And CDC – for years – has been up to its eyeballs in biowarfare work.

They always try to justify the development of offensive biological weapons by claiming it’s being done for “defensive” purposes.  That’s just a lie … and it’s always been a lie.

It’s been the case on Ebola and just about every other biowarfare agent you can think of.

WASHINGTON’S BLOG:  Does that type of research violate the Biological Weapons Convention?

DR. FRANCIS BOYLE: Well, of course! It also violates the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act [which Boyle drafted], which was passed unanimously by both houses of the United States Congress and signed into law by President Bush, Senior.

That Act creates life in prison for this type of “Dr. Menegle” type work.

WASHINGTON’S BLOG:  And Obama recently said – as quoted in the New York Times article – that he’s “curtailing” this type of defensive research, or putting it on hold.

Do you believe him?

DR. FRANCIS BOYLE:  That’s the smoking gun, right there. Read that article [the New York Times article quoted above, which notes "a sudden change of heart by the Obama administration" about labs creating ever-deadlier versions of germs which are already lethal].  

The reason they’ve stopped it is to cover themselves, I think, because they know that this type of work was behind the outbreak of the [Ebola] pandemic in West Africa.

But that’s an admission right there, de facto.

u.s. hospitals weigh withholding care to ebola patients...,

reuters |  The Ebola crisis is forcing the American healthcare system to consider the previously unthinkable: withholding some medical interventions because they are too dangerous to doctors and nurses and unlikely to help a patient.

U.S. hospitals have over the years come under criticism for undertaking measures that prolong dying rather than improve patients' quality of life.

But the care of the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the United States, who received dialysis and intubation and infected two nurses caring for him, is spurring hospitals and medical associations to develop the first guidelines for what can reasonably be done and what should be withheld.

Officials from at least three hospital systems interviewed by Reuters said they were considering whether to withhold individual procedures or leave it up to individual doctors to determine whether an intervention would be performed.

Ethics experts say they are also fielding more calls from doctors asking what their professional obligations are to patients if healthcare workers could be at risk.

U.S. health officials meanwhile are trying to establish a network of about 20 hospitals nationwide that would be fully equipped to handle all aspects of Ebola care.

Their concern is that poorly trained or poorly equipped hospitals that perform invasive procedures will expose staff to bodily fluids of a patient when they are most infectious. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is working with kidney specialists on clinical guidelines for delivering dialysis to Ebola patients. The recommendations could come as early as this week.   
The possibility of withholding care represents a departure from the "do everything" philosophy in most American hospitals and a return to a view that held sway a century ago, when doctors were at greater risk of becoming infected by treating dying patients.

"This is another example of how this 21st century viral threat has pulled us back into the 19th century," said medical historian Dr. Howard Markel of the University of Michigan.

american anthrax: why secrets, public service, and governance don't mix

ICH |  September 11, 2001, shook the United States to the core, a country that had been nearly untouchable since its democratic inception. However, immediately following this horrific tragedy, another equally as impactful 'terrorist attack' occurred when weaponized anthrax was sent to multiple Congressman and journalists through the U.S. Postal Service.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were both one-time events that happened in two prominent cities. Unlike 9/11, the Anthrax Attacks localized terrorism and spread fear to every corner of American life, where the simple act of getting your mail could prove to be fatal. Five people died as a result of breathing in the deadly anthrax spores, including postal workers and one NY Post reporter. Countless others were infected.

The Bush administration initially tried to link this 'second wave of terrorism' to al-Qaeda with zero proof. Once that talking point out-lived its usefulness, the official narrative began leaning towards Saddam Hussein and his mythological biological weapons program.

Establishment propagandists like John Mccaine and ABC news reporters intentionally spread disinformation to plant the seed in the public mind that the anthrax came from Iraq, which eventually lead to Colin Powell's infamous 2003 WMD speech at the UN. All the while, the U.S. government was fully aware that the anthrax did not come from an external source, because the strain showed tell-tale signs of being a specific anthrax strain that was weaponized and manufactured by the U.S. military.

Regardless, the idea of the Anthrax Attacks being executed by an external terrorist organization remained conventional wisdom the public was conditioned into believing in the aftermath of 9/11. Eventually, two men were accused of being the perpetrators behind the attacks, yet no charges were ever brought to either of them. The first accused individual, Steven Hatfill, ended up being rewarded a multimillion dollar settlement from the government for being wrongly accused before any evidence was presented against him. The subsequent accused individual, Bruce Ivins, allegedly committed suicide while the FBI was trying to break him into confessing.

Ultimately, the FBI asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to verify its evidence pointing to Ivins as the main suspect. Instead, the NAS concluded that the DNA in the anthrax sent in the mail was in fact not a match to the anthrax Ivins worked with. Before the National Academy of Sciences finished their independent investigation, the FBI rushed its preestablished conclusions about Ivins's guilt to the press, and the case was closed. To this day, the FBI has never commented on the many glaring contradictions in the official government narrative about the Anthrax Attacks.

the evolutionary roots of human altruism...,

sciencedaily |  A group of researchers from Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Italy and Great Britain, headed by anthropologist Judith Burkart from the University of Zurich, therefore developed a novel approach they systematically applied to a great number of primate species. The results of the study have now been published in Nature Communications. 

For their study, Burkart and her colleagues developed the new paradigm of group service, which examines spontaneous helping behavior in a standardized way. With the aid of a simple test apparatus, the researchers studied whether individuals from a particular primate species were prepared to provide other group members with a treat, even if this meant missing out themselves (see box). The scientists applied this standardized test to 24 social groups of 15 different primate species. They also examined whether and how kindergarten children aged between four and seven acted altruistically.  

The researchers found that the willingness to provision others varies greatly from one primate species to the next. But there was a clear pattern, as summarized by Burkart: “Humans and callitrichid monkeys acted highly altruistically and almost always produced the treats for the other group members. Chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives, however, only did so sporadically.” Similarly, most other primate species, including capuchins and macaques, only rarely pulled the lever to give another group member food, if at all – even though they have considerable cognitive skills.     

Until now, many researchers assumed that spontaneous altruistic behavior in primates could be attributed to factors they would share with humans: advanced cognitive skills, large brains, high social tolerance, collective foraging or the presence of pair bonds or other strong social bonds. As Burkart’s new data now reveal, however, none of these factors reliably predicts whether a primate species will be spontaneously altruistic or not. Instead, another factor that sets us humans apart from the great apes appears to be responsible. Says Burkart: “Spontaneous, altruistic behavior is exclusively found among species where the young are not only cared for by the mother, but also other group members such as siblings, fathers, grandmothers, aunts and uncles.” This behavior is referred to technically as the “cooperative breeding” or “allomaternal care.”  

The significance of this study goes beyond identifying the roots of our altruism. Cooperative behavior also favored the evolution of our exceptional cognitive abilities. During development, human children gradually construct their cognitive skills based on extensive selfless social inputs from caring parents and other helpers, and the researchers believe that it is this new mode of caring that also put our ancestors on the road to our cognitive excellence. This study may, therefore, have just identified the foundation for the process that made us human. As Burkart suggests: “When our hominin ancestors began to raise their offspring cooperatively, they laid the foundation for both our altruism and our exceptional cognition.”

did he get fed up being poor and exploited at the institute?

wikipedia | Pranav Mistry (born 1981) is an Indian computer scientist. He joined Samsung electronics as the Director of Research in 2013, and leads the Think Tank. He introduced Samsung Galaxy Gear smart watch in September 2013.^[1] Previously he was a research assistant and a PhD candidate at MIT Media Lab. Before joining MIT, Pranav worked as a UX Researcher with Microsoft. Pranav holds a Master's degree in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT and Master of Design from Industrial Design Center, IIT Mumbai. He has completed Bachelors’ degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Nirma Institute of Technology in Gujarat.^[2][3] He is from Palanpur, which is situated in northern Gujarat in India. Mistry is best known for his work on SixthSense.^[4][5][6] Among some of his other work, Pranav has invented Mouseless – an invisible computer mouse; SPARSH – a novel way to copy-paste data between digital devices; Quickies – intelligent sticky notes that can be searched, located and can send reminders and messages; Blinkbot - a gaze and blink controlled robot; a pen that can draw in 3D; and a public map that can act as Google of physical world. Pranav’s research interests include Augmented reality, Ubiquitous computing, Gestural interaction, AI, Machine vision, Collective intelligence and Robotics.

vatican inc.

tdf | Pope Benedict’s resignation shocked the Catholic Church and left the Vatican in disarray. His successor will face many challenges, from recurrent sexual scandals to concerns about financial impropriety at the Vatican’s own bank, the IOR or Institute of Religious Works.

In 2011, Al Jazeera investigated allegations that the IOR had been involved in money laundering and examined Pope Benedict’s plans for cleaning up the secretive system. With many of those reforms having fallen short and the Vatican’s finances still under a cloud, the next Pope might benefit from watching this report once again.

Every Sunday worshipers crowd the Saint Peter’s colonnades in square and from its balcony the Pope imparts a sacrament and the latest behavioral guidelines. Over one billion Catholics look to the pontiff for guidance and donate their money to the Catholic Church. A large portion of this money makes its way to the Vatican and into the vaults of the IOR, the Institute for Religious Works, the Vatican’s Bank.

The IOR is the vehicle through which thousands of charitable and religious initiatives around the globe are financed. In the recent past, Italian state prosecutors placed the bank under investigation for suspected money laundering. Twenty three million Euros in Vatican funds were seized representing only a fraction of suspect transactions now being scrutinized. IOR president, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, was also placed under investigation and a huge financial scandal now threatens to envelop the church. For many Catholics, it has the disturbing echoes of another scandal of 30 years ago, the infamous “Banco Ambrosiano affair” and some now fear that history may be repeating itself.

President Ettore Gotti Tedeschi was questioned in order to clarify the situation, but after the questioning the prosecution thought that they had not received satisfactory answers. It is surprising that even the president of the IOR could not find a way to clarify the circumstances.

The Institute for Religious Works is located behind the walls of the Vatican City state and inside the massive tower build by Niccolo V. The bank was founded in 1942 by Pope Pius XII with the purpose of safe keeping the Vatican’s vast assets in capital and real estate. The IOR doesn’t allow everyone to open accounts. There are specific regulations allowing only religious organizations or members of clergy to do so.

The IOR is administered by industry professionals under the supervision of the Council of Cardinals, but because the IOR has only one central branch inside the Vatican, it has to use other banks outside the city state to move its funds around. However, the names of its accounts holders are kept secret and transactions bare no other identification than that of the IOR. This means the origins of any deposit coming into an IOR account are wiped from the record before the funds are moved out to the international banking system and that, say critics, makes money laundering all too easy.

Generally, the profits that the IOR makes during a year’s worth of financial operations and from the deposits made, are given to the Pope for charitable works that are carried out worldwide. The amount corresponds roughly to 70 or 80 million Euros every year.

Inevitably, this huge flow of cash, much of it untraceable, has attracted the attention of investigators. The latest probe began in the hills around Rome in late 2008 when Father Evaldo Biasini, treasurer of the Congregation of the Missionaries of the precious blood, answered his mobile phone.

microshizzle: your privacy is our priority

 

Guardian | Skype worked with intelligence agencies last year to allow Prism to collect video and audio conversations. 

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.

The documents show that:

• Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;
• The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;
• The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;
• Microsoft also worked with the FBI's Data Intercept Unit to "understand" potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;
• In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;
• Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a "team sport".

The latest NSA revelations further expose the tensions between Silicon Valley and the Obama administration. All the major tech firms are lobbying the government to allow them to disclose more fully the extent and nature of their co-operation with the NSA to meet their customers' privacy concerns. Privately, tech executives are at pains to distance themselves from claims of collaboration and teamwork given by the NSA documents, and insist the process is driven by legal compulsion.

In a statement, Microsoft said: "When we upgrade or update products we aren't absolved from the need to comply with existing or future lawful demands." The company reiterated its argument that it provides customer data "only in response to government demands and we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers".

In June, the Guardian revealed that the NSA claimed to have "direct access" through the Prism program to the systems of many major internet companies, including Microsoft, Skype, Apple, Google, Facebook and Yahoo.

Blanket orders from the secret surveillance court allow these communications to be collected without an individual warrant if the NSA operative has a 51% belief that the target is not a US citizen and is not on US soil at the time. Targeting US citizens does require an individual warrant, but the NSA is able to collect Americans' communications without a warrant if the target is a foreign national located overseas.

Since Prism's existence became public, Microsoft and the other companies listed on the NSA documents as providers have denied all knowledge of the program and insisted that the intelligence agencies do not have back doors into their systems.

Microsoft's latest marketing campaign, launched in April, emphasizes its commitment to privacy with the slogan: "Your privacy is our priority."

nsa recruitment drive goes wrong...,

guardian news | On Tuesday, the National Security Agency called at the University of Wisconsin on a recruitment drive. 

Attending the session was Madiha R Tahir, a journalist studying a language course at the university. She asked the squirming recruiters a few uncomfortable questions about the activities of NSA: which countries the agency considers to be "adversaries", and if being a good liar is a qualification for getting a job at the NSA. 

She has posted a recording of the session on Soundcloud, which you can hear above, and posted a rough transcript on her blog, The Mob and the Multitude. Here are some highlights.

The session begins ...

Tahir: "Do you consider Germany and the countries that the NSA has been spying upon to be adversaries, or are you, right now, not speaking the truth?"

Recruiter 1: "You can define adversary as 'enemy' and, clearly, Germany is not our enemy. But would we have foreign national interests from an intelligence perspective on what's going on across the globe? Yeah, we do."

Tahir: "So by 'adversaries', you actually mean anybody and everybody. There is nobody, then, by your definition that is not an adversary. Is that correct?"

Recruiter 1: "That is not correct."

Recruiter 2: "… for us, our business is apolitical, OK? We do not generate the intelligence requirements. They are levied on us ... We might use the word 'target'."

Tahir: "I'm just surprised that for language analysts, you're incredibly imprecise with your language. And it just doesn't seem to be clear."

Later ...

Tahir: "... this is a recruiting session and you are telling us things that aren't true. And we also know that the NSA took down brochures and factsheets after the Snowden revelations because those factsheets also had severe inaccuracies and untruths in them, right? So how are we supposed to believe what you're saying?" Fist tap Dale.

coopetition...,

wikipedia | Coopetition or Co-opetition (sometimes spelled "coopertition" or "co-opertition") is a neologism coined to describe cooperative competition. Coopetition is a portmanteau of cooperation and competition.

Basic principles of co-opetitive structures have been described in game theory, a scientific field that received more attention with the book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944 and the works of John Forbes Nash on non-cooperative games. It is also applied in the fields of political science and economics and even universally [works of V. Frank Asaro, J.D.: Universal Co-opetition,2011, and The Tortoise Shell Code, novel, 2012].

Coopetition occurs when companies interact with partial congruence of interests. They cooperate with each other to reach a higher value creation if compared to the value created without interaction, and struggle to achieve competitive advantage.

Often coopetition takes place when companies that are in the same market work together in the exploration of knowledge and research of new products, at the same time that they compete for market-share of their products and in the exploitation of the knowledge created. In this case, the interactions occur simultaneously and in different levels in the value chain. This is the case of the arrangement between PSA Peugeot Citroën and Toyota to share components for a new city car - simultaneously sold as the Peugeot 107, the Toyota Aygo, and the Citroën C1, where companies save money on shared costs while remaining fiercely competitive in other areas. Several advantages can be foreseen, as cost reductions, resources complementarity and technological transfer. Some difficulties also exist, as distribution of control, equity in risk, complementary needs and trust. Not only two companies can interact within a coopetitive environment, but several partnerships among competitors are possible.

former federal reserve governor and columbia economist lying for $$$?

zerohedge | Some time ago we penned a post, titled"Mishkin On Iceland: "Nothing Is F*#&ed Here Dude" which discussed the former Fed director's March 2006 analysis "Financial (IN)Stability In Iceland." Those interested in our original observations of Mishkin's horrendous analysis (of what proved to be the first bankrupt European country of the new century, but certainly not last) can find them at the original link. Yet continuing with the Duderino references, today, new shit has come to light, which once again confirms that not only is the Fed populated by the most intellectually incapable and corrupt people, but that anything coming out of Columbia University (and the Ivy League in general) is not worth the paper it is printed on. Watch the attached clip to see a former Fed director go from comfortable, to fidgety, to stuttering, to thoroughly discredited, to in dire need of diaper change, in under 2 minutes. Last but not least, here is the soundbite of the year: "You have faith in the central bank." No further comment necessary. Fist tap Big Don.

2 UC Davis neurosurgeons accused of experimental surgery are banned from human research

sacbee | A prominent UC Davis neurosurgeon was banned from performing medical research on humans after he and an underling were accused of experimenting on dying brain cancer patients without university permission, The Bee has learned.

Dr. J. Paul Muizelaar, who earns more than $800,000 a year as chairman of the department of neurological surgery, was ordered last fall to "immediately cease and desist" from any research involving human subjects, according to documents obtained by The Bee.

Also banned was the colleague, Dr. Rudolph J. Schrot, an assistant professor and neurosurgeon who has worked under Muizelaar the past 13 years.

The university has admitted to the federal government that the surgeons' actions amounted to "serious and continuing noncompliance" with federal regulations.

Documents show the surgeons got the consent of three terminally ill patients with malignant brain tumors to introduce bacteria into their open head wounds, under the theory that postoperative infections might prolong their lives. Two of the patients developed sepsis and died, the university later determined.

The actions – described by two prominent bioethicists as "astonishing," and a "major penalty" for the school – threaten both the doctors' professional careers and the university's reputation and federal-funding status.

"This is really distressing" said Patricia Backlar, an Oregon bioethicist who served on former President Bill Clinton's national bioethics advisory commission.

"UC Davis is a very respectable school, but even the best places have trouble," Backlar said. " … These men have put that school in jeopardy."

Research on both humans and animals is tightly controlled in the United States and, according to federal regulations and university policy, must undergo a rigorous approval process to ensure that subjects are protected.

where the trough is overflowing (let my people go!)

NYTimes | Every five years or so, Congress promises a new, improved farm bill that will end unnecessary subsidies to big farmers, enhance the environment and actually do something to help small farmers and small towns. But what it usually does is find ways of disguising the old inequities, sending taxpayers dollars to wealthy farmers, accelerating the expansion of industrial farming, inflating land prices and further depopulating rural America.

The new five-year farm bill that could hit the Senate floor as early as this week promises more of the same — excessively generous handouts, combined with a serious erosion of environmental protections. The nearly trillion-dollar bill would provide over 10 years roughly $140 billion in farm subsidies, $55 billion or so in conservation programs and more than $750 billion in food stamp aid.

The subsidies have always been controversial. A mix of direct payments, price supports, loans, subsidized insurance and disaster relief, these subsidies provided protection for millions of farmers in the New Deal and afterward against the vicissitudes of the weather and the market. But in recent years, they have mainly lined the pockets of big farmers of big row crops who don’t need help, while ignoring the little guys who do.

As numerous studies from the Environmental Working Group have shown, the story of modern agriculture in this country is a story of concentration, of huge subsidies flowing to relatively few farmers who grow a handful of row crops — corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton and rice — in a dozen or so Midwestern and Southern states.

Because farm subsidies, old and new, have been tied to production, those cultivating the largest acreage get the biggest payouts. The top 20 percent of recipients from 1995 to 2010 got 90 percent of the subsidies; the bottom 80 percent just 10 percent. Many farmers — well over half the total, by some estimates — get no help at all.

The Senate bill leaves these basic contours unaltered. One positive change is the elimination of an indefensible program of “direct subsidies” that showered $5 billion a year on farmers in good times and bad. But big farmers won’t be worse off. The Senate Agriculture Committee redirected much of the savings into a different subsidy — crop insurance, which pays farmers if they have a loss in revenue or crop yield.

The existing crop insurance program, which pays on average 60 percent of the cost of insurance premiums for farmers, has risen from about $2.4 billion in 2001 to about $8.7 billion in 2011, and is expected to cost $9 billion annually in the coming years. The committee also added a second insurance-related program that could cost an additional $3 billion a year. The main beneficiaries of crop insurance will still be the big farmers, who take out the biggest policies.

this devil had the nerve to hollar "let my people go!"

Long, long ago(1980s) a 'Glorious Deal' was struck in Springfield, Illinois. Chicago wanted to get control of the failing Chicago Public Schools but suburban Republicans refused to allow Chicago Public Schools to 'secede'from the State Board of Education unless the State of Illinois agreed to pay for the teacher pensions of all suburban school districts and the pensions for all Illinois
public university and junior college teaching faculties.

The Illinois university/CC system also have the ability to tax to pay pensions but don't bother doing it.

Over the last 30 years, the entire Illinois State pension liability has risen to $53 billion dollars(2010) of which $38 billion(72%) was suburban/downstate teacher's pension and $14.3 billion(27%) was state university/CC faculty and all other state employee pensions(judges, state
troopers and other state workers) totalled <$1 billion(1%).

http://sunshinereview.org/index.php/Illinois_public_pensions

So what has this to do with downstate Republican State Rep Mike Bost's tirade(who squealed from the floor, 'Let my people go!') ?

At this time of great sacrifice(eg Medicare is getting slashed), IL House Majority Leader Mike Madigan inserted a 'poison pill' into the Pension bill ending 'the Glorious Deal' and forcing local school districts/colleges to pay the pensions of their own teachers (oh horror!). In Illinois schools are paid by property tax levy(schools are ~75% of property tax as is) and ending the Glorious Deal would unleash the Mother of All Property Tax Increases.

For Illinois conservatives this is a truly nuclear option.

Since Bost's Teapot explosion, Democratic Governor Quinn directed the Republican leader Tom Cross to try to mend the Pension bill without unloading the teacher pensions properly on to suburbanites/downstaters but Chicago's Madigan said he wants the poison pill included.

Quinn is terrified that not dealing with the Pension bill will cause Wall Street to downgrade the Illinois' terrible credit rating.

As of today there is still no compromise.

Mike Bost became unhinged at the possibility that his constituents' free ride was ending and for him to support that ending in the name of financial responsibilty would unleash a tsunami of property tax increases would amount to political suicide.

This is the real story of our current crisis---conservatives and the wealthy want to balance the books on the backs of the poor and middle class, 'let someone else pay for it!'( even though the poor simply haven't the money to do it) and given their superior lobbying abilities that is exactly what will happen.

The rich who fret over 'subsidies' to the poor and middle class, can't bear to lose a penny from the MUCH larger, MUCH more secret subsidies they suck from the system.

If this occurs, America will become more Haiti-like with the 99% masses sunk into the pit and the 1% comfortably living in chateaus. And these were also the condition in 1789 France.

"Qu'ils mangent de la brioche," said the Queen of France.

how corporate socialism works (let my people go!)

Reuters | A proposal to spend $250 million of taxpayer money on a retail project here illustrates the damage state and local subsidies do by taking from the many to benefit the already rich few.

Nationwide state and local subsidies for corporations totaled more than $70 billion in 2010, as calculated by Professor Kenneth Thomasof the University of Missouri-St. Louis

In a country of 311 million, that’s $900 taken on average from each family of four in 2010. There are no official figures, but this one is likely conservative because — as documented by Thomas, this column and Good Jobs First [1], a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog organization funded by Ford, Surdna and other major foundations — these upward redistributions of wealth keep increasing.

In Irondequoit, just outside Rochester, N.Y., and a few miles from where I live, developer Scott Congel wants $250 million in sales taxes to finance rebuilding the Medley Centre mall while adding condominiums and a hotel. Typically local governments issue bonds, which are paid off using sales tax receipts that are diverted from public purposes to the developer’s benefit.

Subsidies for retail businesses are the worst kind of corporate welfare because, as the end of the economic chain, retailing grows only when population and incomes increase. If population or income falls, then subsidies for new projects like Congel’s damage existing businesses, where people would otherwise be spending their money.

The mall, which struggled from the start, was built in 1990 for $140 million in today’s dollars. A Congel associate, Adam Bersin, bought it in 2005 for less than $6 million in today’s dollars. He then persuaded the Monroe County industrial development agency to issue $5.4 million in bonds and then flipped the real estate to Congel in 2007.

[2]Today the mall is empty, its doors sealed, except for a Sears at one end and a Macy’s at the other, each with a handful of customers during my visits.

Congel promised a $260 million project, but five years on nothing is built and Congel is seeking delays in fulfilling promises for which the mall was granted property tax breaks.

That’s how corporate socialism works – taxpayers contribute when the market rejects.

the case against kids: is procreation immoral?

TheNewYorker | In “Why Have Children?: The Ethical Debate” (M.I.T. Press), Christine Overall tries to subject that decision to morally rigorous analysis. Overall, who teaches philosophy at Queen’s University, in Ontario, dismisses the notion that childbearing is “natural” and therefore needs no justification. “There are many urges apparently arising from our biological nature that we nonetheless should choose not to act upon,” she observes. If we’re going to keep having kids, we ought to be able to come up with a reason.

Of course, people do give reasons for having children, and Overall takes them up one by one. Consider the claim that having a child benefits the child. This might seem self-evident. After all, a child deprived, through some Knowltonian means, of coming into existence, loses everything. She can never experience any of the pleasures life has to offer—eating ice cream, say, or riding a bike, or, for the more forward-thinking parents among us, having sex.

Overall rejects this argument on two grounds. First of all, nonexistent people have no moral standing. (There are an infinite number of nonexistent people out there, and you don’t notice them complaining, do you?) Second, once you accept that you should have a baby in order to increase the world’s total happiness, how do you know when to stop? Let’s say one kid eating ice cream represents x amount of added pleasure. In that case, two kids eating ice cream represents 2x, four kids 4x, and so on. The family with eight kids could perhaps afford to buy ice cream only half as often as the one with four. Still, provided the parents were able to throw in a bag of M&M’s, they (or, at least, the world) would fare better, total-happiness-wise, with the larger brood. And, from a strictly utilitarian perspective, things would be even better if the parents kept pumping kids out. Generalize this process, and the world would teem with more and more people leading less and less satisfying lives, until eventually the happiness of each individual would start to approach nil. This reductio ad Duggar Family was first articulated by the British philosopher Derek Parfit; it is known in academic circles as the Repugnant Conclusion. Overall considers it dispositive: “A simplistic utilitarianism is wrong about the ethics of having children.”

Overall finds most of the other frequently invoked rationales to be, philosophically speaking, similarly inadequate. Some people justify the decision to have children on the ground that they are perpetuating a family name or a genetic line. But “is anyone’s biological composition so valuable that it must be perpetuated?” Overall asks. Others say that it’s a citizen’s duty to society to provide for its continuation. Such an obligation, Overall objects, “would make women into procreative serfs.”

Still others argue that people ought to have children so there will be someone to care for them in their old age. “Anyone who has children for the sake of the supposed financial support they can provide,” Overall writes, is “probably deluded.”

Finally, lots of people offer the notion that parenthood will make them happy. Here the evidence is, sadly, against them. Research shows that people who have children are no more satisfied with their lives than people who don’t. If anything, the balance tips the other way: parents are less happy. In an instantly famous study, published in Science in 2004, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman asked nine hundred working women to assess their experiences during the preceding day. The women rated the time they’d spent taking care of their kids as less enjoyable than the time spent shopping, eating, exercising, watching TV, preparing food, and talking on the phone. One of the few activities these women found less enjoyable than caring for their children was doing housework, which is to say cleaning up after them.

But none of this really matters. Procreation for the sake of the parents is ethically unacceptable. “To have a child in order to benefit oneself is a moral error,” Overall writes.