Archive for the 'Dictatorship' Category
From 2004: “Army Test in 1950 May Have Changed Microbial Ecology”
July 14th, 2014Via: San Francisco Chronicle: Serratia is a bacterium that some doctors and residents of the Bay Area have been familiar with for many years. In 1950, government officials believed that serratia did not cause disease. That belief was later used as a justification for a secret post-World War II Army experiment that became a notorious […]
Have We Gone From a Post-War to a Pre-War World?
July 13th, 2014Via: Huffington Post: On June 28, 1914, a chauffeur panicked after a failed bomb attack on his boss, took a wrong turn and came to a complete stop in front of a café in Sarajevo where Gavrilo Princip was sitting. Princip, discouraged at the apparent failure of the planned murder, seized the unexpected opportunity and […]
Banks Dreading Computer Hacks Call for Cyber War Council
July 13th, 2014Via: Bloomberg: Wall Street’s biggest trade group has proposed a government-industry cyber war council to stave off terrorist attacks that could trigger financial panic by temporarily wiping out account balances, according to an internal document. The proposal by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, known as Sifma, calls for a committee of executives and […]
CIA Employee’s Quest to Release Information Destroyed Career
July 6th, 2014Via: Washington Post: His CIA career included assignments in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the most perilous posting for Jeffrey Scudder turned out to be a two-year stint in a sleepy office that looks after the agency’s historical files. It was there that Scudder discovered a stack of articles, hundreds of histories of long-dormant conflicts […]
The Military Is Already Using Facebook to Track Your Mood
July 2nd, 2014Via: Defense One: Critics have targeted a recent study on how emotions spread on the popular social network site Facebook, complaining that some 600,000 Facebook users did not know that they were taking part in an experiment. Somewhat more disturbing, the researchers deliberately manipulated users’ feelings to measure an effect called emotional contagion. Though Cornell […]
Billionaire: When The Pitchforks Come Out, There Won’t Be Time to Board Our Gulfstream Jets for New Zealand
June 27th, 2014There’s another take on this over at Daily Ticker. In short: Wealthy People Should “Chill Out” Because Docile, Bewildered Americans Will Just Keep Watching TV: The rich ought to chill out. While the masses may envy their wealth, there’s no evidence of a revolution brewing, or even a well-behaved civil disturbance. Americans are clearly dismayed […]
Obama Asks Congress for $500 Million for Rebels
June 26th, 2014The ink is hardly dry on this one: Militants in Iraq Take Over Four Cities, Make Off with Arms Cache and Nearly Half a Billion Dollars. So they are backing the good terrorists and the bad terrorists. The amount needed for the good terrorists is interesting, wouldn’t you say? The bad terrorists make off with […]
Massachusetts SWAT Teams Claim They’re Private Corporations, Immune from Open Records Laws
June 26th, 2014Via: Washington Post: As part of the American Civil Liberties Union’s recent report on police militarization, the Massachusetts chapter of the organization sent open records requests to SWAT teams across that state. It received an interesting response. As it turns out, a number of SWAT teams in the Bay State are operated by what are […]
The Rise of Militarized NGOs
June 25th, 2014Via: The Atlantic: Who invaded Crimea? Civil society. Who has occupied government offices and police headquarters in eastern Ukraine, bringing massive instability to that region? Civil society. Who is fighting the governments of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Nouri al-Malaki in Iraq? Civil society. And who are thecolectivos confronting Venezuelan students who protest against the […]
And Now… “Americans Have Joined Militant Group ISIS”
June 25th, 2014*wink* Via: CBS: The Sunni militant group in Iraq is a force roughly 3,000 strong and includes some Americans, a senior intelligence official told CBS News on Tuesday. The majority of fighters in the group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, are of Iraqi and Syrian origin. In all, up to 10,000 are fighting […]
