18 Secret Armies of the CIA
January 3rd, 2007Via: Canongate:
1. UKRAINIAN PARTISANS
2. CHINESE BRIGADE IN BURMA
3. GUATEMALAN REBEL ARMY
4. SUMATRAN REBELS
5. KHAMBA HORSEMEN
6. BAY OF PIGS INVASION FORCE
7. L’ARMÉE CLANDESTINE
8. NUNG MERCENARIES
9. PERUVIAN REGIMENT
10. CONGO MERCENARY FORCE
11. THE CAMBODIAN COUP
12. KURD REBELS
13. ANGOLA MERCENARY FORCE
14. AFGHAN MUJAHEEDIN
15. SALVADORAN DEATH SQUADS
16. NICARAGUAN CONTRAS
17. HAITIAN COUPS
18. VENEZUELAN COUP ATTEMPT
CEOs Pass Average Canadian Salary by January 2nd
January 3rd, 2007Warning: If you attempt to perform a similar calculation for U.S. executives and workers, your head might explode. Scanners style.
Well, these guys did it, and lived to write up the results. In 2004, American average CEO/worker pay ratio was 431:1.
Via: ctv.ca:
By the time most Canadians drag themselves into work on Tuesday after the holidays, the country’s highest-paid CEOs will already have earned the average employee’s annual salary.
By 9:46 a.m. Tuesday, the 100 highest-paid private-sector executives will have earned an average Canadian’s salary of $38,010, says a new study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
For minimum-wage workers, the country’s top earners made their entire salary average of $15,931 by New Year’s Day.
“When you say that the average CEO made $9 million in 2005 and the average Canadian made ($38,000), the comparison between those things is so far into the stratosphere that I think people have trouble just coming to terms with what the comparison means,” Hugh Mackenzie, an economist with the independent research institute that focuses on issues of social and economic justice, told The Canadian Press.
“Converting it into time sort of puts it into a frame that people can get their heads around.”
The statistics are based on 2005 salary figures from Statistics Canada and Report on Business magazine’s most recent listing of the 100 best-paid CEOs of Canadian publicly traded companies.
According to the figures, by the end of the workday Tuesday, the average CEO will have pocketed a staggering $70,000.
“I was kind of hoping it would get into the second week of January. As it turns out, it was not even close,” said Mackenzie. “Once people get over how stunning the differentials are, I think it really raises a lot of questions in people’s minds.”
“How can somebody possibly be worth that amount in income and . . . if those people are taking that much money out of the company or out of the economy, what does that mean for what’s left for the rest of us?”
U.S. ‘Licence to Snoop’ on British Air Travellers
January 1st, 2007Via: Telegraph:
Britons flying to America could have their credit card and email accounts inspected by the United States authorities following a deal struck by Brussels and Washington.
By using a credit card to book a flight, passengers face having other transactions on the card inspected by the American authorities. Providing an email address to an airline could also lead to scrutiny of other messages sent or received on that account.
The Dangling Corpse of Saddam Hussein and a Bit of Context
January 1st, 2007
On 17 December 1983, President Reagan’s special Middle East envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, flew into Baghdad bearing a hand written note to Saddam. In it Reagan offered to renew diplomatic relations and to expand military and business ties with Baghdad. Howard Teicher, who traveled to Baghdad with Rumsfeld, said that it was this letter that paved the way for the U.S. tilt to Iraq: “Here was the U.S. government coming hat-in-hand to Saddam Hussein and saying, ‘We respect you, we respect you. How can we help you? Let us help you.'”
In 1995, I wrote a case study entitled, The Tilt that Backfired – Historical Perspectives on the Persian Gulf Crisis. If you’re interested in placing the dangling corpse of Saddam Hussein into a bit of context, I’d still recommend that paper. If you want more than a bit of context, there’s not a finer source on the subject than the almost entirely unknown, forgotten and out of print, Spider’s Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq written by Alan Friedman.
Will the Americans, who made Saddam Hussein’s ghastly crimes possible, also get their necks snapped by the hangman’s noose?
Related: He Takes His Secrets to the Grave
Living in America’s Fringe Economy
December 31st, 2006Via: AlterNet:
Far from a mom-and-pop industry, America’s fringe economy is largely dominated by a handful of large, well-financed multinational corporations with strong ties to mainstream financial institutions. It is a comprehensive and fully formed parallel economy that addresses the financial needs of the poor and credit-challenged in the same way as the mainstream economy meets the needs of the middle class. The main difference is the exorbitant interest rates, high fees, and onerous loan terms that mark fringe economy transactions.
…
The fringe economy plays a big role in the housing market, where subprime home mortgages rose from 35,000 in 1994 to 332,000 in 2003, a 25% a year growth rate and a tenfold increase in just nine years. (A subprime loan is a loan extended to less creditworthy customers at a rate that is higher than the prime rate.) According to Edward Gramlich, former member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, subprime mortgages accounted for almost $300 billion or 9% of all mortgages in 2003.
Related: Inside a Wall Street Chop Shop
Police Threaten to Arrest Man for Refusing to Discuss His Personal Travel Plans at DUI Checkpoint
December 30th, 2006Via: TheNewspaper.com:
A teenager harassed by police in St. Louis, Missouri caught the incident on tape. Brett Darrow, 19, had his video camera rolling last month as he drove his 1997 Maxima, minding his own business. He approached a drunk driving roadblock where he was stopped, detained and threatened with arrest when he declined to enter a conversation with a police officer about his personal travel habits.
Change Blindness: Real Power and the Coolest Psychology Experiment… Ever
December 30th, 2006This is a simple, clinical expression of how the game is played. This is the basic framework that underlies real, tangible power.
We all know that subduing the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.
But how?
How is it done, specifically?
“By way of deception thou shalt do war.”
Keep Mossad’s motto in mind as you read the following material and check out the simple experiments:
Via: Mixing Memory:
The difficulty people have in noticing changes like this is called change blindness. There’s a pretty large literature on change blindness, and I don’t want to get into all of that right now, because I want to get to the coolest… experiment… ever, but I will give you a few of the conclusions from the literature, from Simons and Ambinder (p. 44):
1. “Change blindness occurs whenever attention is diverted from the change signal.”
2. “Changes to objects that are central to the meaning of the scene or changes to visually distinctive objects are detected more readily than other changes, presumably because observers focus attention on important objects
3. “Attention may be necessary for change detection, with changes to unattended objects going unnoticed.”
4. “Attention to a changing object may not be sufficient for change detection; observers frequently fail to detect changes to the central actors in motion pictures and to real-world conversation partners even though these people clearly are attended suggesting that change detection requires observers to encode the changing features before and after the change and compare them”
In short, change blindness is an issue of attention and representation. If we fail to represent an object in a scene either before or after a change, then we won’t notice the change, and we tend not to represent objects that aren’t important to the meaning of what we’re looking at, because we’re just not paying attention to them (though paying attention to them doesn’t guarantee representation).
Lawyer Who Questioned Bush Regime on Treason Falls to His Death
December 29th, 2006Why assassinate an activist lawyer, who also happened to be a dedicated husband and father, on Christmas Eve?
It might be that the intended PSYOP effect would be to get other people, who oppose the criminal regime, to think, “I don’t want my wife to be made a widow, and my children left without a father, on Christmas Eve.”
The average person will look at this case and just think, “How sad.” But the message wasn’t meant for the average person. Was it? This is a political assassination, as well as a PSYOP. Heavy on the PSYOP.
They’re not capable of making all of us offers we can’t refuse…
Or maybe They just did.
Via: Monterey Herald:
In what police describe as a “probable” suicide leap, a prominent Monterey Bay Area attorney fell at least nine floors to his death at the Embassy Suites Hotel Monterey Bay in Seaside the morning before Christmas.
Shortly before 9:30 a.m. Sunday, officers found the body of Aptos attorney Paul Sanford in the west end of the hotel lobby, where he had landed on a large ventilation grate.
…
Almost immediately, he caused a stir after he joined the White House Press Corps in 2005, making waves as the first reporter to ask then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan whether the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name might be considered an act of treason.
“There has been a lot of speculation concerning the meaning of the underlying statute and the grand jury investigation concerning Mr. Rove,” Sanford asked. “The question is, have the legal counsel to the White House or White House staff reviewed the statute in sufficient specificity to determine whether a violation of that statute would, in effect, constitute treason?”
McClellan was apparently flustered by the question and replied that “those are matters for those overseeing the investigation to decide.”
…
Friends and associates expressed disbelief at the news of Sanford’s death and that it was ruled a suicide, saying Sanford seemed happy and had made many plans for this week and in coming months. Mills said he and Sanford recently decided to open a shared law office to serve Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, something Sanford was looking forward to doing.
He and Sanford spoke on the phone “around four or five times a day,” Mills said, and the two had just spoken on Thursday, “tweaking a marketing plan” for their new law practice before Mills went out of town for the Christmas holiday.
“I just don’t know what happened since Thursday. There was nothing on the horizon there to know this was going to happen,” Mills said. “We were going to get together this week.”
Mills said he had spoken to Sanford’s wife, Paula, and that she also was in shock. He said Sanford, a father of two, was a devoted family man.
“This is a horrible thing for his family. He would never have intentionally put his family through that trauma. Something’s not right, it doesn’t make sense.”
Police said that before Sanford fell, hotel housekeepers saw him pacing the hallway of an upper floor. Cercone said Sanford’s car was parked next to the hotel, and he was not checked in as a guest.
Police declined to state exactly why they ruled the case a suicide.
How Old Is the Grand Canyon?
December 29th, 2006Update:
In the light of day, I looked at this story again and went into a state of denial. I just couldn’t believe it.
According to the National Park Service web site:
How old is the Canyon?
That’s a tricky question. Although rocks exposed in the walls of the canyon are geologically quite old, the Canyon itself is a fairly young feature. The oldest rocks at the canyon bottom are close to 2000 million years old. The Canyon itself – an erosional feature – has formed only in the past five or six million years. Geologically speaking, Grand Canyon is very young.
Are the oldest rocks in the world exposed at Grand Canyon?
No. Although the oldest rocks at Grand Canyon (2000 million years old) are fairly old by any standard, the oldest rocks in the world are closer to 4000 million years old. The oldest exposed rocks in North America, which are among the oldest rocks in the world, are in northern Canada.
So, I don’t know what National Park Service employees are telling visitors about the age of the Grand Canyon, but if the nuts are running the nut house, they haven’t gotten around to updating the web site to reflect the faith based theories.
Yet.
Via: Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility:
Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
“In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology,†stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment.’â€
In a letter released today, PEER urged the new Director of the National Park Service (NPS), Mary Bomar, to end the stalling tactics, remove the book from sale at the park and allow park interpretive rangers to honestly answer questions from the public about the geologic age of the Grand Canyon. PEER is also asking Director Bomar to approve a pamphlet, suppressed since 2002 by Bush appointees, providing guidance for rangers and other interpretive staff in making distinctions between science and religion when speaking to park visitors about geologic issues.
California to Build 1,500 Megawatt Wind Farm
December 29th, 2006Via: Southern California Edison:
Southern California Edison (SCE), the nation’s leading purchaser of renewable energy, today signed a ground-breaking wind energy contract that will provide the utility’s customers with a major new source of emission-free power.
The agreement with Alta Windpower Development LLC, a subsidiary of Allco Financial Group Inc. of Australia, a global financial-services business, is the largest wind energy contract ever signed by a U.S. utility. It secures for SCE customers 1,500 megawatts* (MW) or more of power generated by new projects to be built in the Tehachapi area of California. The contract, which more than doubles SCE’s wind energy portfolio, envisions more than 50 square miles of wind parks in the Tehachapi region – triple the size of any existing U.S. wind farm. Oak Creek Energy Systems Inc. of Mojave, Calif., is a partner with Allco in the development, construction, and operations of the projects.
