One Economic Chart That You Should Permanently Burn Into Your Memory
July 23rd, 2010Via: Economic Collapse Blog:
Total U.S. Debt as Percent of GDP
Congress Ranks Last in Confidence in Institutions
July 23rd, 2010In other Scum and Villainy news: Panel Hits Rangel with Ethics Violations.
Via: Gallup:
Gallup’s 2010 Confidence in Institutions poll finds Congress ranking dead last out of the 16 institutions rated this year. Eleven percent of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress, down from 17% in 2009 and a percentage point lower than the previous low for Congress, recorded in 2008.
Underscoring Congress’ image problem, half of Americans now say they have “very little” or “no” confidence in Congress, up from 38% in 2009 — and the highest for any institution since Gallup first asked this question in 1973.
Marine at Heart of Camp Pendleton Stolen Files Case Dies
July 22nd, 2010Via: AP:
A Marine Corps colonel accused of leaking classified information to an anti-terrorism unit of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has died.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department says Larry J. Richards was suffering brain, kidney and liver problems when he died Saturday at his home in Lake Arrowhead. He was 52.
Richards was a Marine reservist and sheriff’s detective in 2003 and 2004 when he allegedly helped leak Marine intelligence information from Camp Pendleton to an anti-terrorism task force he helped organize. He was later recalled to active Marine duty and was awaiting a military hearing.
Four other Marines have been convicted in the case.
The military has not released the nature of the leaked information.
More Car Buyers Paying With Cash Rather Than Borrowing
July 22nd, 2010This is exactly what Becky and I have been doing for years:
“It seems people are re-assessing their financial situations and deciding to spend less, buy used and pay more often with cash…”
Via: Car Connection:
It appears the recent economic downturn and spate of fuel price rises has not only changed the types of cars we buy, but also the way we pay for them. The latest study by independent vehicle pricing and information authority Kelley Blue Book has revealed that new car buyers are almost twice as likely to pay for their new purchase with cash as they were just three years ago.
The results are based on the findings of 338 in-market car shoppers surveyed last month on Kelley Blue Book’s website (kbb.com) and show that 74 percent of respondents plan to buy a car within the next six months; 67 percent of them opting for a used car and the remaining 33 percent planning to buy new.
Of these, 42 percent of used car shoppers and 20 percent of new car shoppers said they plan to pay cash for their next vehicle instead of going with a loan. Just three years ago, only 11 percent of new car buyers wanted to pay cash (there is no data for used car buyers).
“In-market car shoppers are taking a decidedly conservative approach to car buying right now, which we think can be directly attributed to low consumer confidence in the current economy,” explained Kelley Blue Book market analyst James Bell. “It seems people are re-assessing their financial situations and deciding to spend less, buy used and pay more often with cash…”
Canada: Woman Humiliated During Airport Strip Search
July 22nd, 2010Via: Toronto Sun:
Shileen Flynn, 29, had already missed one flight and lost her luggage when she says she found herself in a room at the Vancouver airport, naked and squatting, while two crude border agents strip-searched her.
…
Flynn — a frequent traveller who has been strip-searched twice before — said this time was different. She said the women made her bend over a table, open her legs, and squat and cough. They asked her personal questions, like when she last had sex, Flynn said.
She fought back tears throughout the ordeal.
“I thought, if I start crying, they’re gonna think I’m guilty,” she said.
“As soon as they finished the strip search, I started bawling.”
One guard told her if she didn’t stop crying, she’d be detained, Flynn said. When she explained why she was crying, Flynn said a guard piped up: “How do you think I feel? I just had lunch. You make me feel sick.”
“It’s the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to me in my life,” said Flynn, who cried the whole way to Frankfurt. “It was totally demeaning and degrading. … I’ve done nothing wrong. Absolutely nothing wrong.”
As soon as she got to Spain, she called her father, Charlie Flynn, who reported what happened to CBSA.
CBSA launched an internal investigation, interviewing Shileen and the officers involved.
After months of back and forth, Charlie received a letter from CBSA that read: “We have fully investigated the incident and concluded that the BSOs involved in examination of your daughter followed established guidelines and conducted themselves in a professional manner.”
Emotiv Systems Neural Interface
July 22nd, 2010Via: TED:
Tan Le’s astonishing new computer interface reads its user’s brainwaves, making it possible to control virtual objects, and even physical electronics, with mere thoughts (and a little concentration). She demos the headset, and talks about its far-reaching applications.
Big Picture Gallery: Oil Spill in Dalian, China
July 22nd, 2010Via: Big Picture:
Five days ago, in the northeastern port city of Dalian, China, two oil pipelines exploded, sending flames hundreds of feet into the air and burning for over 15 hours, destroying several structures – the cause of the explosion is under investigation. The damaged pipes released thousands of gallons of oil, which flowed into the nearby harbor and the Yellow Sea. The total amount of oil spilled is still not clear, though China Central Television earlier reported an estimate of 1,500 tons (400,000 gallons), as compared to the estimated 94 – 184 million gallons in the BP oil spill off the Louisiana coast. The oil slick has now grown to at least 430 square kilometers (165 sq mi), forcing beaches and port facilities to close while government workers and local fishermen work to contain and clean up the spill.
BP Photoshopping Images
July 22nd, 2010“If you’re not monitoring it independently, you’re asking the perpetrator to give you the video of the crime scene.”
—James Cameron on BP Oil Spill
With the initial batch of Photoshopped images, I thought, “BP lies. Thanks, Captain Obvious.” This new one, though, is hilarious.
Via: Gizmodo:
This week it came to light that BP had photoshopped—poorly—an official image of their crisis command center. Apparently, that wasn’t an isolated incident. Let’s take a closer look at this view from a helicopter, shall we?
The photo, sent in by a tipster and entitled “View of the MC 252 site from the cockpit of a PHI S-92 helicopter 26 June 2010,” shows up here, a section of BP’s website that hopes to explain their response effort through pictures. This one, sadly, is fabricated.
Half of Americans Have Less Than $2,000 Saved for Retirement
July 21st, 2010Here’s some great advice from the Washington Post: To Retire Comfortably… Save Up Between $1.5 and $3 Million. HAHAHAHA.
Via: Alternet:
With declining earnings and a culture of borrow-and-consume, America’s workers face a future of uncertainty and little money to pay for their retirement.
The days of quietly retiring with a nest egg built up from years of savings from a long career on the verge of disappearing. For tens of millions of Americans, facing rising costs, shrinking incomes and growing debts they already have disappeared.
“One out of three working Americans does not have retirement savings beyond Social Security, and about 35% of those over 65 rely almost totally on Social Security alone,” Dallas Salisbury, president of the Alliance for Investor Education and the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) , explained to AlterNet. “Of the remaining two-thirds of working Americans that have some retirement savings, 27 percent report less than $1,000, 16 percent between $1,000 and $9,999, 11 percent between $10,000 and $24,999, 12 percent between $25,000-$49,999, and 36 percent $50,000 or more.” Perhaps the most shocking number is that half of Americans have $2,000 or less saved for retirement.
Crunch the numbers and you end up with a retirement myth, rather than a money-maker. We face a colder economic reality: Not only are there no astronomical retirement returns coming down the financial pike, but what nuts and nest-eggs families have set aside for their futures have been mostly sucked dry.
Joint Special Operations University: Blogs and Military Information Strategy
July 21st, 2010Via: U.S. Special Operations Command / Hosted at Cryptome (PDF):
In this regard, information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence already within the target nation, group, or community to pass the U.S. message. In this way, the U.S. can overleap the entrenched inequalities and make use of preexisting intellectual and social capital. Sometimes numbers can be effective; hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering. On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the U.S. military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.
An alternative strategy is to “make” a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however, and depending on the person running the blog, may impose a significant educational burden, in terms of cultural and linguistic training before the blog could be put online to any useful effect. Still, there are people in the military today who like to blog. In some cases, their talents might be redirected toward operating blogs as part of an information campaign. If a military blog offers valuable information that is not available from other sources, it could rise in rank fairly rapidly.
Any blogs and bloggers serving an IO mission must be coordinated and synchronized with the overall influence effort in time and message. However, they must be prepared to argue and debate with their audience successfully and independently on behalf of the U.S. policy stance. In this sense, bloggers must be able to “circumvent the hierarchy” as blogger George Dafermos put it. This means that they must be trusted implicitly to handle the arguments without forcing them to communicate “solely by means of marketing pitches and press releases.”
There are certain to be cases where some blog, outside the control of the U.S. government, promotes a message that is antithetical to U.S. interests, or actively supports the informational, recruiting and logistical activities of our enemies. The initial reaction may be to take down the site, but this is problematic in that doing so does not guarantee that the site will remain down. As has been the case with many such sites, the offending site will likely move to a different host server, often in a third country. Moreover, such action will likely produce even more interest in the site and its contents. Also, taking down a site that is known to pass enemy EEIs (essential elements of information) and that gives us their key messages denies us a valuable information source. This is not to say that once the information passed becomes redundant or is superseded by a better source that the site should be taken down. At that point the enemy blog might be used covertly as a vehicle for friendly information operations. Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data—merely a few words or phrases—may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience. Better yet, if the blogger happens to be passing enemy communications and logistics data, the information content could be corrupted. If the messages are subtly tweaked and the data corrupted in the right way, the enemy may reason that the blogger in question has betrayed them and either take down the site (and the blogger) themselves, or by threatening such action, give the U.S. an opportunity to offer the individual amnesty in exchange for information.
There will also be times when it is thought to be necessary, in the context of an integrated information campaign, to pass false or erroneous information through the media, on all three layers, in support of military deception activities. Given the watchdog functions that many in the blogging community have assumed—not just in the U.S., but also around the world—doing so jeopardizes the entire U.S. information effort. Credibility is the heart and soul of influence operations. In these cases, extra care must be taken to ensure plausible deniability and nonattribution, as well as employing a well-thought-out deception operation that minimizes the risks of exposure. Because of the potential blowback effect, information strategy should avoid planting false information as much as possible.
…
To function most effectively, units conducting blog-based operations must be staffed appropriately. Ideally, such units would be drawn from the special operations and intelligence communities, because of their historical experience in and ability to conduct (when tasked) sensitive operations. Linguists and intelligence analysts (preferably analysts who are also linguists), who are commanded or advised by qualified PSYOP or IO officer should form the core of such a unit. These capabilities must be augmented through liaison relationships with the other influence organizations, those responsible for planning and conducting PSYOP, PA, PD, CA/CMO and MILDEC. Because of the unique nature of blog-related intelligence, comprising both open and highly classified sources and producing an output intended for open distribution, a blog operations unit should have solid information, operations, and network security programs in place. It also needs oversight.
In order to act and react efficiently in managing bloggers and blogs, the intelligence specialists and planners who have the knowledge should be the ones running the actual blog. Or, in cases where indigenous bloggers and their blogs have been identified and recruited, the blog operations cell should also house the case officer managing the asset, having done the work to cultivate and recruit him or her. The same metrics used to select a blog can also serve as indirect measures of effectiveness; for example:
Once blog operations have begun, does the blog attract new inbound links?
Is there an increase over time in the blog’s ranking via various metrics?
Through polling and media analysis, can a change in public opinion be correlated with growth in the blog’s indicators?
What does content analysis of the interaction that occurs with the blogger on the site reveal (change in opinions posted by readers? positive or negative?)
Do the comments on the blog correlate with public opinion results obtained by polling and/or portrayed in the mainstream media?
Does the blog get referenced by the mainstream media in the target country, and with what degree of frequency?
Do other sources of intelligence confirm these indicators?
Like any other influence operation, blog operations must be given time to work. There are no magic bullets. We would suggest quarterly reviews of the blog’s effectiveness along these lines and then adjusting fire to reverse any negative trends and accelerate positive trends.
