---BREAKAWAY CIVILIZATION ---ALTERNATIVE HISTORY---NEW BUSINESS MODELS--- ROCK & ROLL 'S STRANGE BEGINNINGS---SERIAL KILLERS---YEA AND THAT BAD WORD "CONSPIRACY"--- AMERICANS DON'T EXPLORE ANYTHING ANYMORE.WE JUST CONSUME AND DIE.---
Atmospheric water generator could make offgrid systems viable or unlivable places inhabitable.
Editor’s Note: Scalable atmospheric water generators are a great solutions
application for alternative lifestyles. They exist here and now (but
could probably be tweaked), and are already on the market for individual
families, but are also sold scalable to the industrial or community
application. Could this help provide abundance to corners of the world
struggling for the basics of survival? What would happen if the needs of
the poor were provided, or if private citizens concerned about the
quality of municipal water supplies started their own system?
Whatever the motivation or scale of the project, we don’t have to be
subjected to a captive market system profiting off of artificial
scarcity, mass medication and/or skyrocketing rates – at least an
alternative is possible where it might be desirable.
Water-producing billboard designed to inspire
gizmag.com
February 26, 2013
The University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) in Lima, Peru has
partnered with advertising agency MAYO-DRAFT FCB to create an
advertising billboard that grabs moisture from the desert air and
converts it into filtered drinking water.
[...]
An advertising billboard erected along the Pan-American Highway is
also home to some hidden harvesting, conversion and purification
mechanisms (including an air filter, condenser, carbon filter and cold
tank). The electric system takes moisture from the humid air by means of
reverse osmosis and delivers purified drinking water through small
ducts at the foot of the billboard, and down to a tap at the base of the
structure.
FACTIONAL INFIGHTING, THE FINANCIAL OLIGARCHS, AND THE MILITARY INTELLIGENCE COMPLEX, PART ONE
My
thanks to Mr. A.F. for bringing this to my attention, for these two
articles over the next two days need to be pointed out, and talked
about.
Why am I so enthused?
Truth to tell, I am not so much enthused as I am intrigued,
for it would seem that aspects of my basic “post-9/11 analysis model”
are also being entertained in other circles. The ?”post-9/11 model” is
simply this: that the event was an op within an op within an op, and
that this means it was a deeply penetrated operation, that
there was – to coin an expression whose true significance will be
evident in a moment – a “third force” or actor on the stage beyond the
first two levels. The first level was simply the terrorists themselves.
The second level was that “rogue group” within the American national
security-political-military establishment that had contrived the
operation as a means of injecting more American power into the Middle
East, and to use a “war on terror” to expand its own police state
powers. But at a much deeper level, there was a hidden player,
perhaps a rogue group within the rogue group, but its actions were
completely unknown to the first level, and came as a shock to the
second.
Now here’s the thing: whether my model of the sad events of that day
is true or not, it did serve to make me notice something else that began
to happen in the wake of 9/11, namely, that the western power
oligarchs, the financial elites of London and New York, seem to begin to
unravel; they began fighting each other, they began to lose their unity
of purpose. In the bailout hearings, it even struck me that they were
showing the clear signs of panic, of being under duress and pressure
from some outside force. The requests for “no oversight” during the
bailout hearings in Congress reminded me of a kidnap victim’s family,
begging for money from the authorities, and pleading that there be no
police following him or her as they went to make the payoff and
(hopefully) redeem the situation.
Now this type of analysis seems to be getting attention elsewhere: Banking Scandals as a Mirror to the Struggle for World Domination (I)
The parasitic and predatory behavior that we have come to expect from large banks is evident in this paragraph:
“A series of scandals also broke out this summer related
to the fact that banks have moved beyond financial markets, establishing
themselves in commodities and energy markets and manipulating prices.
The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) ordered the British
conglomerate Barclays to pay a fine for manipulating
electricity prices in the state of California. It was also reported at
the end of July that the FERC had accused America’s largest financial
conglomerate JP Morgan Chase of manipulating electricity
markets, first and foremost in the state of California and the US
Midwest. The Wall Street bank is now being threatened with a fine to the
tune of US $400 million.”
It’s a handy thing: to be able to manipulate electricity costs, while
simultaneously promoting memes of “global climate change”(note the
change in language from global warming) and promoting yet another
“security,” the weather derivative.
But such shenanigans don’t really concern us here. I suspect our real clue lies here:
“Experts have hinted that financial regulators like these
and other “overlookers” could even reach as far as the well-known
London “gold fixing”, which has been in operation since 1919. The gold
fixing is the procedure by which the price of gold is determined. It
involves a total of five companies and banks that fall within the
Rothschild clan’s sphere of influence. The machinations of this fixing
are not really known, but everyone involved in the world gold market is
guided by London prices. Gold fixing prices not only directly or
indirectly influence the gold market, but all financial markets. “Gold fixing” is a kind of control centre for the global finances of a small group of moneylenders.Is
it really possible that some “regulators” could be having a go at the
inner sanctum of global finances?”(Bold-italics emphasis added)
In other words, the weirdness of the behavior of gold is the
sure sign of major factional infighting among the very highest echelon
of the globaloney elites, the Rockefailures, and the Rottenchilds, and
their various financial satraps. And, lest we forget, this assault on
the gold center was an assault not just on the idea of gold as
“real money” – near and dear to the Austrian School of economics – it
was an assault on the whole structure of western finance in the postwar
age, a structure which, unlike many analysts, I believe to be built upon
the entire multi-trillion(and more probably, multi-quadrillion) dollar
system of entirely hidden finance that was created as a top
secret slush fund by the Truman administration to fund postwar covert
operations and black projects research. The basis of that
system was and is gold, specifically, the gold and other loot plundered
from Europe by the Nazis and Fascists, and from Asia by the Imperial
Japanese. Financially, in the postwar world, there was a “new Axis,” a
Tokyo-Bonn-Wall Street Axis. And the creation of this Axis spelled
something else: it spelled the entry of the intelligence community directly as competitors to the established central banks.
I strongly suspect that the factional infighting we are observing is
thus vastly more complex than it might at first glance seem, for in
addition to subtle hints of Rockefeller-Rothschild meltdowns, in
addition to infighting between the continental and English branches of
the Rothschild family, we may add the pressures being brought to bear by
Russia, China, and the BRICSA “alliance,” and more fundamentally, the
assault on western central bank gold reserves that began when the late
Hugo Chavez of Venezuela demanded the return of his country’s gold from
the New York Fed, followed closely thereafter by Germany’s insistence. That action, I believe, ultimately triggered the run on real gold.
A hint of the interwoven nature of this factional infighting is aptly summarized in these two paragraphs:
”A typical European bank that has been a victim of judicial prosecution is Deutsche Bank.
This officially German, but in fact international, bank (the largest in
Germany) is under the control of the Rothschilds. As a result of
scandals (first and foremost regarding the Libor rate), it has suffered
serious losses. While the bank’s net profit in 2011 equalled EUR 4.3
billion, at the end of 2012 this had fallen to EUR 0.7 billion (the
lowest figure since the 2008 crisis). For the period 2013-2015, the
bank’s management has been forced to declare an austerity regime.
“Another bank involved in the scandals – The Royal Bank of Scotland,
part of the Rothschilds’ empire – is in an even worse position.The
latest crisis had a serious impact on the bank, which has been
practically nationalised (80 percent of its capital was bought by the
British government). While RBS losses amounted to US$2 billion in 2011,
by the end of 2012 this had quadrupled to US$8 billion.”
The Royal Bank of Scotland, you’ll recall, was also the target of
Baron Blackheath’s remarks concerning strange behavior regarding that
bank, and others, with respect to the amounts of gold in the world.
The bottom line, is this:
“These conflicts often boil down to the struggle between
the two banking groups of the New World and the Old World, to the
struggle between American and European banks. Simplifying the issue,
journalists sometimes say that the struggle is between banks on Wall
Street and banks in the City of London. As has already been stated, the
victims of the banking scandals are primarily European banks, including
British banks (the City of London). In my opinion, however, this
“geographical” approach to an analysis of the banking scandals
simplifies the picture too much. It would be more correct to talk about
the struggle between two main financial and banking clans – the
Rothschilds and the Rockefellers. It is these two who are currently the
main shareholders of the US Federal Reserve System, and the Federal
Reserve is the central institution of the global financial system.While
the West had a common enemy in the USSR, conflicts between the two main
FRS shareholders took second billing. Today, however, following the
global financial crisis, the continued existence of the FRS is under
threat and the principle shareholders have different ideas about a way
out of the crisis. This has intensified the conflict, with everybody
starting to pull the blanket over to their side. The Rothschilds and the
Rockefellers have started to rock the boat known as “the global
financial system”. It is true that an incident took place in May 2012
which many believed to be significant. This was the strategic alliance
agreed upon by the Rothschild and Rockefeller dynasties. As part of the
alliance, the exchange-listed assets of Jacob Rothschild’s investment
trust RIT Capital Partners and the company Rockefeller Financial Services
were joined together, and RIT acquired a 37 percent stake in a company
that manages the assets of the Rockefellers. Somebody saw this
development as an end to the war between the clans and a sign of the
global oligarchy’s consolidation under the aegis of the Rothschilds and
Rockefellers. I am convinced that the move was symbolic – it was not
followed by a chain reaction.”
Or to put it more simply:
“Banking scandals are evidence of the fact that
the global elite are far from consolidated; it is divided according to
interest groups.There is an intense and relentless struggle going on
between various groups for survival, influence and world domination.”
True enough as far as it goes, but this analysis strikes me, once
again, as ignoring the clear signs of a “third force” on the scene, one
powerful enough, perhaps, to compel such symbolic agreements between New
and Old World banking dynasties, one wanting its money back, or one
powerful enough to compel those two factions to bury whatever hatchets
they were wielding against each other, to make common cause against the
player they crawled into bed with after World War Two: the national
security-intelligence state, and international Fascism.
… after all, the one can read Mr. Rockefeller’s and Mr. Rothschild’s
email and monitor their phone calls, and employ its massive computers
and the best code-breakers in the world to decrypt whatever messages
they send, to eavesdrop on their every machination.
And the other? Well, given the postwar developments and penetrations
into radical Islam and international drug trade, it has that
all-important “humint” component, to use the lingo of the trade, and can
reach out and touch literally any member of those dynasties in all
manner of unpleasant ways.
Maybe what we have been watching, then, is the mad scramble of people
who made what they thought was a “great deal” at the end of World War
Two, but now the loan sharks have walked into your place of business
(your local prime international bank), and demanded their money… with
interest. And just to reinforce the point, they’ve sent along two suited
gorillas with prominent bulges under their arms. And for good measure,
knocked off a few prominent bankers and investors along the way, to
convince you they’re very serious.
There’s more, of course, but that will have to wait until tomorrow…
As we have been reporting, Oprah Winfrey has been in hot
water lately for crying racism after receiving bad customer service at a
boutique.
Then, Oprah compared Trayvon Martin to Emmett Till several times.
Glenn Beck has had enough. He said, “Oprah Winfrey, you disgust me.”
He continued, “As a woman, who has gone through hell and back and
made it, and pulled yourself out by the bootstraps, you made it. You
grew up with hate from your own race, you grew up with rape in your own
race. And the American people, both black and white, yellow and red, it
doesn’t matter the color, they saw you make it! They saw you overcome
everything you had faced, and we celebrated that!”
“Why are you telling everyone else they can’t make it? Why are you
telling us that white people are the problem? Oprah, I choose to be the
person that America thought you were. Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breath free,” he said. “Give me the ones
that you have told ‘you’ll never make it.’ Send them to me. The
tempest-tost, because I hold my lamp beside a golden door.”
Does Oprah disgust you too? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
Oprah: White People Are Still Racist, Even If They Don’t Use The N-Word
Is it a coincidence that Oprah is
ranting on about racism right when she needs to drum up some publicity
for a race-focused movie she’s in? First she accused a Swiss sales clerk
of being racist because the sales clerk said some variation of “Are you
sure you would to see that?” when this woman of the people (and PETA
supporter) asked to look at a $35,000 animal-skin purse. Now, after offering a half-hearted non-apology, Oprah’s back again, this time saying that all Americans are racist even if they hold no negative views towards blacks.
This dazzling bit of Orwellian doublethink took place when CNN’s
Anderson Cooper interviewed both Oprah and Forest Whitaker as they made
the media rounds to shill their new movie, The Butler. That
movie, which has been damned for anti-Republican inaccuracies, purports
to show the entire civil rights movement, right up until Obama’s
election, through the eyes of a White House butler.
Oprah opened up the subject by suggesting that Emmitt Till, a
14-year-old boy whom racists murdered in Mississippi during the height
of the civil rights era, was exactly the same as Trayvon Martin, a
drug-taking, violence-obsessed, hulking 17-year-old who was killed when the man he was trying to beat to death
managed to shoot him first. Anderson responded by saying that, while
blacks are upset about the Martin case, whites think that they are
reading too much into it.
And there was the opening Oprah needed to begin discussing whites and race in America. It started off innocuously enough:
Oh, I know, I know. That’s why I love the film in light
of this discussion is because it brings context to this discussion. I
mean, look at the film, beginning with that lynching scene and ending
with walking into Obama’s office, look at what has happened in the span
of one man’s lifetime.
From this meaningless, New Age blah-blah, it was a short step to
incoherence for Oprah and Whitaker. Inspired by Oprah, Whitaker offered
that “This movie reminds us of the circular motion of things still
trying working themselves is going on, as in Emmitt Till, and we’re
looking at Trayvon, we’re looking at Oscar Grant, we’re looking at all
these situations and recognizing we have to move ourselves forward with
this change.” If nothing else, Whitaker reminds us that most actors do
better with someone else’s lines than when they try to write their own.
Not to be outdone by someone other than herself, Oprah upped the incoherence ante:
Emmitt Till became a symbol for those times as Emmitt
Till has become a symbol for this time. I mean, there are multiple
Trayvon Martins whose names never make the newspapers or the headlines.
The circumstances surrounding that allowed that to be. There were
multiple Emmitt Tills, there were multiple lynchings, there were
multiple young black boys whose names are not remembered and often not
even recorded.
I’ve read that five times now and I still can’t figure out what
Oprah’s saying. I think she had a talking point memo that urged her to
use the phrases “Emmitt Till,” “Trayvon Martin,” and “lynchings,” with
urgent intensity in the hope that some meaning would eventually emerge.
Talking nonsense was just the warm-up act for Oprah’s real point,
which is that white people are inherently racist, even if they’re not
actually . . . racist. Oprah had her answer all ready when Cooper
pointed out that there was one juror (clearly a bad jury) “who
did not understand, did not feel linked to Trayvon Martin, felt
connected to George Zimmerman in a way, but not Trayvon Martin, she felt
race was not part of this case at all.” Heck, Oprah practically
stampeded him to get her point out there:
People don’t feel it’s race because people don’t call it
race…A lot of people think if they think they’re not using the n-word
themselves, they physically aren’t using the n-word themselves, and do
not harbor ill will towards black people that it’s not racist. But to me
it’s ridiculous to look at that case and not to think that race was
involved.
In other words, if a black person is involved in anything whatsoever
that’s not a completely positive situation, racism is at the root of it.
End of story.
Let’s stipulate that there are racist people in America. These are
people who judge others, not by the content of their character, but by
the color of their skin. Let’s further stipulate that this is a bad
thing, because it dehumanizes people. And while the race mongers won’t
want to admit this, let’s stipulate that blacks are as guilty of racism
as whites. But what all honest people have to acknowledge is that, while
we have racist people living in America, America is no longer an
institutionally racist nation, because our laws and traditions are
strongly opposed to racism.
Oh, and one more thing: Let’s stipulate that we won’t assume that
actors are stupid and ill-informed until they open their mouths and
actually prove it.
In Jewish and Czech folklore, the golem
is an artificial, human-like creature that's animated by magic. Now
some scientists want to try their best to create a real-life version of
the golem.
The Beyond Artificial Intelligence
conference, to be held at the University of West Bohemia in the Czech
Republic this November, is calling on researchers to submit papers on
how to best create an "Artificial Golem Intelligence."
Although the official conference subject is Artificial General Intelligence, organizers are happy to explore the relevance for building real-life golems, as seen in the call for papers below.
Topics for the conference include possibilities for building
cybernetic brains, the use of Kabbalah in artificial intelligence labs,
and the uncanny valley.
So, the question is... who wants to be the first owner of a real-life magical superhuman giant?
[Image: Flickr user One From RM]
Is Barack Obama a homosexual? According to Fox news reporter Todd
Starnes, Obama may very well be homosexual. Barack certainly has the
right to make that decision, if that is what he chooses to do with his
life…still, don’t the American people deserve to know if he really is
gay, as leader of the ‘free world’? There have been countless rumors
suggesting that Obama is gay; yet this is the first time I’ve heard
this subject brought up by the MSM. So, what do you think? Is Barack
Obama gay? If so, does it matter?
If you want to talk about real
injustice, let’s talk about the case of George Madison Jr. — a black
youth pastor and firefighter who was recently thrown to the ground and
cuffed by taser-wielding police who construed his friendly wave as a way
of ‘flipping them off’. In
a case of true injustice, and not just a media fluff piece turned
racial, an innocent man who serves his community was treated like pure
scum by the officers within his county. The kind of treatment that no
man should be subject to — especially from ‘public servant’ police
officers. And it all started when Evansville, Indiana resident George
Madison Jr. was actually trying to show his respect to the very officers
that ultimately forced him onto the ground with tasers drawn.
An off-duty firefighter and youth pastor that is familiar with the
police in the area, Madison was attempting to be kind to the police
officers driving via offering a quick wave. You know, the gesture that
signifies a friendly ‘hello’.
Well, as it turns out, the officers were infuriated by the wave.
In fact, they thought Madison was flipping them off, AKA giving them
the middle finger. Or at least that’s what they say. What happened next
was a textbook case of county police turned commando power trippers.
Madison was immediately harassed in what would soon become a major
case of abuse. Since Madison had no idea what was going on and actually
had somewhat of a friendship with the police chief in the area, he took
out his phone to give him a call. The officers absolutely hated this,
demanding that he hang up the phone and get on the ground immediately.
The second that Madison insisted he be able to call his police chief
friend, reports confirm that one officer then took out a taser.
Taser Threatened Despite ‘Hands In Air’
Because a youth pastor on a bike who tried to wave at you is certainly a threat worthy of a taser.
But it gets worse, Madison explains that the officer was waving the taser inches from his face despite the fact that he was willing to comply with the officer. He even had his hands in the air
in a show of submission — something that predatory individuals (police
or otherwise) tend to only feed off of. In his recount to The Courier Press newspaper, Madison said:
‘It was literally maybe inches from my face. I
immediately threw my hands in the air. What he asked me to do I was more
than willing to do.”
After nearly being tased by officers, they finally listened to
Madison’s explanation of what went on. When it came out that he was a
firefighter and really did know chief Billy Bolin,
the officers began to calm down. Can you imagine what they would have
done to someone who stood up to them and had no connections?
Far too often the media will cling to a truly false piece of ‘injustice’, such as one surrounding billionaire Oprah’s inability to
pass a language barrier in order to purchase an overpriced designer
handbag. But in the case of Mr. Madison and others who truly do face
situations that are worthy of the terminology, they are completely
ignored.
A massive industry profits off the government-induced fear of terrorism.
Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency, has invaded America’s televisionsets in recent weeks to warn about Edward Snowden’s leaks and the continuing terrorist threat to America.
But what often goes unmentioned, as the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out, is
that Hayden has a financial stake in keeping Americans scared and on a
permanent war footing against Islamist militants. And the private firm
he works for, called the Chertoff Group, is not the only one making
money by scaring Americans.
Post-9/11 America has witnessed a boom in private firms
dedicated to the hyped-up threat of terrorism. The drive to privatize
America’s national security apparatus accelerated in the aftermath of
the terrorist attacks, and it’s gotten to the point where 70 percent of
the national intelligence budget is now spent on private contractors, as author Tim Shorrock reported. The private intelligence contractors have profited to the tune of at least $6 billion a year. In 2010, the Washington Post revealed that there are 1,931 private firms across the country dedicated to fighting terrorism.
What it all adds up to is a massive industry profiting off
government-induced fear of terrorism, even though Americans are more
likely to be killed by a car crash or their own furniture than a terror attack.
Here are five private companies cashing in on keeping you afraid.
1. The Chertoff Group
On August 11, former NSA head Michael Hayden, the man at the center of the Bush administration‘s 2005 surveillance scandal, was defending his former agency on CBS News in the wake of the latest NSA spying scandal. Commenting on President Obama’s half-hearted promises to reform some NSA practices, Hayden told host Bob Schieffer that “the
President is trying to take some steps to make the American people more
comfortable about what it is we’re doing. That’s going to be hard
because, frankly, Bob, some steps to make Americans more comfortable
will actually make Americans less safe.”
Former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff had a
similar message when he appeared on ABC News August 4. Speaking about
the purported threat from an Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen that led to the
closure of 19 U.S. embassies, Chertoff said that “the collection of
this warning information [about Al Qaeda] came from the kinds of
programs we’ve been discussing about, the ability to capture
communications overseas.”
CBS and ABC did not see fit to inform viewers that both
Hayden and Chertoff are employees of the Chertoff Group, a private firm
created in 2009 that companies hire to consult on best practices for
security and combatting terrorism. Some of the companies
the firm advises go on to win government contracts. Chertoff is the
founder and chairman of the group, while Hayden serves as a principal.
So they profit off a war on terror they say is crucial to keeping
Americans safe.
Though it’s unclear how much in total exactly the firm
makes, there are some known numbers. After the failed attempt in 2010 to
blow up an airliner on Christmas Day with a bomb hidden in underwear,
Chertoff pushed for better airport security procedures. One of the
suggestions Chertoff made was for the Transportation Security Agency to
use full-body scanners like the ones Rapiscan, one of the Chertoff
Group’s clients, made. And sure enough, after the Christmas Day plot,
the TSA ordered 300 Rapiscan machines. The Huffington Post reported that Rapiscan made $118 million from the government between 2009-2010.
2. Booz Allen Hamilton
This private intelligence contractor has become a household name in the wake of the NSA scandal.
Edward Snowden, the man responsible for leaking secret documents that
exposed the breadth of NSA surveillance, was working for Booz Allen when
he downloaded the documents he handed off to media outlets. As the New York Times reported in June, the
company parlays its technology expertise for intelligence uses into
massive government contracts. Thousands of employees of the company
provide services to the NSA, like analyzing the massive amounts of data
the government agency collects every day. The company is also the
shining symbol of the government-private security complex’s revolving
door: its vice president is the former director of national
intelligence, while the current director of national intelligence is a
former employee of Booz Allen.
Despite the Snowden security breach, Booz Allen continues
to work with the government. And they’re making a lot of money from the
U.S. In the last fiscal year, the company made $1.3 billion from working
in U.S. intelligence. In total, Booz Allen Hamiltion made over $5
billion last fiscal year. And the cash keeps coming: in January, the
company announced that it had won a contract with the Defense Department
to provide intelligence services. The amount of money it could make
from the deal is up to $5.6 billion.
And like Hayden and Chertoff, Booz Allen’s vice president
Mike McConnell has publicly hyped up the threat of terrorism to blast
Snowden’s leaks. McConnell told a government contracting conference in
July 2013 that Snowden’s leaks have done “irrevocable damage” to the U.S.’s ability to stop terrorism. “It’s going
to inhibit our ability to understand nuclear activity in North Korea,
what’s going on in Syria, what might be happening with the Taliban in Afghanistan,” said McConnell.
3. Science Applications International Corporation
Sometimes referred to as “NSA West” because so many former
NSA employees go on to work for the formerly California-based Science
Applications International Corporation (SAIC), this firm makes a ton of
cash off government contracts. And they do so by hawking their expertise
in combatting the terrorist threat.
Browse through SAIC’s website and you’re constantly greeted
with the words “terrorist threat” and information on how the SAIC can
help the government and others battle it. SAIC developed a “Terrorism
Protection Manual” for Florida law enforcement that was developed to fight “today’s national terrorist threat and implement recommended security best practices.” They boast of their “experience meeting
the terrorism incident response training needs of a wide variety of
customers, from training for a national Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) scenario, applicable at agency response levels, to lesser levels of incidents affecting a city, a military installation or a special facility.”
Back when John P. Jumper, the current CEO of SAIC, was an Air Force general, he said
the threat of terrorism is “greater than Nazism, greater than
communism. This threat that we have of terrorist zealots is the most
dangerous because these are people who care nothing about life. They
care nothing about our lives, for sure, and they care nothing about
their own lives.” And Larry Prior, a U.S. intelligence veteran who used
to run the company’s Intelligence and Security Group, said in an
internal newsletter that “the future of the nation rests on their
backs,” referring to employees in his group.
SAIC is an immensely lucrative and large company. It boasts
42,000 employees—20,000 of whom hold U.S. government security
clearances. It is the NSA’s largest contractor, according to CorpWatch, and is deeply involved in the NSA’s collection of intelligence. Last year it reported a net income of $525 million.
4. Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies
U.S. intelligence agencies
aren’t the only sectors of government where the private sector has
cashed in on the fear of terrorism. The post-9/11 world has seen the
blossoming of a cottage industry of self-styled “experts” on Islam from
private companies that market their supposedly ironclad analysis of the
threat from Islamists to other federal agencies and state and local law
enforcement. These companies have profited from law enforcement taking
part in the “war on terror.”
Through Homeland Security grant programs like
the State Homeland Security Program and the Urban Areas Security
Initiative, the federal government has doled out over billions of
dollars to these private companies to provide Islamophobic training. One
of these companies is called the Center for Counterintelligence and
Security Studies.
Based in Virginia, the center “posits radical Islam as a
new global ideological menace on the order of the old communist threat
from the Soviet Union,” as Political Research Associates (PRA) noted in a 2011 report on private firms doing counter-terror training. Staff members include former FBI, CIA and Defense Department personnel.
Their claim to fame is providing education and training to members of the U.S. national security community—including law enforcement agencies, according to their website. They say they have trained over 67,000 people over the past decade.
It’s unclear exactly how much this firm makes per year. But
according to the PRA report, a five-day course for government employees
on the “Global Jihadist Threat Doctrine” costs $39,280. The firm also lists
the costs of individual courses on their website. For a 30-person class
titled “Dying to Kill Us: Understanding the Mindset of Suicide
Operations,” the cost is $7,856. For a three-day course for 30 people
on “Informant Development for Law Enforcement to FighTerrorism,” the
cost is $23,568.
The training pushes anti-Muslim ideology. On the section of
their website where they list feedback from participants of the
courses, one wrote: “An eye-opener. Especially how many Muslim
Brotherhood front organizations there are and that the government
doesn’t get it.”
5. Security Solutions International
Security Solutions International is yet another private firm hawking
anti-Muslim training to law enforcement. This Miami-based company
founded in 2004 uses its Israeli security connections to boost its
standing in the market. They use Israeli security trainers in their
courses and their president, Henry Morgenstern,
is a dual Israeli-U.S. citizen who says he “developed excellent high
level contacts with the Security Establishment [in Israel], making SSI
the premiere training company for counter-terror related subjects.”
The company has trained over 700 law enforcement agencies since 2004. Officials from law enforcement agencies like the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and the Department of Homeland Security
have participated in the conferences they put on for profit. While SSI
claims that they don’t cast aspersions on the whole of Islam, an
examination of their trainings, conferences and the speakers they use
indicate otherwise.
At a 2009 conference sponsored by Police magazine, an SSI
instructor who is the company’s “expert” on Islam used a video that
showed a terrorist beheading a hostage. After the course was met with
criticism, the company’s CEO said “their religion got linked to
terrorism a long time ago.”
Throughout the debate on sharing culture and knowledge in violation
of the copyright monopoly, one question keeps popping up. But it’s not a
question as much as an insult to all artists. We’ve
all heard the objection to sharing culture and knowledge many times –
“How will the artists get paid, if you manufacture copies of their
creations without paying them?”
This question is delusional on so many levels I’ve lost count.
First, artists that are copied do get paid, only not by a per-copy
sale but in other ways. I encourage copying of my leadership handbook Swarmwise,
for example, because I know the book promotes other avenues of income.
The average income for musicians has risen 114% since people started
sharing culture online on a large-scale, according to a Norwegian study. Other studies agree with this observation.
Second, even if they didn’t get paid, people who share still don’t
carry any kind of responsibility for the business models of other
entrepreneurs. Because that’s what artists are once they go plinking
their guitar in a kitchen looking for sales: entrepreneurs.
Same rules apply to those entrepreneurs as to every other entrepreneur
on the planet: nobody owes an entrepreneur a sale, you have to offer
something which somebody else wants to buy. Wants. To. Buy. No excuses, nothing deserved, just business.
Third, we don’t live in a planned economy. Nobody is held accountable
to the question of where somebody’s next paycheck is going to come from
except that very person. In Soviet Russia, you could tell Vladimir
Sklyarov that his guitar plinking was highly artistic (meaning nobody
liked it) and that his next paycheck would therefore come from the
Bureau of Incomprehensible Arts. But we don’t live in a planned economy,
we live in a market economy. Everybody is responsible for their own
paycheck – of finding a way to make money by providing value that
somebody else wants to pay for. Wants. To. Pay. For. No excuses, nothing deserved.
Fourth, even if this set of entrepreneurs magically deserved money
despite not making any sales, control of what people share between them
can still not be achieved without dismantling the secrecy of
correspondence, monitoring every word communicated – and fundamental
liberties always go before anybody’s profits. We never determined what
civil liberties we have based on who can profit and who can’t. But let’s go to the root of the question. It’s not a question, it’s an insult. One that has stuck around for as long as artistry itself, for it implies that artists need or even deserve
to get paid. No artist thinks in these terms. The ones who do are the
parasitic business people middlemen that you find defending the
copyright monopoly and then robbing artists and their fans dry, laughing all the way to the bank while exploiting a legal monopoly system ruthlessly: the copyright monopoly. Meanwhile, among artists, there is one insult that has
remained consistent throughout artistry in history. An insult between
artists that rips somebody’s artistry apart, that tells somebody they’re
not even worthy of calling themselves an artist. That insult is “You’re
in it for the money”.
“How shall the artists get paid?”, implying artists won’t play or
create otherwise, that they’re doing it for the money, is a very serious
insult.
There’s a reason “sellout” is a sharply negative word in artistry.
The large majority of artists aren’t happy at all when you’re asking
them if they’re playing to make money; it’s a grave insult. The
frequently heard notion that you don’t create culture if you’re not paid
for it comes from those who exploit artists, and never from artists themselves.
After all, we create not because we can make money off it as
individuals, but because of who we are – how we are wired. We have
created since we learned to put red paint on the inside of cave walls.
We are cultural animals. Culture has always been part of our
civilization, rewarded or not.
If an artist wants to sell their goods or services and become an
entrepreneur, I wish them all the luck and success in the world. But
business is business, and there is nothing that entitles an entrepreneur
to sales.
Posts
In
a case of true injustice, and not just a media fluff piece turned
racial, an innocent man who serves his community was treated like pure
scum by the officers within his county. The kind of treatment that no
man should be subject to — especially from ‘public servant’ police
officers. And it all started when Evansville, Indiana resident George
Madison Jr. was actually trying to show his respect to the very officers
that ultimately forced him onto the ground with tasers drawn.
We’ve
all heard the objection to sharing culture and knowledge many times –
“How will the artists get paid, if you manufacture copies of their
creations without paying them?”