Yes WikiLeaks keeps secrets. I'll tell you how you should treat people who keep secrets:
1) Do not pay them anything (eg, taxes).
2) Do not give them your guns when they come to collect them.
3) Do not join their army and kill for them.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Gladiator School - montanakaimin.com
Gladiator School
by Roman Stubbs | July 14, 2010 | Montana Kaimin
This article was originally published on February 19, 2010. On July 13, the University of Montana announced that the NCAA cleared Jimmy Wilson to play the upcoming season of Griz football.
He sat at his grandmother’s dining room table late on that sweltering June night, dreaming. Eating his ribs and collard greens in silence, pondering his future with each bite.
For Jimmy Wilson, there were only seven hours left before deliverance. Duffel bags packed, alarm clock ready. At five o’clock in the morning, he was going to rise out of bed and drive 17 hours from his Southern California home to Missoula, Montana, and love every minute of it. When he arrived on the University of Montana campus for summer workouts they would see a polished cornerback, a reinvented man.
This was his year. To show what an All-American candidate was all about. To send the message that his legendary hits for this program were about to get a lot more vicious. And to make all those people who mocked his NFL dream think twice before they judged that dream again. Nothing was going to get in his way.
A half hour later, Jimmy Wilson had an AK-47 pointed to his chest.
Gladiator School - montanakaimin.com
Friday, July 23, 2010
Study: Deepwater Horizon workers were afraid to report safety issues - CNN.com
Study: Deepwater Horizon workers were afraid to report safety issues
July 22, 2010 7:08 p.m. EDT
(CNN) -- A confidential report on safety conditions aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, conducted about one month before the rig's explosion, points to widespread fear of reprisal for reporting employee mistakes that could undermine safety aboard the rig.
"There was a stated fear of reprisal related specifically to the reporting of dropped objects," states an executive summary of the report obtained by CNN.
"Only 46.3 percent of participants felt that, if their actions led to a potentially risky situation (e.g., forgetting to do something, damaging equipment, dropping an object from height), they could report it without any fear of reprisal," the report states. ....
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
FW: [Ageless-Nooz] Armenian Genocide Matters - Shut Up About Armenians or We'll Hurt Them Again
-------------- Forwarded Message: --------------
From: "laodog" <laodoggie@yahoo.com>
To: Benner-Nooz-List@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Ageless-Nooz] Armenian Genocide Matters - Shut Up About Armenians or We'll Hurt Them Again
Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2010 18:15:03 +0000
In my country there are 170,000 Armenians. Seventy thousand of them are citizens. We tolerate 100,000 more. So, what am I going to do tomorrow? If necessary I will tell the 100,000: OK, time to go back to your country. Why? They are not my citizens. I am not obliged to keep them in my country.This extraordinary threat was not made at some stupid rally in a fly-blown town. It was uttered in England, on March 17, on the Turkish-language service of the BBC. Just to be clear, then, about the view of Turkey's chief statesman: If democratic assemblies dare to mention the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in the 20th century, I will personally complete that cleansing in the 21st!
Where to begin? Turkish "guest workers" are to be found in great numbers all through the European Union, membership of which is a declared Turkish objective. How would the world respond if a European prime minister called for the mass deportation of all Turks? Yet Erdogan's xenophobic demagoguery attracted precisely no condemnation from Washington or Brussels. He probably overestimated the number of "tolerated" economic refugees from neighboring and former Soviet Armenia, but is it not interesting that he keeps a count in his head? And a count of the tiny number of surviving Turkish Armenians as well?
The outburst strengthens the already strong case for considering Erdogan to be somewhat personally unhinged. In Davos in January 2009, he stormed out of a panel discussion with the head of the Arab League and with Israeli President Shimon Peres, having gone purple and grabbed the arm of the moderator who tried to calm him. On that occasion, he yelled that Israelis in Gaza knew too well "how to kill"—which might be true but which seems to betray at best an envy on his part. Turkish nationalists have also told me that he was out of control because he disliked the fact that the moderator—David Ignatius of the Washington Post—is himself of Armenian descent. A short while later, at a NATO summit in Turkey, Erdogan went into another tantrum at the idea that former Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark would be chosen as the next head of the alliance. In this case, it was cartoons published on Danish soil that frayed Erdogan's evidently fragile composure.
In Turkey itself, the continuing denial has abysmal cultural and political consequences. The country's best-known novelist, Orhan Pamuk, was dragged before a court in 2005 foracknowledging Turkey's role in the destruction of Armenia. Had he not been the winner of a Nobel Prize, it might have gone very hard for him, as it has for prominent and brave intellectuals like Murat Belge. Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink, also prosecuted under a state law forbidding discussion of the past, was shot down in the street by an assassin who was later photographed in the company of beaming, compliant policemen.
The original crime, in other words, defeats all efforts to cover it up. And the denial necessitates continuing secondary crimes. In 1955, a government-sponsore
So it is not just a disaster for Turkey that it has a prime minister who suffers from morbid disorders of the personality. Under these conditions, his great country can never hope to be an acceptable member of Europe or a reliable member of NATO. And history is cunning: The dead of Armenia will never cease to cry out. Nor, on their behalf., should we cease to do so. Let Turkey's unstable leader foam all he wants when other parliaments and congresses discuss Armenia and seek the truth about it. The grotesque fact remains that the one parliament thatshould be debating the question—the Turkish parliament—is forbidden by its own law to do so. While this remains the case, we shall do it for them, and without any apology, until they produce the one that is forthcoming from them.
Become a fan of Slate on Facebook. Follow Slate and the Slate Foreign Desk on Twitter.
http://www.slate.
From: "laodog" <laodoggie@yahoo.com>
To: Benner-Nooz-List@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Ageless-Nooz] Armenian Genocide Matters - Shut Up About Armenians or We'll Hurt Them Again
Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2010 18:15:03 +0000
Shut Up About Armenians or We'll Hurt Them AgainTurkish Prime Minister Erdogan's latest sinister threat.
Posted Monday, April 5, 2010, at 10:43 AM ET
April is the cruelest month for the people of Armenia, who every year at this season have to suffer a continuing tragedy and a humiliation. The tragedy is that of commemorating the huge number of their ancestors who were exterminated by the Ottoman Muslim caliphate in a campaign of state-planned mass murder that began in April 1915. The humiliation is of hearing, year after year, that the Turkish authorities simply deny that these appalling events ever occurred or that the killings constituted "genocide."
This year, the House foreign affairs committee in Washington and the parliament of Swedenjoined the growing number of political bodies that have decided to call the slaughter by its right name. I quote now from a statement in response by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the current prime minister of Turkey and the leader of its Islamist party:In a technical and pedantic sense, the word genocide does not, in fact, apply, since it only entered our vocabulary in 1943. (It was coined by a scholar named Raphael Lemkin, who for rather self-evident reasons in that even more awful year wanted a legal term for the intersection between racism and bloodlust and saw Armenia as the precedent for what was then happening in Poland.) I still rather prefer the phrase used by America's then-ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau. Reporting to Washington about what his consular agents were telling him of the foul doings in the Ottoman provinces of Harput and Van in particular, he employed the striking words "race extermination." (See the imperishable book The Slaughterhouse Province for some of the cold diplomatic dispatches of that period.) Terrible enough in itself, Morgenthau's expression did not quite comprehend the later erasureof all traces of Armenian life, from the destruction of their churches and libraries and institutes to the crude altering of official Turkish maps and schoolbooks to deny that there had ever been an Armenia in the first place.
In my country there are 170,000 Armenians. Seventy thousand of them are citizens. We tolerate 100,000 more. So, what am I going to do tomorrow? If necessary I will tell the 100,000: OK, time to go back to your country. Why? They are not my citizens. I am not obliged to keep them in my country.
Where to begin? Turkish "guest workers" are to be found in great numbers all through the European Union, membership of which is a declared Turkish objective. How would the world respond if a European prime minister called for the mass deportation of all Turks? Yet Erdogan's xenophobic demagoguery attracted precisely no condemnation from Washington or Brussels. He probably overestimated the number of "tolerated" economic refugees from neighboring and former Soviet Armenia, but is it not interesting that he keeps a count in his head? And a count of the tiny number of surviving Turkish Armenians as well?
The outburst strengthens the already strong case for considering Erdogan to be somewhat personally unhinged. In Davos in January 2009, he stormed out of a panel discussion with the head of the Arab League and with Israeli President Shimon Peres, having gone purple and grabbed the arm of the moderator who tried to calm him. On that occasion, he yelled that Israelis in Gaza knew too well "how to kill"—which might be true but which seems to betray at best an envy on his part. Turkish nationalists have also told me that he was out of control because he disliked the fact that the moderator—David Ignatius of the Washington Post—is himself of Armenian descent. A short while later, at a NATO summit in Turkey, Erdogan went into another tantrum at the idea that former Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark would be chosen as the next head of the alliance. In this case, it was cartoons published on Danish soil that frayed Erdogan's evidently fragile composure.
In Turkey itself, the continuing denial has abysmal cultural and political consequences. The country's best-known novelist, Orhan Pamuk, was dragged before a court in 2005 foracknowledging Turkey's role in the destruction of Armenia. Had he not been the winner of a Nobel Prize, it might have gone very hard for him, as it has for prominent and brave intellectuals like Murat Belge. Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink, also prosecuted under a state law forbidding discussion of the past, was shot down in the street by an assassin who was later photographed in the company of beaming, compliant policemen.
The original crime, in other words, defeats all efforts to cover it up. And the denial necessitates continuing secondary crimes. In 1955, a government-sponsore
So it is not just a disaster for Turkey that it has a prime minister who suffers from morbid disorders of the personality. Under these conditions, his great country can never hope to be an acceptable member of Europe or a reliable member of NATO. And history is cunning: The dead of Armenia will never cease to cry out. Nor, on their behalf., should we cease to do so. Let Turkey's unstable leader foam all he wants when other parliaments and congresses discuss Armenia and seek the truth about it. The grotesque fact remains that the one parliament thatshould be debating the question—the Turkish parliament—is forbidden by its own law to do so. While this remains the case, we shall do it for them, and without any apology, until they produce the one that is forthcoming from them.
Become a fan of Slate on Facebook. Follow Slate and the Slate Foreign Desk on Twitter.
http://www.slate.
Genetic on-off switch key to evolution of complex life - life - 20 June 2010 - New Scientist
NewScientist
Genetic on-off switch key to evolution of complex life - life - 20 June 2010 - New Scientist
Genetic on-off switch key to evolution of complex life
- 20 June 2010
- Magazine issue 2765.
A SIMPLE on-off switch may have been key to the evolution of complex life.
How colonies of single cells evolved into multicellular organisms has long been a puzzle. The process requires single cells to band together and divide the tasks of life. To do so, some cells must give up their ability to reproduce.
To investigate, Sergey Gavrilets of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville created a mathematical model describing a colony of identical cells able to survive and reproduce. He assumed trade-offs between the tasks: being better at reproducing made cells worse at survival, and vice versa. In the simplest case, the colony evolved into organisms made of cells that were mediocre at both tasks.
But that changed when Gavrilets included genes that could suppress the activity of one trait or the other. A colony of cells could now improve both traits at the same time, by making some cells exclusively reproducers and others survivors. This led cells to completely specialise in less than a million generations - an evolutionary blink of an eye (PLoS Computational Biology, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000805).
Genetic on-off switch key to evolution of complex life - life - 20 June 2010 - New Scientist
Law.com - Judges Give Thumbs Down to Crack, Pot, Porn Mandatory Minimums
Judges Give Thumbs Down to Crack, Pot, Porn Mandatory Minimums
The National Law Journal
June 16, 2010
Mandatory minimum sentences are too high, restitution for crime victims should be available in all cases, and judge-specific data on sentencing should not be reported, according to a survey of more than 600 federal trial judges.
From January through March of this year, the U.S. Sentencing Commission for the first time questioned federal judges on their views about sentencing under the advisory guidelines system in effect since 2005. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the mandatory sentencing guideline system in its 2005 ruling U.S. v. Booker.
The survey, released last week, drew responses from 639 of the 942 judges to whom it was sent -- a 67.8 percent response rate. The 639 judges who responded had sentenced 116,183 offenders, or 79 percent of those sentenced during fiscal 2008 and 2009.
Sixty-two percent of the judges said the mandatory minimums that they were required to impose were too high, particularly for crack cocaine (76 percent), receipt of child pornography (71 percent) and marijuana (54 percent). However, strong majorities believed the sentencing guideline ranges for most federal offenses were appropriate, with the exception again of those for crack cocaine, marijuana, and the possession and receipt of child pornography, which they said were too high.
....
Law.com - Judges Give Thumbs Down to Crack, Pot, Porn Mandatory Minimums
Fw: swr Over 20,000 Studies Conducted on Marijuana; What Is It That Scientists Do Not Yet Know?
--- On Tue, 7/13/10, Gnostic Media <hemperor@sheremembers.org> wrote:
|
Chimpanzee Gangs Kill for Land | LiveScience
Animals
Chimpanzee Gangs Kill for Land
By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Senior Writerposted: 21 June 2010 12:01 pm ET
Chimp-on-chimp attacks in the wild are very common, especially among small packs of males on patrol. Now research suggests the motive for these crimes is to gain territory.
To understand this violence, researchers studied a large group of chimpanzees living in Ngogo, Kibale National Park in Uganda. After monitoring the group for over a decade, scientists counted 21 chimp-on-chimp murders.
Of those crimes, the researchers witnessed 18 directly, and deduced three from circumstantial evidence. They think as many as 13 of the victims belonged to a single neighboring group.
"The take-home is clear and simple," said researcher John Mitani of the University of Michigan. "Chimpanzees kill each other. They kill their neighbors. Up until now, we have not known why. Our observations indicate that they do so to expand their territories at the expense of their victims."
.... Chimpanzee Gangs Kill for Land | LiveScience
Monday, July 12, 2010
SpyTalk - Nixon-CIA spy ploy in Vietnam backfired, new records show
SpyTalk
Jeff Stein
By Jeff Stein | July 6, 2010; 7:10 PM ET
Categories: Foreign policy , Intelligence , Military
SpyTalk - Nixon-CIA spy ploy in Vietnam backfired, new records show
Jeff Stein
Nixon-CIA spy ploy in Vietnam backfired, new records show
President Richard M. Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, deliberately “leaked” word to North Vietnam that U.S. forces planned to invade Cambodia, in a failed attempt to intimidate Hanoi into retreat, declassified U.S. documents reveal.
Nixon and Kissinger also used a CIA double agent in Laos to concoct a false “leak” of U.S. plans to mine North Vietnam’s major port, Haiphong, in 1972, according to a separate set of documents, which were discovered in a new volume of Foreign Relations of the United States, the State Department's official history of the era.
But that ploy also failed to undermine North Vietnam’s resolve.
“In both of these cases the action was a covert psychological warfare ploy that was taken at the direction of the president and Kissinger and not on the initiative of the CIA," says Merle Pribbenow, a retired CIA expert on Vietnam who discovered the overlooked documents in State Department records.
The documents have never been written about, Pribbenow said.
“In both cases, the information was provided clandestinely by double agents who fed the information to North Vietnamese officials, claiming that they had obtained the information surreptitiously or fortuitously,” Pribbenow added.
"The idea was to make the North Vietnamese believe that they had obtained advance knowledge of a planned U.S. operation in order to frighten them into pulling their forces back, but in both cases the Nixon administration then went ahead and carried out the action,” Pribbenow said.
"The end result was that, not only were the North Vietnamese not frightened out of doing what Nixon wanted to scare them out of doing, Nixon unintentionally gave them advance warning of what the U.S. was about to do.”
The ploy, in short, ended up foiling Nixon’s main goal for invading Cambodia: to annihilate Hanoi’s command post for staging attacks on South Vietnam.
“I have to say that when I read these documents I was absolutely appalled,” said Pribbenow, who spent 27 years in the CIA as a Vietnamese language and operations officer. “I have never been a big fan of psychological warfare and covert propaganda, as I think it is mostly just a waste of time and money, but in this case it could have cost us more than just time and money.”
Pribbenow and other Vietnam scholars said was impossible to say with certitude whether the disinformation attempts resulted in increased U.S. casualties.
“No U.S. aircraft were lost on 9 May 1972, when the mining of Haiphong Harbor occurred, so there certainly were no U.S. casualties from that warning,” Pribbenow said.
But in regard to Cambodia, the picture is muddier, said Pribbenow and historian John Prados, author of several books on the Vietnam War and the CIA.
Tipping Hanoi about American plans to invade Cambodia “might have” caused additional U.S. casualties, Prados said. Casualties “increased significantly” during the two months preceding the April 29, 1970 invasion, he noted, and “spiked” in May.
The Nixon-Kissinger ploy probably foiled any chance to destroy North Vietnam’s command post in Cambodia -- known by its acronym COSVN, the Central Office for the War in Vietnam -- which Nixon repeatedly cited as his goal for the invasion.
“If they were being explicit about invading Cambodia, it would have allowed them to move COSVN and to prepare the battlefield for the invasion,” Prados said in an interview.
“The effort to intimidate Hanoi ahead of the invasion of Cambodia would certainly have helped the North Vietnamese prepare for it more successfully than if it had been more of a surprise,” agreed Gareth Porter, author of “Peace Denied: United States, Vietnam and the Paris Agreement,” among other histories of the war.
Pribbenow added a further damning detail. After analyzing a Vietnamese-language account of the operation, he said that the Nixon-Kissinger ploy probably prompted the communists to move COSVN only hours before a “massive B-52 strike.”
“There is no explanation of why that particular time was chosen to leave,” he added, “but it is quite possible that the decision to move was either caused or at least influenced by the Nixon-directed warning.”
“It looks like a couple of classic cases of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing,” Pribbenow said.
“In the Cambodian case, when the order to pass the [false] information was given, no one had any plan to send U.S. troops into Cambodia -- the plan was only to use South Vietnamese troops in selected areas -- and not against COSVN.
"And indeed," Pribbenow continued, "CIA Director Richard Helms suggested 10 days before the Cambodian invasion that to improve the [disinformation agent’s] ‘credibility,’ the U.S. should consider sending ‘selected’ U.S. troops up to points near the Cambodian border to make it appear as if the story was true. “
“Nixon did not make the decision to send U.S. troops into Cambodia until several days later,” Pribbenow added, “but apparently forgot to tell the agency to call off the operation, with the result that we ended up unintentionally giving the North Vietnamese advance warning of the upcoming attack on COSVN.”
Sowing dissent in Hanoi
The documents also reveal a CIA operation that employed a double agent in North Vietnam’s ruling circles to plant false information about a nonexistent antiwar faction in Hanoi’s politburo.
“I was especially fascinated by the stuff on trying to convince North Vietnamese that the U.S. was in touch with a dissident faction,” said Porter.
“I’m not so sure that one played so well, simply because of the [Hanoi’s] consensus on prosecuting the war strategy, at least in broad outlines. They wouldn't have believed that that there were Central Committee guys ready to give in to the U.S. “
Porter called the CIA’s plan “the usual self-delusions at work -- all familiar territory by now.”
Indeed, a memo from George A. Carver, then-CIA Director Helms’s special assistant for Vietnam, reported that things hadn’t gone so well with that operation.
“Our project to convince the Hanoi leadership that the U.S. government is in clandestine communication with a high-level dissident faction within North Vietnam hit a snag when our double agent … muffed his lines in a 22 May session with the North Vietnamese intelligence officer with whom he has been in contact,” Carver wrote to Richard T. White, a National Security Council staffer at the time.
”Unfortunately, at the point in the conversation, where the agent was to allude to information about American contact with dissidents allegedly provided by the agent’s notional ‘American friend’ (the purported source of the earlier data on mining), the agent strayed from his prepared script and the North Vietnamese did not pick up the point or pursue it.”
Carver pleaded that double agent operations were “tricky.”
”As you recognize, structuring this kind of disinformation in a manner that whets the target’s appetite and remains plausible is a tricky proposition, which cannot be rushed, and which is always subject to the vagaries of chance and human nature,” he told White.
“We will keep you advised of progress as it occurs.”
Neither Kissinger nor White could not be reached for comment.
Categories: Foreign policy , Intelligence , Military
SpyTalk - Nixon-CIA spy ploy in Vietnam backfired, new records show
Saturday, July 03, 2010
DK Matai: The Rise of The Bio-Info-Nano Singularity
DK Matai
Chairman: mi2g, ATCA, The Philanthropia
Posted: July 1, 2010 07:58 AM
....
DK Matai: The Rise of The Bio-Info-Nano Singularity
Chairman: mi2g, ATCA, The Philanthropia
Posted: July 1, 2010 07:58 AM
The Rise of The Bio-Info-Nano Singularity
We are witnessing accelerating trends of exponential growth in the Bio-Info-Nano (BIN) revolution unfolding all around us. Just as soon as we have grasped the relevance of some new BIN innovation, we are challenged by yet more extraordinary technological developments that completely supersede our expectations and understanding. The paradigm shifts, taken together, present asymmetric opportunities for unparalleled growth as well as rising asymmetric risks for human society's globalized structure, its sustainability and longevity. This phenomenon of constant acceleration in new technologies is referred to as the Bio-Info-Nano Singularity within our network of organizations including mi2g.net, ATCA and The Philanthropia.....
DK Matai: The Rise of The Bio-Info-Nano Singularity
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
