nswd

pipeline

‘In war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.’ –Sun Tze

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President Obama has secretly sanctioned a huge increase in the number of US special forces carrying out search-and-destroy missions against al-Qaeda around the world, with American troops now operating in 75 countries.

The dramatic expansion in the use of special forces, which in their global span go far beyond the covert missions authorised by George W. Bush, reflects how aggressively the President is pursuing al-Qaeda behind his public rhetoric of global engagement and diplomacy.

When Mr Obama took office US special forces were operating in fewer than 60 countries. In the past 18 months he has ordered a big expansion in Yemen and the Horn of Africa — known areas of strong al-Qaeda activity — and elsewhere in the Middle East, central Asia and Africa.

According to The Washington Post, Mr Obama has also approved pre-emptive special forces strikes to disrupt terror plots, and has given the units powers and authority that was not granted by Mr Bush when he occupied the White House. (…)
The aggressive secret war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups has coincided with a surge in the number of US drone attacks in the lawless border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, an al-Qaeda and Taleban haven, since Mr Obama took office.

Just weeks after he entered the White House, the number of missile strikes from the CIA-operated unmanned drones significantly increased, and the pattern has remained. In Iraq, US forces have killed 34 out of the top 42 al-Qaeda operatives in the past 90 days alone. (…)

The order also allowed for US special forces to enter Iran to gather intelligence for a possible future military strike if tensions over its alleged nuclear weapons programme escalate dramatically.

The seven-page document states that the surge is designed to build networks that could “penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy” al-Qaeda and other militant groups, and to “prepare the environment” for future military strikes by US and local forces.

{ Times | Continue reading }

Just as the Defense Department and its suppliers worry about dependence on foreign oil, they also must be concerned about growing needs — and potentially declining supplies — of rare earth metals.

Rare earth materials are used in commercial and military systems for their magnetic and other unique properties. They include rare earth ores, oxides, metals and alloys.

According to a recent Government Accountability Office report, worldwide availability of these materials may be limited to a few overseas sources, primarily China. GAO noted that the Defense Department is in the early stages of assessing its dependency on rare earth materials and is planning to complete a study by September 2010.

A potential disruption of supplies of rare earth metals would not only affect the U.S. military’s ability to produce high-end weapons, but would also jeopardize the nation’s adoption of green-energy technologies.

{ National Defense | Continue reading | Thanks Douglas! }

Flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend

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{ It’s not often that a US president has cause to declare that, given the chance, he would sack the boss of one of the UK’s leading companies. | The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe uncannily mirrors the global financial meltdown that was triggered by the September, 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers. | Thanks Douglas! }

‘A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.’ –George Orwell

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Americans are getting increasingly anxious–and for good reason.

People are worried about the economy, and they should be. They have been told to expect a strong rebound from our deep recession. The usual pattern is that recoveries mirror the strength of the decline–the steeper the drop, the more vigorous the rebound. It isn’t happening. The latest employment report makes it clear that the economy is not adding jobs. State and local governments faced with declining revenues are being forced to cut employment, wages and services, and they are raising taxes wherever they can.

A little over a year ago the Obama administration passed a staggering $787 billion stimulus package designed to rescue the economy. More than half of that money has now been spent, and the economy is still just creaking along. But now people are realizing that there is a dark side to this spending orgy. It has to end, and then we have to pay the bill. If we need any reminders that the day of reckoning is coming we have only to look to Europe.

{ Forbes | Continue reading }

For years, almost nobody paid attention to the sky-is-falling alarms of Edward Hugh, a gregarious British blogger and self-taught economist who repeatedly predicted that the euro zone could not survive. (…)

But now that the European sovereign debt crisis is rattling world markets, driving the euro lower almost every day and raising doubts about the future of the monetary union, his voluminous musings have become a must-read for an influential and growing global audience, including policy makers in the White House.

{ CNBC | Continue reading | Thansk Douglas }

related:

Personal Bankruptcies Jump 9% In May, And The Outlook For The Year Has Been Jacked Up.

China bank adviser says property woes worse than US.

Europe’s financial woes will hit the global economy, warns the governor of the Australian central bank, Glenn Stevens.

Public Pensions Could Bankrupt California.

Venice forced to sell off dozens of historic palazzos in order to bolster fast-diminishing funds.

Language of flowers. They like it because no-one can hear. Or a poison bouquet to strike him down.

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An earworm is a song going around in your head that you can’t get rid of. Some claim that earworms are like a cognitive itch, we scratch them by repeating the tune over and over in our heads.

In new research, Beaman & Williams (2010) asked 103 participants aged 15-57 all about their earworm experiences. Here’s what they found:

• Many earworms were pop songs, although adverts and TV/film themes and video game tunes were also mentioned.

• One-third generally experienced the chorus or refrain over and over again, but almost half said that it varied.

• 10% of participants reported that earworms stopped them doing other things.

• Contrary to popular belief those with musical training were no more likely to experience earworms. (…)

For most of us earworms are relatively untroubling. And if you are tempted to moan then just be thankful you’re not the 21-year-old described in a case report by Praharaj et al. (2009). This man had had music from Hindi films going around in his head against his will for between 2 and 45 minutes at a time, up to 35 times a day, for five years. Unfortunately even powerful drugs couldn’t stop the music.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

It sometimes feel like our minds are not on the same team as us. I want to go to sleep, but it wants to keep me awake rerunning events from my childhood. I want to forget the lyrics from that stupid 80s pop song but it wants to repeat them over and over again ad nauseam. (…)

Perpetual thoughts of food drive people to obesity, persistent negative thoughts cue depression and traumatic events push back into consciousness to be relived over and over again. (…)

Although it makes perfect intuitive sense to try and suppress unwanted thoughts, unfortunately the very process we use to do this contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more we try and push intrusive thoughts down, the more they pop back up, stronger than ever.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

photos { Kate Moss photographed by Michael Thompson, 1993 }

related { Kate Moss shows off six piercings after visit to tattoo parlour, 2009 }

bonus:

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Like that haughty creature at the polo match

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{ Kathy Grayson }

‘To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.’ –Thomas Edison

{ Thanks JJ }

Clearly I can see today. Moisture about gives long sight perhaps.

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The M3 money supply in the United States is contracting at an accelerating rate that now matches the average decline seen from 1929 to 1933, despite near zero interest rates and the biggest fiscal blitz in history.

The M3 figures - which include broad range of bank accounts and are tracked by British and European monetarists for warning signals about the direction of the US economy a year or so in advance - began shrinking last summer. The pace has since quickened. (…)

Mr Congdon said the dominant voices in US policy-making - Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz, as well as Mr Summers and Fed chair Ben Bernanke - are all Keynesians of different stripes who “despise traditional monetary theory and have a religious aversion to any mention of the quantity of money”. The great opus by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz - The Monetary History of the United States - has been left to gather dust.

Mr Bernanke no longer pays attention to the M3 data. The bank stopped publishing the data five years ago, deeming it too erratic to be of much use.

This may have been a serious error since double-digit growth of M3 during the US housing bubble gave clear warnings that the boom was out of control. The sudden slowdown in M3 in early to mid-2008 - just as the Fed talked of raising rates - gave a second warning that the economy was about to go into a nosedive.

Mr Bernanke built his academic reputation on the study of the credit mechanism. This model offers a radically different theory for how the financial system works. While so-called “creditism” has become the new orthodoxy in US central banking, it has not yet been tested over time and may yet prove to be a misadventure.

{ The Telegraph | Continue reading }

Europe is in crisis. Austerity measures have been announced in several countries including Greece and Spain, the euro is under pressure and stock markets across the globe have fallen sharply from their recent highs – and it is all due mainly to sovereign debt. (…)

What has caused the debt crisis?

In a word or two, over-borrowing. Sovereign debt is fine so long as the governments have no problem repaying the debt. But several countries have borrowed beyond their means – the ramifications of the financial crisis have left them struggling to repay their debt. This is why the IMF has agreed a financial package to bail them out.

Greece and other countries will struggle to pay off these debts. This has led to a dramatic spike in borrowing costs for these countries, exacerbating the problems further,” Mr Howse added. “Investors have begun to question the future of European Economic and Monetary Union and whether the crisis may spread beyond the peripheral European countries.

{ The Telegraph | Continue reading }

To push a fuckin’ RAV4?

{ Agency: Buzzman, France }

And here what will you learn more?

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The commercial makes the point that AT&T’s wireless service covers 90 percent of the country by showing orange fabric being unfurled over natural and man-made landmarks around the nation like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the Las Vegas strip. (…)

some viewers have suggested may be based too closely on the work of the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. (…) AT&T spokesman, Steve Schwadron, who works for the Fleishman-Hillard public relations agency, replied with this statement: “The artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have had and have no direct or indirect affiliation or involvement with the creation of AT&T’s advertising.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

This AT&T spot is not appropriation; it is intellectual theft. Anyone familiar with Christo’s work understands he and Jean Claude have always demanded total control of everything associated one of their works, for two compelling reasons: First, Christo and Jean Claude believe that everything involved in one of their works is an inseparable part of the work. This includes the negotiations and planning leading up to the work’s installation, a prolonged process that often consumes many years and even decades (as was the case with Gates).

Second, to fund this process — a Christo and Jean Claude work is completely paid for by the work itself — Christo and Jean Claude create images, multiples and other things that are sold to collectors. When an advertiser or handbag maker appropriates part of a Christo and Jean Claude work, this devalues the work, blurring the distinct line between art created by an artist and commerce engaged in solely to make money. Note that the AT&T spot steals from Christo and Jean Claude’s entire career, not just Gates: Much of their work involves wrapping or covering large objects, landscapes or seascapes with fabric, which transforms them into something entirely new and fascinating. AT&T, by contrast, is merely claiming to cover most of the world with its cellphone network — hardly transformative, and by no means art.

Sadly, Jean Claude, Christo’s longtime spouse and creative partner, died recently. Of the two, she was the fiercer protector of the work they did together and its legacy. Were she alive today AT&T would be in court with its back against the wall — and that spot would be off the air and every scrap of it destroyed.

AT&T should be thoroughly ashamed of itself, as should its agency, BBDO New York, and everyone involved in this sordid affair.

{ NY Times | Comment by Tom P. }

What kind of restaurant makes you cook your own food?

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Seppuku (”stomach-cutting”) is a form of Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment. Seppuku was originally reserved only for samurai. Part of the samurai honor code, seppuku was used voluntarily by samurai to die with honor rather than fall into the hands of their enemies, as a form of capital punishment for samurai who have committed serious offenses, or performed for other reasons that have brought shame to them.

The ceremonial disembowelment, which is usually part of a more elaborate ritual and performed in front of spectators, consists of plunging a short blade, traditionally a tantō, into the abdomen and moving the blade from left to right in a slicing motion. (…)

Women have their own ritual suicide, jigai.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Police searched Wednesday for a porn actor suspected of killing one colleague and injuring two others with a sword that was used as a movie prop at a production studio where the suspect had been living. (…)

“There was no indication that things were going to get violent, there was nothing that provoked this attack, but at some point Steven chose to arm himself with what can be best described as a sword,” Price said. “He then used that sword against those three victims.”

{ AP/Huffington Post | Continue reading | via Craig }

These are handy things to have. See. This is for sovereigns. This is for shillings, sixpences, halfcrowns. And here crowns. See.

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Most people become stressed when lying, but new research shows that people with power feel just fine when lying — and are better at getting away with it.

Lying is costly, extracting physiological and cognitive tolls from most people. The body of research on lying consistently shows that people become stressed when they do not tell the truth. The speed with which they process information slows down, possibly because lying requires keeping track of the lie and the truth while simultaneously trying to suppress nervous habits or other signs that might give the liar away. (So-called lie-detector tests, or polygraphs, can’t actually determine if people are lying, but they can identify signs of physiological stress that are consistent with lying.)

Professor Dana R. Carney, who studies social judgment and decision making, noticed that in a different area of scientific study, psychologists have observed that power — defined as control over others’ social or monetary outcomes and always accompanied by feelings of power — enhances cognitive functions and makes people feel good. The effects of feeling powerful are precisely the inverse of those that most people experience when they lie.

“The overlap is remarkable. When you feel powerful, you feel good, you’re a little smarter in that you process information more quickly and are better at multitasking, and some evidence suggests you may be more physiologically resilient,” Carney says. “When you lie, you feel bad, your cognitive systems are overworked, and you are physiologically taxed. What if you put lying and power together? It’s a match made in heaven or a match made in hell.”

{ Columbia Business School | Continue reading | Thanks Douglas }

In town you’re the law, out here it’s me. Don’t push it. Don’t push it or I’ll give you a war you won’t believe.

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Their focus was Project B—Assange’s code name for a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007. The video depicted American soldiers killing at least eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists; it later became the subject of widespread controversy, but at this early stage it was still a closely guarded military secret.

Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account.

The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.

{ The New Yorker | Continue reading }

A wise tabby, a blinking sphinx, watched from her warm sill


“The step after ubiquity is invisibility,” my old friend from Apple Al Mandel explained to me years ago. And it’s true. Telephone service was once rare but is now universal and anything truly universal eventually become a commodity. No wonder phone companies no longer make money from long-distance calling nor — as Verizon’s sale of its New England landlines business confirms — even make enough money from local phone service. Now it is all about mobile and thank God for texting and ringtones, the telco execs say… for awhile. Well I think the same thing is about to happen to Facebook — privacy issues or no.

Facebook is huge with 350 million members but that’s not the problem. The problem is that my Facebook friends list is too long and so is yours. I have 809 Facebook friends. My wife has friend envy because she thinks my friends are generally more interesting than her friends. I wouldn’t know because I’m only on Facebook once or twice a week for a few minutes. But even that’s enough to know my friend list is too long. (…)

Facebook is being really stupid lately about making money from its traffic by violating user privacy. (…) If Facebook really wants to get profitable it needs to get smaller by kicking-off users who don’t make it money. (…)

Facebook is useless to me. We’re all too connected to really connect.

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

video { Thanks Tim }

Murmuring here and there a word. Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus if you don’t please.

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{ BP CEO Hayward told CNN that the sick workers, who blamed their nausea, headaches and chest pain on the oil cleanup at the beach at Grand Isle, probably got sick from food poisoning. | Court News | Full stroy | More: 30 quotes about the oil spill that reveal the horror this disaster is causing. }

Keller could see the future

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{ Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that the Justice Department had launched a criminal investigation into the BP oil spill, in New Orleans on Tuesday. | Image: Visualizing the BP Oil Spill | More: Fears oil may continue spewing into the Gulf of Mexico for another two months into the hurricane season wiped $23 billion off BP’s market value on Tuesday and sent the cost of protecting its debt soaring. | And: There Was ‘Nobody in Charge’ }

You’ll never shut down the real Napster

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{ Edible chocolate anus }

Might just walk into her here. The lane is safer.

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{ Watch the video }

Never yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love you, O Eternity!

Mossberg pumping, shotgun dumping and drama means nothing

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{ A quick draw beetle that fires volatile liquids with the pulse of a Tommy Gun, aphids that self-combust at the threat of a predator and a double-pistoled worm that sprays its victim with streams of goo. Of course, these insects are not the only invertebrates carrying chemical artillery—bees are maybe the most famous projectile-launching bugs around. | Meet the ballistics experts of the bug world. | ESA | full story | Photo: Ann Johansson for The New York Times }

How many performance artists does it take to change a light bulb? I don’t know, I had to leave after four hours.

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{ Identity chip implanted into man gets computer virus | BBC video | Illustration: R. Crumb }



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