February 24, 2010

What is Citizenship?



An exploration into the ethic of citizenship.






Anarchy is Bullshit



Anarchy and Anarchism are utter bullshit. Everybody has a different definition for what Anarchy actually is, and most 'anarchists' use it to describe things that the word doesn't even mean. It's a meaningless term and arguments about anarchist political theory are fucking pointless.






February 18, 2010

Current.com Gives up Journalism for Lent



In the photo here, you will see six items featured at the same time on the homepage of Current. for almost the entire day of February 18th, 2010.

You will notice that one of them is different than the others.

You will notice that it is a serious news story about something that actually fucking matters, that happened today.

You may notice, if you've spent time on Current.com that it is ALSO the ONLY USER POSTED STORY on the front page.

For those of you who don't know, Current.com used to be a news aggregation website that had an open source model for journalism. Users could create content, and then the community could vote on it.

The users generally had a decent sense of journalistic integrity, and otherwise overlooked stories often trended on the site's front page.

Now, it regularly features nonsensical staff picks, or videos that are created in house by staff. Regularly the front page is flodded with 'news items' that have minimal votes, without any regard to the user population or what stories are actually trending on the site.

It used to be that current.com was ahead of the 24 hour news networks by several news cycles. Today the story of a disgruntled man flying an airplane into a federal building did not reach the front page until nearly 10 hours after it happened.

Recently there was a shift in management, with Al Gore stepping away and some new guy from MTV stepping up to the plate. And the journalistic integrity of current.com has since been steadily sliding downhill into mindless garbage. Just like MTV moved away from showing music videos, and toward mindless garbage. Who'da thunk?

February 16, 2010

Politics and Ethics part 3

Or, Why Newt Gingrich is a total asshole




This is Viewer Supported Media. Are you Viewing? Support it, or it will go away.





February 14, 2010

Politics and Ethics Part 2

Or why Private Health Insurance is a Bigger National Threat than Terrorism.





This is Viewer Supported Media. Are you Viewing? Support it. $1, $10, $100, I don't care...





February 2, 2010

CIA moonlights in corporate world

The CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side.



Full article at POLITICO.com

In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.

In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.

The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32290.html#ixzz0eNxgZJdE

But sources familiar with the CIA’s moonlighting policy defend it as a vital tool to prevent brain-drain at Langley, which has seen an exodus of highly trained, badly needed intelligence officers to the private sector, where they can easily double or even triple their government salaries. The policy gives agents a chance to earn more while still staying on the government payroll.

A government official familiar with the policy insists it doesn’t impede the CIA’s work on critical national security investigations. This official said CIA officers who want to participate in it must first submit a detailed explanation of the type of work involved and get permission from higher-ups within the agency.

“If any officer requests permission for outside employment, those requests are reviewed not just for legality, but for propriety,” CIA spokesman George Little told POLITICO.

There is much about the policy that is unclear, including how many officers have availed themselves of it, how long it has been in place and what types of outside employment have been allowed. The CIA declined to provide additional details.

Generally, federal employees across the vast government work force are allowed to moonlight in the private sector, but under tight guidelines, that can vary from agency to agency, according to the federal Office of Government Ethics.

“In general, for most nonpolitical employees, they may engage in outside employment, but there are some restrictions,” said Elaine Newton, an attorney at the Office of Government Ethics. She explained that agencies throughout the federal government set their own policies on outside employment, and that they all typically require that the employment not represent a conflict of interest with the employee’s federal job and that the employee have written approval before taking on the work.

But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.

The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.” BIA’s clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.

BIA has employed active-duty CIA officers in the past, although BIA president Cheryl Cook said that has “not been the case with BIA for some time.”

But the ties between BIA and the intelligence world run deep. The name itself was chosen as a play off CIA. And the presence of so many former CIA personnel on the payroll at BIA causes confusion as to whether the intelligence firm is actually an extension of the agency itself. As a result, BIA places a disclaimer in some of its corporate materials to clarify that it is not, in fact, controlled by Langley.

BIA’s clients can put the company on a retainer for as much as $400,000 to $800,000 a year. And in return, they receive access to a variety of services, from deception detection to other programs that feature the CIA intelligence techniques.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32290.html#ixzz0eNxlOtw2