An army of networked kiosks is invading New York City. Hundreds of them. They’re large vertical slabs, practically ten feet tall and chock full of sensors. Reminiscent of the mysterious black monoliths from Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001. These kiosks are replacing the city’s aging public telephone booths and after this initial wave of monoliths hits Gotham there will be thousands more installed throughout the city.
For the past decade, the US intelligence agencies operating in Turkey have worked closely with the increasingly influential parallel government of Fethullah Gulen. Their approach to power was, until recently, a permeationist strategy, of covertly taking over political, economic, administrative, judicial, media, military and cultural positions gradually without resort to elections or military coups. They adopted flexible tactics, supporting and shedding different allies to eliminate rivals.
Rabble — There’s something about Justin Trudeau and his PR-spinning Liberal Team that reminds me of the Tennessee Williams character Harvey “Big Daddy” Pollitt from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Pollitt famously uttered the line:
What’s that smell in this room? Didn’t you notice it, Brick? Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odour of mendacity in this room?… There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odour of mendacity… You can smell it. It smells like death.
The Democratic National Committee under Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in fact, served as the Hillary Clinton Coronation Organizing Committee, operating, step by step, to ensure that the front-runner would become the party’s nominee.
So far there have been 44 U.S. presidents, each with their own legacy. Two of these presidents were in office for only a month, so their legacies are short.
A sad day. A disgraceful day. The Fourth was probably pretty bad in terms of hypocrisy. I can only imagine. I don’t live there any more. But today (now yesterday – I thought it better not to vent my immediate and utter frustration), when I read that FBI director Comey decided that the investigation into la Clinton’s DoS document affair didn’t warrant an indictment. I was speechless. I stared at the face of that cackling hyena and knew I was looking at the face of pure Evil.
Tactics of minimisation have been central to Hillary Clinton’s political career. When stumbling takes place, go for the established book of deflective rules. When violations of the law take place, explain that it was normal at the time. Suggest that others had engaged in a form of conduct only subsequently frowned upon.
Truthout.org: In the movie Sneakers, a motley gang of security experts chase after a little black box that can crack any form of encryption. Though the idea of a digital skeleton key may seem like the stuff of Hollywood thrillers, there are researchers at the University of Michigan who’ve recently created just that.
According to Seymour Hersh, the original plan of the Obama Administration regarding the disclosure of the execution of Osama bin Laden to the press was that he had been killed in a drone strike in the Hindu Kush mountains on the Afghan side of the border. But things didn’t go as planned during the operation as a Black Hawk helicopter crashed in Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound and the whole town now knew that an operation was underway.
Five days before the celebration of the 71st anniversary of Nazi Germany’s capitulation to the Soviet and allied troops in the WWII, the new NATO Supreme Commander in Europe Curtis Scaparrotti announced that he came to beat the drums of war again.
