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Was Jackson Pollock a weapon in the Cold War? There is a lot of barbed wire surrounding that question. The Cold War had battlegrounds all over the world, and it was a hot enough war in some of them, but in the main battleground, Western Europe, it was a war for hearts and minds—an idea war, an image war, a propaganda war. Global combat on these terms was the policy of the American government. There was no secret about the policy, and most of its enactments—such as the Fulbright Program, which was established in 1946—were carried out in broad daylight and to public acclaim. But some were carefully shrouded, made to appear the work of individuals and institutions acting on their own, without government sponsorship, as was the case with the magazine Encounter, which was published in London and contributed to by prominent American and European intellectuals, and which was revealed, in 1967, to be a creature of the C.I.A.
It seems a contradiction, even hypocritical, for the United States to have promoted the Western values of free elections, free speech, and free markets by covert methods. Democracy means accountability; that's what makes democratic governments different from authoritarian and totalitarian ones. But, until its cloak unravelled in the late nineteen-sixties, the C.I.A., and the people who were in on its activities, operated in secrecy. They kept the secret because they understood the logic. The target audience for cultural propaganda in the Cold War was foreign élites—in particular, left-wing intellectuals and avant-garde writers and artists who might still have some attachment, sincere, sentimental, or opportunistic, to Communism and the Soviet Union. The essence of the courtship was: it's possible to be left-wing, avant-garde, and anti-Communist. Look at these American artists and intellectuals, happily criticizing bourgeois capitalism and shocking mainstream tastes, all safely protected by the laws of a free society. In Russia, these people would be in the Lubyanka, or somewhere north of the Arctic Circle.
In practice, though, the American creed boils down to this: you have a right to say or create what you please, but the taxpayer doesn't have to pay for it. Highbrow criticizing and shocking are regarded by most Americans as toxic by-products of the culture of liberty: they show that we're serious about the First Amendment, but there is no reason to subsidize them. This was one of the lessons of the congressional attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts at the very end of the Cold War; but the lesson had been learned before, in a parallel episode, at the very start of the Cold War, an episode that defined the limits of what government could openly do in the practice of cultural diplomacy.
Taylor Littleton and Maltby Sykes's "Advancing American Art: Painting, Politics, and Cultural Confrontation at Mid-Century," recently published in a second edition (Alabama; $19.95), is an appropriately amused and acerbic account of the fiasco. In 1946, the State Department's newly formed Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs put together a show called "Advancing American Art." The division spent forty-nine thousand dollars of government money to purchase seventy-nine paintings by American artists. The exhibition was intended, as Littleton and Sykes put it, to be "one element in an international definition of American reassurance, stability, and enlightenment"—a friendly beacon in the grim aftermath of the war. It included works by Romare Bearden, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Ben Shahn, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Jacob Lawrence. Very few of the paintings were abstract, but most were identifiably modern: naturalist, expressionist, painterly. The State Department wanted the world to know that the United States was not just a nation of cars, chewing gum, and Hollywood movies. A preview of the exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum was well received. In The Nation, Clement Greenberg, already a leading arbiter of advanced painting, wrote that the show was "a remarkable accomplishment, and its moral should be taken to heart by those who control the public destiny of art in our country." The collection was split into two; thirty paintings were sent to Latin America, and the rest went to Paris and then to Prague. The exhibition was scheduled to continue to Hungary and Poland, but Czechoslovakia turned out to be the last stop.
In spite of the reviews, the show had been attacked by the American Artists Professional League, an organization of conservative artists and illustrators, which wrote to the State Department to complain that the selection was unrepresentative, and that the paintings that had been chosen were "strongly marked with the radicalism of the new trends in European art" and were "not indigenous to our soil." By the time the show was overseas, the story had been picked up in the mainstream press. Look ran an article, with illustrations, under the headline "Your Money Bought These Paintings." The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee wrote an angry letter to the Secretary of State, George C. Marshall. "The paintings are a travesty upon art," he complained. "They were evidently gotten up by people whose object was apparently to, (1) To make the United States appear ridiculous in the eyes of foreign countries, and to (2) Establish ill-will towards the United States."
Another congressman demanded inquiries into the political backgrounds of the artists represented in the show. It turned out that the names of eighteen of the forty-seven artists appeared in the records of the House Un-American Activities Committee; three were reported to have been members of the Communist Party. As was his habit, President Truman spoke bluntly: he described the collection as "the vaporings of half-baked lazy people." Marshall ordered the show recalled, and the paintings were consigned to the War Assets Administration as war surplus and sold off. They brought in $5,544. An O'Keeffe sold for fifty dollars. Marshall announced that no taxpayer money would be spent on modern art again, and the State Department issued a directive that no artist suspected of being a Communist or fellow-traveller could be exhibited at government expense.
"Advancing American Art" was a boomerang, reconfirming the very prejudices about American philistinism that it was intended to demolish. It also helped to put a man named George Dondero into the history books. Dondero was a congressman from Michigan, and his tender appreciations of modern art are so often quoted that one almost suspects that he composed them with solely that aim in mind. It is hard to believe, for example, that his great 1949 speeches against "the black knights of the isms" were the work of a man incapable of irony:
The artists of the "isms" change their designations as often and as readily as the Communist front organizations. Léger and Duchamp are now in the United States to aid in the destruction of our standards and traditions. The former has been a contributor to the Communist cause in America; the latter is now fancied by the neurotics as a surrealist.
Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder.
Futurism aims to destroy by the machine myth. . . .
Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule.
Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane. . . .
Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms.
Surrealism aims to destroy by the denial of reason.
The State Department plainly needed to find other ways to skin this diplomatic cat. Michael Krenn's "Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit" (North Carolina; $39.95) is a history of government efforts to send American art abroad after 1946 without throwing raw meat to the demagogues. The problem with "Advancing American Art" was that it was entirely a government program: the State Department actually owned the work that it was exhibiting. The solution was to enlist the participation of institutions like museums, foundations, and arts groups, and to give the government's role a much lower profile. By these means, Krenn says, between 1945 and 1970 the State Department, the United States Infor-mation Agency, and the Smithsonian Institution managed to send hundreds of exhibitions of American art abroad, often to positive reviews and enthusiastic audiences.
As Krenn shows, it was not a straight road. It swerved as Cold War anxieties swerved, and the fortunes of the exhibitions had little to do with their content. You would not imagine that a show named "Sport in Art," sponsored in part by Sports Illustrated, would arouse the anti-Communists, but it did. When the exhibition previewed, in Dallas, in 1956, it was attacked by an outfit called the Dallas County Patriotic Council, whose chairman expressed distress that "our tax money is going into the pockets of artists devoted to the destruction of our way of life." He meant that the artists were Communists, and though the show went on in Dallas, an international tour was cancelled by the U.S.I.A., nominally because of "budgetary considerations." A major exhibition, "American Painting, 1900-1950," was cancelled soon afterward for the same reason: charges that some of the artists were Communists or fellow-travellers.
The official line, of course, was that art in the United States was beyond politics. Eisenhower had more patience than Truman did with modernism; he thought of cultural diplomacy as a branch of psychological warfare, and his Administration was the first to provide systematic funding for international arts exhibitions. "As long as our artists are free to create with sincerity and conviction, there will be healthy controversy and progress in art," Eisenhower said in 1954, for the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art. "How different it is in tyranny. When artists are made the slaves and tools of the state; when artists become the chief propagandists of a cause, progress is arrested and creation and genius are destroyed." His Administration helped sponsor tours of American art, opera ("Porgy and Bess," meant to counter Soviet propaganda about American racism), musical theatre, dance, and jazz.
Still, the promotion abroad of American art and letters after 1946 required a delicate form of intrigue between private institutions and government agencies. The more radical or modernist the art and letters, the more covert the government's participation needed to be. The State Department and the U.S.I.A. could send "Oklahoma!" around the world (and did), but they could not very comfortably arrange emergency funding to keep Partisan Review afloat, as the C.I.A. seems to have done in 1953, or promote a style of avant-garde painting offensive to congressional tastes. The revelation about Encounter was part of a general exposure of the considerable extent to which the C.I.A., by means of dummy foundations and front organizations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, headquartered in Berlin, had subsidized and promoted activities that it calculated to be anti-Soviet. The fall-out was unpleasant. Many of the writers and editors associated with Encounter claimed that they had had no idea about the man behind the curtain; these people looked like dupes. Others claimed that "everyone knew"; these looked like the people Julien Benda warned about in "The Treason of the Intellectuals." A shadow of suspicion fell over everything that might have elicited the interest and assistance of the C.I.A., and one of those things was Abstract Expressionism.
What would have been the geopolitical uses of abstraction? The theory, as it was proposed in articles published in Artforum and other journals in the nineteen-seventies, and then elaborated in Serge Guilbaut's "How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art" (1983) and Frances Stonor Saunders's "The Cultural Cold War" (1999), is that abstract painting was an ideal propaganda tool. It was avant-garde, the product of an advanced civilization. In contrast to Soviet painting, it was neither representational nor didactic. It could be understood as pure painting—art absorbed by its own possibilities, experiments in color and form. Or it could be understood as pure expression—a "school" in which every artist had a unique signature. A Pollock looked nothing like a Rothko, which looked nothing like a Gorky or a Kline. Either way, Abstract Expressionism stood for autonomy: the autonomy of art, freed from its obligation to represent the world, or the freedom of the individual—just the principles that the United States was defending in the worldwide struggle. Art critics therefore developed apolitical modes of appreciation and evaluation, emphasizing the formal rigor or the existentialist drama of the paintings; and the Museum of Modern Art favored Abstract Expressionists in its purchases and international exhibitions, at the expense of art whose politics might have been problematic—the kind of naturalist art, for example, that was featured in the "Advancing American Art" exhibition. But the C.I.A. lurked in the shadows. It turned out that a Pollock had a politics.
This was a revisionist interpretation of art history, and it had two prongs. The first was the suggestion of actual collusion between MOMA and the C.I.A. The evidence for this has always been largely circumstantial. The man who directed cultural activities at the C.I.A. in the early years of the Cold War, Thomas Braden, had previously been the executive secretary of MOMA. According to Saunders, a number of MOMA trustees were also on the board of the Farfield Foundation, a C.I.A. front. The president of the museum in the nineteen-forties and fifties was Nelson Rockefeller, whose family had supported MOMA from the beginning, and who had close ties to the intelligence community and an unabashed commitment to the patriotic uses of art. (It was Nelson who had demanded the removal of Diego Rivera's murals from the walls of Rockefeller Center, because they depicted Lenin.) During the war, Rockefeller had been the Roosevelt Administration's coördinator of inter-American affairs; the head of the art section in that office, René d'Harnoncourt, joined MOMA in 1944 and became its director.
What this suggests, though, is simply that the leaders of MOMA, like the leaders of most mainstream institutions in the United States after the war, were anti-Communists. As Saunders acknowledges, there were no explicit arrangements between the government and the museum, and the reason was that there didn't need to be. Everybody was on the same page. Rockefeller and Alfred Barr, the founding director of MOMA, who, after the war, served as chairman of the painting and sculpture collections, did not have to be encouraged to use American art to promote the nation's image abroad. They never pretended that they were up to anything else. Barr was a lover of European modernism, but he was on a mission to persuade Americans that theirs was a modern culture—a mission that he pursued by mounting exhibitions on modern architecture and design, and starting the museum's department of film, headed by the formidable Iris Barry and dedicated to the proposition that Hollywood movies were part of the modern movement in the arts.
The other prong of the revisionist thesis was the attack on the critical doctrine, dominant in the nineteen-fifties and into the nineteen-sixties, that the conditions of a painting's production and reception are irrelevant to its significance as art. On this point, the revisionists were right. Everything was shaped by Cold War imperatives after 1945, because everything is always shaped by circumstance. The "apolitical" interpretation of abstract painting derived, quite self-consciously, from a politics. Both Greenberg, the critic most responsible for the view that Abstract Expressionism was pure painting, and Harold Rosenberg, the critic most responsible for the view that it was pure expression, were left-wing anti-Communists who had been associated with the antiStalinist Partisan Review in the nineteen-forties, and whose theories of art were formed in reaction to Soviet aesthetic dogma, according to which abstraction was individualist self-indulgence. Greenberg and Rosenberg were both outspoken champions of the Americanness of Abstract Expressionism. Rosenberg called it "American action painting."
Still, no work reduces to a single context. When you stand before Pollock's "Lavender Mist," you do not think about "artistic free enterprise" or the C.I.A. or the cultural politics of Partisan Review. You think about how a painter could have taken all he had experienced across a creative threshold that no one had crossed before, and produced this particular thing. The painting's importance for a certain strand of Cold War cultural politics is part of the story of how it got to us, a generation or more later, and that history is worth knowing, because bits and pieces of it—the existentialist encounter, the "American" indifference to painterly decorum—still cling to it. After all, other ways of understanding Abstract Expressionist paintings were once possible, for images are highly malleable (one of the reasons they make poor instruments for propaganda). It might easily have been argued that Abstract Expressionist works are hostile to the spirit of liberal democracy, that they reflect a totalitarian aesthetics—monumental, peremptory constructions that make us feel our insignificance.
Pollock's paintings have other contexts that matter. It is not the least of the many pleasures of Jed Perl's commodious new book, "New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century" (Knopf; $35), that it has scarcely a word to say about the Cold War. The book is about a moment when painters, sculptors, dancers, poets, and performance artists, Americans and émigrés, converged on a city, and about the difference the city made to what they were able to imagine. Its sympathies are entirely with the individual artist and the act of making. Perl calls the decade after the war a Silver Age; he is in love with the moment, and he makes it glow. He also makes it unfamiliar again. Unlike most histories of American art, "New Art City" does not put the Abstract Expressionists at the center of the stage. Perl doesn't especially like the drip paintings. The bookends of his story are not Pollock and Pollock's evil twin, Andy Warhol; they are Hans Hofmann and Fairfield Porter.
And there are reasons to feel that the claims about MOMA and its devotion to abstract art over all else are exaggerated. In 1994, Michael Kimmelman, now the Times' chief art critic, published a report on the history of the museum's purchase and exhibition of Abstract Expressionist paintings, in "Studies in Modern Art," a MOMA publication. His conclusion, recently confirmed by David Caute in his valuable history of Cold War cultural diplomacy, "The Dancer Defects" (Oxford; 2003), was that there was no unusual pattern of preference for Abstract Expressionism at the museum—some people at the time believed that Barr was rather late in recognizing its importance—and no record of international exhibitions specially emphasizing Abstract Expressionist works until the late nineteen-fifties, when a show called "The New American Painting" was sent abroad by MOMA in coördination with the International Arts Council, an organization affiliated with the museum and financed by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the U.S.I.A., which provided some publicity. In the catalogue for the exhibition, the show was referred to as "benevolent propaganda for foreign intelligentsia." By then, Pollock was dead, and Abstract Expressionism was no longer new.
Still, Barr was nothing if not a public-relations man. "Since 1929 he had worked to build an audience for modern art," Perl writes. "Some might say that he had invented that audience." He did, eventually, see the significance of Abstract Expressionism as an art form, and—always crucial for him—the importance of giving it popular appeal. If an association with Americanism and Cold War politics helped, then Barr was happy to propose one. In February, 1949, when Pollock had started on the short, great period in which he created the drip paintings, Time ran a mocking story referring to him as the "darling of the highbrow cult." In March, Barr wrote a letter to Henry Luce, the publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune, to propose that his magazines consider changing their attitude toward modern art. He suggested that Abstract Expressionism might be regarded as "artistic free enterprise," and he reminded Luce that attacking abstract art was something that totalitarian regimes did. In August, Life published a lavish piece on Pollock, with photographs of him at work by Arnold Newman. It made Pollock famous—the "action painter," the very type of the modern American culture hero.
Cultural diplomacy is a tricky business in a democracy. It's awkward to promote art officially by claiming that it is free from official constraints, and it is especially awkward if the art is, in fact, unpopular. Cold Warriors in the nineteen-fifties often found themselves in the position of propagandizing for American values by exhibiting art that was manifestly élite, and attacking the Soviet Union for mandating that art appeal to the common man. In 1952, Barr wrote a piece for the Times Magazine, "Is Modern Art Communistic?," in which he tried to argue, in effect, that "democratic" is a totalitarian standard for judging art. He wasn't wrong, but it meant that a lot of congressmen were behaving like totalitarians.
Then again, the American Artists Professional League wasn't wrong when it complained, about the "Advancing American Art" exhibition, that modern art was "not indigenous to our soil." The native style in the United States had been regionalist; mid-century modernism was internationalist, and the Abstract Expressionists, all of whom lived in New York, worked in an art scene dominated by European émigrés. Pollock's first mentor, at the Art Students League of New York, was Thomas Hart Benton, the leader of what was known as "American Scene painting," and a populist who hoped to make American painting as prestigious as Europe's. Benton left New York in 1935 and returned to Missouri. He thought that the East Coast art establishment had been taken over by Communists. "Communism is a joke everywhere in the United States except New York," he said. This was not the sort of artist the cultural Cold Warriors went out of their way to promote. His Americanism was much too pure. ♦


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I am thankful for every little word, thing, and deed that others have provided to attempt to make it easier for us. Sincerely, you and your kind hearts are appreciated. You are bright rays of sunshine on our cloudy days.
In the midst of one cloudy day, I picked up the mail to find the current issue of South Dakota Magazine. I knew it was coming. I had been waiting for it. In fact, I had been stalking the area newsstands for it. You see, I was on page 11. Yep. The Eye On Keloland segment and the local newspaper were not enough. I found my way into a publication that focuses on interesting people, places, and events in our state. (I know! Me?!?) Truly, it is an honor to be chosen for the interview and very cool to have a little part of the March/April issue. The staff of South Dakota Magazine does a great job exploring our state and sharing both its known and unknown treats and treasures.
And speaking of treats, I have to have something for snacking as I flip through my issue of the magazine. What could be better than Chocolate Frosted Peanut Butter Rice Krispie Treats? An area convenience store makes them from scratch. They sing a siren song and tempt me every time I pass. I had to make my own pan of gooey bars to nibble. They are definitely not light (my jeans are screaming in rebellion as I try to button them), but I can't resist a Chocolate Frosted Peanut Butter Rice Krispie Treat On My Plate.
1 cup Karo syrup
1 cup peanut butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 cup peanut butter
Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. (This will easily burn.)
Remove from heat and pour over cereal; mix well.
Pat into a 9 x 13 pan that has been sprayed with cooking spray (being careful not to condense too much or the bars will be tough).
Meanwhile, combine 1 cup peanut butter and 1 cup chocolate chips.
Melt over low heat, stirring constantly.
Spread over Rice Krispie treats.
Allow to set for 2 hours before cutting into squares. (Serves 12-30, depending on size of bars...and ultimately your butt)

subset: commoncrawl


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Soy may not provide relief during menopause: study
By Genevra Pittman
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Taking soy supplements may not help women ease their menopause symptoms or prevent the bone changes that start at that time of life, suggests a new study from Florida.
Women who took the supplements every day for two years didn't have any improvement in their symptoms compared with those who took a soy-free placebo pill -- and they suffered more hot flashes by the end of the study.
Researchers also didn't see any changes in their bone mineral density compared to women taking placebos. Low bone mineral density puts women at higher risk of osteoporosis and broken bones.
Women seeking relief from menopause symptoms have been without a clear go-to treatment since the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study of hormone therapy reported heart and cancer risks with estrogen and progestin use.
Previous studies have shown that soy supplements don't have those same added risks. But the studies have also found mixed results on soy's ability to slow bone weakening and ease hot flashes and other menopause symptoms.
"What prompted us to do this study was in the wake of WHI when many of our patients stopped using hormone therapy," said Dr. Silvina Levis, the study's lead author from the Miller School of Medicine, University of Miami.
"Many of them had just gone to a health food store and started on soy supplements," she told Reuters Health. "The study was started to try to answer a simple question: will these soy isoflavone tablets help women with the issues they were concerned with?"
Levis and her team randomly split 248 women who had recently hit menopause into two groups. For two years, half of the women took 200 milligrams of soy isoflavones every day -- about twice the amount that would be in a soy-rich diet. The other half took placebo pills. None of them knew whether they were getting the real or sham treatment.
Most of the participants were Hispanic, and 182 completed the study.
At their two-year visit, women in both groups had lost the same amount of bone density in their spine and hip since starting the study. They also reported a similar number of menopause symptoms, except more women in the soy group said they had hot flashes -- 48 percent of them, compared to 32 percent in the placebo group.
Women taking the daily soy supplements also reported some of the stomach and digestion problems, such as constipation, that have been linked to soy before, Levis said. But there were no serious side effects related to the supplements, the authors report in Archives of Internal Medicine.
The soy tablets can be bought for about 25 to 50 cents per day.
"When we started the study we wanted this to work, because it would provide an easy and healthy way to help women in the initial stages of menopause," Levis said.
However, "we didn't see any protection from bone loss or any relief from menopause symptoms." After this, she added, "maybe women will reconsider" taking soy tablets during menopause.
William Wong, a nutritionist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston who didn't participate in the new study, agreed. "The scientific evidence is telling them that they might not receive any benefit" from extra soy, he told Reuters Health.
Wong, whose research has also shown a lack of effect of soy during menopause, said that doesn't mean soy couldn't have health benefits over a longer period of time -- such as if girls started getting more of it during puberty.
Medications including certain anti-depressants may provide relief for menopause symptoms in some women, Levis said. For bone health, Wong recommended regular physical activity, combined with calcium and vitamin D supplements.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/fO01ME Archives of Internal Medicine, online August 8, 2011.
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Soy may not prevent clogged arteriesNEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Taking extra soy supplements did not help ...


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Hamner bill to add two judges to district passes committee
A bill to add two new district judgeships and support staff to the 5th and 9th judicial districts passed the House Judiciary Committee unanimously Thursday, according to a news release.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Millie Hamner (D-Dillon), would fulfill the Judicial Department's request for two new district judges and staff for the 5th and 9th judicial districts, which are both in Hamner's House district. The two judicial districts include Summit, Eagle, Clear Creek, Lake, Pitkin, Garfield and Rio Blanco counties.
The 5th Judicial District currently has the lowest district court judge staffing level in Colorado with just under 70 percent of full staffing. The 9th Judicial District has the second lowest with 73 percent of full staffing.
Hamner said this bill will lessen the burden on the courts and expedite court cases.
"Right now, these district judges have extremely heavy caseloads and this bill will help ensure every judge has and is able to give the proper time and attention to their cases," Hamner said. "This bill will make our judicial system more efficient and speed up the process for people going through the court system in those areas."
The 5th Judicial District last received a new district judge in 2005 and has since grown its caseload by 71 percent where the 9th Judicial District last received a new district judge in 2009 and has since increased its caseload by 68 percent.
Start a dialogue, stay on topic and be civil.
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Information Security
iSTOCK/GETTY IMAGES
A Dynamic Decade | News of the Day | Trustworthy Finally? | Crystal Ball
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| A Dynamic Decade
Information security has matured as a profession in a mere 10 years, despite waging an endless game of catch-up with threats, legislation and the demands of business.
Where to begin? Well, at the start of Information Security's journey in December 1997, there wasn't a security profession. At least not as we understand it today. The chief information security officer was a notion whose time had not yet arrived. Compliance wasn't the bane of corporate security's existence, and macro worms were, well, around.
"The most obvious thing is that 10 years ago, there was no profession," says AT&T senior vice president and chief security officer Ed Amoroso, a veteran of the industry who in his early days at Bell Labs was immersed in a think tank surrounded by UNIX giants Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. "You could be a techie, but there were no CISOs, no senior executives in a company. Now it would be almost impossible to find a large or medium-sized company or government agency that did not have a management-level security staff."
The emergence of the Internet as a ubiquitous business medium touched every facet of IT, and caused the growth of information security as a profession. Guardians like Amoroso and his peers in the enterprise had to learn a whole new lexicon between 1997 and today, and transform the way they looked at their jobs. As more business moved online, it became less of an imperative to protect networks and individual systems, and more about aligning what they do with overall business goals. Risk management became more than a term used by liability companies and financial professionals. Security pros were forced to think in these terms, and build programs to address what has become an organized criminal element targeting not only customer data, but invaluable intellectual property as part of sophisticated corporate espionage. Nations are also suspected of using computers to attack one another, not causing bloodshed but stealing secrets and threatening critical infrastructure.
"We have gone from a lot of malicious, exploratory, vandalism types of hacking to the realm where there is significant economic activity," says luminary Gene Spafford, founder of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) at Purdue University.
| Criminals are organized and international. The Internet changed their economic model as well. Physical access is no longer needed to steal; a hacker is as likely to attack from a living room in Beijing as he is from a data center in Silicon Valley. Web sites are no longer defaced for fun, denial-of-service attacks no longer carried out for notoriety. Instead, hackers blackmail high-traffic, big-money sites with DDoS attacks; money is laundered over the Net, secrets stolen and business models put in jeopardy.
Yesterday's tattered system or network administrator, or Web site operator, fought back with signature-based defenses, or sometimes hid in the weeds hoping they'd plugged the latest Windows hole and prayed the latest mass-mailing worm would skip on by. That kind of security by obscurity is fatal today to many business models.
"Coupled with [the changing threat landscape] has been the transformation of attack tools, going from largely self-propagating attacks or hacker tool-kits to automated, sophisticated blended threats with a high reliance on social engineering," Spafford says. "Botnets and rootkits are prominent. For those of us looking at trends, we see a similar evolution of viruses--stealthy, widespread, automated, organized criminal activity, coming from where we were 10 years ago."
Donn Parker, a longtime computer crime observer and prominent researcher with SRI International, says the cat-and-mouse game between criminals and those paid to keep them in check followed business' migration to the Net--and he doesn't expect it to abate any time soon.
"I've said time after time, the problems associated with the use and misuse of computers is a one-upsmanship problem. The bad guys figure out new ways to beat the newest security, and good guys increase security again," Parker says. "Used to be in the 1960s, '70s, '80s, it was amateur criminal activity where the criminals were motivated to solve their own personal problems by malicious acts against computers. Gradually...it has grown into a very large-scale organized criminal activity where motivation is for financial gain."
| Microsoft, to its credit, took measures to about-face its security profile. Bill Gates' famous 2002 Trustworthy Computing memo (see "Trustworthy Finally?", below) put a temporary halt to development in Redmond, Wash. Microsoft's developers were given security mandates, and a secure development lifecycle was established. As we look at Vista, which launched this year, the security changes are stark.
| "Microsoft has made [security investment], but it's not clear that it's gone all the way yet," Spafford says. "Had Trustworthy Computing not occurred, we'd be in much worse shape than we are now. Other vendors need to get with it."
Amoroso says we're stuck with bad software--for now.
"If you look at other branches of engineering such as electrical engineering, these are fairly mature branches of engineering--thousands of years of experience built on principles. If you study engineering, there's a routine curriculum no matter where you go," Amoroso says. "Software engineering doesn't enjoy that kind of maturity. You couldn't get a software engineering degree in 1980. We have to deal with the immaturity of it as a discipline. But each year that passes, we learn more about it, and programming gets better. In the meantime, we have to be somewhat reactive. I'll say that probably in my lifetime, we won't see massively sized, complex software that's actually correct."
Adding to the complexity is the depth of the vendor pool through which security managers must wade and execute make-or-break buying decisions. The boom days of the early 2000s sprouted hundreds of companies, each with a solution to the day's most pressing problems. Unfortunately, most ended up being just different takes on the same technology, and reactions to the threat of the day. Patch management and vulnerability management firms popped up in response to Microsoft's Patch Tuesday releases. Intrusion prevention made headway against signature-based intrusion detection systems. Antivirus software became commoditized, and providers began to differentiate themselves with antispyware and antispam offerings.
| "Regulation--SOX, HIPAA, GLB, the credit card industry's PCI, the various disclosure laws, the Euro-pean Data Protection Act, whatever--has been the best stick the industry has found to beat companies over the head with. And it works," says Bruce Schneier, founder of BT Counterpane, creator of the Blowfish and Twofish algorithms, and a noted author and speaker. "Regulation forces companies to take security more seriously, and sells more products and services."
The ChoicePoint debacle kicked off the data breach era in 2005, and hundreds of millions of lost records later, companies have state data breach notification laws to comply with, credit card standards to adhere to, and industry-specific regulations to watch. Security and risk must work in concert, forcing IT security to emerge from clichéd basement hideouts, and often sit alongside business units in order to learn how to best tailor protections to satisfy not only management, but auditors.
"Legislation demonstrates a failure of the information security community in meeting its responsibilities and requirements," Parker says. "An analogy is the seat belt problem in cars--we had to have laws to put them in cars and use them. A similar situation, only on a grander scale, has occurred in information security. We're shifting objectives in information security from attempts to reduce risk to attempts to meet compliance with law. That's a sad commentary on information security."
As we hit the end of this decade, and look to the start of Information Security's next 10 years, we see security duties being absorbed more and more by networking groups. Security technology is being baked into infrastructure like routers and switches, and big vendors like Cisco, IBM, HP and EMC are scooping up important security technologies. Stand-alone security vendors, no matter how innovative, are sitting ducks for acquisition. Compliance is going to be a perpetual issue for security managers, and overall risk management is slowly superseding the role of the CISO.
Amoroso, for one, predicts that in 10 years, security as we know it today will be gone.
"We'll look back on this five to 10 years from now and say this was the era when we overlaid security onto networks and systems, and I think we already have learned that's a flawed model," Amoroso says. "It doesn't make sense to design a network and then build security onto it or run a network where security components are separate. That's silly."


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There's a gardening app for that
This just in on a day with glowering skies and three days of snow/rain mix coming on: There's now an iPhone app for gardeners.
Broomfield-based seed company Botanical Interests has put together an iPhone app ($5.99) that lists the company's vegetable and herb seeds and compiles growing tips and invormation on them. The app will update with flower seeds sometime in 2010, and soon you'll be able to order seeds through the application, says the company's Internet marketing manager, Shayna Lashway. You can save information to a favorites list and organize searches based on, say, harvest times and lighting conditions. The app also has cultivation tips and you get a 5% discount on your first seed order (nice since it's a relatively pricey app).
But wait, there's more: Botanical Interests has collaborated with the Denver Botanic Gardens on a series of 16 seed varieties: an agastache, an allium, an artemisia, prairie aster, two echinaceas, a rudbeckia, a salvia, a verbena and more. The Garden's senior curator, Panayoti Kelaidis, collaborated with the seed company on the plant selections. Many of the natives are threatened or endangered in parts of the U.S. There are plans at Botanical to collaborate with other U.S. botanic gardens on the seed selections.
If last spring's mad planting rush is a blurry memory to you, Botanical is the company with the pretty botanical drawings on their seed packets whose racks you've likely seen at your seed store or even your health-food store. They're family-founded and owned and sell non-GMO and certified organic varieties.


text:
Top Items:
Woody Allen / New York Times:
Woody Allen Speaks Out — Last Sunday, Nicholas Kristof wrote a column about Dylan Farrow, the adopted daughter of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. Mr. Allen has written the following response to the column and Dylan's account. — TWENTY-ONE years ago, when I first heard Mia Farrow had accused …
Discussion: The Week, YouGov US Opinion Center News, The Huffington Post, Mashable, ABC News, Guardian, TMZ.com, Gothamist, Mediaite, Politico, Talking Points Memo, Riehl World News, CANNONFIRE, The Raw Story, Gawker, BuzzFeed, Lawyers, Guns & Money, Althouse, Liberaland and Booman Tribune, more at Mediagazer »
Monica Nickelsburg / The Week: 10 things you need to know today: February 8, 2014
Katie Jagel / YouGov US Opinion Center News: Americans divided over Woody Allen
Kate Sommers-Dawes / Mashable: Woody Allen Responds to Abuse Allegations in 'Times' Op-Ed
Anthony Castellano / ABC News: Woody Allen Rejects Dylan Farrow's Molestation Claims
Ben Yakas / Gothamist: Dylan Farrow Hits Back At Woody Allen's "Legalese, Distortions, & Outright Lies"
Josh Feldman / Mediaite: Dylan Farrow Reacts to Woody Allen's NY Times Piece: 'I Won't Let the Truth Be Buried'
Dylan Byers / Politico: NYT passed on Farrow's letter
Tom Kludt / Talking Points Memo: Woody Allen Lashes Out At Mia Farrow, Defends Himself Against Abuse Claims
Tom Boggioni / The Raw Story: Woody Allen responds in New York Times to daughter Dylan Farrow's accusations
Taylor Berman / Gawker: Woody Allen Responds to Daughter's Sexual Abuse Allegations
Kate Aurthur / BuzzFeed: What Does Ronan Farrow's Parentage Have To Do With The Accusations Against Woody Allen?
Paul Campos / Lawyers, Guns & Money: Woody Allen responds
Ann Althouse / Althouse: "Not that I doubt Dylan hasn't come to believe she's been molested, but if from the age of 7 …
Maureen Orth / Vanity Fair:
10 Undeniable Facts About the Woody Allen Sexual-Abuse Allegation — This week, a number of commentators have published articles containing incorrect and irresponsible claims regarding the allegation of Woody Allen's having sexually abused his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow.
Discussion: JustOneMinute, Gawker, Ed Driscoll, The Huffington Post, Riehl World News and Weekly Standard
Tom Maguire / JustOneMinute: Ebbing And Flowing With Woody Allen
Jordan Sargent / Gawker: Dylan Farrow Responds to Woody Allen: "I Have Never Wavered"
Lauren Duca / The Huffington Post: Dylan Farrow Responds To Woody Allen's Op-Ed, Calling His Response Full Of 'Outright Lies'
John Podhoretz / Weekly Standard: Fallen Idol — Woody Allen and the culture of celebrity.
Kevin Drum / Mother Jones:
Chart of the Day #2: The Madness of Austerity — January's job numbers were fairly dismal, but the bad cheer wasn't equally spread. Private sector employment, as usual, increased—by 142,000 jobs last month. At the same time, public sector employment declined. Government employment at all levels was down 29,000 in January.
Discussion: americanthinker.com, The Week and Washington Monthly
Michael O'Hare / Washington Monthly: Employment and Freedom — Kevin Drum, who had the nerve …
Jason Seher / CNN:
Crist: End the Cuba embargo — Washington (CNN) - Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced Friday his support for lifting the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, a policy shift that shows how far the former Republican has moved since switching parties. — "The embargo has done nothing …
Discussion: Politico
Lucy McCalmont / Politico: Charlie Crist wants Cuba embargo 'taken away'
George F. Will / Washington Post:
President Obama's magic words and numbers — Barack Obama, the first president shaped by the celebratory culture in which every child who plays soccer gets a trophy and the first whose campaign speeches were his qualification for the office, perhaps should not be blamed for thinking …
Discussion: Viking Pundit and Washington Wire
Dante Chinni / Washington Wire: Politics Counts: Where Workforce Dropouts Are Highest
Christopher Ketcham / American Prospect:
This Land Was Your Land — In Utah and other Western states, the country's most pristine wilderness faces new threats from Big Energy and its powerful allies.
Discussion: Yahoo! News
Ashley Kringen / KFOR-TV:
GRAPHIC LANGUAGE: Oklahoma restaurant owner says doesn't want 'f*ggot, freak' customers — ENID, Okla. - A restaurant in Enid is getting heat after one of its patrons posted a pretty strong message on social media about discrimination. — The restaurant and bar has been open …
Discussion: I Acknowledge and Gawker
Scott Kaufman / The Raw Story:
Oklahoma restaurant won't serve 'freaks,' 'f*ggots,' the disabled and welfare recipients
Oklahoma restaurant won't serve 'freaks,' 'f*ggots,' the disabled and welfare recipients
Discussion: No More Mister Nice Blog
Stephen Dinan / Washington Times:
Rand Paul demands Dems return money raised by 'sexual predator' Bill Clinton — ** FILE ** Former President Bill Clinton, left, is seen on March 9, 2004, in New York. Monica Lewinsky, is shown in an undated promotional photo provided by Fox. Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday, Jan. 26, 2014 …
Discussion: Althouse, Outside the Beltway, Talking Points Memo, The Gateway Pundit and Daily Kos
Ann Althouse / Althouse: Rand Paul thinks anyone who raised money through Bill Clinton ought to give the money back.
Catherine Thompson / Talking Points Memo: Rand Paul: Dems Should Return Money They Received From Bill Clinton
Jim Hoft / The Gateway Pundit: Rand Paul: Democrats Should Return Campaign Cash Raised by 'Sexual Predator' Bill Clinton (Video)
Jennifer Epstein / Politico:
White House fence-climber apprehended
White House fence-climber apprehended
Discussion: CNN and Liberaland
Shimon Prokupecz / CNN: All clear at White House after man tries to jump fence
Sam Youngman / The Daily Beast:
Tea Partier Matt Bevin Is Selling Himself as the Anti-Mitch McConnell — Mitch McConnell's Tea party opponent in the Kentucky race for the U.S. Senate is largely unknown, but his best shot may be to change his name and run as Not Mitch McConnell. — To spend time around Matt Bevin …
Mike Lear / Missourinet:
Two articles of impeachment filed against Governor Nixon (AUDIO/COPY OF THE ARTICLES) — A state representative who said he would file articles of impeachment against Governor Jay Nixon (D) has made good on that intent. — Representative Nick Marshall (R-Parkville) has filed two articles of impeachment.
Discussion: The Raw Story
Jonathan Martin / New York Times:
Lacking a House, a Senator Is Renewing His Ties in Kansas — DODGE CITY, Kan. — It is hard to find anyone who has seen Senator Pat Roberts here at the redbrick house on a golf course that his voter registration lists as his home. Across town at the Inn Pancake House on Wyatt Earp Boulevard …
Discussion: Hot Air, American Prospect, National Review, OnPolitics, Politico, Outside the Beltway, Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, Post Politics and Gawker
Betsy Woodruff / National Review: Roberts: NYT Residency Story Is Wrong
Catalina Camia / OnPolitics: Sen. Pat Roberts pushes back on story about Kansas residence
Jose DelReal / Politico: Pat Roberts's aides lash out at NYT article
Doug Mataconis / Outside the Beltway: Kansas Senator Doesn't Live In Kansas?
David Nir / Daily Kos: Republican Sen. Pat Roberts admits his Kansas 'residence' is a time-share in a La-Z-Boy
Daniel Strauss / Talking Points Memo: Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts Doesn't Actually Live In Kansas
Sean Sullivan / Post Politics: Pat Roberts doesn't have his own home in Kansas
Adam Weinstein / Gawker: Embattled U.S. Senator From Kansas Admits He Doesn't Live in Kansas
Robert Graham / Errata Security:
That NBC story 100% fraudulent — [Yesterday (Feb 5 2014)] On February 4th, NBC News ran a story claiming that if you bring your mobile phone or laptop to the Sochi Olympics, it'll immediately be hacked the moment you turn it on. The story was fabricated.
Discussion: The Verge, Business Insider, Mediaite, Gigaom and The Huffington Post
Russell Brandom / The Verge: Hackers aren't the problem at Sochi, surveillance is
Brett LoGiurato / Business Insider: NBC Blasts Claims That Richard Engel's Terrifying Sochi Hacking Report Was 'Fraudulent'
Josh Feldman / Mediaite: Cybersecurity Expert Accuses NBC of '100% Fraudulent' Hacking Story, NBC Fires Back
Catherine Taibi / The Huffington Post: NBC Fighting Claims That Richard Engel's Hacking Story Was 'Fabricated'
Hadas Gold / Politico:
Cybersecurity expert contests NBC
Cybersecurity expert contests NBC
Discussion: Trend Micro Simply Security, NBC News, Errata Security and NewsBusters
Kyle Wilhoit / Trend Micro Simply Security: Details Behind the NBC Honeypots: Part 2
Mike Kelly / NorthJersey.com:
GWB scandal: Fort Lee mayor now says Christie campaign courted him for endorsement — Governor Christie's campaign orchestrated an extensive operation over two years that involved gifts to Fort Lee — including Port Authority funded shuttle buses, snow plowing, pothole repair and emergency radios …
Discussion: CNN and Talking Points Memo
House GOP closing in on debt limit package — House Republicans are moving toward introducing a bill that would lift the debt limit until the first quarter of 2015, while patching the Medicare reimbursement rate for nine months and reversing recent changes to some military retirement benefits …
Discussion: Daily Kos, americanthinker.com, Business Insider, Washington Monthly and CNN
Greg Dworkin / Daily Kos: Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: New twists with the debt ceiling, including an SGR explainer
Rick Moran / americanthinker.com: House GOP readies debt limit package
Brett LoGiurato / Business Insider: There's A New Drop-Dead Debt Ceiling Date, And House Republicans Finally Have A Plan
Ed Kilgore / Washington Monthly: The House GOP's Balanced Empty Gesture


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Story highlights
- Tokyo moved up from No. 2 last year to become world's most expensive city
- Housing costs are the biggest indicator of cost of living, researchers say
- Euro crisis caused many European cities to fall in rankings
- Asian cities make up five of the top 10 most expensive cities
Tokyo has overtaken Luanda, Angola, as the world's most expensive city for overseas staff after the cost of imported goods rose in the wake of last year's earthquake.
An annual cost of living report, released Tuesday by U.S. consulting firm Mercer, showed several Japanese cities had moved up in the rankings after the yen strengthened against the U.S. dollar.
Two other Japanese cities rank in the top ten: Osaka comes in third with Nagoya in 10th place. Elsewhere, Luanda drops to second, Moscow is forth, with Geneva in fifth place.
Researchers looked at 214 cities around the world, analyzing data from March 2011 to March 2012.
"We compare the cost of over 200 items in each location, including housing, transport, food, clothing, household goods and entertainment," senior researcher Nathalie Constantin-Métral said in a video on the company's website.
The survey uses New York City, which dropped one spot to 33rd on the list, as their base city when evaluating foreign cities.
As a result of the on-going European financial crisis, many cities across Europe fell in the rankings. London dropped seven spots to 25th this year, while Paris moved down 10 spots to No. 37.
"Countries badly hit by the Eurozone crisis, including Greece, Italy and Spain, have also experienced drops in rental accommodation prices," Constantin-Métral said in the report. In Italy, Milan dropped 13 spots, while Rome fell eight spots to No. 42.
By contrast, cities in Asia and the Americas moved up as their currencies strengthened.
The cost of housing remained the strongest indicator for the cost of living in all cities.


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Mehmet Eryigit is the last farmer of Rumeli Hisari. He came from a village near Trabzon on the Black Sea to Istanbul in 1967 when he was still a little boy. His father opened a butcher's shop in Rumeli Hisari:
"My father used to say, "I learned to be a butcher from the Armenians'. We, for example, are kaba (artless, unsophisticated) butchers; we cut and tear the meat to pieces. The Armenians taught my father how to cut meat properly.' Most of my father's clients were Armenians. …One day they told him about the house in the Armenian cemetery and asked him if he would want to stay there.'
Though the area above the village was then still inhabited by wolfs rather than human beings the family moved to what was to become the upper village of Hisari (Hisar Ustu) in 1977. At that time there were about 15 farms there. When migration from the Turkish hinterland to Istanbul increased in the 1970s more and more Anatolian migrants came. Mehmet remembers the first settlements:
"The first gecekondus were set up in the bushes …. People started settling little by little, they enclosed some land, then brought their relatives from the villages, and that's how we come to this.'
Today Mehmet still uses the land of the Armenian cemetery, looks after the cemetery (which is still used) and sells honey and the milk from his seven cows. Surrounded by former gecekondus, the graveyards lie next to a vegetable garden and a meadow with trees full of peaches, cherries, mulberries, nuts and hazelnuts.
October 2008


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If you would like to enquire about using Australia Zoo as a location for filming, please fill out the enquiry form below, including information regarding filming requirements and exposure opportunities.
Please note that a filming fee and/or donation to conservation may be applicable, and restrictions will apply.
For further enquiries, please contact Australia Zoo Media on (07) 5436 2000 or visit our contact form


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By Zahir Ebrahim | Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
Tuesday, February 25, 2014 02:00 pm | Last updated Thursday, February 27, 2014 04:10 pm
Caption "This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through." Vladimir Jabotinsky, 1923 (Click bookcover to download PDF, https://tinyurl.com/Undoing-The-Theft-of-Palestine)
Sun Tzu wrote in the Art of War some 2500 years ago:
'If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.'
After over three decades of interaction with Zionists beginning immediately upon my arrival at MIT as an undergraduate and latching on to the "vigorous" dissent of Noam Chomsky, and after as many years of friendship with Palestinians beginning at Engineering University in Lahore Pakistan as a teenager looking for my own intellectual footings for the first time in my life and naturally siding with the "mazloomeen" (the oppressed) as is often the norm when passing through those gates of idyllic years, finding the key to unlock the mysteries of the universe has been an elusive pursuit. As Elie Wiesel had put it in one of his memoirs: "it is a mystery whose parallel may only be the one of Sinai when something was revealed to mankind." Especially so in the modernity du jour, in the age of Superman. At least for most of us ordinary people; those who aren't the Nietzschean Superman that is.
Until one reads Sun Tzu, Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Hegel, and of course the Balfour Declaration. Then, speaking for myself, most of it becomes crystal clear – as if one finally found the key to the door past which no one can otherwise see.
Unfortunately, none of the above methods of statecraft and its attendant methods of narrative control is either studied by, or taught to, the Palestinians. And that appears to me to be the primary reason for Palestinians continuing to lament their Nakba song year in and year out – and they will likely continue to do so until the "Zion that will light up all the world" is achieved.
It is more than just lamentable and tragic, outright criminal in fact, that most Palestinians, activist and silent bystanders alike, in this day and age of iphones and ipads, do not even know to whom the Balfour Declaration is addressed. The primary document that instrumented their subjugation and almost a century long oppression, the Palestinians most Kafkaesquely remain unaware of despite being most tech-savvy in tweeting text messages and pouring their heart out in volumes on facebook. While many have surely heard of the Balfour Declaration by name, almost none of the outspoken lot in the Palestinian Diaspora has evidently actually read it – if one is permitted to conclude their ignorance by their omissions that is. The ubiquitous deafening silence alone makes the self-policing self-evident.
Who, or what forces have deprived the latter day Palestinians of this knowledge of their own history? What lies behind this self-policing narrative control among the Palestinians themselves?
Try this simple test yourself in your rebel meetings, freedom conferences, and classrooms. Ask your Palestinian students, professors, and other colleagues and friends who support the Palestinian cause: To whom is the Balfour Declaration addressed? At best they might come back to you surprised: "it is addressed to someone?"
How can the young activist wage an effective struggle against the long-running, systematic, and piece-meal usurpation of his homeland when diligent intellectualism has been replaced by plentiful talk by the ignorant activist to the equally ignorant Western audiences; by weekend street protest more in catharsis than in effectiveness before returning happily to the pursuit of the 'American Dream' the remaining days of the week; and by ineffective emotional sloganeering and book publishing rather than effective intellectual combat against a most diabolical adversary? Especially for the Palestinians holding on to their keys in their forced Diaspora where no one is shooting them and their brothers and sisters in the eyes?
The safety enjoyed by the Palestinian activist in the West is all but lost to his and her unwitting ignorance of, or witting self-policing silence on, the most diabolical methods employed, and still continue to be employed, in the theft and ongoing military occupation of Palestine.
Whatever the Palestinian activist can say today has been said many times even by the oppressors themselves. What they don't say is what no one else is saying either. Thus I have found this bizarre empiricism that they do not know the name of their prime-mover oppressor.
The enemy has been most carefully cloaked from the public mind by some sort of "iron wall". Part One of Sun Tzu's test to prevail upon the enemy is failed right off the bat by the Palestinians.
From time immemorial, from when Kaabil killed Haabil (Cain killed Abel), to the present, from Afghanistan to Palestine, Iraq to Pakistan, and from TSA at American airports to police state USA being inflicted upon the bewildered American mind in the name of protecting them from Islamofascist terror, the only morality seen in practice is the control of the public mind; by hook or by crook.
While it is a truism that might makes right, but as Aldous Huxley pointed out, you can do everything with a bayonet except sit on it. In order to control the public mind indefinitely, you must have some measure of their consent. Machiavelli and Hegelian Dialectic easily enable today's "history's actors" to get away with the theft of commonsense and good judgment of the public mind; and in the aftermath of that heist, easily convincing the mass mind of absurdities and consequently getting them consenting to atrocities.
Or, for the tiny rebellious minority made of sterner brain cells that are not so easily bamboozled by idiotic mainstream narratives, getting them to run endlessly on treadmills under alternate controlled narratives that encourage and glorify dissent. These controlled opposition of the discourse space is most carefully laid out in front of them to steer their moral anger and quest for truth and justice --- to anything and everything but that.
The focus of the rebels is cunningly shifted away from the prime-movers, away from the first cause, to effects. By engineering all the discourses to get the causality wrong, the prime-movers are cleverly kept occulted from the public mind. The effects are already visible to all and sundry anyway. Let that remain focus of dissent. It will get nowhere. And it evidently does not. That ineffectiveness is the problem of the Palestinians' own making. It is their first intellectual co-option, their mental servitude, that they so easily follow the core narratives laid out before them in their resistance.
The control and self-policing of the Palestinian narrative to principally mask out the prime-movers behind their cataclysm while continuing their illusion of vigorous struggle and debate, ensures the Machiavellian failure of their struggle for justice ab initio, and equally ensures the permanent fait accompli of the murderous resettlement of Zionistan in Palestine.
See if the forcibly displaced Mexican can return to California, or the reservation consigned what's left of the Native American Indian can return to his lands, today!
This is what Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote in the "Iron Wall" in 1923:
"This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through."
What is that "iron wall"? Who or what is that force that is independent of the local population?
You will not hear that examined and analyzed by anyone in the United States --- neither the loud Jewish professors who claim high moral ground critiquing the Jewish State from America's mightiest university podiums (like Noam Chomsky at MIT and Norm Finkelstein previously of Princeton and DePaul University), nor the Palestinian Professors proudly adorning the mantle of high scholarship in empire's best universities (like Rashid Khalidi et. al. at Columbia and Hatem Bazian at UC Berkeley). Most men and women of conscience in Diaspora and on ground zero in Palestine, both Jewish and Palestinian, somehow always seem to know to what extent they may exercise their "vigorous" dissent before they might be permanently "retired". Pursuing BDS is that extent of safe dissent.
I have come to the sad realization that most prominent rebel leaders are outright Trojan Horses, house niggers, and useful idiots, cultivated to keep their Jewish Superman massa good company playing the Hegelian Dialectic of Dissent. The beleaguered Palestinian public mind holding on to its keys and its memories is encouraged to follow these celebrated controlled opposition as their political leaders, intellectual opinion-makers, and activist pied pipers. All of these celebrated icons and champions of Palestine share one key fact in common: their silence on the prime-movers behind the theft of Palestine.
The diabolical theft of Palestine is perhaps the best case-study of waging war by way of deception. The success of that deception is underscored by Sun Tzu quoted above. The Palestinians today neither know themselves, nor do they know their enemy. And thus they have lost every battle against the Zionists.
The struggle for Palestine will continue to remain ineffective so long as the real harbingers and their real agenda remains cloaked in deception; so long as the Israel Project is kept "under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through." That local population will soon come to encompass the entire earth, in a "Zion that will light up all the world", in one-world government. The Palestinians are only the canary in the coal mine!
The Oligarchic Primacy in Palestine and the Oligarchic Primacy for World Government is one and the same project.
That straightforward recognition has been most carefully kept away from the Palestinian public mind by virtually all the political as well intellectual leaders and scholars of Palestine.
Not one among them ever mentions the name Rothschild --- the king of the Jews and of the world --- in whose name the Balfour Declaration was issued by the British Empire.
Caption The Balfour Declaration main text: Dear Lord Rothschild, 'His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavor to facilitate the achievement of this object. it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.' (signed) Arthur Balfour, Foreign Office, November 2nd, 1917.
The Invisible House of Rothschild has managed to construct that "iron wall" around Palestine that remains independent of the local population of Palestine even a hundred years later. All the heads of Europe and the United States bow before it in silence, even today.
And evidently, so do the Palestinians.
Source URL: http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2014/02/self-policing-palestinian-struggle.html
Related: Palestine: Seeking The Enemy Within
Self-Policing the Palestinian Struggle Zahir Ebrahim | Project Humanbeingsfirst.org


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God is Loving and Other Heresies
little book BIG IDEAS
1 John 5:1-12
Erin Julihn
Coast Hills Preaching Team
November 17, 2019
God is Love
what is the fear in that?
little book BIG IDEAS
1 John 4:16b-19
Kevin Snyder
Lead Pastor
November 10, 2019
Coast Hills Church Hidden Figures of Hope little book BIG IDEAS The Kingdom Of God is a Party Philippians Summer Book Study Surprised by Hope Palm Sunday The Last Words of Jesus Spiritual Practices for the Ordi...
The Furious Longing of God GOD in search of HUMANITY Walking in Wisdom What's Stirring? ACTS: The Expanding Kingdom AGM 2018 Core Values I AM Living the Prayer Advent Living on Mission Mark + the Subversive Kingdom Thanksgiving The Story of Naomi Psalm 139 Images of Advent Images of Advent - Joy Dream Again Fruit of the Spirit Grace Wins Easter Essential Practices for Growing ... Journey to Bethlehem Finding Faith 40 Days of Love - We Were Made f... James - Where the Rubber Meets t... SonSpark Labs Vision 2015-2016 Mother's Day ...because of GRACE FLOURISH The Great Invitation A Work Of Heart: Mirror vs. Model A Work of Heart The Way Guest Speaker - Steve Klassen of... Guest Speaker - Ron Friesen, Col... SonTreasure Island Community Post-Resurrection I AM JESUS Choose Joy - A Study in Philippians Guest Speaker - Dr. Bryan Born, ... New Year Our Journey at Christmas Different Parables Kidz Camp 2013 Hide & Seek Giving God Your Life Giving Life to Living Guest Speaker - Samir Youssef Easter Sunday 2013 Famous Last Words Introduction to Lent Strength for Tough Times - Lesso... New Year's Message Carols Tell the Story FAQ's Ancient Practices to Change Your... Simple Faith Kidz Camp Closing Program Kidz Camp Preview Service Better THE GOD OF SECOND CHANCES Easter Sunday No Limits! Guest Speaker - Steve Berg Affordable Priceless Gifts Simply Amazing: When Life Encou... The Ups & Downs of Life
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2020 2 2019 47 2018 47 2017 48 2016 50 2015 52 2014 52 2013 52 2012 53 2011 23 All


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Henry: Save Keystone school
The Keystone Science School has been successfully educating students and teachers for some 35 years. It is now embarking on a new direction – that is separating from The Keystone Center and becoming a local 501-(c) 3 organization. This requires substantial community support as Keystone Science School purchases the 23 acre parcel of land on which they are now located.
The positive economic impact of the School on Summit County (over $2 million annual budget), the success of unbiased science education and the relationship with the Summit School District are a few of the important reasons why the community should support this investment.
We hope you will take the time to investigate this establishment of an independent Keystone Science School and join us in supporting it financially.
For further information, please contact: http://www.keystonescienceschool.com or Ellen Reid at email@example.com .
Start a dialogue, stay on topic and be civil.
If you don't follow the rules, your comment may be deleted.


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From the Far North and the Altiplano to the Far South of Chile, someone is always waiting to receive you with open arms.
Chile has many different adventures to offer tourists: stargazing in the driest desert in the world, millennial glaciers in the southernmost part of the planet, enchanted forests, and lakes located at the foot of massive volcanoes. It has islands full of legends, winemaking traditions, great challenges to be overcome, and the modern and accessible city of Santiago.
But, there is something about Chile that has not yet been said. Chile has wide-open natural landscapes, but you can also find this openness in the Chilean people. The feeling of being alive floods over you in these wide-open spaces in Chile. Here you can get in touch with nature or set out to explore pristine areas. The people of Chile will also pleasantly surprise you with their kindness and hospitality. This will be a completely new experience in a place where you will feel at peace.
Under a sky with infinite stars lies the world's driest desert waiting for the anticipated blooming.Go to north and the atacama desert
According to NASA, Moon Valley looks like Mars on Earth.
Moon Valley, in San Pedro de Atacama, is NASA's favorite place to carry out expeditions since it is so similar to Mars.
Older than the Egyptian mummies, Visit the mummies of Chinchorro.
Discover the mummies of Chinchorro, the oldest ones in the world that are close to 8,000 years old.
Valleys nestled between the Andes and the ocean bring life to a land of flavors that will awake your senses.Go to Central Area, Santiago and Valparaiso
Robinson Crusoe Island actually exists! Get to know it when you visit the Juan Fernandez Archipelago in Chile.
The Juan Fernandez Archipelago, declared Biosphere Reserve by Unesco, is a National Park found in the central area.
Discover the enormous Santiago Metropolitan Park at the heart of the city!
Santiago Metropolitan Park is one of the four largest urban parks in the world, with 730 hectares.
Enigmas and legends from an ancestral culture enrich the landscapes and tropical beaches at the naval of the world.Ir a Rapa Nui
Explore one of the world's largest cave systems on Easter Island.
Thanks to its underground lava tunnels, there are more than 7,000 meters of galleries under the island's floor.
Visit three continents in just one country!
Chile is the only tricontinental country in Latin America, with territories in America, Antartica and Oceania.
A magical place with traditions full of wisdom, where the living ecosystem grows and develops at its own natural pace.Go to The South, Lakes and Volcanoes
Visit the open-air market that is open 365 days a year!
The market of Lota, city located in the south of Chile, actually opens every day of the year.
Discover the "hermetic" culture of Chiloé, there's nothing like it in the world!
The people of Chiloé developed their own culture which revolves around the abundant elements on their island: wood, water, earth, religion and a complete universe of fantastical creatures.
Fjords and glaciers hidden among green landscapes that give way to the horizon that disappears at the end of the world.Go to Patagonia and Antarctica
Visit Puerto Williams, the southernmost town in the world!
Located on Navarino Island, on the southern tip of Patagonia, Puerto Williams is the southernmost administrative settlement in the world.
Learn about the airlines and direct routes that connect Chile to the rest of the world


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As it's a holiday, there won't be Weekender Star published tomorrow. Which means there will be no Dog Talk published this week. So for those of you who demanded their "fix" (you know who you are!) here is an extra story. It was originally intended to be mostly about dogs but once Au got into it, he took over. Hope you like it.
ALSO: do remember that a compendium of favourite stories has now been published in a book, Katz Tales, Living Under The Velvet Paw, by Ellen Whyte, October 2009 Marshall Cavendish ISBN 978-967-3035-64-9. It's been lying in the warehouse for more than a month now but should be in the shops soon. Will keep you posted.
Now on with Dog Talk…
A touch of devilishness
Bushy, the little Yorkshire Terrier who lives across the street from us, was on patrol in his garden this morning at dawn. So the second the newspaper delivery guy arrived, our little Cerberus was barking as loud as he could.
When he gets excited Bushy also jumps in the air. He's quite a springy little dog; he can bounce a meter or so off the ground with each leap. But because Bushy is so little, and his bark is quite big, each woof sets him back about a foot.
I always laugh when I see Bushy doing the bouncing barking dog routine but Au thinks it completely unamusing.
This morning our senior cat was having a lie-in when Bushy started up. Au staggered off his rug, made his way to the window and peered out. Knowing that Bushy will bark for a good 5 minutes, Au shook himself and went outside. He jumped up on the wall, putting one ear back to show how incredibly put he was by Bushy's barking.
Bushy of course has no idea that his fierce defence is totally useless. As Bushy sees it, the newspaper man sneaks in every morning, intent on entering Bushy's domain. Bushy thinks that his barking drives the man away. So for our furry neighbour, each morning begins with a triumph: the driving off of the wanna-be invader.
Unlike his daft neighbour, Au knows perfectly well what the newspaper man, postman, rubbish truck and other passers-by are all about. Our cat supervises them all from the comfort and security of his wall, looking rather superior as he watches everyone else work about him while maintaining an air of insouciance. We kid him on that this approach makes him excellent senior management material.
Very sometimes we have a passer-by who wants to touch Au. I noticed the electricity meter reader paying homage to his fuzzy majesty only last week. Au was well within reach but he gave the poor man such a steely glare that his admirer hastily tucked his hand behind his back and merely praised Au from a respectful distance. From Au's satisfied gaze I could see this is exactly the sort of behaviour he would like to see more of.
While Au won't give Bushy (or any other dog) the time of day, Bushy watches Au with great interest. He doesn't understand how Au can keep his cool while strangers are about. Where Bushy is all pep, zest and fire, Au is so cool he could chill sushi.
Bushy has been flummoxed by Au ever since he was a pup.
When Bushy first met Au, our cat was with his older friend Scoop. Bushy stuck his nose rudely towards the cats, and Scoop gave him a ding on the ear that set the little dog reeling. Scoop passed away two years ago, but if Bushy gets too close, Au gives him a wallop on the nose just to remind him who's boss.
Luckily Bushy is a sweet little dog. He just shakes his head, backs off and looks sideways at Au as if to say, "Now what's up with you, pal? I'm just saying hello!" Bushy may be loud, but he likes cats. When a neighbourhood stray put a kitten in his garden last week, Bushy didn't do a thing – to her or the kitten.
Bushy may be loud but he's a dear and he doesn't deserve to be bopped on the nose by our rude fuzz. When I tell Au off for hitting Bushy, he turns big green eyes on me with a look that says very clearly that he is totally unrepentant. I know I can't change Au's opinion. He says dogs are inferior and that's that.
But at least I have stopped him from doing one thing: Au used to hop over to Bushy's house, sit up on the wall and dangle his tail over the edge. As poor little Bushy jumped up and down, trying desperately to reach that twitching tail, our evil fuzzy's green eyes would gleam with devilish amusement.
For me that scene really sums up the essential difference between cats and dogs. Dogs are mainly about trying to do the best job possible. Like the Marines, they want to be the best of the best. But cats have a nasty sense of humour that delights at causing mayhem. And I'm ashamed to admit that this is just one of the reasons why I like cats so much. There must be a touch of the devil in me too.
If you like this story, please don't copy it but provide a link to this page. Thanks!


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"Tonight, I am instructing the leaders of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to develop a Terrorist Threat Integration Center, to merge and analyze all threat information in a single location. Our government must have the very best information possible." Thus spoke President Bush in the 2003 State of the Union address. A White House fact sheet called the center "the next phase in the dramatic enhancement of the government's counterterrorism effort."
Among other things, the center took over the job of preparing the government's annual report on "Patterns of Global Terrorism." The latest report, released in April, claimed to document a sharp fall in terrorism. "You will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight," Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage declared. But this week the government admitted making major errors. In fact, in 2003 the number of significant terrorist attacks reached a 20-year peak.
How could they get it so wrong? The answer tells you a lot about the state of the "war on terror."
Credit for uncovering the report's errors goes to Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist, and David Laitin, a Stanford political scientist, who are studying patterns of terrorism. Mr. Krueger tells me that as soon as they looked at the latest report, they knew something was wrong.
All of the supposed decline in terrorism, they quickly saw, resulted from a fall in the number of "nonsignificant" events, which Mr. Krueger and Mr. Laitin say "are counted with a squishy definition." Even the original report showed significant attacks — a much less squishy category — rising to a 20-year high. And the list of significant attacks ended on Nov. 11, 2003, but there were several major terrorist incidents after that date. Sure enough, including these and other omitted attacks more than doubled the estimated 2003 death toll.
Was the report's squishy math politically motivated? Well, the Bush administration has cooked the books in many areas, including budget projections, tax policy, environmental policy and stem cell research. Why wouldn't it do the same on terrorism?
The erroneous good news on terrorism also came at a very convenient moment. The White House was still reeling from the revelations of the former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, who finally gave public voice to the view of many intelligence insiders that the Bush administration is doing a terrible job of fighting Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush was on a "Winning the War on Terror" campaign bus tour in the Midwest.
Mr. Krueger, a forgiving soul, believes that the report was botched through simple incompetence. Maybe — though we can be sure that if the statistics had told the administration something it didn't want to hear, they would have been carefully checked. By the way, while the report's tables and charts have been fixed, the revised summary still gives little hint of how bad the data really are.
In any case, the incompetence explanation is hardly comforting. In a press conference announcing the release of the revised report, the counterterrorism coordinator Cofer Black attributed the errors to "inattention, personnel shortages and [a] database that is awkward and antiquated." Remember: we're talking about the government's central clearinghouse for terrorism information, whose creation was touted as part of a "dramatic enhancement" of counterterrorism efforts more than a year before this report was produced. And it still can't input data into its own computers? (It should be no surprise, in this age of Halliburton, that the job of data input was given to — and botched by — private contractors.)
Think of it as just one more indication that Mr. Bush isn't really serious about this terrorism thing. He talks about terror a lot, and invokes it to justify unrelated wars he feels like fighting. But when it comes to devoting resources to the unglamorous work of protecting the nation from attack — well, never mind.
Speaking of numbers: in 1980, middle-income families with children paid 8.7 percent of their income in income taxes, not 8.2 percent, as I reported on June 8. But it's still true that their combined income and payroll taxes rose under Ronald Reagan.
Originally published in The New York Times, 6.25.04