This secret history of ISIS (PBS)

"We created chaos, we abandoned that chaos, we created ISIS.."
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson

Link here.

In the words of former FBI Assistant Director, Thomas Fuentes . . .

“If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that ‘We won the war on terror and everything’s great,’ cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.”

Link here.

The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness

"Artificial lights raise night sky luminance, creating the most visible effect of light pollution—artificial skyglow. Despite the increasing interest among scientists in fields such as ecology, astronomy, health care, and land-use planning, light pollution lacks a current quantification of its magnitude on a global scale. To overcome this, we present the world atlas of artificial sky luminance, computed with our light pollution propagation software using new high-resolution satellite data and new precision sky brightness measurements. This atlas shows that more than 80% of the world and more than 99% of the U.S. and European populations live under light-polluted skies. The Milky Way is hidden from more than one-third of humanity, including 60% of Europeans and nearly 80% of North Americans. Moreover, 23% of the world’s land surfaces between 75°N and 60°S, 88% of Europe, and almost half of the United States experience light-polluted nights."

Link here.

"The dark gray level (1 to 2%) sets the point where attention should be given to protect a site from a future increase in light pollution. Blue (8 to 16%) indicates the approximate level where the sky can be considered polluted on an astronomical point of view, as indicated by recommendation 1 of IAU Commission 50 (9). The winter Milky Way (fainter than its summer counterpart) cannot be observed from sites coded in yellow, whereas the orange level sets the point of artificial brightness that masks the summer Milky Way as well. This level corresponds to an approximate total sky brightness of between 20.6 and 20.0 mag/arcsec2 (0.6 to 1.1 mcd/m2). With this sky brightness, the summer Milky Way in Cygnus may be only faintly detectable as a small increase in the sky background luminosity. The Sagittarius Star Cloud is the only section of the Milky Way that is still visible at this level of pollution when it is overhead, as observed from southern latitudes. Red indicates the approximate threshold where Commission Internationale de l’Eclairage (10) puts the transition between scotopic vision and mesopic vision (1 mcd/m2). Also inside the range of the red level, the sky has the same luminosity as a pristine uncontaminated sky at the end of nautical twilight (1.4 mcd/m2) (11). This means that, in places with this level of pollution, people never experience conditions resembling a true night because it is masked by an artificial twilight."

Here's a picture of US light pollution.

Noam Chomsky - Who Rules the World? (pt 2)

"Polk cites a treatise on warfare by Henry Jomini, influenced by Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of Spanish guerrillas, that became a textbook for generations of cadets at the West Point military academy. Jomini observed that such interventions by major powers typically result in 'wars of opinion,' and nearly always 'national wars,' if not at first then becoming so in the course of the struggle, by the dynamics that Polk describes. Jomini concludes that 'commanders of regular armies are ill-advised to engage in such wars because they will lose them,' and even apparent successes will prove short-lived.

Careful studies of al-Qaeda and ISIS have shown that the United States and its allies are following their game plan with some precision. Their goal is to 'draw the West as deeply and actively as possible into the quagmire' and 'to perpetually engage and enervate the United States and the West in a series of prolonged overseas ventures' in which they will undermine their own societies, expend their resources, and increase the level of violence, setting off the dynamic that Polk reviews.

Scott Atran, one of the most insightful researchers on jihadi movements, calculates that 'the 9/11 attacks cost between $400,000 and $500,000 to execute, whereas the military and security response by the U.S. and its allies is in the order of 10 million times that figure. On a strictly cost-benefit basis, this violent movement has been wildly successful, beyond even Bin Laden’s original imagination, and is increasingly so. Herein lies the full measure of jujitsu-style asymmetric warfare. After all, who could claim that we are better off than before, or that the overall danger is declining?'

And if we continue to wield the sledgehammer, tacitly following the jihadi script, the likely effect is even more violent jihadism with broader appeal. The record, Atran advises, 'should inspire a radical change in our counter-strategies.'"

Link here.

Noam Chomsky - Who Rules the World? (pt 1)

"Mainstream parties have been rapidly losing members to left and to right. The executive director of the Paris-based research group EuropaNova attributes the general disenchantment to 'a mood of angry impotence as the real power to shape events largely shifted from national political leaders [who, in principle at least, are subject to democratic politics] to the market, the institutions of the European Union and corporations,' quite in accord with neoliberal doctrine. Very similar processes are under way in the United States, for somewhat similar reasons, a matter of significance and concern not just for the country but, because of U.S. power, for the world.

The rising opposition to the neoliberal assault highlights another crucial aspect of the standard convention: it sets aside the public, which often fails to accept the approved role of 'spectators' (rather than 'participants') assigned to it in liberal democratic theory. Such disobedience has always been of concern to the dominant classes. Just keeping to American history, George Washington regarded the common people who formed the militias that he was to command as “an exceedingly dirty and nasty people [evincing] an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people.”

In Violent Politics, his masterful review of insurgencies from 'the American insurgency' to contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq, William Polk concludes that General Washington 'was so anxious to sideline [the fighters he despised] that he came close to losing the Revolution.' Indeed, he 'might have actually done so' had France not massively intervened and 'saved the Revolution,' which until then had been won by guerrillas — whom we would now call 'terrorists' — while Washington’s British-style army 'was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.'

A common feature of successful insurgencies, Polk records, is that once popular support dissolves after victory, the leadership suppresses the 'dirty and nasty people' who actually won the war with guerrilla tactics and terror, for fear that they might challenge class privilege. The elites’ contempt for 'the lower class of these people' has taken various forms throughout the years. In recent times one expression of this contempt is the call for passivity and obedience ('moderation in democracy') by liberal internationalists reacting to the dangerous democratizing effects of the popular movements of the 1960s."

Link here.

Economists discover people don’t behave rationally

"To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

Adam Smith (1723-1790)

Link here.