I guess I don't understand why you are posting this.

Oh I suppose b.c the theme of the story being about foundation weasels, this is a pretty good period piece to show the Rockefeller Foundation, kind of notorious as a front for the CIA, up to its tricks in the mid-80s with the idea of mass sterilization. That toxic cottonseed substance is years later getting used more expansively, and this document indicates the fondness of the CIA-friendly foundations towards population control grants using additives, toxins etc.

Here are some clever cats from the DEMOS thinktank in UK with a sound approach to establishment thinking about thinktanks vs conspiracies. I'm sure JPD will find it completely awesome, it seems to imply all individual bankers never have any incentive to personally screw people over in an organized way. I am shocked :-D

DEMOS: The Power of Unreason - Conspiracy Theories Paper

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Hongpong.com - Having too much fun w Scribd.com

They are scripts. I took one of them apart; He is clearly a charlatan but it was a lot of work and I do not get paid for it. It is much easier, much less work, to produce scripted bullshit than to prove a negative. That is not a marketplace of ideas it is obfuscation of the truth.

More directly related to the thread, which of these think tanks is it that Sunstein works for?

“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

think tank, is certainly a generator of much neo-liberal rubbish.

^{"Sí che dal fatto il dir non sia diverso."}

-Dante

...for the two of the three I know anything about. Haass hasn't had what I'd term the world's greatest record of original thought and insight for all the long and deep exposure and Arthur, well - suffice it to say we've quite different interpretations of things (and I'm an actual expert in our field, contrary to my amateur enthusiasms in foreign policy), but I'd still prefer their approach to the one liners and casual ad hom.

Seriously, what is it that you want to do with all this (i.e., the website, community, etc.)? If you want to make a difference it takes more than a series of one liners condemning what you're against and that's what it seems much of the dialogue of late has fallen into.

“Honour the threat." ~ old USAF saying (look it up)

I'd like to know what it is; otherwise you sound just like

bread and circuses

. Sunstein is exactly what we are talking about. He is being rewarded for writing rubbish and I assume he is intelligent enough to know that it is rubbish but doesn't care.

...crippled or not,as an int guy might think about it.

“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

I think it is ironic that a government known for its prowess of spreading propaganda and disinformation also says that people who have a wrong belief have a crippled epistemology; what a crock.

It does not matter though, Epistemology has a very specific definition especially when it comes to the law. Thinking of it as an intel person, I should think you would want to think like the lawyer i.e., What did he or she know and when. Perhaps an intelligence officer might want to use epistemology as the courts do, a presumption of a defendant's innocence as the "truth" concerning the proposition of guilt. There is no such thing as crippled epistemology; Sunstein previously made up that term and used it in a TV interview as he is fond of saying. Epistemology has nothing to say about people who just believe, whether their belief is in America, against America, in God, or a holy war, those are not epistemological beliefs; they are not crippled; epistemology has nothing to do with it.

Maybe there is an epistemology of covert intelligence gathering, the definition of what constitutes truth in a covert world; I would suspect that is a secret just like the truth but let us hope that it is not anything like Sunstein's ideas though that would explain a lot of the trouble in the world.

A false belief in a proposition is still an epistemological belief. It is not a crippled epistemology and neither is a true belief for the wrong reasons.

...or not, what he's saying is very familiar to any int guy. More than anything the central issue of intelligence analysis is "How do we know what we think we know?" If the "how" is flawed (myriad ways for this to occur) the "what" is suspect. One of the central characteristics of conspiracy theories as I've observed them is that the inference chains tie back to something that is taken on faith (or actively sold) to mean something that it doesn't. A crippled epistemology indeed.

“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

A "crippled epistemology" would mean that someone believes something is true when they know it is false. Such a person would certainly have trouble living in any society. Concluding something is true or false and being wrong about it is normal regardless of the validity of your information source; whether it is a tabloid or scientific peer reviewed literature it is not crippled.

...and his co-author mean when they use the term. Their central point is that people rationally believe conspiracy theories to be true due to extremely limited and erroneous data sources.

“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

And well, ... Duh, of course people who have access to poor sources of information are more likely to come to the wrong conclusion. so what. Sunstein came to the conclusion however, that specific response by the U.S. government should be to not cooperate with Freedom of Information Act requests, that is the executive branch should hide the truth.

...to information than it is the preferential use of information. The paper is replete with examples where already available information effectively rebuts the conspiracy theory but is ignored by the internally referenced and self-radicalizing groups. This isn't a "hard science" issue of what knowledge is accessible - it's a "social science" issue of inability to transition effectively from information to knowledge. There are many reasons intelligence is frequently conceptualized as a social science or even an art (see Kent on the former [there's about a zillion reprints], Lang on the latter [Bureaucrats vs. Artists]).

The argument with regards to FOIA is a little more complicated. Their operating assumption is that in many cases the government will be motivated to rebut conspiracy theories and will generally tend to release the information - there they focus on issues of timing and whether the executive is more competent than the courts to decide timing. Where the interests of government mitigate against release for self-serving reasons or where the courts have clear direction from statute they counsel release.

“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

What a great idea! The White House in charge of releasing information. Like we would know any truth about anything. Pentagon Papers, Iran Contra, Allende, they would tell us about that all in good time right?
Mr. Sunstein failed even to mention these cases. The U.S. government has abused its power concerning secrets. It does not have standing to complain about conspiracy theories. Without the Pentagon Papers the truth about the Vietnam War would be just a conspiracy theory. The whole idea of the FOIA is to prevent the government from controlling secrets unless there are clear National Security implications.