As the transformation of the nation accelerates, the question of who should be exempt from the strictures of the New Society comes more and more to the fore.
In discussions about the Surveillance/Police State that's been "exposed" this summer -- like sharks in the water and missing white women (sometimes men and boys) -- I've pointed out that the real issue is exemptions, whether they be for the press and media (the original demand, after all, when the AP Thing broke) or for the High and Mighty (such as our representatives in Congress Assembled), or for the idle rich or the superintendents of our digital lives.
At no point, at all, has it been suggested that We, the Rabble be protected by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Certainly not. Nor has it ever been suggested that the private sector be barred from collecting and storing the kind of information about us that the Nefarious Government does, nor have there been any suggestions that the private sector should be barred from trading and selling the information it collects with the government or anyone else it chooses to. Free Market solutions and all.
In other words, We, the Rabble will not be relieved of constant surveillance and police state tactics; fuggetaboutit.
But certain sectors of the population will be relieved to know that the exemptions they seek are on the way or already in place. Yay! Victory!
Showing posts with label Stochastic Terror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stochastic Terror. Show all posts
Thursday, August 8, 2013
Monday, June 24, 2013
Just Read This
Arun Gupta at the Guardian has posted a very good dot connecting story about Barrett Brown, the commerce in information and surveillance, and just how nasty the whole game is. Barrett Brown is sitting in jail in Texas because of his ties to getting some of the information on what was going on to the public (he posted a link).
There is more, much more, but Gupta puts it much of it together well.
Don't forget the connections with Michael Hastings...
----------------------------------
It should be noted that HBGary which figures prominently in Gupta's story, is not actually 'gone' as Gupta states. Rather, HBGary Federal (a commonly owned and operated affiliate of HBGary, Inc.) was shut down as a separate company when HBGary itself merged with ManTech International in 2012. HBGary is still in business, and under ManTech's wing, HBGary's operations include the same sort of service to Federal agencies that HBGary Federal offered. More here.
There is more, much more, but Gupta puts it much of it together well.
Don't forget the connections with Michael Hastings...
----------------------------------
It should be noted that HBGary which figures prominently in Gupta's story, is not actually 'gone' as Gupta states. Rather, HBGary Federal (a commonly owned and operated affiliate of HBGary, Inc.) was shut down as a separate company when HBGary itself merged with ManTech International in 2012. HBGary is still in business, and under ManTech's wing, HBGary's operations include the same sort of service to Federal agencies that HBGary Federal offered. More here.
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Several Things To Keep In Mind About This Domestic Surveillance Thing
*If all you're paying attention to is the NSA, you're missing a good 70% or more of the story, given that word has it (not from Snowden or the Guardian, btw) that at least 70% of the (secret) intelligence budget goes to the myriad private sector "partners" who actually do and analyze much of the surveillance and who design, build, and operate most of the surveillance infrastructure.
*The motivations of Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian in being the primary conduit for this story do matter, just as one would be interested in the motivations of Sy Hersh and the New Yorker or Judith Miller and the New York Times or Brian Killmeade and FOX. To attempt to deny that Greenwald's and the Guardian's motivations matter is an attempt to obscure the full story. Generally speaking, that's not wise in a case of this sort.
*While most of the surveillance revelations aren't new, the documentation is. The failure to produce documentation is partly why previous whistle-blowing efforts about domestic surveillance failed to carry the kind of punch this one has -- though they weren't ignored by any means. The documentation provided by Snowden to the press has reinforced the stories we've been told or have surmised about domestic surveillance over the years, and it has made quite plain that our worst suspicions about it were actually on the mark.
*It is not beyond consideration that this whole brou-ha-ha is a "limited hangout" operation. Such things have happened before and no doubt they will be done again. It could equally be that there are several simultaneous factors at play. We do not live in a linear, binary world in which only one path is open, only one fact can be considered true, and only one potential is possible.
*Let's keep in mind that at the time of the first surveillance bombshells from the Guardian, there were a number of brewing pseudo-scandals and potentially real scandals surrounding the Presidency. Benghazi. IRS. AP reporter surveillance. FOX reporter surveillance. And there was an ongoing background rumble over the failure of the Justice Department to charge and bring to trial any of the malefactors of great wealth who had plunged the country and the world into such economic misery. Keep in mind, too, that the initial stories were posted from Hong Kong -- which is Chinese territory despite efforts to obscure the fact -- while the Chinese Premier was meeting with the American President in California. Pretty much all of the pseudo- and potential scandals have faded from the "news" while this one has taken primary attention.
*Don't forget the "news" is a corporate enterprise -- which includes the Guardian. There is little or no "independent media" of national or international scope and reach. All serve corporate interests. Why they focus on what they do -- and when -- is always a matter for corporate interest and determination. Just because a "news" outlet is presenting information you agree with or want to hear doesn't mean it is 1) independent; or 2) telling the truth.
*Corporations compete with one another for attention and pre-eminence, and they co-operate with one another in pursuit of mutual interest. Surprisingly enough, they can do both at the same time.
*In much of the western world, and certainly in the United States, government serves the interests of its corporate partners first. We refer to "captive government" in these cases. An exclusive focus on the NSA in these stories obscures the overall picture of surveillance in this country and it serves as a means to diminish the importance of the corporate sector in organizing and conducting the surveillance.
*How the surveillance is implemented and what is done with the information once acquired -- and by whom -- is still unclear, though the picture is somewhat less murky than it once was. There is an active information marketplace wherein data is traded and bought and sold like commodities. The government is an eager player in this marketplace, but so are many, many private sector interests. Who gets what information and what they then do with it is still enough of a mystery that most people have no idea what kind of information on them is accessible and to whom, and few have any idea to what purposes it may be put.
*The recent spectacular death of Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed journalist Michael Hastings has sent shock waves through parts of the media, though it doesn't seem to have affected other parts at all. By comparing and contrasting reactions it may be possible to get a better picture of media... complicity, let's say... in pursuit of powerful interest. Who do you protect? Who do you serve?
*The motivations of Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian in being the primary conduit for this story do matter, just as one would be interested in the motivations of Sy Hersh and the New Yorker or Judith Miller and the New York Times or Brian Killmeade and FOX. To attempt to deny that Greenwald's and the Guardian's motivations matter is an attempt to obscure the full story. Generally speaking, that's not wise in a case of this sort.
*While most of the surveillance revelations aren't new, the documentation is. The failure to produce documentation is partly why previous whistle-blowing efforts about domestic surveillance failed to carry the kind of punch this one has -- though they weren't ignored by any means. The documentation provided by Snowden to the press has reinforced the stories we've been told or have surmised about domestic surveillance over the years, and it has made quite plain that our worst suspicions about it were actually on the mark.
*It is not beyond consideration that this whole brou-ha-ha is a "limited hangout" operation. Such things have happened before and no doubt they will be done again. It could equally be that there are several simultaneous factors at play. We do not live in a linear, binary world in which only one path is open, only one fact can be considered true, and only one potential is possible.
*Let's keep in mind that at the time of the first surveillance bombshells from the Guardian, there were a number of brewing pseudo-scandals and potentially real scandals surrounding the Presidency. Benghazi. IRS. AP reporter surveillance. FOX reporter surveillance. And there was an ongoing background rumble over the failure of the Justice Department to charge and bring to trial any of the malefactors of great wealth who had plunged the country and the world into such economic misery. Keep in mind, too, that the initial stories were posted from Hong Kong -- which is Chinese territory despite efforts to obscure the fact -- while the Chinese Premier was meeting with the American President in California. Pretty much all of the pseudo- and potential scandals have faded from the "news" while this one has taken primary attention.
*Don't forget the "news" is a corporate enterprise -- which includes the Guardian. There is little or no "independent media" of national or international scope and reach. All serve corporate interests. Why they focus on what they do -- and when -- is always a matter for corporate interest and determination. Just because a "news" outlet is presenting information you agree with or want to hear doesn't mean it is 1) independent; or 2) telling the truth.
*Corporations compete with one another for attention and pre-eminence, and they co-operate with one another in pursuit of mutual interest. Surprisingly enough, they can do both at the same time.
*In much of the western world, and certainly in the United States, government serves the interests of its corporate partners first. We refer to "captive government" in these cases. An exclusive focus on the NSA in these stories obscures the overall picture of surveillance in this country and it serves as a means to diminish the importance of the corporate sector in organizing and conducting the surveillance.
*How the surveillance is implemented and what is done with the information once acquired -- and by whom -- is still unclear, though the picture is somewhat less murky than it once was. There is an active information marketplace wherein data is traded and bought and sold like commodities. The government is an eager player in this marketplace, but so are many, many private sector interests. Who gets what information and what they then do with it is still enough of a mystery that most people have no idea what kind of information on them is accessible and to whom, and few have any idea to what purposes it may be put.
*The recent spectacular death of Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed journalist Michael Hastings has sent shock waves through parts of the media, though it doesn't seem to have affected other parts at all. By comparing and contrasting reactions it may be possible to get a better picture of media... complicity, let's say... in pursuit of powerful interest. Who do you protect? Who do you serve?
Monday, August 6, 2012
Killer Kulture
Mars, Bitches!
It was the strangest mash up yesterday, with most of my day taken up in following the Oak Creek Temple Massacre on line and then in the evening staying up late to watch the latest Mars landing, also online. Olympics gymnastics was on the teevee, but I really haven't watched the Olympics since the opening ceremony, and then only to be struck dumb by the... erm... spectacle(?).
[As as side note, once I learned of the modern Olympics' pretty overtly fascist operations and highly corrupt underpinning, if you will, I began to see the Games more as a mean joke than as a serious competition; as a rule, I don't see more than a few minutes of a few events, especially since the Games have been on NBC, whose coverage is another mean joke. But I digress.]
Both the Massacre and the Mars Landing were highly evocative of past events, the Landing going back to the very long ago, the Massacre evocative of much more recent events.
I was struck by how antiquated the NASA/JPL procedures were as the Curiosity Mission neared Mars. My doG, they were still using 3 ring binders to read off their sequences, despite the fact that they had the latest computer equipment right in front of them. They were watching the plots of the landing on large screens at the sides of the room, just as they would have done at Houston Mission Control decades ago, and there were rows and rows of Curiosity Mission Control terminals at which rows and rows of Mission Control personnel scanned monitors for data and announced their satisfaction therewith as the Mission Scientist called on them one by one. Their voices were distorted the way space mission voices have been distorted by space mission radio gear for decades. At one point, the Mission Scientist's radio gear failed, the way that such gear seems to fail fairly often at Mission Control, and a colleague handed over his own equipment so that the Mission Scientist could communicate with the rest of the room.
The Curiosity Mission team was a highly individualistic bunch, though, and I would say the "star" of the room -- who never said a word publicly -- was a Latin looking dude with a fancy multi-colored roach haircut with starsshaven spray painted into the side of his head. He didn't say anything and he didn't really seem to have anything to do but nod his head, grin and look decorative. And why not? It's Mars!
Mohawk Guy is an Internet SuperStar:
Damb, we're easily amused!
I found I was just as caught up in the Landing as I'd been when Mercury capsules were returning to Earth; and it was a real thrill when the announcement came that the Curiosity craft was on the surface of Mars. Even more of a thrill was the first image from the surface, a thumbnail that had been enormously enlarged so that it was almost impossible to make out what it showed. It didn't matter; it was a picture from the surface, broadcast of millions of miles, after a landing that had taken place moments before, and it was from Mars.
Wow.
And all of it was so evocative of so much space exploration since I was a child. Seriously, nothing has changed. It is the same operating theory and practice now as it was 50 years ago and more. The same procedures, the same hierarchies, the same look, the same sound.
Striking too is the fact that there hasn't been a mission to Mars that could actually look for the "markers" of biology -- not for life itself, of course -- since 1976, when the Viking Landers returned ambiguous data that were officially interpreted as indicating a sterile lifeless surface, without any carbon or carbon compounds at all (not even from meteorites) and literally lethal to living organisms due to deadly ultraviolet light and a surface saturated with peroxides and other substances and compounds which would kill anything and everything on contact.
I've made Mars something of a hobby for many years, even set up a website (which still exists though many of the links no longer work) beginning in 1997 or so to explore some of the controversies and disputes concerning what was really what on Mars. I was an active participant in a few space science boards, and through them became acquainted with quite a number of planetary scientists and interested laymen. Through sometimes heated discussions on those boards, I learned a great deal about what was not known or poorly understood about Mars, and especially how heavily images and information released to the public had been manipulated for many years to further certain standard and accepted theories rather than provide the means to explore and debate.
I learned that it was more than marginally likely that the Vikings had indeed "discovered life on Mars" but that there were political reasons both within the government and within NASA's planetary science community to obscure the data and deny the "discovery" -- if it was a discovery.
I made a "discovery" myself based on Mars Orbital Camera images taken near the south pole -- evidence and images of active geysers. And wouldn't you know, the evidence I produced was fiercely denied, and my interpretation was denounced as "an optical illusion."
Later, surprisingly -- or not -- the question of geysers at the south pole of Mars became something of a serious study, and surprisingly enough -- or not -- the presence of active geysers at certain seasons of the Mars year was widely accepted within the planetary science community, mechanisms enabling geysering were explained, and essentially everything but the visual evidence I provided has become standard and essentially uncontroversial. There had been scientific speculation about active geysering on Mars for years, but interestingly, the trigger for the acceptance of the notion was Gregg Orme's "Mars Spiders" investigations, the "spiders" being frequently encountered surface features that were otherwise inexplicable.
I also made stabs at discovering currently active glaciers on the surface, some of which have since been confirmed.
I stepped back from more active exploration of the Mars surface data when it became clear to me after the Pathfinder, Opportunity, and Spirit Missions, that the long-time focus on the question of whether there was or ever had been flowing water on Mars was barking up the wrong tree. Whether or not there had ever been "water" on the surface -- which obviously there was both as ice and flowing water -- the far more common liquid at the surface had been and perhaps still is sulfuric acid.
Liquid water and liquid sulfuric acid are chemically similar (H2O vs H2SO4) and -- depending on what you are looking for and how you look -- they may be indistinguishable, but the one can imply the presence of biology while the other will almost certainly imply the absence of biology (at least on Earth.)
When it occurred to me that quite possibly sulfuric acid had been the primary surface liquid throughout the history of Mars, a whole lot of otherwise difficult to understand evidence seemed to make sense.
Sulfuric acid has a much lower freezing temperature than water, and it doesn't require the atmospheric pressure water does in order to remain liquid over time. Under current conditions, in other words, sulfuric acid could remain liquid and flow over much of the Martian surface (assuming it was available at the surface) whereas pure water could not do so for more than a very brief period before freezing or evaporating. But flowing sulfuric acid would have the effect of sterilizing the surface just as surely as any of the hypothesized oxides, peroxides and superoxides that were once alleged to have combined with hyper-ultraviolet flux to sterilize the surface.
The key to understanding presence of biology or the absence of biology on Mars (which would be even more peculiar if there had been a water regime) lay in acceptance of the idea that "water" as we understand it -- whether solid, liquid or gas -- may never have been abundant at the surface of Mars during any period of the planet's history and continued focus on finding such evidence may be a wild goose chase if sulfuric acid was the key surface volatile throughout Mars's history.
There is evidence of at least some water at some time periods -- including now -- on Mars, and that water could have harbored biology, but if it ever did, it seems to me that any potential biology would have been killed if there was contact between water at or below the surface and the abundant sulfuric acid. Mars, therefore, is potentially self-sterilizing, a Killer Planet, but not necessarily the way planetary scientists have long hypothesized.
Needless to say, the appropriate tests to find out are not being done, any more than tests to confirm the presence or absence of the long-hypothesized sterilizing super-oxides have ever been done. (Actually, there's no experimental evidence on Mars that they exist at all.)
Meanwhile, in Oak Creek, a suburb of Milwaukee, an All-American Killer went on a rampage at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, apparently taking out the prominent men of the religious community before apparently being killed himself by police. I say "apparently" because these All-American massacres and slaughters have a way of turning out to be not quite what they are initially reported to be, and especially the killers themselves aren't quite what they were initially made out to be.
I haven't checked news on either Mars or the Massacre this morning so I'm not sure how either story has developed; I'm recording mostly what I saw/heard yesterday.
There were initial reports of up to four shooters in Wisconsin which police assure us was probably really only the one, seen from different angles. According to later reports, the shooter was some sort of skinhead white supremacist who may have been seeking revenge for 9/11, but at the time, there was no way to even begin to confirm such a thing. However, the authorities quickly classified the attack as an act of "domestic terrorism" -- something they have been highly reluctant to do in the case of white men shooting up people and places or making terrorist threats to blow up this or that monument or facility.
Until recently, at any rate, "terrorism" in the popular mind and among our National Security authorities was almost entirely confined to Muslims and brown people. Only since the advent of the Occupy activities which have involved all kinds of anarchists have white men been rounded up and accused of "terrorism."
This may be the first time that a "skinhead" or "white supremacist" has been designated a "terrorist." But since he was apparently killed in a gun battle with police, he will not be subject to ... interrogation. We may never know the truth about him.
Unfortunately, the threats to and murder of Sikhs in revenge for 9/11 (which they had nothing to do with) has been fairly common in this country for years. In fact, I think one of the first revenge killings after 9/11 was of a Sikh walking on the street. There have been quite a few more since then, but nothing on the scale of the massacre yesterday.
But the myth-makers were busy yesterday assuring us that there had never been any threats to the Sikh community in Wisconsin, which is just silly. Yes, there have been threats. It's a fact of life for Sikhs in the United States, whether in Wisconsin or anywhere else. The myth of no threats against Sikhs is bogus.
Some Sikhs in America do not wear turbans or beards because of the ignorance of too many Americans regarding the origin and nature of Sikhism, and the fact that Sikhs had nothing to do with 9/11 or any other terrorist attack on Americans. (In India it's a different story, but we'll leave that aside for now.)
This is the second All-American Massacre in America's Heartland ina little over less than a month. Let's hope we're not on yet another cycle of copy-cat massacres, but we may be. American Exceptionalism, eh?
It's simply been a fact that people with the itch to kill in our culture find their impetus more easily available when someone else does it "first."
For a time, I wondered if the All-American Massacre was a result of Manchurianizing or otherwise "triggering" particularly vulnerable individuals to kill, whether or not they were actively recruited or trained. I don't think we can ever know. But G2Geek's exploration of "Stochastic" terrorism is worth some additional contemplation. His hypothesis is basically that the American culture itself provides the triggers for these periodic mass killings, that there is something very deep seated in our collective sub-consciousness that almost requires it.
And when you think about all the mass murders and massacres that have been features, not bugs, of Euro-American culture from the beginning, starting almost at the moment Europeans first set foot in this New World and continuing relentlessly ever since, then there may truly be no way out of this Killer Kulture box we're in.
Gun nuts of course reject any controls on their acquisition and use of personal weaponry, which is just absurd. But they may be right that controlling firearms access might not have any effect on the tendency of some Americans to engage in massacre. It may not be due the guns or their availability that enables the routine massacre of Americans by other Americans. It may be the culture itself, going back to the very beginnings of what we now call "America."
Something so deep seated and so out of whack will take more than a superficial approach to change.
---------------------
Now to check the news.
It was the strangest mash up yesterday, with most of my day taken up in following the Oak Creek Temple Massacre on line and then in the evening staying up late to watch the latest Mars landing, also online. Olympics gymnastics was on the teevee, but I really haven't watched the Olympics since the opening ceremony, and then only to be struck dumb by the... erm... spectacle(?).
[As as side note, once I learned of the modern Olympics' pretty overtly fascist operations and highly corrupt underpinning, if you will, I began to see the Games more as a mean joke than as a serious competition; as a rule, I don't see more than a few minutes of a few events, especially since the Games have been on NBC, whose coverage is another mean joke. But I digress.]
Both the Massacre and the Mars Landing were highly evocative of past events, the Landing going back to the very long ago, the Massacre evocative of much more recent events.
I was struck by how antiquated the NASA/JPL procedures were as the Curiosity Mission neared Mars. My doG, they were still using 3 ring binders to read off their sequences, despite the fact that they had the latest computer equipment right in front of them. They were watching the plots of the landing on large screens at the sides of the room, just as they would have done at Houston Mission Control decades ago, and there were rows and rows of Curiosity Mission Control terminals at which rows and rows of Mission Control personnel scanned monitors for data and announced their satisfaction therewith as the Mission Scientist called on them one by one. Their voices were distorted the way space mission voices have been distorted by space mission radio gear for decades. At one point, the Mission Scientist's radio gear failed, the way that such gear seems to fail fairly often at Mission Control, and a colleague handed over his own equipment so that the Mission Scientist could communicate with the rest of the room.
The Curiosity Mission team was a highly individualistic bunch, though, and I would say the "star" of the room -- who never said a word publicly -- was a Latin looking dude with a fancy multi-colored roach haircut with stars
Mohawk Guy is an Internet SuperStar:
Damb, we're easily amused!
I found I was just as caught up in the Landing as I'd been when Mercury capsules were returning to Earth; and it was a real thrill when the announcement came that the Curiosity craft was on the surface of Mars. Even more of a thrill was the first image from the surface, a thumbnail that had been enormously enlarged so that it was almost impossible to make out what it showed. It didn't matter; it was a picture from the surface, broadcast of millions of miles, after a landing that had taken place moments before, and it was from Mars.
Wow.
And all of it was so evocative of so much space exploration since I was a child. Seriously, nothing has changed. It is the same operating theory and practice now as it was 50 years ago and more. The same procedures, the same hierarchies, the same look, the same sound.
Striking too is the fact that there hasn't been a mission to Mars that could actually look for the "markers" of biology -- not for life itself, of course -- since 1976, when the Viking Landers returned ambiguous data that were officially interpreted as indicating a sterile lifeless surface, without any carbon or carbon compounds at all (not even from meteorites) and literally lethal to living organisms due to deadly ultraviolet light and a surface saturated with peroxides and other substances and compounds which would kill anything and everything on contact.
I've made Mars something of a hobby for many years, even set up a website (which still exists though many of the links no longer work) beginning in 1997 or so to explore some of the controversies and disputes concerning what was really what on Mars. I was an active participant in a few space science boards, and through them became acquainted with quite a number of planetary scientists and interested laymen. Through sometimes heated discussions on those boards, I learned a great deal about what was not known or poorly understood about Mars, and especially how heavily images and information released to the public had been manipulated for many years to further certain standard and accepted theories rather than provide the means to explore and debate.
I learned that it was more than marginally likely that the Vikings had indeed "discovered life on Mars" but that there were political reasons both within the government and within NASA's planetary science community to obscure the data and deny the "discovery" -- if it was a discovery.
I made a "discovery" myself based on Mars Orbital Camera images taken near the south pole -- evidence and images of active geysers. And wouldn't you know, the evidence I produced was fiercely denied, and my interpretation was denounced as "an optical illusion."
 | ||
| My cropped and colorized image of Martian geysers near the South Pole c. 1999 |
I also made stabs at discovering currently active glaciers on the surface, some of which have since been confirmed.
I stepped back from more active exploration of the Mars surface data when it became clear to me after the Pathfinder, Opportunity, and Spirit Missions, that the long-time focus on the question of whether there was or ever had been flowing water on Mars was barking up the wrong tree. Whether or not there had ever been "water" on the surface -- which obviously there was both as ice and flowing water -- the far more common liquid at the surface had been and perhaps still is sulfuric acid.
Liquid water and liquid sulfuric acid are chemically similar (H2O vs H2SO4) and -- depending on what you are looking for and how you look -- they may be indistinguishable, but the one can imply the presence of biology while the other will almost certainly imply the absence of biology (at least on Earth.)
When it occurred to me that quite possibly sulfuric acid had been the primary surface liquid throughout the history of Mars, a whole lot of otherwise difficult to understand evidence seemed to make sense.
Sulfuric acid has a much lower freezing temperature than water, and it doesn't require the atmospheric pressure water does in order to remain liquid over time. Under current conditions, in other words, sulfuric acid could remain liquid and flow over much of the Martian surface (assuming it was available at the surface) whereas pure water could not do so for more than a very brief period before freezing or evaporating. But flowing sulfuric acid would have the effect of sterilizing the surface just as surely as any of the hypothesized oxides, peroxides and superoxides that were once alleged to have combined with hyper-ultraviolet flux to sterilize the surface.
The key to understanding presence of biology or the absence of biology on Mars (which would be even more peculiar if there had been a water regime) lay in acceptance of the idea that "water" as we understand it -- whether solid, liquid or gas -- may never have been abundant at the surface of Mars during any period of the planet's history and continued focus on finding such evidence may be a wild goose chase if sulfuric acid was the key surface volatile throughout Mars's history.
There is evidence of at least some water at some time periods -- including now -- on Mars, and that water could have harbored biology, but if it ever did, it seems to me that any potential biology would have been killed if there was contact between water at or below the surface and the abundant sulfuric acid. Mars, therefore, is potentially self-sterilizing, a Killer Planet, but not necessarily the way planetary scientists have long hypothesized.
Needless to say, the appropriate tests to find out are not being done, any more than tests to confirm the presence or absence of the long-hypothesized sterilizing super-oxides have ever been done. (Actually, there's no experimental evidence on Mars that they exist at all.)
Meanwhile, in Oak Creek, a suburb of Milwaukee, an All-American Killer went on a rampage at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, apparently taking out the prominent men of the religious community before apparently being killed himself by police. I say "apparently" because these All-American massacres and slaughters have a way of turning out to be not quite what they are initially reported to be, and especially the killers themselves aren't quite what they were initially made out to be.
I haven't checked news on either Mars or the Massacre this morning so I'm not sure how either story has developed; I'm recording mostly what I saw/heard yesterday.
There were initial reports of up to four shooters in Wisconsin which police assure us was probably really only the one, seen from different angles. According to later reports, the shooter was some sort of skinhead white supremacist who may have been seeking revenge for 9/11, but at the time, there was no way to even begin to confirm such a thing. However, the authorities quickly classified the attack as an act of "domestic terrorism" -- something they have been highly reluctant to do in the case of white men shooting up people and places or making terrorist threats to blow up this or that monument or facility.
Until recently, at any rate, "terrorism" in the popular mind and among our National Security authorities was almost entirely confined to Muslims and brown people. Only since the advent of the Occupy activities which have involved all kinds of anarchists have white men been rounded up and accused of "terrorism."
This may be the first time that a "skinhead" or "white supremacist" has been designated a "terrorist." But since he was apparently killed in a gun battle with police, he will not be subject to ... interrogation. We may never know the truth about him.
Unfortunately, the threats to and murder of Sikhs in revenge for 9/11 (which they had nothing to do with) has been fairly common in this country for years. In fact, I think one of the first revenge killings after 9/11 was of a Sikh walking on the street. There have been quite a few more since then, but nothing on the scale of the massacre yesterday.
But the myth-makers were busy yesterday assuring us that there had never been any threats to the Sikh community in Wisconsin, which is just silly. Yes, there have been threats. It's a fact of life for Sikhs in the United States, whether in Wisconsin or anywhere else. The myth of no threats against Sikhs is bogus.
Some Sikhs in America do not wear turbans or beards because of the ignorance of too many Americans regarding the origin and nature of Sikhism, and the fact that Sikhs had nothing to do with 9/11 or any other terrorist attack on Americans. (In India it's a different story, but we'll leave that aside for now.)
This is the second All-American Massacre in America's Heartland in
It's simply been a fact that people with the itch to kill in our culture find their impetus more easily available when someone else does it "first."
For a time, I wondered if the All-American Massacre was a result of Manchurianizing or otherwise "triggering" particularly vulnerable individuals to kill, whether or not they were actively recruited or trained. I don't think we can ever know. But G2Geek's exploration of "Stochastic" terrorism is worth some additional contemplation. His hypothesis is basically that the American culture itself provides the triggers for these periodic mass killings, that there is something very deep seated in our collective sub-consciousness that almost requires it.
And when you think about all the mass murders and massacres that have been features, not bugs, of Euro-American culture from the beginning, starting almost at the moment Europeans first set foot in this New World and continuing relentlessly ever since, then there may truly be no way out of this Killer Kulture box we're in.
Gun nuts of course reject any controls on their acquisition and use of personal weaponry, which is just absurd. But they may be right that controlling firearms access might not have any effect on the tendency of some Americans to engage in massacre. It may not be due the guns or their availability that enables the routine massacre of Americans by other Americans. It may be the culture itself, going back to the very beginnings of what we now call "America."
Something so deep seated and so out of whack will take more than a superficial approach to change.
---------------------
Now to check the news.
Friday, July 13, 2012
From the AntiFa Trenches, c. 1938 (contd)
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| Spanish Antifascist Poster, c. 1938 |
The interesting thing to me has always been that Franco's fascist Spain endured through WWII and for many decades thereafter, in some respects it endures today. Latin American dictatorships during and after the War were largely modeled on European fascism. And most of the anti-communist dictatorships supported by the United States, wherever they were found, were more or less fundamentally fascist throughout the Cold War era.
In other words, World War II did not actually defeat fascism. Depending on your perspective, it wasn't a war against fascism at all. (Soviets saw it a little differently of course.) Apart from the Soviets, it was a war of one faction of corporatist-imperialists against another for global hegemony. As the Nazi-fascist faction was defeated, the Enemy then became, almost instantaneously, the Global Communist Conspiracy centered in the Soviet Union, the chief enemy of the fascists, and the one the United States had focused on prior to WWII.
All of this long ago convinced me that a faction of the fascists actually won World War II, despite the hoop-lah and propaganda of Allied Victory. I grew up in an era of intense anti-communism and propaganda, a near absence of civil liberties (such as freedom of speech, assembly and association), and an ongoing civil crusade against "subversion." In the background was the constant drumbeat of immanent nuclear war of annihilation between the stalwart USofA and the perfidious Soviet Russians. It was many years before I understood that had it been up to the Soviets, none of this would have happened. There would have been no Cold War, no arms race, threat of instant incineration. It was all a fever dream and fantasy in a way.
So as I read "The Peril of Fascism" by A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, the parallels between their view of what was going on in the USA c. 1938 and what we know today is more and more striking. The book is mostly contemporaneous reporting and an interweaving of various threads of knowledge. We see much the same kind of thing in the many news aggregators of today, each of which operates with a certain point of view and political bias, but each of which, if you apply critical thinking to them, can provide excellent insight into what's really going on.
The chapter called "Terror, Incorporated" seems to me to be particularly germane given recent events:
On May 22, 1936, the lifeless body of Charles Poole, an employee of the Works Progress Administration, was found lying in a ditch on the outskirts of Detroit. It seemed like another murder story. But before many days had passed, there grew out of that tale of death the ominous outlines of a far-reaching conspiracy whose victim was to be not that pitiful bullet-ridden body found in a ditch, but the rights and liberties of thousands of Americans. The Black Legion, flinging its shadow across the American scene, jolted the unwary and incredulous into a realization that it could happen here.
The Black Legion may appear in retrospect a bit fantastic and unreal, but no more so than Hitler's rowdies in the Munich beer hall days. The full truth about this brotherhood of hate and murder will perhaps never been known. Too many higher-ups of the industrial and political world were involved for complete candor. But enough has been revealed to indicate that while this terrorist organization may have been born in more or less spontaneous fashion, it was suckled and reared by the great automobile corporations of Detroit and Michigan. Of course, even the so-called spontaneous birth of such movements is possible only in a society which breeds fascism as filth breeds germs.
The two chief weapons of fascism are demagogy and terror. And in both, amateurdom gives way to science, the sporadic and haphazard are supplanted by system and organization. The lynch mobs of the South which spring up suddenly, live briefly and as suddenly melt away, the vigilante bands which function only during specific labor disputes, are the Black Legion in embryo -- but only in embryo. In the period of mounting disintegration and decay, when capitalism is beset by chronic ills it never knew before, these primitive forms of mob violence no longer suffice. Organizations of a more permanent kind, with a more stable membership and a more elaborate program are required. Hence, the modern Ku Klux Klan, the Black Legion, the Silver Shirts -- groups for whom terror is a profession and murder an art.
It is an omen of what can happen here that this country gave birth to one of the earliest semi-fascist terrorist organizations in the world, the modern Ku Klux Klan. Launched in November, 1915, it antedated the Fascisti of Mussolini and the Storm Troops of Hitler. It is significant, however, that not until after the World War, in the wake of the social dislocations that followed the conclusion of imperialist bloodshed, did the Ku Klux Klan, like the Fascisti in Italy and the various terror groups in Germany really come into its own. The Klan was, however, in its first stage less pronouncedly fascist than were the Italian and German murder gangs.
....
It will be noted that the period of the Klan's greatest strength coincided with the post-war crisis of capitalism and the first emergence of fascist tendencies throughout the capitalist world including the United States. Furthermore, the Klan, after its eclipse during the years of temporary capitalist stabilization, has been revived in another period of economic and social stress. It is significant, too, that while the Klan's main emphasis in the days of its great efflorescence was on anti-Catholicism, it soft-pedaled the anti-Catholic issue when it re-emerged during the economic crisis and directed its main energies against labor under the guise of combating Communism.
Thus the New York Sun of May 5, 1933, wrote:
The Ku Klux Klan, almost killed off seven years ago by the exposure of a series of flogging cases and other criminal activities attributed to it, has been revived in the South for the announced purpose of "educating" the Negro against Communism and other radical doctrines.
...
The shift in prejudices to which the Klan is appealing is a measure of the growth and deepening of those fascist tendencies which first manifested themselves after the war. The Black Legion, too, while its creed included attacks on Catholics, Jews, Negroes, and the foreign-born, made these subordinate to the fight against labor.
Yet it would be foolhardy to conclude that Catholics, Jews, Negroes, and the foreign-born would find any security should the forces which the Klan and the Black Legion represent gain power. In Germany the Nazi drive on labor merely constituted the hub of the wheel of repression that moved relentlessly against Jews, Catholics, Protestants, liberals and all who by any stretch of the imagination could be regarded as critical of the Nazi regime. The breadth of the orbit of hatred within which the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Legion moved offers no reason to suppose that fascist dictatorship in this country would be any less ruthless and sweeping.
...
Together with the growth of the Klan grew the trail of blood and terror that it left behind it in state after state. And the KKK learned to combine organized hooliganism with political action. Before long the three great Southwestern states, Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma, were completely under the thumb of the Klan. Elsewhere, too, the Klan became a power in city and state politics and entrenched itself in the police forces in many parts of the country. This expansion took place despite considerable opposition which the organization met not only from Catholics, Jews, Negroes and the foreign-born, but from many native white Protestants for whom the Klan represented everything reprehensible, stupid and reactionary in American life.
...
On its revival in 1931-32, the Klan left no doubt as to its militant anti-labor character. "The Klan Rides Again -- Communism Must Be Destroyed!" read handbills distributed throughout the South. In an Atlanta dispatch to the New York Post of September 14, 1934, David G. Wittels wrote:
The Ku Klux Klan has entered the strike picture in the South
Primed into new life by money from Anti-New Dealers, it is gathering strength for a battle against organized labor -- and eventually against President Roosevelt.
Rejuvenated three months ago, it has 30,000 members in Georgia, and 100,000 throughout the South.
In a few places in the South the Klan went so far as to adopt the Nazi trick of appearing to be pro-labor. At Columbus, Georgia, where 11,500 mill workers were striking, the KKK participated in a Labor Day parade. And at Griffin, Georgia, it was even instrumental in calling a strike. This will recall the Nazi "support" of the Berlin tramway workers' strike in the fall of 1932 on the eve of Hitler's accession to power.
In the mining town of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the Klan in 1936 distributed printed cards -- with a union label -- listing the following program:
1. Deport illegal aliens
2. Drive out Communism
3. Restore Constitutional government
4. Keep church and state separate
5. Buy American-made products
6. White supremacy
It will be noted that anti-Catholicism has here been relegated to fourth place and euphemized into the inoffensive "Keep church and state separate." Number five shows that the Klan has taken over Hearst's "Buy American" campaign. In fact, the entire program, with the exception of points four and six, is identical with the public pronouncements of Hearst and the other big business reactionaries.
...
The revived Klan has been particularly active in Florida. Under the leadership of Kleagle Fred McLendon Bass, who was also a member of the executive committee of the Orlando, Florida, American Legion post, the Klan kidnapped and murdered Frank Norman, International Labor Defense organizer, in April, 1934. The most flagrant of the revived Klan's acts of violence was the kidnapping and flogging at Tampa, Florida, in November, 1935, of Joseph Shoemaker, Dr. Sam Rogers, and Eugene Poulnot, leaders of a liberal group known as the Modern Democrats. This outrage, which proved fatal to Shoemaker, was perpetrated with the connivance of the Tampa police whose chief, R. G. Tittsworth, was a member of the Klan.
While this excerpt has focused mostly on the violence of the Ku Klux Klan (and there is a great deal more documented than I have excerpted here), there were many other similar and affiliated fascist terrorist groups active in the United States during the period, many with the active complicity of the local authorities. It was not an easy time to be a labor organizer, a Negro, a Catholic, a Jew, or of foreign birth anywhere in the country. All were considered "suspect" by America's good-upstanding-white-christian folk, and many were considered a priori Communists. Terror tactics were commonly employed, much more widely and against a much broader cross-section of Americans than is generally believed. If you were a member of one of the designated and targeted out groups, there was essentially no way to avoid it. But this was one of the great benefits of "small government" back in the day. There was no way to protect people from this sort of constant terror by various groups, especially when the police were part of the terror-forces.
This is something Americans seem to have little collective memory of. Because there is very little collective memory of this domestic terror apparatus that operated as a public-private partnership in service to the financiers and capitalists, it's easy enough to revive it when conditions warrant. We've seen it already in some of the border control and other militias, in aspects of the Tea Party, and in the vast expansion of private mercenary forces at home and abroad. It's not an altogether new phenomenon. And as always, these domestic terror forces are in service to their sponsors and owners, the vaunted 1%.
Always.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Rude -- I like it
I scarfed this up from American Everyman blog. It's pretty good! Worth the ten minutes or so to sit through.
There's more at http://www.corbettreport.com
There's more at http://www.corbettreport.com
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Stochastic terrorism
This article by dKos writer G2geek is getting a lot of coverage or at least exposure, and it seems to fit in with my notion that these routine killing sprees are actually "triggered," in G2geek's view by cultural and media contexts, they are not the accidental outcomes of "lone wolves" or "psychotic nuts" gone inexplicably rogue.
They are "triggered."
G2geek doesn't discount the possibility that the triggering may be intentional, but seems to shy away from it nonetheless. In such a toxic cultural and media environment, one can assume that some people will be triggered to act out their fantasies and kill. One doesn't have to trigger them intentionally; it happens automatically -- and regularly. And yet, if those who do the triggering are aware of their power to set the killers in motion, why not do it intentionally, at particular times and places, if it's possible to do so?
I can understand shying away from the Tinfoil on a topic like this, but often enough the conspiracy you suspect is actually real, or some version of it is.
One of the aspects in Loughner's case that I find very intriguing is that he really does seem to be trying to communicate (in those videos) what is happening to him. All the talk about mind control and how it is being done may not make sense on the surface but if you think about it in the context of Stochastic Terrorism, you start to realize, "OMG! He's trying to tell us!" I think we'll see that with a lot of the other Shooters out there, too. They understand that they are being "driven" by a force or forces completely beyond their control, and in so many cases, they can point to something in the media that has triggered their rage.
I've noticed who's been out defending the "vitriol" and denying that it has anything to do with the creation of these shootings, each of which, of course, is a singular event with no connection to anything else.
It is the entire Republican political establishment. It is the entire Rightist media complex. It is most of the Mainstream Media plex. It is almost all the Libertarian media -- including the "progressive" blogosphere (Jane and Glenn have become especially shrill in defending the vitriol.) And I noticed last night with a kind of horror that Ezra Klein has taken to defending the vitriol too. Though he rattled on at great length, he was not making a coherent argument; he was all over the map, flailing. And when he was confronted, by another commentator, he practically had a meltdown right there on the teevee.
A case can be made that he wasn't actually defending the vitriol, only the freedom to be vitriolic without being blamed for shoot-em-ups, but the case being made for Stochastic Terrorism is that shoot-em-ups are the inevitable consequence of the kind of media vitriol that Americans are soaked in.
I'm reminded of something from years ago. I think most people who read this little corner of Cyberspace know that I live in Sacramento -- when I'm in California! -- and have lived here for quite a while. Most people know that Rush Limbaugh got his major media start here when he was given a regular show on KFBK Radio. It was at the time a very provocative, even shocking show, but not a whole lot different than his national show now. One of the targets for his vitriol was gay people. It was early in the AIDS epidemic, and he railed against gay people day in and day out. All of a sudden, "incidents" started happening. Gay men -- and suspected gay men -- were being attacked all over town, some badly injured, and I believe one was killed. People were horrified. The police were stymied. The mayor, however, recognized that these attacks stemmed from Limbaugh's constant raving against gay people on his radio show, and she called on him publicly to desist. Of course he denied any mal intent -- as he always does -- but he did tell his followers that he never wanted any of them to attack anyone and if any of his followers were involved in the attacks, he wanted them to stop.
Sure enough. They stopped. At least for a while.
In this case, it wasn't "unstable" people who were being influenced to attack targeted outsiders mindlessly. It was pretty ordinary folks exposed to a constant diet of media rage and outrage, with the implication, always, that they had "permission" to act out their rage violently. This is little different than the talk radio influencing, aiding, abetting and enabling the genocide in Rwanda.
At some point, Americans and their media have got to come to grips with the pervasiveness of hatred and rage and gun violence as the "solution" that they purvey and absorb all the time. People ARE triggered to act. And the outcome gets worse and worse.
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