Let Us Reason Together -- Competing Propagandas (or "Blame Bernays") (6)

One of our constant problems as Americans -- as humans trying to muddle through somehow and as participants in our own Fate -- is the persistence and predominance of propaganda in practically every aspect of our social and political lives.

Propaganda.

We are exposed to it all the time, through constant advertising, through the entire entertainment realm and much of the academic realm, through the yapping and yammering of "balanced news" broadcasts and opinion writinh, and through the many elements of the Alternative "News" business. Don't even get started on the "elections industry" and their cadres of consultants and pollsters and what have you.

We are seeing such an explosion of competing propagandas over such a wide variety of issues these days, from abortion to domestic and international surveillance, to climate science, to the situation at Fukushima Daiichi, and on and on.

There is much smoke but little -- and often no -- light. At times, every topic seems to be the exclusive purview of propagandists, polemicists and provocateurs. It's little wonder so many people tune it out.

Most people seem to have become inured to propaganda and propagandists and it's understandable that they rarely bother to hack their way through the thickets toward some kind of truth. Instead, as intended, they either ignore it all or they adopt one or another of the competing positions as the functional equivalent of "truth" and go forth, oblivious to any fact contrary to their belief.

In some cases, one is all but required to adopt a side in a controversy and root for one's team in the supposed "marketplace of ideas." And if no side is arguing anything approaching "truth," but all sides are mired in falsehood or irrelevancy, what is one to do?

Obviously, such a one cannot be allowed to play.

Edward Bernays figured this all out generations ago, and our "marketplace of ideas" is one of his many questionable legacies.

The level of propaganda -- and competing propagandas -- we're mired in becomes very obvious when something like the Summer NSA Story hits the "marketplace." There is almost no truth or objectivity in the story, though apparently a good deal of the relatively few documents so far released are authentic enough. The story, however, has all the elements of a spy thriller novel or movie, tailor made to sell a product on the one hand, and to develop loyalties to a team on the other. Much heat, very little light.

As intended.

Let's face it, "reality" is often enough a created fiction. We get mired in these fictions, which we think of at least temporarily as "reality." But they are created, they come out of a shop, quite a cynical shop in many cases, and they are not in any objective sense "real." The Snowden/NSA Story is one of those creations, I have no doubt. What is really going on will probably remain an Inscrutable Mystery for the rest of my life, but the outlines of what may be taking place on the backchannels is fairly clear.

The NSA is having its wings clipped. It isn't being destroyed or nor is its primary work being interfered with. Instead, it is being exposed (as it has been before) by an insider -- peripheral though he may have technically been -- for its gross overreach of mission, an overreach that is being marketed as "The NSA is Spying On You; the NSA is Spying on Everyone!!!!!™ Well. Yes. And?

We knew this. Some of us knew that there are multiple layers of surveillance on practically everyone in the whole wide world, and it has been so for many, many years. We live in a surveillance society, and we know that this surveillance has only increased -- massively -- by law and practice since the events of 9/11/2001, which "changed everything." Yes, we know.

Having documentary proof that it is so is little more than gilding the lily. We now know the names of some of the programs and have (perhaps) seen sketches or charts of how they are organized and what sort of hardware/software may be employed. This is important historical knowledge for those who seek means and methods of thwarting some of this surveillance. It is historical in that what is in place and operating currently may well be quite different than what has been exposed, and it is knowledge useful only to a few adepts. And from what I've heard, they are complaining because the "knowledge" we've been given is far from sufficient to do anything about the surveillance tactics being employed. In other words, it appears that what we've been told is only enough to whip up OUTRAGE!!!!™, not even close to enough to thwart the surveillance/security apparat.

OK then. Every day that goes by, the hoard of material Snowden took with him becomes less and less current and timely. Much of what has been revealed was already many years old, and everything in the Snowden Hoard ages by the minute.

But even as history, the People should know what has been done to them, what has been done in their names, and who the major players are. We don't have more than a hint -- we've never had much more than that -- even after months and months of "revelations" and hot-as-the-sun debate and controversy over them.

That is a function of propaganda. There may be all kinds of truth carried along with the propaganda, but the point of it is to present a kind of pageant that persuades us to believe certain things and root for Our Team against the Other in the supposed contest between something and something else.

In my view, there is a contest, but it's not one that we're involved in.

From what I've seen so far, the contest is between factions -- "shops," if you will -- within the bloated intelligence community, a contest for dominance. Because of the way the NSA is organized and has typically operated outside the lines of its mandate, the NSA is seen as an internal threat to other aspects of the security/surveillance state, and so must be curbed. The way chosen to do it is to invoke a public debate about its means and methods and to generate reforms to be determined and implemented as quickly as possible to rein in a rogue agency.

This sort of thing has an extensive precedence, going back to the revelations of COINTELPRO, the Church Committee, and all the rest. Modest reform comes, but it is very quickly subverted. It doesn't last, and it has to be done again and again. Really, the only way to overcome the threat to democracy and liberty posed by out of control security and surveillance apparats is to abolish them altogether and start over, and so far as I know, no state has done that except in utter defeat after war and conquest.

The only upshot I can see from this Story of the Century is that the NSA will be pruned of its extraneous operations which will be folded into other agencies, some of which will be newly hatched, like poisons out of the mud, and the Security/Surveillance State will go on as if little or nothing had taken place.

I will add, however, that the State we're talking about will be less and less a matter of constitutional self-government and more and more a matter of corporate governance through a staff of employees that masquerade for a time as an elected government, and then, after a while, drop the charade and become what they are: "staff."

Meanwhile, the propaganda is relentless.

Musical Interlude -- "Quiet Village" and other Exotica

Haven't posted a Musical Interlude for a while, and since I was going through some of my record albums (yes, vinyl... even celluloid or whatever those old 78s were made of) before I got laid up with the sciatica, I was reminded of many of the records I heard when I was a child. "Quiet Village" of course was one.



This is a link to a full album, "Exotica" featuring the stylings of Ted Auletta, c. 1962 in Full Stereophonic Quadraphonic Sound.

Some Paintings for the New Year...

NOTE: I think I've posted these images before, but a reminder is appropriate every now and then.

Let Us Reason Together -- the Panopticon (5)

The Panopticon was Jeremy Bentham's 18th Century enlightenment notion of how it would be possible for a very limited staff of keepers to control a large population of inmates by making it possible for one keeper to look into any cell simply by turning around. The beauty of it was that the inmates would never know whether and when they were being watched, and that fact would work with innate human nature to enforce proper behavior within the prison. Rebellions and uprisings wouldn't occur. They couldn't. None could be organized without detection. There would be less need for brutality and the usual cruelties prisoners were subjected to. Harmony would reign.

Well, there was more to it than that, of course, but the general idea of the All Seeing Panopticon seemed perfectly rational at the time, and in due time, versions of Bentham's vision were tried with varying results. Part of the rationale for the Panopticon, in addition to the ability to watch prisoners at will, was the isolation of inmates, each to their own cell, rather than being held en masse in cages in the dungeons. A way to control unruly types through isolation was long known and understood, but employing it in general was considered too expensive. But the Panopticon made isolation economically reasonable because it reduced prison staffing requirements substantially.

Ultimately it was understood more or less widely that the simplest way to keep prisoners and reduce rebellions was to hold them in isolation and keep watch on them in ways they could never fully know while severely punishing any infraction of increasingly arbitrary and draconian rules.

Harmony would reign.

Then it was realized that the same principals that underlay the Panopticon for Prisons could be applied to the general population, thus curbing non-conformity and rebellion among the Rabble. The only problem was that there was no technology to do it efficiently and broadly until very recently. But even with more or less inefficient and primitive tactics, the principles of the Panopticon were employed in all sorts of social and political situations The watched actually become the watchmen and women and enforce conformity of mind and body without the necessity for an overly large and intrusive surveillance apparatus. Sure enough, it worked.

Until it didn't.

Harmony reigned temporarily, sometimes for quite a long time, and then it broke down.

Studies have been going on ever since to figure out why that breakdown occurred and to ensure that it never happens again, at least never again in that way. Our Chinese friends may be furthest along in figuring out how to suppress rebellion and enforce conformity on a more permanent basis. But that remains to be seen. As China undergoes as thorough a remaking of its social economy as it has ever endured, rebellion is constant. At the same time, there seems to be a level of relative harmony and peace, in the midst of fierce competition, that is unprecedented. From the perspective of many social engineers, China is obviously doing something very right. But what it is and exactly how they are doing it isn't entirely clear.

The recent hoo-hah around the world about the NSA and to a lesser extent (much lesser extent) about the more or less pervasive corporate and lower-level law enforcement surveillance of entire populations is related directly to the notion of the Panopticon and the principles of its operation. What we have learned is that the keepers now have the technology to keep an eye on every one of us essentially all the time or whenever they want, and we can never know for certain whether we are being watched at any particular moment. Thus our behavior is controlled in theory and largely in fact just by our knowing that we can be watched and any deviation from accepted norms in our behavior noted -- and can be used against us at any time our keepers choose. Even if we don't necessarily deviate from the norm (whatever that is declared to be at any given time), patterns of behavior can be manipulated to create false "deviations" which can then be utilized for prosecution or persecution -- or to sell you something you neither want nor need but which your "pattern" suggests you are susceptible to purchasing with the right persuasion.

It's a wonderful thing from the point of view of those who make and operate these surveillance/marketing/and population control systems. As for the general public, what I've taken to calling the Rabble, it's not so wonderful, but as long as it is not too intrusive, it seems, most people don't much mind that it is going on. Many may actually appreciate it on a visceral level.

Think Facebook, Twitter, and the endless devices of our modern world which make instant communications possible and inevitable and which for the most part provide the user with no privacy at all. Anyone can observe anyone else, and many, many people want to be observed in practically every aspect of their lives pretty much continuously. They can easily get their wish, more easily than ever before in human history. Nearly the entire world can vicariously participate in nearly anyone's life through modern technology.

That includes governments and their private sector sponsors. (Increasingly, "government" and "corporate" are distinctions without a difference as they subsume one another.)

The Panopticon principle as it is today is a versatile and useful tool of population control employed by corporate-governments on a broader scale than ever before in history. Because so many people are eager to share their lives with others through social media and the like, it is remarkably easy to get people in general to adopt technology which utilizes the Panopticon principle for control.

The notion that one can have privacy under the circumstances is absurd. You can't. No matter what you do, you cannot opt out of the technology of observation and surveillance that is built in to the devices, hardware and software of our lives, and even the loudest "privacy advocates" know this full well. There is no "secret place" within our devices where we can whisper secrets to one another without being overheard, any more than inmates in Bentham's Panopticon Prison could ever be sure they were unobserved.

The Revelations we've been exposed to the past few months are the details of a surveillance regime that is pretty much universal at this point and cannot be undone.

Where did the idea that electronic communications were somehow private come from?

It came from marketing. Marketing which obscured the facts.

One was sold the idea of encryption and secure communications, but it was never real in the sense that your online communications were ever truly private  and inaccessible to interested parties -- as we're finding out with more and more detail. A few adepts may have been able to temporarily secure and privatize their own communications, but for most internet users, there never was a time when the bulk of communications couldn't be accessed either by the carriers or by governments whenever and however desired. And there's never been a time that I was aware of that carriers weren't eager to sell their bulk information on their customers to government. The architecture of the internet is purpose-designed for this very practice, as most of us once knew but seem to have forgotten.

The ability to surveil the activities of users online -- constantly and automatically -- is one of the key industry ideals and motivations, both to be able to sell something to them and to be able to keep tabs on their potentials for disruption and rebellion (what's generally called "criminality.")

This has always been true of the intranets that gave birth to the internet -- which itself has never ever been either "free" or "private." Marketing myths that have long been sold to the public promise otherwise, of course, but they are simply false and always have been.

The notion of "privacy" itself is actually a recent social development that is in many ways tied to marketing ideas of the early 20th Century ("Blame Bernays.")  What I think the idea of universal privacy and the right to privacy came out of was the understanding that the Overclass of the 19th and early 20th centuries used their position to live private lives out of the view of the Rabble and more importantly to develop products and policies in secret from the public, policies and products which were then imposed often by main force, without consultation with or approval by the public. The idea was that if the public didn't know (at all or very much) about how their Betters lived their lives and what was being planned, they wouldn't be able to object or rebel before the policy was instituted, and they could be induced to admire rather than object to the lives of their Betters.

The idea of "privacy" as a general matter turned that understanding of what was being done to the public by the Overclass on its head by proposing a general right for everyone to the same sort of private lives their Betters had long enjoyed.

That's where I think the idea of "privacy" as it is commonly understood in the western world came from. It was heavily marketed as something desirable and necessary to a full and rewarding life -- because Our Betters had it. And you want to be like them, don't you?

Which is not to say that personal space of some sort ("A Room of One's Own" as it were) has not always been with us. It is the fetishization of privacy as the defining characteristic of what it means to be "human" that simply never existed before very recent times, and for most people, it doesn't compute at all.

Most societies exist under forms of formal and informal surveillance. The discovery that Our Own (Exceptional) Society is also under surveillance, and that our corporate-government is a -- or perhaps the -- leading purveyor and employer of surveillance technology is much less of a surprise than our media is making it out to be. We knew, but we made less of it, for the most part, than apparently we are supposed to now that we really know.

Yet there is no plan or movement to reduce or eliminate mass surveillance, quite the opposite. Instead, we are seeing any number of calls to restrict surveillance activities of government while leaving in place or even expanding corporate surveillance -- on the false premise that corporate surveillance is benign. It is not. It is extraordinarily invasive and potentially more dangerous to individual liberty ("") than anything the government might be able to do. Which is of course why corporate surveillance gets a pass.

The current drive for online privacy has many components, of course. One of them is intended to make it difficult or impossible for government to have access to certain aspects of one's life online, akin to the constitutional restrictions placed on government regarding reasonable search and seizure of one's home, papers, and effects requiring a warrant issued by a competent court before any such action can be taken. This is the Fourth Amendment restriction -- which unfortunately has been so riddled with holes and exceptions that it's all but moot in today's world. If some court actually wants to return the 4th to something akin to its original intent, I'm all for it, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

Meanwhile, it's hard to imagine real online privacy unless the whole architecture of the internet is reconfigured to provide it, and I don't see that happening any time soon, either. Well, at least not on the "free" internet that most of us use.

There could well be another, "secure" internet established for use by "members," say by subscription -- and I'm not so naive to imagine such a thing doesn't already exist in some respects, I'm just noodling for the moment. This is where I see the "privacy" movement (such as it is) headed. We'll have a two-tier "public access" internet, part of which is "free" -- in that use does not require payment (whereas access still will) and which is essentially open to corporate-government surveillance, and there will be another, more costly, internet (parts of which already exist) that is not quite so open -- though still not entirely secure -- for use by those who choose what we might call a higher level of service, and there will be a multiplicity of proprietary, highly secure, internets not available or accessible to the public at all, which will be used by the High and the Mighty. All of these things are essentially already in place, they just need some tweaking to become the standard.

When the Snowden Thing first broke, Naomi Wolf expressed some reservations about it based on her personal knowledge of whistleblowers and how they had approached their duties and actions in the past. The Snowden Thing was a distinct outlier compared to previous episodes of whistleblowing. She noodled for a bit wondering why it might be so, and she suggested that there might be an ulterior reason for exposing the doings of the NSA in the way it was being done: when people know they are being watched -- or rather, can be watched at will -- they tend to modify their behavior, "conform" in a word, almost instinctively. Letting people know that the NSA was "watching" them was, she thought, a useful way to ensure conformity. It's based on human psychology and the principles behind the Panopticon.

Snowden partisans immediately denounced and smeared Wolf for daring to raise questions about the true nature of the Snowden Thing. It was done in a manner that formed the template for denouncing and smearing anyone who expressed reservations about Snowden's motives or authenticity. These denunciations are a form of propaganda -- quite obvious to anyone who has made a study of propaganda and its effects -- a form that was raised to practically an art form by previous totalitarian regimes (Stalin, Hitler, Mao...) and it's effective, at least for a time.

And then it isn't.

Let Us Reason Together -- Things Fall Apart (4)

The heat of the Omidyar/Greenwald "partnership for a new global media" hasn't produced any light at all to date, and given Twit Trends, it may never. There is something going on that we, the Rabble, are not privy to. What it is may never be revealed, but the signs aren't looking very promising right now.

"Pierre" has never had any kind of public profile or persona to speak of. He's always been in the shadows -- at least until recently. Now that he's declared his intentions, however, he's come under a lot of scrutiny, from people already in the media (such as Mark Ames and Yasha Levine who've been plugging away on the oligarchy beat for many a long year) and many others.

Greenwald has a long and storied history of turning on, attacking and smearing individuals who are natural allies in what he says he wants, in the quest for civil rights and liberties, and in the realms of media, law, and justice.

Together, the scrutiny of "Pierre's" dealings with the world and his companies' actions (particularly eBay and PayPal -- but there is more, much more) and Greenwald's... social difficulties... seem to be combining into a perfect storm that may lead to the undoing of the "new global media" venture before it even goes live for the first time.

The difficulty of the project was inherent, of course. The idea of forming a media partnership with a somewhat shadowy billionaire to concentrate on investigative journalism exposing government secrets and wrongdoing sounds pretty straightforward and necessary... until...

When you realize that "government" is operating today essentially as a service to and adjunct of corporate interests and power, the notion of exposing its secrets and wrongdoing may not be what it initially appears to be, especially when the exposition is being underwritten by one of the oligarchs (for that is what "Pierre" truly is) who is intimately involved in the nexus of government-corporate power through his companies and apparently through his charities as well.

If you don't ask what the intent is and just blindly and mindlessly accept that any exposure of government secrets and wrongdoing is a priori a Good Thing, then you probably don't understand the nature of government operations today and the many connections between corporations and government that have almost completely blurred the lines between the two.

To set an objective of exposing "government" secrets and wrongdoing while not mentioning the level of corporate control of the governments under which we live, suggests that the real intent of this "new global media" venture is to enhance corporate power and authority and diminish (perhaps extinguish) "government" authority over certain corporations.

Ultimately, one has to ask, "Is it all that wise to sacrifice what little government power and authority remains and submit entirely to corporate authority and control?"

I always ask, when people are pontificating about 'civil liberties' -- "Liberty for whom? To do what?" They never have an answer. But in Greenwald's case, it has long been clear that he is an advocate of "liberating" corporate interest from government control or authority, and he has little or no interest in personal liberties beyond his own. His defense of the abomination of the Citizens United decision was a clear enough indication of where his sympathies lay. And it's not with the People at all.

This may be why, in some measure, he tends to alienate so many people who would otherwise be his natural allies.

On the other hand, "Pierre" and his various enterprises (including a small media venture in Hawaii) seem to be allied with the National Security State in many intricate and intimate ways. The prosecution of the PayPal 14 is one of the highest profile examples of that alliance.

And that's where things have started falling apart.

Alexa O'Brien, who is as dogged and intrepid a New Media journalist as there is, who calls them as she sees them, covered the trial of the PayPal 14 and was horrified at the case presented by PayPal -- owned by "Pierre" -- that asserted falsehoods and damages that were never done, insisted on prosecution for relatively minor online offenses, and required severe punishment for those involved. Wait, said Alexa, this is wrong. This is corporate wrongdoing on a significant scale and an abomination. "Pierre" is involved in this matter, and his companies are pursuing to the limit these individuals that did not damage him or his companies in any sensible way but who fought back against his blockade of WikiLeaks, a rival in the "new global media of wrongdoing" game...

And Greenwald is now linked with this outfit?

She called "Pierre" out on it, and she's called Greenwald out on it. How can you be against "government" secrets and wrongdoing while protecting the kind of corporate viciousness she's seen in full cry in the case of the PayPal blockade of WikiLeaks and the trial of the PayPal 14?

She gave an interview in Germany (Episode 105: Jung und Naiv) in which she reiterated her reservations (linked in a previous post) about "Pierre" and his new media venture and refusing to endorse it or Greenwald's participation in it.

Shortly, Greenwald and O'Brien met on Twitter and had at one another in a very public spat in which, apparently, Greenwald was so rattled, he outright lied about whether Alexa had ever raised the PayPal 14 issue with him when he spoke to her about joining the New Media Conglomerate.

Understandably, Alexa is pissed.

Greenwald has a tendency to double down in these sorts of situations, so I wouldn't be surprised to see him smearing Alexa in numerous full-throated denunciations. It never seems to matter to him who he alienates or what sort of wreckage he leaves behind him as long as he gets what he wants. Which -- among other things -- is power, fame, and money.

Alexa is strong. Greenwald is ruthless.

And "Pierre" wants... what?* Well, that remains to be seen, doesn't it? But from the signs he wants to make government subject and subservient to his demands.

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Oh, and any bets on how soon Snowden is offered immunity and repatriated?
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* The intimacy with which "Pierre's" companies are allied with the Security/Surveillance State is a subject of a good deal of crowd-sourced research at the moment. Every day, something new comes to light, as should be expected given the depth of penetration the Oligarchy has among those who surveil us and secure them from us. There seem to be a number of overlaps -- shall we say -- between Omidyar's empire and that of the Booz Allen investment conglomerate (IIRC, Booz is wholly partially owned by Carlyle, but I could be misremembering [Indeed].)  In other words, my speculation the other day that perhaps Snowden and "Pierre" hooked up in Hawaii well before the Revelations of the Story of the Century, LLC™ may be at least partially correct. It's hard to believe there would be "no knowledge" between them given their proximity and their co-interests. Ahem. (Did they [Snowden/Pierre] meet in a Honolulu strip club? "It would be irresponsible not to speculate..." Heh.)

But time will tell. Unraveling this thing is going to take a great deal of investigative journalism, and we can bet that none of the principals in First Look will have the slightest interest in doing it.

Clever.

This particular document may be getting close to the "smoking gun..."

 http://www.minds.com/blog/view/264199355085361152/5-unnerving-documents-showing-ties-between-greenwald-omidyar-and-booz-allen-hamilton

Let Us Reason Together -- The Pope In Rome and Other Things of Interest and Import (3)

I gave up on the Catholic Church too many years ago to count, as have many nominal Cat-licks. There's just no way to maintain one's faith in the face of an institution so rotten to the core.

And then comes Francis, Pope in Rome, to seem to say, "Well, what is to be done, then? What are we to do about it, eh?"

Left to their own devices, institutions -- whether the Church (yes, I still call it that) or governments or major market enterprises -- fail. They fail themselves, they fail their duty, their communities, and in the case of the greatest institutions, they fail the world.

I've written fairly extensively since about 2000 on the topic of The Failure of Institutions in the post-modern era. The Catholic Church seemed to be leading the way, demonstrating daily how to fail monumentally... and yet survive. Hollowed out, perhaps. Irrelevant. But still there.

So here we had a case of a Nazi-Pope retiring... and a new fellow from Argentina, well known around the Curia but hardly known to the public outside Buenos Aires, being elected Pope and all of a sudden he's out there using his bully pulpit not so much to condemn and denounce and demean and discourage (Benedict, creature of the Inquisition, never could get over that part of his "ministry") as to uplift and encourage and call out the real evils that have for too long been tolerated if not actively undertaken by his Holy Institution. It's time for change.

And so, millions of people around the world, Catholic and no, have hope again, whereas many of those who have given up on the Church are in wonder at this man and his humility, his humor and his good cheer. Hope that he will reform the Church? No. Not that. But at least he might put a more human face on it. Somewhat less ghoulish is always good, yes?

Meanwhile, the mean people are OUTRAGED!!!!™ It's hard to explain what a big change this is, for until very, very recently, it was the good people who were constantly seething with impotent rage at the blindness and cruelties of their Betters. That the good people should be in a constant state of rage and rebellion at the depredations of the Overclass, but would never be able to do anything about it was taken for granted as the way things were supposed to be. The Overclass laughed at the impotence of the masses, remember? It wasn't all that long ago.

And then comes Francis and says, "You know, this has got to change." The world turned upside down.

Behold.

The cruelties haven't ended, but the Overclass isn't laughing any more. And more and more, governments are once again wondering if they should actually pay attention to their people rather than continue to rule contrary to the public interest.


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"Other things to come."

Let Us Reason Together -- New Year Edition (2)

The Obamacare Clusterfuck is perhaps the second most media-watched and driven story of 2013, but the realities of it will only start hitting home this year (Happy New Year!!!), and as they do, the horror of it all is liable to mount exponentially. Which is not to say that things were so much better Before Obamacare. They weren't. For millions, they were worse. Now, for other millions they're getting worse.

First of all, this thing costs a fortune in diamonds, rubies, emeralds and pearls to deliver essentially nothing more than "peace of mind." That is to say, those who get "insurance" through this boondoggle will receive in return the joy of knowing they have "insurance" that pays for approximately nothing until they have already spent every dime they have or are ever likely to have; and the joy of it is that hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month go to the "insurance" companies for each and every one of these essentially worthless policies, month in and month out, year in and year out. It's one of the most astonishing domestic scams ever pulled on the public of this country, and everyone involved in its creation and implementation knew exactly what they were doing.

As Americans recognize just what a scam this is, I wonder what sort of fallout there will be.

By now everyone knows that the correct, final and only real answer to the health care issue in this country is what eventually came to be called "Medicare for All." In other words, everyone qualifies for Medicare the instant they are born, and they never lose it throughout their lives. If they or their parents wish them to have additional coverage, they are free to obtain it on the insurance market, but at the very least they will be covered for most medical expenses from the time they are born until they die. This is not rocket science. It's simple, straightforward, and to the point.

We are told over and over again that such a thing is "politically impossible," but we're never told why. We're just supposed to believe there is no way in hell that We, the Rabble, will ever get out from under the insurance industry yoke, so better just get over it.

Once the full impact -- and expense to the individual -- of Obamacare starts hitting home, I doubt our political class, for once in their useless lives, will be able to resist the backlash, but you never know.

They say that 2014 could well result in a worse "shellacking" for Dems than 2010 did. Could be. On the other hand, the whole political class needs to be shellacked this election year, from top to bottom, red and blue alike, as do their pestiferous funders and owners. We may reach the tipping point.

Happy New Year.

Let Us Reason Together -- Year End Edition (1)

This has been quite an exciting year, hasn't it?

Nothing quite like it has come down the pike in quite a long time, and how all the various elements fit together, providing they do, is yet to be seen.

The highest profile "news" story was of course the Summer Splash of the Snowden Thing. Pssst: The NSA is spying on you..." Yes, it is. Well, maybe not on you personally, but then again, maybe yes, on you.  Personally.

We already knew that practically anything we did on the Internet was an open book to spooks and marketers, we've known it for years. Sometimes we've even made use of that knowledge to freak out both the spooks and the marketeers, sometimes with hilarious results. So it was passing strange, in my book, that the Summer Story of the Century became such a cause célèbre throughout the latter half of the year. Of course, the drama of it all, the cat-and-mouse, the jajaja, the personalities of the players, and the government response all made for an excellent narrative, and that's what media sells these days, so it will probably continue for quite a little while to come.

The entry of "Pierre" Omidyar into the fray, by setting up a high profile media shop specifically for Greenwald's continued... erm... pleasure ... added a whole other layer to the frolic and frenzy. (I should note that I use "Pierre" in air quotes because of a wonderful interview (the interview has been reclassified "unlisted," so sharing is discouraged) Alexa O'Brien did with Stanley Cohen regarding the PayPal 14, who plead out on really nasty charges brought by "Pierre's" PayPal against them for interfering with their work product.  Or something. Cohen uses air quotes throughout when mentioning "Pierre" and given the fact that the man himself doesn't have much of a public persona or profile, it seems appropriate to follow in the tradition...)

This media firestorm (which I indelicately called a "Summer Shark and Missing White Boy Story" throughout its summertime incarnation) led to a rather remarkable Study Group and Report by insiders commissioned by the White House and released the day after the President invited the highest ranks of the Silicon Valley nobility to meet with him and reason together on what should be done now with regard to the Surveillance/Security State under which we are all privileged to live. Praise Be and Bow Down.

After reading the Report, I came to the conclusion that much of it had been pre-prepared and that the upshot of it all is to move the discomforting aspects of mass surveillance out of the purview of the NSA and put them into other cubby-holes where they can be better monitored or at least left to fester. Or something . 

Whatever the case, there is no indication whatsoever that any of the powers usurped by the Surveillance/Security State will be curtailed let alone abolished. 

Now it should be noted that in all the firestorm and frenzy over the Snowden Thing, there has never been even a hint of interest by the principals, Snowden, Greenwald, Poitras, et al, of loosening the grip of the Surveillance/Security State on the masses. Hardly. All they EVER wanted, they have said over and over, was an "informed debate" over the issue of mass surveillance, and having now had that debate, Snowden now asserts his goal has been accomplished. 

All righty then.

That was quick and efficient, wasn't it? Don't you feel better? I sure do. /s

Whew!


"One Nation, Under Surveillance...." ♫That's America to Meeeeeee....♬

Surveillance of the whole population is not going away, no matter what; who controls it and what is done with the data will be adjusted to better comport with the interests and desires of the SV nobility. You -- and I -- will have nothing substantive to say about it. Have a nice day. Terms and conditions apply.☺

Assuming for the moment that I am correct and the Surveillance/Security State will not be compromised or go away in our lifetimes, but that it will be reconfigured for the comfort and convenience of Our Betters -- as all things always are -- how would one prefer to be surveilled? Would you prefer surveillance conducted by and for the government or by and for corporate interests?

That's the choice, the only real choice, we're being offered.

Myself, I don't much care for either alternative, but as in the case of elections, we don't really have an option, and unlike elections, we can't really opt out -- without completely altering one's lifestyle and location, and essentially disappearing. Well, that may be the option many choose in the not too distant future, but so far, we're not quite there yet.

The upshot of the Snowden Thing, it seems to me, is that in the near-term surveillance of the Rabble will be undertaken by and on behalf of corporate interests (and let's not forget that "Pierre's" eBay and PayPal are huge and global players in this endeavor) with ever greater restrictions put in place on government access to this data. Basically, the idea will be that the private sector will track and compile data on everyone (as they do now) and that only when the private sector interests suspect evildoing by an individual will their data be turned over to government for pursuit and prosecution. This is pretty much the current eBay/PayPal model as it is, though according to Mark Ames, eBay/PayPal is quite amenable to turning over user data when governments suspect the evildoing by users. It's all very merry. And according to some eBay/PayPal users, part of the business model for these outfits is routine closure of accounts and theft of assets. Oh my! Could it be? Apparently it is, but my accounts with PayPal have long been empty, so I wouldn't exactly know.

Now I say that "no surveillance" is the correct approach, at least as an interim measure, but my Betters tell me that is not on the table for consideration. The only thing we get to choose from is whether the dominant party in the Surveillance/Security State shall be the "government" or corporate interests. With the intent of diminishing "government" participation to the extent possible, to be involved only at the beck and occasional call of the corporate sector.

As handmaidens to corporations, we already know how useless to the People our governments have become. There is no sign at all that this will change, and there is no sign at all that either Snowden, Greenwald, or "Pierre" have any interest in changing it. If anything, the signs are they wish to ensure the continued diminution of "government" in the face of corporate power. 

So.... what do we do about it?

That question will have to wait for the New Year for deeper consideration...

Episode 105: Tilo Jung Interviews Alexa O'Brien Re: "Pierre"

It was largely through Alexa's Twitter exchanges with "Pierre" (we don't know who is actually Twitting for Omidyar, but it is likely not himself) that the world and WikiLeaks learned, much to its amazement, that PayPal was not "blockading" WikiLeaks at all, pfft, what an idea, the very thought of it made "Pierre" shudder. Figuratively. Alexa and WikiLeaks probed and probed, but got no satisfactory response regarding this remarkable revision of history. All "Pierre" would say is that WikiLeaks should try setting up a PayPal account again, because there would be no "blockade." WikiLeaks apparently demurred. So it's on them, if they don't use PayPal, not "Pierre," for he is manfully not -- at all -- athwart the barricades.

In this episode of Jung und Naiv, the intrepid but disinterested Tilo interviews Alexa O'Brien about this and other matters of potential interest. I thought the close was priceless: she has enormous respect for Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras. Unmentioned is Greenwald. Skewer thrust, perhaps?



There is also a longer interview with Ms O'Brien mostly regarding the Manning revelations and trial.

Mark Ames Explains It All For You

"Yeah, but... what do we do about it?"

One of the most often heard complaints about Greenwald's longstanding rage against government -- almost never corporate -- abuses of power is his determined failure to provide any course of action or recommendations for effective remedy.

Which is not to say he hasn't provided any outlets for frustration, far from it. He's been instrumental in setting up or participating in all sorts of supposed political action outfits, and is always encouraging donations to them as a means of Being Effective Against The Man, but exactly what they accomplish is subject to dispute. Certainly the very expensive efforts engaged in to bring down Blanche Lincoln and Joe Lieberman didn't accomplish what was being touted by a long shot. For the most part, Greenwald simply demurred when asked what he thought should be or could be done about all the many things he was OUTRAGED!!!!!™ about.

Mark Ames now at Pando.com has few qualms about either raging at The Man or suggesting remedies for the many OUTRAGES!!!!!™ We, the People endure at the whims of Our Betters.

In his latest, he runs through some of the less-known history of the NSA and previous revelations about its, erm... overreach.

Actually, I knew a bit of it, but he goes into much more detail than I was aware of previously. It's not so much surprising as it is confirmational and disheartening.

These agencies are rotten to the core, steeped in their own Original Sin and so far as can be determined, they cannot be reformed.

The Report I read in the days leading up to Christmas makes many, many recommendations about how to reform the NSA and other agencies that have overreached but it never suggests that the powers which have been assumed by them should be abolished. Instead, the recommendations are to transfer them to more appropriate locations within the surveillance state apparatus or outside it to a private entity.

This, as Ames points out, has been done before, only to later discover that the Hydra has regrown its heads and is more powerful and invasive than ever.

So, what to do about it?

Unfortunately, this time Ames has no solution -- nor much snark about it, either.

He's as stumped as anyone else.

So what happened to the abolitionists?

Oh Yes They Can -- Or Zombie Lies That Never Die

One of the persistent myths that we hear all the time in connection with the Snowden Thing is that corporate surveillance is Oh So Benign whereas government surveillance is the Epitome of Evil because "only government has the power to arrest, incarcerate, and kill you."

This is utter unadulterated horseshit, as anyone who has lived in the real world for any length of time, or anyone who's read a book or two (what are books?) for that matter, ought to know all too well. In fact, I look for this line of "reasoning" nowadays, because I figure this little bit of corporate nonsense spew comes straight out of "Reason" magazine as well as the other Corporate Libertarian stink-tanks, of which there are many, almost too many to count.

Corporations very much can engage in arrest, incarceration and execution, with or without the let of the State, as they have been doing since their origin. Letting the private sector do it, after all, washes the hands of government for such wet work and nasty business which was one of the advantages of creating the corporate sector in the first place.

But these powers and authorities are no historical artifact, never employed today. Far from it. Many towns and some cities in the US have privatized their police forces, and every corporate facility is guarded by private security forces, many of which are armed and are authorized to use deadly force. This is not The Government, this is Corporate, through and through.

The idea that these private forces would only act to protect from some crime in progress on their own property, as any private citizen has the perfect right to do, is naive in the extreme. It's based on fantasies, not fact. The corporate sector, but not necessarily individuals, conducts surveillance, investigation and arrest at will, simply because it can. The notion that they don't or can't is absurd, and the notion that they only do it for "benign" commercial purposes -- to learn what your purchasing wants are and offer you goods and services to meet those desires -- is deep in error. They want to know everything about you in order to control you.

Oh.

"Just like the government."

Yes.

They can and do arrest one -- with their private armed forces -- whenever it suits them. Surely you've seen suspected shoplifters being cuffed and hauled into the interrogation rooms beside the entrances to Target and other major retailers. That isn't being done by undercover police, that is being done by security personnel employed by Target or whatever. The public police may be called and the suspect may be hauled off to jail, but the apprehension is done by corporate cops. This can happen on suspicion.

There are extensive "crime fighting" private surveillance and investigation networks, some with global reach, which can and do look into every aspect of a targeted individual's life -- without warrants, let it be noted -- and which can produce complete dossiers on anyone. Those dossiers can be and are sold to interested parties, including governments, but they are typically produced by request of and payment by corporate sector interests (such as insurance companies and the like) for the purpose of making some poor sod's life miserable, a sod who has displeased some corporate master or other.

Corporations work hand in glove with (public) law enforcement agencies which in effect serve at the pleasure of the corporate sector and as an extension of corporate power and authority. This is perhaps their most insidious measure because the appearance is that a (public) law enforcement agency is in charge of surveillance, investigation, apprehension, and arrest of an individual when they're not. They are acting at the direction of and with information provided by a corporate entity. They are taking action as extensions of corporate power and authority. This is so utterly routine, most of us take it for granted, but all by itself, it puts the lie to the notion that corporate surveillance is "benign." It isn't.

There are private courts which exist in many cases to ensure that individuals do not have the right to adjudication of complaints against corporations in courts of law, but must submit to corporate-courts instead. Some of these private courts, however, exist to handle parts of the (public) justice system's "overload." In other words, they have all the powers and authorities of Government courts, though they are not Government, and they are not answerable to the People.

Just so, there are extensive private corporate owned and operated prisons, which also have all the powers and authorities over inmates as any Government Prison might have, if not in fact more, and yet they are not Government and they are not answerable to the People.

We could go on and on detailing just how pervasive corporate control of citizens and governments is in this country, but the point I'm making is that the claim that corporate surveillance is "benign" because corporations don't have the powers of arrest, incarceration and life/death over individuals is a lie, straight out. In many cases, they do, and they use it.

And of course, there is the model private sector quasi-government enforcement agency, the so-called Mafia. Someone will run around screaming, "But that's illegal!!!!!" Yes? And?

----------------------------
NOTE: This post leaves aside the whole corporate subversion of national sovereignty issue embodied in the proliferating free trade agreements and intellectual property protective measures being bruited in various fora as we speak -- fora that are closed to the public, of course. In many of these cases, government power and authority is specifically ceded to corporate interests, which are then authorized to act as if they were government, without let or hindrance.

--------------------------------------------------------
ADDITIONAL NOTE: Yasha Levine at Pando.com expands on the premise of this post with plenty of examples of corporate ability have people... erm... put away. It's a nasty business. And he points out that Young Snowden, like nearly all his partisans, dismiss the problem of corporate surveillance with an airy wave and a jolly, "Corps can't kill ya!" Ha. Utter horseshit.

The Delivery That Doesn't Come

As we know, millions of Americans are still waiting for the delivery of Christmas gifts. I'm one of them.

A gift was ordered a couple of weeks ago for pre-Christmas delivery via FedEx. To date, it still isn't here, though supposedly it left Albuquerque at 4:00am today for delivery... sometime.

We know not when though "Saturday" was listed as the "probable delivery date." Maybe. Who knows?

I loved the excuses UPS and FedEx had ready: "there was so much bad weather and so many more people ordered stuff online we just couldn't get your stuff to you before Christmas. Too bad, so sad."

Contrast that with the unofficial Post Office motto:

"Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night, stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." - Herodotus, 503 B.C.

Perhaps UPS and FedEx will assure us they'll do better-- promise --once the Post Office goes out of business.

FedEx has been the worst, airily proclaiming that the company "experienced no major service disruptions in the week before Christmas despite heavy volume. Every single package is important to us, and we will continue to work directly with customers to address any isolated incidents."

http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-ups-fedex-apologize-late-christmas-deliveries-20131226,0,691597.story#ixzz2ooZleCDi

.. so what? Big deal. Get over it.

At least UPS has had the balls to apologize, but still, it seems perfectly obvious what happened.

The private sector delivery services decided that maximizing profits were more important that customer service, and so they didn't hire enough people and they didn't contract for enough extra vehicles to handle the expected holiday volume of packages quickly and efficiently enough to get them to their destinations as promised, and they didn't bother to accurately update their customers on the whereabouts of their items. But they charged full price -- and even a premium -- for inadequate service, and even if they wind up refunding some shipping charges, they will still make out like the bandits they have decided to be.

It's that simple.

What we will find after this experiment in making people miserable and getting away with it is that in the future, "guaranteed delivery" will mean, "maybe" -- sorta/kinda -- in that ballpark, give or take ten days. But if you pay enough and have a private account, anything might be delivered within the hour.

Two tiers.

Don't you see?

Ho ho ho, the yoke's on us.

----------------------------------------------
UPDATE:  Ho ho ho, little did I know.

The Package, this package which was ordered for Christmas delivery, didn't arrive until December 30, and I had to go pick it up. At the Post Office. It was ordered from Vermont Country Store on December 17, and was shipped by them, they said via FedEx Ground, on December 18. Expected arrival, December 23. It took a week longer and I had to pick it up because it was actually shipped via FedEx under contract to the Post Office, and that the shipper of record was the Post Office, not FedEx, although the tracking information was via FedEx. In fact, there was no sign on our end that this was not a regular FedEx shipment. Apparently the package was delivered to a sorting facility in Denver on Dec 20 where it then sat until Dec 26, when it left for Albuquerque, where it arrived on December 27. It went out from Albuquerque on the way to our local Post Office on December 28 (as we were informed it would "probably" be delivered Saturday Dec 28 -- after sitting in Denver for almost a week), but the local Post Office is closed on Saturday. There is no home postal delivery in this area; we have to go to the Post Office to pick up our mail. FedEx, of course, ordinarily doesn't home deliver on Saturdays unless with specific instructions. So even if it had been shipped via FedEx alone and not under contract with the Post Office, there would have been little or no chance of receiving it on Saturday, Dec. 28 in any case. The tracking information was updated on Monday, Dec. 30, to read "Delivery exception -- see your Post Office to pick up or call to reschedule delivery." First we knew that the Post Office had anything to do with it. I go to the Post Office, and sure enough, there's the package, with no sign whatsoever that FedEx had ever handled it at all. All the labels, everything, say USPS. Very intriguing. I knew that the Post Office used FedEx when volume is high, but I thought the point of doing so is not to delay but to expedite shipments. (The Federal Government uses FedEx rather than the Post Office for sending many -- we might even say most -- paper communications between offices. It's a very cozy deal for FedEx.)   In this case, it seemed the delay in Denver was quite deliberate, one might say strategic, on the part of FedEx, for the Post Office would receive the blame, no?  Of course....

Stretch Goals: Young Snowden Comes Again

Ack! Emmanuel Goldstein Lives!@!

By now perhaps, everybody who's interested has read Barton Gellman's extended pre-Christmas interview with (and paean to) Young Snowden in the WaPo, and many have probably also seen Snowden's Alternative Christmas Message to Britain. (How very.... erm, Alt-Royal of him, né?)

The message is strong and rather clear, if you listen with cocked ears and pay attention to nuance and verbiage.

While many wonder about the subtext in the Intelligence Community Review Panel Report, which is really quite a radical document when you get past the fact that it's come out of the government itself and most of the panel members are tied directly into the Surveillance State, the subtext running rampant through the Snowden "availabilities" is glaring, and to many, it's pretty obvious.

We could go back to Snowden's initial interviews in Hong Kong with Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, but I would dearly love to have been a fly on the wall of the interviews he gave to Guardian editors in New York before that. That was when The Story of the Century (as it has been dubbed by some wags) was solidified and massaged into its soon-to-be world wide media firestorm form. Listen carefully to what Rusbridger and Gibson say to Charlie Rose about meeting with Snowden in New York before he went to Hong Kong, how they decided to make this the story it's become, and notice how Greenwald practically doesn't figure in it at all. It's almost as if Greenwald were little more than a pawn in a much larger game the Guardian was playing.

But as we make note of these things, let's be clear about British media, including the Guardian. They don't always tell the truth. Part of the British media culture is fantabulism, what we would call "making shit up." We saw some of this more openly than usual during Rusbridger's flailing accounts of the "Government" ordering the destruction of computers at the Guardian which supposedly contained the Forbidden Snowden Materials, a story which suddenly "appeared" out of nowhere amid the report of the somewhat theatrical detention of David Miranda at Heathrow. After withholding the story for months, Rusbridgers accounts of what had happened (and his phony "evidence" thereof) simply stank to high heaven, to coin a phrase, and if they were intended to do anything but distract from the Miranda story, it seemed to be for a specific audience's entertainment. (I would say it was a fabricated incident that was intended either to cover up something else or to make clear to the Authorities that the Guardian was no longer in possession of any pertinent Snowden material -- if it ever had any to begin with.)

It may well be that the Guardian never had possession of the Snowden documents, that no media outlet has ever had possession, and that the documents have only been in the possession of a handful of journalists, Greenwald, Poitras and Gellman among them.

So what have the ongoing theatrics been about?

Well, of course, they are necessary for marketing purposes. You cannot keep the story in the public eye for very long without a dramatic arc. So it has been. But at the same time, there has been remarkably little revealed that wasn't already pretty well understood by those who care about matters of surveillance and privacy. It was already well understood, or it should have been, given all the stories in the media  (including frequently in Greenwald's columns) about it prior to the Snowden Emergence, that one literally has no privacy in electronic communications and has very little privacy in any other kind of communications. "Rights" to privacy are a matter of government and private sector whim, the amount of money one has, and one's ability to thwart the all-pervasive Surveillance State under which more and more inhabitants of the earth now live. Every bit of one's life is liable to become part of the Surveillance State's data hoard, and there is essentially nothing most individuals can do to prevent it.

Public and private sector data acquisition and storage on every one of us for all kinds of purposes has been built in to the architecture of the Internet, and it's not going away.

This was known in general years before Young Snowden's advent, something that's been pointed out repeatedly but is routinely scoffed at by Snowden/Greenwald partisans in and out of the media. "Yes, but..." is the typical opening the scoffers use, "you didn't have documentary proof until Snowden came forth, so you actually knew nothing. Bow down."

This, of course, is horseshit. The presence or absence of documentary proof in these situations -- especially when there is all kinds of other evidence to draw on, including reams of testimony -- has little effect on the truth of the matter. In fact, relying on documents to the exclusion of testimony, which became the MO of the Snowden camp, can rapidly obscure the truth. Which may have been the point all along.

As I saw what was going on, I became more and more alarmed. The obsessive focus on the NSA in the summer's stories was obscuring the truth about the extent and pervasiveness of the Surveillance State. Surveillance by the private sector is the aspect that affects most people directly, daily, and constantly. Local and other law enforcement surveillance, not directly connected with the NSA data accumulation, is the next level of surveillance that has a broad effect on individuals. There are many other forms of government surveillance that affect individuals all the time, from the IRS and state and local taxing authorities, to the Social Security Administration, to the Census Bureau and Post Office. This government surveillance activity is going on all the time and can have interesting and sometimes severe consequences on individuals and as well as whole communities.

At no point during the obsession with NSA surveillance was the pervasive extent of public and private surveillance made clear in the major mass media outlets hawking the Snowden Revelation stories. It still hasn't been. Now and then, there would be brief mention of law enforcement and private sector cooperation with the NSA (though how it worked was never entirely clarified), and occasional mention would be made of FBI overreach and misbehavior, but beyond that, practically nothing was said about the Surveillance State as a whole and how it interrelates and interacts to affect and control so many people's lives.

So much was being left deliberately unsaid, it seemed to me the point of the firestorm was to enable something (I knew not what) to take place in the shadows, protected from view by the glare of the NSA scandal spotlight.

Comes Snowden in his Gellman interview and he seems to be acknowledging there was "something else" on the agenda.

Yes, well. That was obvious.

But what was/is it?

Let us examine. There is this term, for example, that Snowden uses in one of his more widely quoted quotes:

““For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” he said. “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember,

I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”

“All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed,” he said. “That is a milestone we left a long time ago. Right now, all we are looking at are stretch goals.” Washington Post

And what, we may ask are these "stretch goals" of which he speaks?

Well, there's no way of knowing what he's referring to exactly, as he seems to speak in koans and technobabble when not declaiming a prepared text, but the term "stretch goals" is something to be wary of. As I understand it, it's a business term that is a way to demand the impossible from staff, primarily sales staff, as a means to ensure "creative" thinking about problems. So if all we are looking at now are "stretch goals" -- the mission having been accomplished -- then perhaps he's describing the motivation for this whole affair.

As has been pointed out a number of times, neither Snowden nor Greenwald have ever called for the abolition of the Surveillance/Security State, far from it. All they've ever said they wanted was for the public to be well informed enough about the surveillance they are under to have a "debate" about it. Greenwald said a couple of weeks ago that the "debate" has happened (though how it could when 90% or more of what actually constitutes the Surveillance State has been largely ignored), and Snowden is now claiming his "mission" is complete.

The Surveillance State "debate" has led to a number of proposals in congress, and to an extensive report to the President regarding recommendations for "reform" of the intelligence community. Apparently, that's all that the makers of this hoo-hah ever wanted from the  public disclosure of some of the NSA materials Snowden took but says he no longer has.

Of course there is the little matter of Omidyar's Baby HuffPo -- which may or may not ever see the light of day -- and what it will be devoted to, but at this point, what its function may be in realizing Snowden's "stretch goals" is anyone's guess. From outward appearances, it may have nothing to do with them.

According to what I have recently read, the Omidyar First Look Media Project was initially incorporated in Delaware in August, well before Greenwald and "Pierre" say that they came together for this very purpose. Because incorporation takes a while, especially in a case as complex as the Omidyar project, it's likely that the project was greenlighted sometime in the spring or even earlier, which would be about the time that Snowden went to work for Booz Allen in Hawaii and began collecting documents about the NSA's overreach. Just as a side note "Pierre" has a home and a media outlet in Hawaii. Whether Snowden was aware of it, I don't know, although I assume everyone in Hawaii knows about it.

Wouldn't it be something if this whole thing was engineered by "Pierre" -- whose companies are supposedly tied in rather intimately with the Security/Surveillance State in somewhat unusual and surprising ways -- as an exercise in Billionaire Power over government?

Oh. My...


And the "stretch goals" of this exercise would be???

Christmas Comes Again

Polaroid Christmas Tree

We spent a couple of hours up in Santa Fe yesterday participating in the Annual Canyon Road Farolito Walk, a tradition we have adopted it would seem, just for the joy of it all. Tens of thousands of area residents and tourists fill narrow and often dark Canyon Road from adobe wall to adobe wall, making for some tricky maneuvering to get from place to place. Some of the galleries are open for the evening, serving biscochitos and hot cider, but many are only open for "private parties" -- parties that look to consist of no more than a handful of clients, each one hoping to be persuaded that this or that painting or sculpture is perfect for their abode or garden or to give as a gift to someone deeply loved.

Santa Fe has produced galleries on an industrial scale. I've overheard tourists complain that "there's nothing but galleries!" in the City Different's historic district, and if you expect to find anything but galleries along Canyon Road, you're probably going to be disappointed. Well, there are a few expensive restaurants where the movie stars and ricos eat out of an evening from time to time between galleries, so there is that.

Galleries mean artists and art-making on an industrial scale as well, and I've had more than a few misgivings about that. It means that much of what is in the galleries is essentially the same. Not just the same sorts of art, but done in the same styles, the same sizes, the same prices, the same display techniques, etc. Often enough, the galleries will even show the same artists. Meaning whoever is huge at the moment.

We do have our favorites, however, and even though most of the galleries in Santa Fe are practically indistinguishable from one another (as is the case in practically every art market) there are some that stand out.

Among those we visited last night are the Chalk Farm Gallery, Lone Dog Noise Cat, and Ed Larson's Art, as cheery a studio/gallery as I've ever seen.

Chalk Farm was showing "Polar Express," which was kind of fun. It is a supremely gorgeous place, unique in Santa Fe and probably among galleries anywhere, very welcoming, embracing you might say.

Lone Dog Noise Cat is a relatively new gallery on Delgado Street off Canyon Road, and it had to have been the hopping-est place of the night, people coming and going constantly and everyone enjoying the "neo-ab-Original" art and the glee and welcome of the gallery proprietors. The gallery dog Angus was having more fun than practically anyone, while I  had to pose for pictures with some of the gallery visitors due to my Santa-esque appearance. It was fun, and by golly if Ms Ché didn't find a piece she wanted as a Birthday present. Sure enough, she is now the happy owner of a genuine and beautiful hand-made work of Native American art. Heh. The artist himself, Todd (Lone Dog) Bordeaux, sold her the piece and made her day with a whole string of Indian jokes.

There was lots of food at Ed Larson's, tamales and biscochitos, lots of cider, and plenty of charming folk art, all of it done by himself, jamming the place from floor to rafters, and much of it less "folky" than one might expect.

There wasn't as much caroling along the walk this year but there was plenty of conviviality and good cheer,  while the farolitos burned joyfully. At one stop along the route, a stroller asked of the gallery proprietor about the "flying farolitos" which were banned by the fire department two weeks ago. The proprietor seemed to take it in stride, just one of those things, you know, that happens sometimes, he said as he lit his earthbound luminaria, one of several placed around the gallery grounds.

We left before the crowds got too dense, but not before the sky dazzled us once again with the brilliance of the late December heavens, and the smell of pinon wood fires penetrated our clothes and my Santa beard.

There was less caroling this year and no snow or flying farolitos, but as we headed back home, we passed through the little town of Galisteo. In front of the church, Nuestra Senora de los Remedios, burned a half dozen luminaria, as the Christmas Eve bonfires are called in this part of New Mexico, and the road leading to the church was lined for what seemed like hundreds of yards with glowing paper farolitos. The scene was charming and breathtaking at the same time...

Only in New Mexico.

Feliz Navidad!

Byzantium

They Might Be Giants - Istanbul (Not Constantinople) from They Might Be Giants on Vimeo.

Complex systems and the need to stampede...

As I got near the conclusion of "The Report," visions of the Nature of Government began swirling in my brain, and the very Byzantine nature of the Intelligence Community was most definitely highlighted.

If the various elements of the National Security/Surveillance State have been running roughshod and rogue, it's plain to see why. It is in the nature of the beast. Without appropriate and rigorously enforced restraints, they will run wild, there is no way around it.

After 9/11 what minimal restraints they had been under were released, and we now live with the consequences. Reining them back in may prove to be more difficult and problematic than even the panelists on the Review Committee, all of whom have plenty of Deep State experience, recognize.

The key recommendation of The Report is the overhaul and reform of the NSA, essentially re-creating it from the ground up.

Clearly, from this recommendation alone, it's obvious that the Agency has seriously overstepped its bounds and authorities. What Snowden revealed, which seems now to be barely the tip of a very deep bottomed iceberg, barely scratched the surface of what this rogue agency has involved itself in. From the evidence in The Report, it appears that the NSA has violated the trust of the highest levels of the Government itself, and thus must face the consequences.

Seemingly it got that way almost by accident, but it was driven by ethos of the Cheney Faction within government, a faction that recognizes no bounds to its authority in law and custom and which seeks to impose as complete a system of quasi-dictatorial rule as possible. It would appear that the NSA has been seeing itself as the lead agency in that quest. This ethos, such as it is, all goes back to Nixon. Sigh. Will we never be free of it?

But make no mistake. It is in the nature of governmental systems to be this way, especially the more complex they become. It's almost unavoidable. Thus, of course, the key recommendation is to break up the NSA, to curb its tendency to overreach and to apply more rational control over its activities.

A good thing, right?

In a sense, sure. The problem is that once a system like the NSA is allowed to run free as it apparently has been for more than a decade, and once that system has developed extensive tentacles into both the government and the private sectors, as apparently the NSA has, it becomes nearly impossible to reform or remove it without affecting and perhaps damaging the rest of government.

The Report provides a roadmap forward, but it may not actually be possible to follow through. This is due in part to institutional inertia which can become self-perpetuating. Barring a serious and potentially devastating power play within the government (which may indeed be taking place), it may be too late to intervene in the metastasizing Surveillance State.

We may be stuck with what we've got.

I have a few more pages to go before get to the end of The Report, but I'm neither reassured nor hopeful given what I've read so far.

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 This logo/graphic appears on page 269 and 270, Appendix B, "Overview of NSA Privacy Protections under FAA 702/EO 12333"

As an aside, could the Target hack be related to the NSA lashing out at the idea of being curbed? Ohhhhhh......

Continuing to Slog Through "The Report"

I realize I'm not offering up commentary on specific recommendations or details of The Report at this point. It's partly due to the structure of The Report itself, heavy on conclusions at the outset, then quite dense (for this kind of thing) with details to back them up. What I've been trying to do is understand the subtext that flows through the whole thing and get a better idea of what's (perhaps) really going on.

The Snowden Thing is obviously the trigger mechanism for this Report, but where Snowden fits in the whole assembly is still somewhat obscure. I've had my doubts about the "genuineness," shall we say, of his whistle blowing from the outset of the summertime media frenzy over the story mainly because of the way it was being packaged and marketed and due to the rather surprising reluctance of the any of the participants to get into anything particularly substantive regarding the omnipresent Surveillance/Security State they were supposedly exposing.

The story had the earmarks of a Limited Hangout, purposely engineered by a faction within the Security State in order to hamstring or undermine some other faction.

Focusing almost exclusively on the NSA when there are dozens if not hundreds of elements to the overall apparat of surveillance and security in this country alone, most of them much, much closer to the day-to-day lives of individuals and affecting them much more immediately and stringently, was a "tell" for me that this set of revelations and the summertime media frenzy it engendered was not what it seemed and was being sold as.

There was clearly a background and backchannel within the government itself that was directing this story.

I saw it as a likely contest between the CIA and the NSA for Security State Pre-eminence, and I mentioned several times that there was a curiously silent Spook in all of this, one John Brennan, recently selected head of the CIA -- the very agency Snowden came out of before going to the NSA (or so the story went.)

The overall point of the stories was clearly to diminish the powers and authorities of the NSA -- some of which it had arrogated to itself contrary to law and custom  -- but not to get rid of them altogether. Instead, the idea seemed to be to put those elements elsewhere, either in other agencies or in the private sector.

This is clearly the intent and upshot of the recommendations in The Report. In no way that I can discern are the powers and authorities of the Surveillance/Security State diminished by the recommendations, nor are their validity and utility disputed within the detailed narrative. Their application by the NSA is, however, clearly recognized as a problem. Time after time, the NSA is singled out for criticism for overstepping its authorities, violating court orders, lying to oversight bodies and so on. If this is not a "rogue agency," I don't know what is.

On the other hand, there is no sign I've found in The Report that the powers and authorities that the S/S State holds should be diminished or removed. They should merely be better monitored by courts and "policymakers" (which is a whole other kettle of fish) and -- importantly -- should be redistributed among extant agencies (mostly unnamed).

The Report does take pains to point out that the NSA is only one aspect of the S/S State, and that it is not the primary element in many ways (though obviously it would like to be). This is something that the media (in the person of Greenwald) nearly completely ignores, but it is something that more and more other media have come to recognize -- slowly and timidly, but still....

The Report also goes into great, almost exhaustive, detail about some of the Programs that have caused so much heartburn during the past six months, much more detail about them than appeared in the media. For The Report to be so open about the Programs -- when the Agency has a history of being so secretive, and even the Snowden Revelations didn't get into such a level of granularity about them -- indicates to me that there has long been some kind of urge within the S/S State to reveal itself as fully and clearly as possible, an urge which heretofore, the NSA has opposed and resisted.

Well, they can't do it now.

An internal shake-up is underway.

But will it be more the cosmetics? Time will tell.

The 6th World

The 6th World Screen grab

Recently over at Ian's Place there's been quite a little hoo-hah over Ian's rather dire warnings about the Our Fate if We don't colonize Space. His presentation is couched in the familiar formulae of Western -- I would say "Anglo" -- colonialism and imperialism, and as is my wont, I take exception to it.

I realize Ian grew up in a colonialist/imperialist household, as he says his father was a minor functionary in the British Raj as India threw off its colonial shackles at the end of the 1940's, when with considerable bloodshed and dislocation, Pakistan divorced from India.

Yes, well. From what I've read Ian say about it, I get the impression he -- or his father -- believe India and Pakistan would have been better off under continued British rule and it was a mistake for them to insist on complete independence from the Raj.

I've read many British colonialists and imperialists who claim essentially the same thing. To me, it's an utterly bizarre position, but to many of those most directly involved -- especially in the context of Pakistan's separation from India -- it makes perfect sense to assert that a better world was possible under a benign British rule than the jibbering natives could ever hope to have on their own.

We sometimes hear the same claim made about how the United States might be better off -- certainly more civilized! -- if it had not become independent of Britain, and we see the same premise expressed in Africa (with the singular exception of the Union of South Africa -- which serves as the counter-example) when the former colonial powers send their troops to "restore order" among the always restive Natives.

Colonialism and imperialism are the problem, and more of it is not the solution.

We attended a Navajo film festival in 2012 as part of the activities during Indian Market Week in Santa Fe, and one of the films we saw was called "The 6th World." I really liked it because it showed such a different approach to the question of establishing a human presence Out There, in this case on Mars. The pioneers may have used the terminology of colonial expansion and empire, but they were doing something else entirely. Something most Anglos can't even imagine.

Compare and contrast with the Zubrinite vision of Mars colonization...