I have occasionally been asked — most notably this week — for opinion and context on hackers as a counterbalance to government and political power.
This week it was a couple journalists asking about Operation Payback and WikiLeaks as some manner of revolutionary change agent.
These types of questions go back a long way. I used to field them when editing the Crypt Newsletter, an old e-zine that covered the subculture of amateur virus-writers.
“This seems like another kind of culture war,” one fellow sent this week. “The hacks and hack nots. The powerless have found a way to overpower.”
Not quite.
Operation Payback did add to the hysteria surrounding WikiLeaks. It contributed to the mess without accomplishing anything other than the symbolism created by revenge in cyberspace.
And it did again prove how easy it is to have a group tantrum, one that always has the potential to inconvenience people.
However, in the short term, the WikiLeaks dumps have demonstrated the power of that agency is finite.
From my point of view, the reaction to WikiLeaks has pushed the US government into being more unreasonable and secretive. This appears to be part of its aim.
But it shows a naïve belief in an end point that’s favorable. Or the experience of one who hasn’t been living in the US and experiencing the way things are.
You can reveal many interior things about US government or corporate dealings today but even if the press writes about it for weeks, and politicians hold hearings, nothing happens.
The best and most obvious case is the worldwide financial meltdown.
“Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson’s documentary on it has played in Pasadena. And there is no more savage and incriminating an indictment of Wall Street and the US banking industry. Watching it makes the blood boil. In a system that wasn’t broken, such a story would be seen by a lot more people, not just those of us in southern California, San Francisco, NYC or Boston. It’s capability to inflame should stoke outrage and the picking up of pitchforks in Oklahoma, Nebraska — anywhere in the heartland.
But it just hasn’t happened.
And Ferguson’s movie is not the first to tell this story. Many have.
Everyone has already been shown — multiple times, very convincingly — that the bankers engaged in rigging and blew up the economy. And that the people running Goldman Sachs and their corporate rivals are criminal greedheads after everyone’s money.
So if WikiLeaks does another document dump, this time from — maybe — Bank of America, no matter what is revealed about our “ecosystem” of corruption, it’s blinkered to think that things will change. It has already been demonstrated, over and over, that Bank of America participated with other financial institutions in the running of a Ponzi scheme.
What happened after the WikiLeaks release of the helicopter attack video?
Nothing.
What happened after the Afghanistan war diary?
Along with the journalism that has been done on the global financial crisis, these things show us how power is, except for election time, totally insulated from consequences in the US in 2010.
WikiLeaks and Julian Assange can’t change that, probably no matter what material is released.
Does that mean it shouldn’t exist to do what it does? No, not at all!
You would say the same thing to the editors of newspapers who must now realize that despite investigative efforts and the placing of utterly damning material on the frontpage, the power to actually create meaningful change now is just about entirely out of reach.
It’s not an optimistic picture. WikiLeaks has not changed this.
So the idea that hackers can achieve a reversal is beamish.
At the time of underground e-zines years ago, hackers were frequently alleged to be capable of turning the tables on the establishment or government enemies of the moment. And although they can strike at people, companies and agencies, it just never worked out that way.
However, as much reported revenge, which is what this is about, it has always had symbolic value in the domain.
As for instigators of societal change, or protest in the US, the only group that has had any impact has been the Tea Party. And while it is profoundly anti-government, it is the very opposite of WikiLeaks.
The criminal and anti-American enterprise WikiLeaks said in a Twitter message this morning that it was under a “distributed denial of service attack,” a method often used by hackers to slow or bring down websites. If this is the U.S. government at work, good for our civil servants. If this is patriotic citizens taking matters into their own hands—even better. The original Tea Party was a grassroots citizens’ effort. If Tea Party-inspired Americans—and freedom-loving hackers around the world—can act effectively in cyberspace against today’s threats to our liberties and well-being, and to the liberties and well-being of others —that’s something to be applauded. Indeed, it’s community activism one can believe in.
“Freedom-loving hackers of the world, unite!” is Kristol’s subhed. It’s to laugh.
What followed was a lament from an anonymous employee of the Department of Homeland Security.
“It has even been suggested that if it is discovered that we have accessed a classified Wikileaks cable on our personal computers, that will be a security violation,” the person writes.
There has been no sign of leadership from any Administration official who would stand up and say: “National security classification is a means, and not an end in itself. What any reader in the world can discover is no longer a national security secret. We should not pretend otherwise.???
A bookend to yesterday’s “Varmint Hunter” piece on Ted Nugent advocating the shooting of feral cats.
Today, Nugent goes after the Dept. of Energy. He has a hate on for Steven Chu and wants the agency destroyed.
Nugent, who never pays attention to anything, makes the assumption that federal agencies never report to the US people what they’re doing.
While this is true for many things concerned with topics under the rubric of Secrecy Blog and WikiLeaks, it’s patently false when it comes to the material covered in Nugent’s column at the Washington Times.
Since Nugent doesn’t cover any news of the government he so despises and appears not to be Internet savvy, he has no idea of the wealth of information that is provided to everyone. Particularly on the economy, furnished by various federal and state agencies.
For example, the DOE could have told us that oil drilling in the Gulf has been banned for the next seven years, how many new windmills were built, how many Americans rode their bicycles to work, how many tankers full of foreign oil we imported this week and how much that imported oil cost America.
Let’s take a minute to address the last one. How much oil do we import and how much does it cost?
Wow, Ted. That took five seconds. And look! It’s furnished by the despised by the Dept. of Energy. US government agencies do, in fact, generally try to release information and statistics on matters under their purview to the American public in a reasonable and timely manner.
As for answering the question on how many people ride bicycles to work in the US, there is no way to exactly measure the answer. As most reasonable people with scientific minds might tell you.
However, none of this matters to Nugent. As it also does not matter to advocate for the haphazard shooting of feral cats, which would be illegal within city and town limits, where most people in the United States live.
Another bit of nosegold buried in Nugent’s current column is an indication that he doesn’t believe in global warming. And that, in particular, he doesn’t believe burning coal contributes to it.
It would come as no shock to me if Secretary of Green Energy Chu views the oil companies as villains, despises nuclear energy and believes burning coal causes global warming and is akin to genocide.
Obviously, it’s no secret that Ted Nugent is as stupid as he is mean. And while he is certainly a demon on guitar, he’s one of the laziest writers under the sun who ever got paid for it.
In related news, sales of Sarah Palin’s book — “America by Heart” — have slowed.
Apparently for making a thirty second TV public service announcement through the aegis of Texas A&M’s forest service university system. That video is here.
Other celebrities who made such videos for Texas include Jake Kellen, George Bush the Elder, and Willie Nelson.
The 2010 call for nominations for the award, run by the US government — which Nugent hates, is here.
DD and friends will be holding an early holiday party on Sunday, starting at 5 pm. On the outside chance that a few readers are actually near and interested in attending, here are the details.
At Artscape, we’ll have drinks and eats. Plus rock ‘n’ roll by yours truly. It’s free.
Readers of this blog know Ted Nugent is a man stunningly bereft of ideas and human warmth.
As evidence one only has to read his columns.
Page after page on the Mao Tse-Tung fan club in the Whitehouse. And how subprime mortgages to people of color and entitlements to the same blew up the world economy, not Wall Street.
In the book Griftopia, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi devotes quite a bit to describing them as confused white nincompoops, easily misled by wealthy crooks. And they, like Ted Nugent, really do believe the economy went to shit and left friends and family without jobs because black people got houses they didn’t deserve.
If you believe in God, then he certainly has a sense of humor.
Right next to Griftopia at Vroman’s in Pasadena — Michael Savage’s Trickle Up Poverty, a book that purports to tell how people who aren’t white blew up the economy and are making us all poor.
Rather surprisingly, Nugent hasn’t yet piped up on the granting of the tax cuts to the wealthy through holding the unemployed hostage. You would think it would have been a natural for him, something to cackle over between assertions that jobless people are bloodsuckers and that all taxes need elimination.
“[I] have instructed my family, friends, hunting buddies and casual passers-by to blast every feral cat they see,” Nugent writes, referring to open season on cats at his Crawford ranch.
Since there were no Democratic targets to insult or hate on for this subject, Nugent singled out a rather reasonable scientific paper issued by the University of Nebraska entitled “Feral Cats and Their Management.”
The population of feral cats in America is 60 million, notes the paper. It’s a staggering number that defies all methods aimed at reducing it.
The purpose of the paper is to describe the effectiveness of various methods of controlling feral cat populations, which are very damaging because of their impact on songbirds.
The authors realize the sensitivity of the subject in cat-friendly America and bend over backwards to avoid giving even the slightest impression of cruelty toward animals as a recommendation.
Nugent, naturally, won’t have it.
“Let us hope the University of Nebraska didn’t spend more than 10 bucks on this research,” he sneers.
The Nebraska authors conclude that “shooting is an efficient method” and that trapping, neutering, vaccinating and releasing of feral cats in established colonies is a great deal of work. And that eliminating colonies in this manner can take years.
They also write of other factors which would be of no concern to Ted Nugent. Like the fact that if you indiscriminately shoot all cats on your property, you will inevitably wind up killing someone’s beloved pet.
“[Determining] which cats are feral and which are someone’s pet may be difficult,” conclude the Nebraska researchers. “Owners must be responsible by keeping their cats on their property …”
“Shooting in urban areas is a very sensitive matter …” they advise in a paragraph informing that gunning for cats is not only potentially unsafe to others within built up populated areas but also illegal in Omaha and Lincoln — and probably, by extension, within the boundaries of most towns and cities.
Nugent’s column is also, naturally, PETA bait. Nugent hates PETA with a passion and recently implied that it was such animal lovers who were responsible for getting him into trouble with the hunting authorities in California.
And a representative of PETA wrote a letter to the editor at the Washington Times as a consequence of Nugent’s piece.
A Baltimore man faces charges of attempted murder and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction after authorities say he tried to detonate what he thought was a bomb at a military recruitment center near Baltimore.
Court documents filed Wednesday say Antonio Martinez, also known as Muhammad Hussain, told an FBI source in October that he was seeking to attack and kill military personnel.
In conversations through his Facebook account, Martinez allegedly told the source that all he thinks about is jihad.
The documents say Martinez talked with the source about shooting people inside the center and burning the building. He was introduced to an FBI agent who along with the source provided him with a phony bomb in a van.
Continuing with the posts on how US electric guitar manufacturers outsourced their production for middle class pieces for the sake of concentrating on custom business for the non-playing wealthy, I have a few items of interest.
The first dates from a year before the economic crash. At the time you could still read stories on what a jolly good business it was to be able to buy Chinese-made US branded guitars displayed in cardboard boxes at Target, Wal-Mart and BestBuy.
From the Newhouse News Service, in 2007:
“Rock has gotten so mainstream that you see or hear guitars in just about every movie and commercial,” says Dana Clarke, manager of Guitar Center in North Olmsted, Ohio. “Combine that with guitars being made overseas, cheaply, and it’s no surprise you see them everywhere.”
Everywhere, as in the aisles of Target, Wal-Mart, even Costco. They come packaged as “rock kits.” In brown boxes. Stacked up like stairways to heaven.
And they’re cheap.
The outsourcing of production to Mexico, China and South Korea has dropped electric-guitar prices to levels that have made them competitive with electronic toys and gadgets.
One penny shy of $70 for an ax at Target. Less than $87 for a “guitar pack,” amp included, at Wal-Mart.
At the same time, prices skyrocketed for domestically-made guitars, made for the collector crowd:
[The Guitar Center man] has witnessed an explosion in price appreciation, even for unloved guitars that would hang on the wall for months.
“In the 1980s and ’90s, guitars became a collectible with a Blue Book value,” he says.
Guitar Center, the article went on to state, “pioneered the guitar-for-masses concept.”
Fender’s new CEO, Larry Thomas, was formerly chairman of Guitar Center.
And while things were heady in 2007, Guitar Center is now stuck in the doldrums. When the middle class was beggared by the economic crash, GC suffered.
“Moody’s downgrades Guitar Center debt,” reads a news story from November 12:
Moody’s Investors Service has downgraded private equity-backed Guitar Center Holdings Inc., parent of Guitar Center, to Caa2, from Caa1, citing increased interest expenses when it begins paying down its senior unsecured pay-in-kind notes starting in April 2011. Until last month the business, owned by Boston buyout firm Bain Capital LLC, has deferred paying cash interest on its $375 million senior notes held at the holding company level. Moody’s said Friday, Nov. 12, that, while sales have improved, its earnings are not expected to recover sufficiently during 2011 to fully cover its interest expense through internally generated cash flow. The agency said the Westlake Village, Calif.-based music store chain, the largest in the U.S., “could voluntarily pursue a debt restructuring or an amendment to its debt facilities” at terms it would deem to be equivalent to a default.
Caa2 means holdings are of “poor standing.” Guitar Center, in other words, is a substantially risky business not far away from falling into default.
Fender, for its part, has had a great deal of trouble controlling who uses its designs. It’s a consequence of other companies fabricating them uncontested and the company’s own mass outsourcing to China. The temptation to capitalize on the brand name and look is very strong.
Paradoxically, in a news item from the Arizona Republic in 2009 (Fender is based in Scottsdale), one reads:
Fender filed for the trademarks as part of its global strategy to fight counterfeiters and protect its intellectual property, he said. The problem has gotten worse as copycats have guitars made in China, ship them to warehouses in the United States and sell them over the Internet …
Over the years, again prior to the current troubles, domestic guitar production as investment pieces for the wealthy was generally hailed.
For example, this from 2003, on a guitar show:
Things took off in the late 1980s and early 1990s as Boomers with increasing disposable income started buying the axes preferred by their musical heroes. Most of those were built in the 1950s and 1960s, the first two decades for mass-marketed electrics. Suddenly, certain models and years, mostly Gibsons and Fenders, started commanding seriously crazy cash — $10,000-$40,000.
And this news piece from 2006 on Gibson’s peddling of premium models to the stupid rich in Japan is also revealing:
Gibson makes a range of guitars solely for the Japanese market, including rocker Tak Matsumoto’s signature Les Paul in such special guitar shades as canary yellow.
“It is so cool,” says Yuki Yamaguchi, a 19-year-old student who bought a $5,400 Tak Matsumoto Gibson on three-month credit. “I open the case and look at in and go: ‘It is so cool.'”
Amateur musicians such as Yamaguchi, who acknowledges he hardly has time to play his guitar and spends more time admiring it, may be just buying a dream.
But they make for serious business.
“Some of these consumers own five, 10, 20 guitars because they’re collecting … They’re collecting for the love of collecting,” a Gibson sales exec told the newspaper reporter.
“The Japan-only Les Paul with the beat-up look costs about $3,000 …” added the piece.
Ironically, flooding in Tennessee stalled Gibson’s domestic production for a couple months earlier this year.
The Nashville newspaper, The Tennessean, reported on the matter:
Widespread flooding two weeks ago pushed many of the city’s rivers and streams well beyond their banks, including Mill Creek, which flows just behind Gibson USA’s sprawling factory complex near Nashville International Airport.
The plant churns out 2,500 guitars a day. It is one of several mass production facilities the company operates around the globe – including in Memphis; Bozeman, Mont.; and at least five factories in China.
Gibson guitars manufactured in the flooded plant cost between $700 and $3000. Paradoxically, the custom shop — which produces Gibson’s really idiotically priced pieces for the plutonomy or Nashville recording artist with a label deal — was not impacted.
The President, angry and rattled that his capitulation has not been warmly received, is giving his “Peace In Our Time” speech. I’m watching it on Fox. Where the previous thirty minutes were devoted to calling him a socialist and saying he needed to give even more to the wealthy and corporate America.
Extended repetitive rationalization of giving in to blackmailers.
Updated
Fox notes the president calling the left “sanctimonious.” Juan Williams, the guy kicked off NPR, cites someone else saying this was the President’s “Gettysburg … but he didn’t withstand Pickett’s charge.”
Shep Smith: “He said to the Democrats, ‘It’s your fault.'”
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, DD and drummer went to Guitar Center to pick up some things in preparation for the big show this Sunday.
It rammed home again how the US business model has converted to plutonomy.
And not for the betterment of any regular workers like the poor guys and gals jobbing the registers for minimal payment at Guitar Center.
At Guitar Center you have a place where everything for sale in it was either invented by Americans or the British. All of the history in hardware of classic rock is on sale. The sound heard round the world.
And virtually everything classic rock in the front of the store — all the stuff being peddled for the holiday season and not behind the glass doors in the back of the place, or hung up so high on the wall you have to get a sales associate to look at it … is made in China.
Everybody took their manufacturing business to China. US firms mercilessly downsized their labor, in the process transforming domestic ‘factories,’ what’s left of them, to small artisan shops making guitars and amplifiers for bankers, lawyers, doctors and other rich people who want to hang Stratocasters and Les Pauls on their walls as investments/sops to impress repulsive friends.
So the real American-made stuff is back in the glass room. Where the more senior employees can carefully watch over it and the unwealthy riffraff discouraged from handling the merchandise.
This, of course, includes most of the employees, too. Since their wages have been kept stagnant they can neither afford the US stuff nor the rate of interest on any credit that might be extended to them.
Like so many businesses, Guitar Center has collaborated in the beggaring of the American consumer. As a consequence, like the rock instrumentation industry, it has split in half — one section for catering to the wealthy, the other — where the vast weight of materiele is — to the vanishing middle class. And, of course, parents looking for something for junior’s annoying hobby this holiday.
One of these front of the store great gift idea, seen right by the cash register, on Black Friday was the Made-In-China authentic “Piedmont Blues” harmonica set!
Twenty bucks for seven harmonicas and a case, shipped from China.
Here’s a rhetorical question.
Since the amount of energy needed to make harmonicas is the same wherever you are in the world, due to the laws of thermodynamics as they apply to manufacturing, what possible benefit is their to make them in China — in terms of a green policy — and then to mass ship them across the Pacific? As opposed to making them closer to home?
As said — rhetorical.
The Piedmont Blues set is ostensibly a Hohner product, the famous German company, also forced to make a relatively cheap instrument even cheaper.
You can, for instance, have Hohner Pro or Marine Band harps which were always acceptable and are still relatively inexpensive
Or if you’ve really been beggared, as so many have, there’s the Piedmont Blues set. You could give up two or three lunches in a week for it.
I mentioned the name “Piedmont Blues” as applied to a Chinese-made instrument with my friend Don, over an afternoon of football the same weekend.
We both had a good laugh. Almost as good as the one reserved for the ludicrous nature of the old Mojo Deluxe Blues & Rock Harmonica. Which was probably made in the same plant and with the same machines as the ‘Piedmont Blues’ harmonicas.
Replaced by the Piedmont Blues.
Over the weekend, the absentee president hailed a trade deal with South Korea.
South Korea is where the American rock instrument industry took some manufacturing for items somewhat less pricey that its domestically made product. It filled the niche Japan used to about twenty years ago, before labor in that country made its rock instruments into premium buys.
It is where DD’s Epiphone Les Paul Ultra II was made, a mid-priced instrument which I would have been able to buy, at some point, in the US when I was in the Highway Kings. Now most Gibsons are prohibitively expensive artisan plutonomy pieces.
So jobs were outsourced to South Korea. Whose people, incidentally, now enjoy a better tech infrastructure than the United States.
One thing I’m hearing, now that all hope of useful fiscal policy is gone, is the idea that trade can be a driver of recovery — that stuff like the South Korea trade agreement can serve as a form of macro policy.
Um, no.
Our macro problem is insufficient spending on U.S.-produced goods and services; this spending is defined by
Y = C + I + G + X – M
where C is consumer spending, I investment spending, G government purchases of goods and services, X is exports, and M is imports. Trade agreements raise X — but they also lead to higher M. On average, they’re a wash.
“And there’s even an argument to the effect that increased trade reduces US employment in the current context; if the jobs we gain are higher value-added per worker, while those we lose are lower value-added, and spending stays the same, that means the same GDP but fewer jobs,” he adds.
South Korea, as it pertained to Epiphone, the low-price brand Gibson subsidiary, meant lost jobs in the US. For less value added jobs at places like Guitar Center here.
Since then, Gibson took a lot of Epiphone manufacturing to China downsizing South Korean labor for cheaper sources. Well, now some of them have probably been working at the national equivalent of Guitar Center, too.
Fact: Washington, DC is loaded with “terrorism experts” read to go on television whenever the FBI nabs some alleged jihadi wanna-be and attest on the growing menace of homegrown Islamic terror.
In the case of the recent teenage case, Juan Zarate — an assistant secretary for “combating terrorism” in the Bush administration was the designated face for the job. While out of power, he’s warehoused as an “adviser” to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Meanwhile, as far as DD can tell there’s never been a single comparison of homegrown white guy terrorists next to the number of alleged homegrown al Qaeda terrorists. Except perhaps at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
From the Associated Press today:
Neighbors gasped when authorities showed them photos of the inside of the Southern California ranch-style home: Crates of grenades, mason jars of white, explosive powder and jugs of volatile chemicals that are normally the domain of suicide bombers.
Prosecutors say Serbian-born George Jakubec quietly packed the home with the largest amount of homemade explosives ever found in one location in the U.S. and was running a virtual bomb-making factory in his suburban neighborhood. How the alleged bank robber obtained the chemicals and what he planned to do with them remain mysteries.
Bomb experts pulled out about nine pounds of explosive material and detonated it, but they soon realized it was too dangerous to continue given the quantity of hazardous substances. A bomb-disposing robot was ruled out because of the obstacle of all the junk Jakubec hoarded.
That left only one option — burn the home down.
San Marcos Fire Chief Todd Newman acknowledges it is no small feat: Authorities have never dealt with destroying such a large quantity of dangerous material in the middle of a populated area, bordered by a busy eight-lane freeway.
Governor Schwarzenegger declared an emergency for the neighborhood, according to the news.
Bomb experts were flown in from all over the country.
Jump on the grenade. Nugent pitches for Sarah Palin’s Alaska.
Good news, lads! Good news! I just learned Ted is up for the role of Howard in a remake of The Treasure of Sierra Madre!
The image of vigor diluted by white fluff on chin and old man dental noise.
The man really needs to figure out how to minimize the teeth whistling sibilants. It’s possible Nugent doesn’t notice it the the way others do since his hearing loss has been well documented. Or maybe he just doesn’t care.
“[The] … median age of [Sarah Palin’s Alaska] show is 57 — that’s 15 years older than TLC’s average,” reads a piece at the Hollywood Reporter.
