03.06.11
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, Stumble and Fail at 4:51 pm by George Smith
Today I point you toward the best history of Julian Assange yet. And it is published outside the routes of celebrity big media where the kings spit and urinate upon the subject, tell him it’s raining, and then proceed to pick the body and skeleton clean of all things for sale as tallow for the soap factory.
It’s not published at the New York Times which would have sniffed due to its lack of pro journalist disdain. Originally, seemingly delivered by the New Zealand Herald and something called The Monthy.
And now it’s on-line at Cryptome here, entitled The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.
It traces Julian Assange from youth to his contribution to the cypherpunks mailing list and the crumbs he left as “Proff,” all the way to the present. (When Crypt Newsletter received occasional mail from him ca. these years, it was always signed from “Proff.”)
Many observations stand out. I’ll sample two.
First:
Assange had once regarded WikiLeaks as the people’s intelligence agency. In January 2007 he sincerely believed that when WikiLeaks published commentary on the Somalia assassination order document it would be “very closely collaboratively analysed by hundreds of Wikipedia editors” and by “thousands of refugees from the Somali, Ethiopian and Chinese expat communities”. This simply had not happened. Commentary by the people on material produced by their intelligence agency never would. He had once hoped for engaged analysis from the blogosphere. What he now discovered were what he thought of as indifferent narcissists repeating the views of the mainstream media on “the issues de jour” with an additional flourish along the lines of “their pussy cat predicted it all along”. Even the smaller newspapers were hopeless. They relied on press releases, ignorant commentary and theft. They never reported the vitally significant leaks without WikiLeaks intervention. Counterintuitively, only the major newspapers in the world, such as the New York Times or the Guardian, undertook any serious analysis but even they were self-censoring and their reportage dominated by the interests of powerful lobby groups. No one seemed truly interested in the vital material WikiLeaks offered or willing to do their Own work.
It’s a demonstration of the well known state-of-affairs in which the publication of unwelcome but necessary information goes unremarked upon, belittled or blocked because it is not delivered by giant media gatekeepers.
In the United States, for example, such outside-the-boundaries material is just ignored due to a combination of factors including sheer timidity, slave relationships to official sources, slave relationships to corporate ownership and NIH, or not-invented-here, syndrome.
This apparently led Assange to conclude most of the world would just not pay attention. He was right until WikiLeaks published the “Collateral Murder” video, provided by Bradley Manning.
Assange then allied with the New York Times, the Guardian and others to deliver the rest of Manning’s information dump. While this might have resulted in WikiLeaks becoming more powerful and effective, reality just became more tortured.
The resulting fame from delivery through these structures, agencies WikiLeaks was supposed to supersede, has for now coincidentally neutralized the exercise more effectively than any US government campaign against Assange could.
The messenger became the message, writes the article’s author, Robert Manne.
The Guardian, Der Spiegel and The New York Times leveraged and monetized Assange and WikiLeaks to the hilt, hard at squeezing every possible dollar out of the organization and its founder’s story. Even to the hardened cynic the personal contempt revealed by the unraveling process has been startling.
Colleagues of Assange deserted the operation for many reasons, some of them very well-explained by Manne and connected to the founder’s personality and the publicity firestorm and celebrity brought on by Manning’s information dump.
Manne writes:
For once, the cliche is true. What happened over the next ten months is stranger than fiction. With the release of the “Collateral Murder” footage, WikiLeaks became instantly famous. At the suggestion of a journalist at the Guardian, Nick Davies, Assange decided to publish the new material he had received from Manning anonymously in association with some of the world’s best newspapers or magazines. Complex and heated negotiations between WikiLeaks and the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel were now conducted. Even though these negotiations are one of the less interesting aspects of this story, already three books from the news outlets involved offering their own perspectives have been published. Assange had long regarded the western media as narcissistic. It is likely that his judgment was now confirmed.
“In early April 2010 hardly anyone had heard of Julian Assange,” reads the piece near its end. “By December he was one of the most famous people on Earth, with very powerful enemies and very passionate friends.”
In its entirety — here.
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Posted in Permanent Fail, Predator State at 8:38 am by George Smith
The top story at the NY Times today is a long piece on US arms sales and contracts with the Egyptian military.
They’re abused, no surprise, worked for the benefit of the old Hosni Mubarak-military-oligarchy.
That story is here.
However, it also unequivocally demonstrates my assertion, published most recently in the Economic Treason post at Globalsecurity, that arms manufacturing is a protected industry in the US. (It was published first on Monday of last week.)
It is a rigged form of socialism for a part of the American private sector, an entitlement, corporate welfare-spending exempt from the downsizing, pick-pocketing, austerity and economic punishments meted out to everyone in the middle class not directly connected to it.
Various quotes taken from the Times piece show a clear picture.
American corporations are the recipient of much of the taxpayer money that is sent to Egypt as military aid. And this is because the US government is concerned about diversion and misuse of funds.
For practical purposes, however, that happens anyway because a sale is a sale to US business. It is always a heads-they-win/tails-they-win situation for those involved.
The examples:
In part because of concerns about diversion of funds, only a sliver of the money from the American aid program actually goes to the Egyptian military. Instead, the Pentagon directly pays American companies that it has chosen to manufacture and ship the tanks, planes, guns and ammunition to Egypt.
========
Edward W. Ross, a former official at the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which oversees the sales, said he was irked by allegations that Egyptians could have pocketed money. “That money goes to the Federal Reserve,??? he said, “and then it is only released to a U.S. contractor.???
===========
The yearly $1.3 billion, one retired colonel explained, is viewed as “an entitlement.???
============
Over the years, the Gulfstream fleet — which now totals nine jets — has cost American taxpayers $333 million, government officials said. The most recent purchase was in 2002, but the Pentagon continues to pay $10 million a year to service the planes.
(Gulfstream Aerospace is an American firm. It is a part of one of the biggest arms manufacturers in the world, General Dynamics. — DD)
============
Last year, the American military awarded two Foreign Military Sales contracts to Chrysler in Detroit. One, for $26 million, was for 750 unassembled Jeeps. The other, announced in November, was for $7 million to ship tools and spare parts for Jeep Wranglers to the Egyptian Ministry of Defense.
=========
Mr. Springborg, the expert on the Egyptian military, said he was skeptical that, in cases like this, the Egyptians could maintain a firewall between production of civilian and military items.
Another area to look at, Mr. Springborg said, is the production of the well-known M1A1 Abrams tank, which the Egyptian military builds under license with American-made parts. The Pentagon pays General Dynamics to ship tank kits to Egypt, where military workers assemble them.
Former American officers consider the tank manufacturing plant a giant jobs program. “It’s as much about providing jobs as it is buying military hardware,??? General Collings said.
In 2007, the Defense Department announced the sale of 125 more unassembled tanks to Egypt, at an estimated cost of $890 million. So far, Egypt has more than 800 of the tanks.
“There are two assembly lines where they make that tank,??? a former senior American military official said. “They are all in the same huge building.???
Next to the tank production line that receives the American aid, he said, workers are assembling an Egyptian construction vehicle for commercial sale.
(General Dynamics Land Systems’ M1 tank business is in Sterling Heights, Michigan, Lima, OH, and Eynon, PA. All the counties these communities are located in have suffered high unemployment during the economic collapse. All are now faced with public sector worker lay-offs. However, arms manufacturing has been exempt from hardship in the same communities, in this case gallingly making and sustaining jobs in Egypt. General Dynamics Land Systems incorporates its various ventures in Delaware, recognized by everyone as a national and community aimed tax-cheating and avoidance strategy. — DD)
While the New York Times article is primarily interested in reporting the news of diversion of military aid to the Egyptian Army aristocracy for civilian projects, it also stands as a striking example of US arms manufacturing welfare. And how the American private sector arms making business is guaranteed and underwritten by the taxpayer, given opportunity and riches not afforded anyone else. Except maybe the oil industry and Wall Street.
The companies involved plead ignorance. They’re totally unconvincing, intelligence-insultingly so.
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03.05.11
Posted in Made in China, Permanent Fail at 9:30 am by George Smith
UPDATED
A long scholarly paper from 2008 by James K. Galbraith took up most of my morning, stumbled across by following Krugman’s pointer to a conference on the causes and consequences of inequality at Princeton.
I’ll jump right to the conclusion of it for an excerpt:
“[Equality] fuels efficiency. A society that systematically reduces the dispersion in its structure of pay forces the pace at which technological change is absorbed by business enterprise, and therefore tends to move up the scale of available productivity levels … [this mechanism] underpinned the rise of Scandinavia where political commitment to egalitarian economic outcomes preceded the advance of the region from the middle to the top of the European (and world) income scales. Similar effects applied to the United States in the New Deal and the Golden Age of economic growth.
“It is intuitively obvious that higher levels of economic inequality make it more difficult to reduce poverty through growth. Where growth is isolated and incomes are concentrated, those who are not directly involved do not benefit. On the contrary, growth necessarily entails environmental degradation and waste, and it is on the poor and the excluded that these burdens necessarily fall. Only when the fruits of growth are distributed, as income or by the provision of infrastructure and other public goods, does the statistical fact of a rising gross domestic product come to be experienced as an improvement in mass living conditions.”
And that describes the United States now where great inequality is the norm. The spoils of growth are concentrated in a few industries — financial, military, technology. Everything else is left to rot which seems to be the very picture of national inefficiency.
It’s also “intuitively obvious” that one political party is ideologically dedicated to increasing inequality — the GOP.
The Democratic Party is less enthusiastically so but still seemingly committed to going along for the ride.
The webpage on “The Politics of the Economic Crisis” at Princeton is here.
The Galbraith paper is a suggested reading on “historical studies of inequality.” A link to it, along with many others, is found therein.
The waning and waxing of inequality in countries like Brazil, Mexico, the Eurozone and China are also analyzed in depth.
Krugman’s slide presentation, “Inequality and Crises: Coincidence or Causation???? — is also worth a quick look.
Much is on the page, to put it mildly. Going for a walk now or I’d read more.
Quote of the day, another “intuitively obvious” observation, from Krugman in the pm:
One is whether emphasizing education — even aside from the fact that the big rise in inequality has taken place among the highly educated — is, in effect, fighting the last war. Another is how we have a decent society if and when even highly educated workers can’t command a middle-class income.
While Krugman attributes this to technological advance in this post, I’d say that some of it also has to do with inefficiency from inequality — even the highly educated, if they’re out of position when they’re downsized by the vulture economy, can’t reconnect with the labor force. “Those who are not directly connected do not benefit,” is the quote of personal interest from a few graphs upstream.
Related: Every time I’ve see Obama at a community college or going on about something have to do with Pell grants, my bullshit detector pegs.
Win The Future! Win The Future! Even as dumb slogan, it’s pretty stinky.
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03.04.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Phlogiston at 3:31 pm by George Smith
The Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy has no shortage of comical characters. While they are always well-treated on the pages of America’s newspapers, there’s are — occasionally — wrong venues.
William Forstchen, the Cult’s semi-famous author, made an appearance at the Homefront game’s balloon debacle in San Fran this week. He had the misfortune to be the opener for the Dillinger Escape Plan, a metalcore band with which I have some familiarity.
As an opener, if you’re not up to snuff, Dillinger fans will heckle you.
From a web game pub:
The event kicked off at noon, with the publisher first inviting foreign relations expert Tae Kim to speak on Homefront’s fictional future timeline, which finds the Greater Korean Republic occupying the United States in the year 2027. As the clean cut Kim spoke from behind a podium, a restless crowd shouted “Dillinger!” in his face as he did his best to keep calm.
Kim was followed by Electromagnetic Pulse blast expert and published author, Dr. William Forstchen. As Forstchen tried to explain the real (and quite terrifying) dangers of an EMP attack on the United States, the crowd continued to get rowdy, and shouted “Dillinger!” in his general direction. (One person even noted that he had an “awesome comb over.”)
The crowd was obviously ignorant of the toil Forstchen has put into peddling his book, One Second After, for the last century. And they were doubtless oblivious to the fact that he is Newt Gingrich’s co-author, too.
Shameful.
To set the scene more accurately, of the Dillinger Escape Plan, I once wrote:
It has been claimed that the Dillinger Escape Plan are kingpins of M.I.T.-inspired science rock. The band is the ultimate combination of skills in arithmetic calculation, progressive composition, and fantastically technical heavy metal. If you don’t get it, goes the argument, your brain is not of the cloth of Ph.D. material the band’s listeners are required to be cut from. A fine and entertaining story it is but the horse doesn’t trot well when the brags are dismounted.
On video, of which there is plenty, the Dillinger Escape Plan resemble nothing if not a squad of men doing calisthenics during basic training. The singer flexes and shakes his muscle at the audience like he’s captain of the wrestling team at the Danzig-Rollins Magnet School for Physical Fitness. This means, naturally, that he loses something on record. And it’s obvious on the new Miss Machine that Dillinger don’t even need a singer, really, for whatever it is they’re performing. The last 10 or so minutes of the CD veer between bursts of riff noise more smoothly recorded than expected and washes of music to watch soft porn by, indicating the charm of being proudly abrasive and busy is wearing off.
“Highlights include the shocked faces of those passing by as [Dillinger] wrecked the stage,” reported the game journal.
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Posted in Rock 'n' Roll at 12:08 pm by George Smith
UPDATED
For a limited time only, La Puta — the album, presented by your host.
In a zip-file (80 Mb) with some art. MP3’s for burning to disc or play on whatever you want to play them on. Here. (3/06 in the am. Expired. If you still would like a digital copy, send an e-mail.)
Track list:
1. Don’t Let Your Daddy Know
2. La Puta
3. Needle & Spoon
4. Hump Blues
5. The Pennsy Redneck
6. Ace of Spades
7. The China Shuffle
8. Had No Pills
9. DeCulo
10. That’s Logistics
11. Act Naturally
12. Let’s Lynch Lloyd Blankfein
13. Highway Patrol
14. Central Park Boogie
15. A Moment from ‘Brown Shoes’
16. Fiscal Discipline Rock
17. Heevahava Boogie
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Posted in Cyberterrorism at 10:57 am by George Smith
Weapons inspector Charles A Duelfer has this to say about Iran’s nuclear program:
The IAEA inspectors report that Iran continues to expand its activities and, in particular, its uranium enrichment seems to be continuing with plans for expansion. Tehran has not complied with requirements to explain suspected military nuclear work and seems unfazed by Security Council sanctions. Moreover, the IAEA reports that the output of the declared facilities continues—despite the affects of the Stuxnet cyber attack. The evidence is that despite increased sanctions, the effects of cyber attacks (and reportedly the sabotaging of imported equipment) and the assassinations in Iran of top scientists, the program marches on…to the point where it is beginning to look inevitable rather than unacceptable as previous White House statements have declared.
The mythology of Stuxnet is indefatigable. Too many businesses are directly interested in the lasting perception that cyberwar can accomplish anything.
A prime example is now HBGary. The Anonymous pillage of HBGary files spilled its material on Stuxnet worldwide.
At Cryptome, it’s archived here.
The zip-file at Cryptome contains some technical analysis and a directory of binaries, all of which should flag positive for malware.
DD randomly tested it a day ago and Avast quarantines all of them, some flagged as generic Windows malware, others as pieces of Stuxnet and infected files which look like its dropper, rootkit and hooks into the kernel and Windows firewall.
It’s easy enough to test your anti-virus on it. A cursory scan of the file as it download won’t flag it — unless the on-access part of your protective suite burrows right into compressed archives.
But if you command the program to look in the archive, it will (or it should) find all of it.
The HBGary Stuxnet archive reveals an old, regular and necessary business practice: The sharing of virus library samples between security companies.
More recently interest beyond simple technical analysis and the fashioning of digital cures is in the picture. And that’s the tinkering with and reverse-engineering of the samples with the aim of making new versions for potential or actual use by the military or government.
Many years ago creating, rewriting and modifying malware was exclusively the domain of amateur virus-writers. But it eventually moved into organized crime when it became possible to monetize the action of computer viruses. And now it is also in the work product of computer security companies, like HBGary, in the business of cadging cyberwar and intelligence work from various official clients and, presumably, also some from the private sector.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 9:53 am by George Smith
Yesterday’s lunch saw Martin Bashir on MSNBC devoting some time to WikiLeaks, specifically Bradley Manning and additional charges brought against him by the Army. One of the guests was a friend of Manning’s who related that solitary confinement was destroying the person he knew.
However, there’s always an obvious problem with the story. It has to do with the celebrity of WikiLeaks and the aspect of the two, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.
Neither are sympathetic even though the treatment of Manning is unconscionable. Every time you see the now common pictures of him a little voice in the back of the head says: There’s a kid who was the most senseless and fit for the job.
The accumulated fame, gained by the regular hyping of Cablegate and its use by the big mainstream media has apparently effectively choked WikiLeaks.
Where is the revelation on the ecosystem of corruption at a big US bank? Where’s all the stuff the HBGary dirty tricks operation was aimed at discrediting?
Maybe — hopefully — it will arrive.
But if it does, will it make a difference now? After the Guardian and the New York Times squeeze their rewards from it as official deliverers, framers and monetizers?
Which makes a review of the Guardian’s tell-all book on WikiLeaks a necessary read.
It’s hilarious, encapsulating the reality left unspoken in the places of high celebrity:
It’s a story, not of brave whistleblowers revealing a specific piece of explosive information, but of an agitated bloke, bored in his army base, Facebooking about how much he missed his boyfriend Tyler, deciding to take Washington’s own disarray to its logical conclusion by vomiting all of its documentation into the hackers’ arena. It was more Oprahite than it was principled, more therapeutic than tactical, more Jeremy Kyle than Daniel Ellsberg. In hilariously comparing this farcical leaking with the Pentagon Papers, describing it as a political event of unprecedented importance, ‘Leigh’ and ‘Harding’ nail the self-importance of Guardian hacks brilliantly. They kill with a satirical sword the attempts by the Guardian and others to doll up the contemporary, much-celebrated and thoughtless cult of let-it-all-out whistleblowing as a stand against warped political authority. I literally LOLed as I turned the page from reading about Manning’s childish informational incontinence to pages containing words such as ‘historic’ and ‘brave’. Brilliant.
The spoofers are also excellent at capturing the media’s cult-like embrace of Assange. ‘Harding’ and ‘Leigh’ recount what a creep Assange is, yet they then profess their ‘own’ and other Guardian journalists’ borderline crush on him! So in one section of the book, we’re told that Assange once signed up to an online dating site with the words ‘I am DANGER, ACHTUNG????????????!’, labeling himself as ‘87% slut’ and someone who likes ‘women from countries that have sustained political turmoil, [because] Western culture seems to forge women that are valueless and inane’. In short, he likes to have sex with exotic blacks rather than boring white birds because – ACHTUNG! – he’s a political rebel.
The rest is here at Spiked-Online.
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Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism at 9:16 am by George Smith
Today’s dose of mainstreamed extremism comes through TIME magazine, a publication that exists to pander to aging not real bright white people. So, perforce, its supermarket readers must include retirees/Tea Partiers whose disposition must be taken into account when covering various odious southern reptiles.
Therefore one gets the paroxysm entitled “On Civil War — Confederate Group Stirs Debate.”
In it one learns of the sincere effort to put an old Ku Klux Klanner on a Mississippi license plate. The obese Haley Barbour says he will not allow it into law, which is nice of him.
It’s lede reads somewhat like the announcement of an unusual ladies tea in Cranford, New Jersey:
In 1867, former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest became the first Grand Wizard of a newly formed organization called the Ku Klux Klan. Forrest had been a slave trader before the Civil War; he was also the commanding officer during a battle known as the “Fort Pillow massacre” in Tennessee at which some 300 black Union troops were killed in 1864. (Whether they died in combat or were killed after they surrendered is still a matter of dispute.)
Now, in honor of the Civil War’s 150th anniversary, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) are seeking to put Forrest on a Mississippi license plate. But the state government opposes it.
“Chuck Rand, a member of the SCV, calls any assumption that the Forrest license plate is racist a ‘knee-jerk reaction’ by people who don’t understand the ‘real causes’ of the Civil War,” it reads, sampling the p.r. of the bona fide douchebag without actually getting around to calling him that, so to speak.
Moving right along, DD’s electromagnetic pulse crazy news filter netted an item from Townhall on the Google news tab. It’s not so interesting for the standard Glenn Beck theme that the revolutions in the Middle East may turn into a drive to establish a Muslim caliphate but for the startling advocacy of a US Foreign Legion:
This also means we’ll need a much larger U.S. military, which to minimize public opposition here at home should be mostly individually recruited from freedom loving souls around the world (not from existing foreign armies). This “International Freedom Force??? of 1,000,000 or more would be commanded and supported by our own military.
However, the French Foreign Legion is a small unit — 7,700 men. That’s not really up to the Townhall writer’s ambitions.
Historically, it should be noted the Waffen SS tried this approach, too. That did not turn out so well.
Of course, one can imagine all the good will which would meet a Muslim-containing US “International Freedom Force” in, uh, Middle East places to be freed from the “caliphate.”
Anyway, here’s the electromagnetic pulse script:
… an Islamic Caliphate stretching its axis of evil from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, and the radicals gaining a stranglehold on well over half the world’s oil and the Suez Canal to boot. They would then likely extend their reach southward across much of Africa.
With huge natural resources under their control and aided by massive Chinese investment capital and technical support, the radicals would pose an intolerable threat to the economies of the free world. But far worse, with their newfound wealth they would amass a nuclear arsenal that could enable them to either bring the West to its knees by threatening Armageddon, or actually bring about Ahmadinejad’s dream of “a world without America??? and “annihilating Israel.??? And let us also be mindful that but a single nuclear missile, fired from a freighter off our shores and detonated some 300 miles above Kansas, could generate an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would knock out virtually our entire electric grid system and, according to the chairman of the congressionally authorized EMP Commission, kill 70 to 90% of the entire U.S. population from starvation and disease within one year!
It’s written by a wealthy white kook who made a reputation selling locally named custom versions of Monopoly.
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Posted in Made in China, Predator State at 8:36 am by George Smith
DD remains mildly amused by the new type of spam comments netted by the blog filter.
Today’s howler is for the sake of a firm specializing in corporate tax avoidance and off-shoring through Panama. And, routinely, the spammer tries to attach such things to posts having to do with jobs and my “Made in China” series.
It’s the very picture of the US-minted global vulture economy, very much aimed at providing enabling to American big business in national looting and pushing people to the brink.
For a mordant laugh, here’s the ID: panama dash offshor(e) dash s(e)rvic(e)s dot com. Be sure to leave out the parentheses around the ‘e’s.
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03.03.11
Posted in Extremism, Permanent Fail at 12:58 pm by George Smith
You can recite what’s real for a comedy show. But no matter how damaging, no change occurs. Instead, you get dozens of upper class media type prescribing medicine they and their masters won’t have to take. Like today’s example number one, Fareed Zakaria.
(Along with Tom Friedman and the president, on top of Muammar Gaddafi’s alleged reading list. It’s quite a recommendation, furnished by WikiLeaks, now virtually neutralized by infame, celebrity misfortune and former collaboration with the New York Times.)
Anyway, yYou can threaten protesters with job loss, or try to rig a situation in which they can be arrested.
But suggest the rich need real threats and the gears don’t move a millimeter. It’s just another reason to deliver another sermon on how austerity and sacrifice must be shared.
The Patriotic Class War Song — remastered.
I was a little bitty baby
I was rocked in the cradle
In an old Middle Class-style home
Now that I’m old and broke
I wanna give the rich a poke
In those big places they call home
We’re gonna invite ourselves to dinner
And shoot ‘em in the kisser
And raze their ritzy mansions to the ground
It won’t be very hard
To piss in the front yards
Of all the shiny houses they called homes
We’re gonna pull ‘em out of cars
And dip ‘em in some tar
Then throw ‘em in a hole and have a laugh
We’re gonna find a big ol’ oak
Hang ‘em all ’til they croak
In America, the place that we call home
In America, the place that we call home
In America, the place that we call …
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