Ask George Smith e-mail: webmaster at dick destiny
On state-run radio, at least. Ten AM Wednesday, Beijing time — or 7 pm tonight, I thin’.
I’ll be on China Radio International English Service to talk about world cybersecurity and cyberwar and hacktivism and …
All things considered [cue harmonica noise].
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I’ve started discussing the complete disconnection of the military and national security aims with anything remotely of interest or value to the welfare of the middle class.
For want of a better tag on the blog, I’m using “Bombing Paupers” to describe the goal. It is directly connected to only a certain slice of wealthy interests in this country and, from the outside, it now always looks like the haves attacking the have-nots.
The defending freedoms in the homeland (or any variation on it) shit just doesn’t work anymore. In fact, it’s as risible a statement as the assertion that Fox News is “fair and balanced.”
At EZSmirkz, on “decline and fall” of trust in American government:
It is easy to be against war because there are no real winners.
Whether one wins or loses the loss of life and treasure cripple both victor and vanquished, devastate economies and engender hatreds that last for generations.
America has seemed to have brought losing wars by a thousand cuts to an art form, articulating goals for military action that it is either unable or unwilling to achieve, and then going through a series of stop gap measures to preserve national pride in the face of inept leadership.
There are no strategic goals, that I have heard, for any of these current wars. Preserving democracy and freedom is a wonderful sentiment that has absolutely zero strategic implications. It is touchy feely. But there is absolutely no sense in what we hope to achieve strategically in either Afghanistan or Iraq. With Libya I can see two, the preservation of the Arab Spring, and the preservation of American power in the Middle East.
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This quote on New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie, in a New York Magazine piece on Roger Ailes’ promotion of GOP presidential hopefuls at Fox News:
But there’s other unfinished business, which is why Chris Christie is so appealing. At dinner last summer, they talked about pension reform and getting tough with the unions, and Ailes saw in Christie a great candidate: an ordinary guy, someone you’d be comfortable talking to over your back fence. But Ailes may have seen something else. Christie’s got Fox News TV values with a ready-made reel. And of course, Obama versus Christie is a producer’s dream: black versus white, fat versus thin, professor versus prosecutor. Maybe, just maybe, Ailes could laugh all the way to the White House and the bank.
That’s some deluded stuff. How many guys between three and four hundred pounds do you consider “ordinary” back fence chatting material?
The upshoot of the long piece: Having spent the last two years employing Fox News to boost and amplify the profiles of the unelectable GOP candidates — Santorum, Huckabee (formerly), Palin, Bachmann, Gingrich et all — because it was good money and personally satisfying, Ailes has a serious case of the frets.
He used his network to promote them, boost their careers and aspirations, and make them wealthy. Now he thinks they’re crap.
So Ailes has fixed himself and Fox upon Chris Christie, who’s not significantly distinguishable from the others in terms of belligerence and animosity towards the middle class unless one factors in his sheer size.
The tone of this — ^^^ — is absolutely perfect.
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Professional hacker Nicholas Percoco received an unusual request from a major financial institution this week: How can you help us avoid becoming the next Citigroup Inc?
Amid a wave of cyber attacks on Citi, the International Monetary Fund and other institutions, Percoco and his team at security firm Trustwave Holdings Inc are fielding more and more calls from banks wanting to stress-test their online defenses.
Again, cybersecurity is wanted by the halves — the plutocrat US multinationals — not because they’re thinking ahead about it being sound business. But now because they don’t like the cyber-paupers being into their stuff. Particularly when it’s embarrassing big news.
It’s another aspect of the detaching of security interests from the national welfare. Security, from the US military down to the grass roots of the Internet, is for protecting the haves from the have-nots.
It does not preserve or make better prospects for average Americans. Bombing paupers doesn’t promote living standards and boost wages for anyone not directly connected to that industry. And securing Vikram Pandit doesn’t even remotely chip away at unemployment.
A year ago I found intrinsically hilarious the argument, used by cyberwar and cyberdefense salesmen, that the American financial system had to be protected at all costs.
Most Americans, around the same time, were feeling (and still feel) a bit different. They think, justifiably, that they need protection from the American financial sector.
Long range, this brings into view the problem of what to do when there’s no popular interest in defending you, even if it’s — like — against the law to break into giant banks and multi-national businesses via cyberspace. What happens when more people believe in “you had it coming” than the rule of law?
Your security problems intensify, if only because the paupers in your organization, the people you’ve beggared through wage compression and outsourcing, no longer have total interest in defending the turf they work on. And they may be some of your IT staff.
You can always hire mercenaries. But it’s not a perfect solution. You’re always going to be looking over your shoulder.
For example, it’s now not hard to find a certain Schadenfreude, perhaps even outright glee, over the problems of Citi or Sony at the hands of hacking groups.
As contempt and dismay spread through the empire’s network it becomes even more difficult to secure. One of the symptoms of the disease of decline and fall is when security is only called for and dearly important when the wealthy want it to keep others from taking bits of their stuff and causing public humiliation.
From Ross Douthat at the New York Times, something to write in a bold song:
The country is weary of war, but the story Rubio tells, with eloquence and passion, is still tremendously appealing — the story of a great republic armed and righteous, with no limits on what it can accomplish in the world.
This is a story that many conservatives — and many Americans — want to believe. Once, I believed it myself.
But that was many years and many wars ago, and now I think Rand Paul is right.
Douthat’s an easy target and Matt Taibbi rips a new asshole in him over the obvious — Iraq war cheerleader now turned “pacifist.”
This just in time to merge with Congressional House reluctance to go along with the President on regarding Bombing Moe as “not war.”
It’s not war, is the reasoning, if it’s by remote control.
Anyway, it’s not that they’re suddenly pacifists, it’s that they’re for any way to mess with Obama.
However, Moe stubbornly refuses to die or go away and Little Tommy Atkins and Co. have to keep re-ordering American smart bombs.
So the only difference taking the President out of the equation with some invocation of Congressional war powers is that it will only slightly slow down drone manufacturing and sales at General Atomics.
At this point the strategy of bombing paupers is not changeable. In fact, if the President were to suddenly advocate a draw down in the pauper-bombing mission planner, the Republican Party would quickly adopt a position for restoring the primacy of bombing the world’s beggars and pantywaists, or as Ross Douthat writes:
Rubio is the great neoconservative hope, the champion of a foreign policy that boldly goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy … His maiden Senate speech was a paean to national greatness, whose peroration invoked John F. Kennedy and insisted that America remain the “watchman on the wall of world freedom.???
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Competing hard for the old Reader’s Digest demographic, Newsweek:
“To find out what pay U.S. workers will really accept for an hour’s work, and how that stacks up against other countries, NEWSWEEK turned to Mechanical Turk … The results: some Americans settled for a shockingly low 25 cents an hour—while counterparts in nations like India and the Philippines expected multiples more. Of course, the results also partly reflect how many workers in each country compete for work on Amazon’s system. But even against other wired places like the U.K. and Canada, Americans desperate to earn even a pittance were the cheapest around.”
Huffington Post exploits laborers desperate to get in print by offering them a byline without compensation while Ariana Huffington makes millions.
And we didn’t need Mechanical Turk and Newsweek to inform us. (Any mention of Mechanical Turf, btw, will automatically generate spam comment caught by the blog filter.)
Fifth-generation Georgia farmer Gary Paulk told local paper The Daily Journal that he has only been able to find half of the 300 workers he needs to pick his blueberry fields, and that’s after hiking wages 20 percent. Another farmer said he had to switch to (less efficient) machines when he couldn’t find enough workers for his fields this spring …
Anti-illegal immigration groups like FAIR argue that if illegal immigration goes down, wages would go up for farm jobs, and then native-born Americans and legal immigrants would want them. Farmers say they can’t afford to pay more.
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The structural thing, at Newsweek, increasingly used as a rationalization to stop worrying about massive unemployment. It’s all the fault of stupid workers with atrophied, obsolete skills.
There are plenty of jobs and employers can’t fill them fast enough:
[One] survey for the National Association of Manufacturers in 2009, near the recession’s nadir, found that a third of companies still faced shortages. These were largest for engineers and scientists and among aerospace, defense and biotechnology firms.
Arms manufacturing and bombing others in our detached wars is bully.
Newsweek allows a little doubt to creep in at the end. Won’t corporate America take a chance? Brother, could you spare a dollar?
There is no instant cure for today’s job mismatch, but it might ease if America’s largest companies were a little bolder. Surely many of them — enjoying strong profits — could make a small gamble that, by providing more training for workers, they might actually do themselves and the country some good.
We know the answer to that.
Readers will remember that last week Jeff Immelt of GE, he of the Prez’s job council, recommended pushing tourism — America’s a great place to visit (!) — and community college.
Anyway, where are the dependable jobs of good wage?
Obvious, really, if you read the New York Times. Border patrol and building more robots to bomb the have-nots of the world.
The US government and Pentagon successfully removed the citizenry for the equation for war. That has made the market stable.
Now the national security apparatus is involved, practically speaking, mostly in money-making and plinking off a wide variety of paupers it finds around the globe. And only very stupid people believe that killing scruffs in AfPak or Yemen or Libya, no matter how bad some of the individuals may be, does anything to defend basic freedoms and promote American value. (Yes, dronifying the pantywaists really has done the trick.)
The mightiest military in the world is for wealth-generation as well as plutocracy and toady protection schemes, from which no fruits are generally shared. While it’s out picking off bad guys and civilians too close to the action, the stuff at home worth defending blows slowly away in the wind.
From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less widely known are the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.
The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones …
There’s the official designated expert cheerleader on drones, Peter W. Singer — Brookings man, to vouchsafe something meant to sound clever and wonderful:
The Pentagon has asked Congress for nearly $5 billion for drones next year, and by 2030 envisions ever more stuff of science fiction: “spy flies??? equipped with sensors and microcameras to detect enemies, nuclear weapons or victims in rubble. Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Wired for War,??? a book about military robotics, calls them “bugs with bugs.???
Had to throw the “victims in rubble” part in to make the technology sound a little like it’s making the world a better place.
If you’re structurally unemployed and not able to get into arms manufacturing, perhaps you aren’t leveraging your iKit and cyberpersona enough.
At Mashable, no link, a consultant tells what you must do:
1. Leverage Your Social Graph
2. Use Augmented Reality and Job Search Apps
And don’t don’t don’t be short on Klout —
In today’s world, not only do you need strong hard and soft skills, but you need to develop online influence.Online influence is measured in how many connections you have, who those connections are (and how influential they are), who and how many people are sharing your content and backlinking to your website and more. Klout.com, a site that measures online influence and gives you a “Klout score??? … [Klout, incidentally, seems to be nothing more than an elaborate parasite economy app for digging into your life on Facebook or Twitter. If you don’t consent to logging onto it through these accounts, you can’t use it.]
5. Turn Yourself Into an Advertisement
Dan Schawbel is the author of Me 2.0 and the founder of Millennial Branding, a full-service personal branding agency. He’s spoken about personal branding at Google …
Eleventy-thousand three hundred six and a buck two eighty “like” it on Facebook.
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Mean is integral to satire. (Well-placed cheap shots, too.) It’s something lefties never really master.
Anyway — if, for example, I did something like this on a Democrat, Drudge or somebody similar would pick it up tomorrow, forcing it in front of every eyeball possible — like this.
The other side, of which I am a part, has nothing like that. Still.
It’s because we all are weak.
There are a number of punch lines buried in “Fat Man.”
Can you guess the identity of the “guest” vocalist from a famous Seventies hard rock band?
A free No-Prize if you can.
Side technical notes from the artisan economy:
I’ve now done enough of these to know — empirically — that YouTube games your video uploads unless you bribe them not to. This is one of the monetization strategies employed by Google properties.
The push to monetization lies in subtly providing inferior service and processing that screws with you unless you sign up or arrange for a premium capability.
When uploading — even if your video is already compressed because of the nature of the video-making software and format you employ — YouTube will randomly attempt to destroy it more.
YouTube’s processing will take your audio track, which has already been degraded in the video-making process, and peremptorily often try to –loss it further. You’ll hear this as an absence of high end, stereo image, or addition of digital artifacts, either in ghostly noises, icy tinkling or other shadowy anomalies.
YouTube processing will often also add digital artifacts to the imagery.
For example, in Fat Man, one sequence of Chris Christie makes it look like he has a disease on his lower lip and chin. It’s not a feature. It wasn’t in the clean copy uploaded to YouTube.
Google YouTube’s “processing” added it.
YouTube “processing” may inexplicably edit your video in a senseless way. One up-load of Fat Man had two seconds hacked off the end of it.
Deleting files messed with in this way and re-uploading doesn’t generally fix such errors. YouTube kept hacking two seconds off the end of Fat Man until I changed it completely and added about six seconds of filler. At which point it stopped and did something else bad to the file.
In other words, you can upload as many times or editions as you like but there is always the chance more interesting digital corruption will be added to your contribution.
YouTube’s “processing” will select three thumbnails from the video. Of these, it will also pick the middle of the three as the default. If you should decide to change it to one of the other two, YouTube may simply decide to ignore your new settings no matter how many times you re-enter and save them.
You’ll have noticed that the old media giants generally never suffer these problems.
That’s because bribery works.
You’ll never see anything that looks or sounds less than perfect from Nashville or Hollywood because all the bandits have been paid off and the proper palms greased. Now, enjoy the shiny advertising YouTube and its partners add to such songs before they load.
Taylors are high end acoustic and electric guitars. The company was always artisan. Now it’s a perfect fit for the new economy, high end instruments — like the Fender and Gibson custom shops — for old classic rockers, Nashville artists and the servants of the upper class who acquire them to fiddle about with in their spare time.
At Taylor’s 200,000-square-foot El Cajon factory, which is open for public tours, the company’s mixture of delicate hand craftsmanship and cutting edge technology is on display. One example of the latter is a robotic painting machine, built by Pinnacle Technologies Inc. of Italy for $250,000, which uses an electrical charge to increase the amount of spray paint that adheres to the instrument …
A roster of Taylor guitar owners reads like a guest list from the Grammys: Katy Perry, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Dave Matthews, Taylor Swift, Prince, John Mayer, Jackson Browne, Sting, Paul Simon, Stanley Clarke, Bryan Adams and many others …
Scientist Joyce Jones, administrator at the Vaccine Research Institute of San Diego, owns two Taylors and is contemplating a third. She recently strummed an eight-string baritone at the company’s factory store that she said was “divinely inspired. I am basking in its glory.”
Taylor’s least expensive guitars — those costing around $300 to $1,300 — are made in a 300-worker factory in Tecate, Mexico. But the bulk of the company’s revenue comes from guitars that range from $1,900 to $10,000, and to as much as $20,000 for specialty jobs. Those are made by the 400 employees in El Cajon.
“Divinely inspired,” said the weekend ham & egger near the beach front Torrey Pines Municipal Golf Course.
If Taylor rings a bell it’s because it’s currently featured in a commercial for the wonderfulness of GE Capital corporate financing.
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Pretty much all jump-on-the-grenade material for anything over 40 seconds.
This one has the added bonus of a strong Taliban-like religious message: Women should shut up in church, or something.
Dad punk rock and death metal isn’t any better than Dad classic rock.
All worship church bands are virtually be definition, Dad rock. This one tries to ameliorate the stain by putting motorcycles on the stage of the superchurch tabernacle. Or something like that. Couldn’t get much past the Life in the Fast Lane parts.
My dad rocks harder than your dad, says the description. Aiming low. I like that.
This is accidentally decent. And short. Sadly, it’s the kid who messes it up with enough overenthusiasm to make your neck sweat. If you’re the Dad.
If there was a button to push …
The zenith of Dad rock — rock fantasy camp with Slash.
Dad rock to the max: Playing a Kiss song with Paul Stanley. Dig Dad, looking a little like Bruce Ivins, on the keys.
Sadly, some women lack the usual female wisdom and cleverness which steers them clear of the shoals of Dad rock fantasy camp.
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