Some national security leaders argue, in turn, that there have been times in U.S. history when the country has to make security investments whether they make business sense or not. The need to prepare for a massive cyberattack, they say, is such an occasion.
Larry Clinton’s response: Then the government should pick up the check.
“If the government was interested in paying the private sector to do all these things, probably we would go a long way toward doing it,” he says. “But the government so far, [with] the Lieberman-Collins bill, wants it all done for free. They want the businesses to simply plow that into their profit and loss statement, and the numbers are staggering. You simply can’t do it.”
First, it’s necessary to understand Larry Clinton is a spokesman for a trade group of big weapons manufacturers and Pentagon contracting businesses (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Science Applications International Corporation) with cyber-defense arms called the Internet Security Alliance.
The Internet Security Alliance knows that if American corporate business which holds the telecommunications, energy, banking and transportation infrastructure is asked to pay for strengthening cyber-defenses they’ll simply decline to spend at the level US arms manufacturers would like to see. If they spend any more than usual, at all.
Therefore, the ISA is very interested in having the government pay for everything, as it more strongly guarantees revenue streams.
Think of it like the business model adopted by the banksters. Risk is shoved off. The government picks up the entire tab and the defense industry profits.
It’s very easy to be supercilious with the Internet Security Alliance.
ISA advocates a modernized social contract between industry and government …
Developing a 21 century policy platform for government to work productively with industry through a “Social Contract …
To understand what the ISA means, substitute the phrase “rent-seeking” for “Social Contract,” which the business group misuses horribly.
Generally, the “social contract” has been used to mean humans ought to live in a civil society, one in which government imposed order and protected the weak and the average from the predatory, who if allowed to prevail would, as Thomas Hobbes described famously, make life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
The “social contract” doesn’t say anything about the government guaranteeing the business of corporate computer security and arms manufacturers because without them, our life might be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” because of cyberwar.
What the Internet Security Alliance wants, like much of what big corporate America advocates for, is “rent.”
The expenditure of resources in order to bring about an uncompensated transfer of goods or services from another person or persons to one’s self as the result of a “favorable??? decision on some public policy. The term seems to have been coined (or at least popularized in contemporary political economy) by the economist Gordon Tullock. Examples of rent-seeking behavior would include all of the various ways by which individuals or groups lobby government for taxing, spending and regulatory policies that confer financial benefits or other special advantages upon them at the expense of the taxpayers or of consumers or of other groups or individuals with which the beneficiaries may be in economic competition.
That the ISA would actually pay corporate mouthpieces to write such self-serving shite about a so-called non-existent “Social Contact” tells you everything you need to know about the group.
Five miles from the nearest paved road, on a compound surrounded by barbed wire in a desolate area of Osceola County, investigators say, Marcus Faella was preparing his troops for war.
Race war.
Faella — who sees himself and his compatriots as “protectors of the white race” — was convinced it was “inevitable” and planned to kill Jews, immigrants and minorities, according to a recently filed affidavit. As they trained in firearm and hand-to-hand combat, members of the white-supremacist group American Front discussed acts of violence and disruption with targets including Orlando’s City Hall, authorities allege.
They also discussed manufacturing ricin …
Another suspect, Richard “Swamp Nazi” Stockdale of St. Cloud, had been painting the house with Brooks but left before officers arrived. Stockdale, 23, has a red-white-blue Confederate flag tattooed around his neck. Anyone who sees him is asked to call Crimeline …
Stockdale was sentenced to more than a year in prison on battery charges in October 2008. Investigators said he attacked a Hispanic high-school student at a party, beating the teen repeatedly while chanting “white power.”
You really have to click the link to see all the mug shots, not only entertaining on an abstract level, but which also decisively answer the question: “Do you think white people with hideous tatts on their faces know how to ‘manufacture’ ricin?”
Now, if they’d just been a little less ragingly anti-social and had a good agent, they might have been able to sell themselves to a minor cable network as a reality show.
And Jesus told the masses in North Carolina: “Tolerate not the Sodomites for they are like vermin, infectious, and will make you into a homo, too.”
And the masses listened.
Background: Last week I asked Mark Smollin to make me a cover for a fake book — The Compleat Sayings of American Jesus.
With my suggestions he came up with the above and a word balloon that needed filling.
I told him to use one of the first “sayings” published last week here. It had to grab with that special kind of nastiness one has come to expect in the white vote in the south and much of the heartland. It also had to have a quality that would immediately buzz off the same pismires because they never see themselves in such a bad light, viewing what they’re doing as defending something special instead of what it actually is — using law, truth determined by majorities and rampant ignorance to pick on people they hate.
What was the citation from yesterday? Yes, here it is, with regards to a country in a state of fail: “Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed to invent outrageous events.”
Today’s double dose:
Just how unpopular is President Barack Obama in some parts of the country? Enough that a man in prison in Texas got 4 out of 10 votes in West Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary.
The inmate, Keith Judd, is serving time at the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution in Texas …
Brown, [a West Virginia electrician who voted for the jailbird], went to the polls Tuesday with his 22-year-old daughter, Emily. She planned to vote for Judd too until she found out where Judd has been living.
“I’m not voting for somebody who’s in prison,” she said.
She was certain about one thing: “I just want to vote against Barack Obama.”
American Jesus told the masses in West Virginia: “Even the lifetime criminal has more virtue than a socialist Muslim from Kenya.”
Just breaking:
And American Jesus said, in a press conference from Charlotte, NC: “Malum est dux qui est infecta homosexualitas” or “Evil is a leader who is infected with homosexuality.”
One of the badges of the stupid right wing bigot, in other words virtually all of the modern Republican Party, is the pass around e-mail joke.
It begins something like this:
Over five thousand years ago, Moses said to the children of Israel, “Pick up your shovels, mount your asses and camels, and I will lead you to the Promised Land.???
Nearly 75 years ago, (when Welfare was introduced)Roosevelt said, “Lay down your shovels, sit on your asses, and light up a Camel. This is the Promised Land.???
I was startled to get this in my e-mail on Monday. I patiently explained to the friend who’d sent it that I knew he’d probably received it in e-mail from one of his Republican friends, someone not even around when FDR issued in the New Deal.
The e-mail ends with an attack on Muslims in Pakistan. Between slurs on those on welfare, a complaint about too much taxation and Obamacare, plus a blanket condemnation of Muslims as suicide bombers, it contains all the sweets the Tea Party loves.
I did a quick Google search and it’s published in lots of places. They all have one thing in common: They’re chat boards and sites for right wing or Tea Partiers who believe it’s hysterical. It also goes well with the idiot wish to wave or display the Gadsden flag so that everyone knows how patriotic you are.
The people who pass it don’t see themselves as bigots. They really do believe it’s a bit of smart wordplay, not something dreadfully dull and telegraphed.
It’s like Rick Santorum’s wealthy sugar-daddy, Foster Friess, on television laughing and smiling at what he thinks is a fine attempt at humor — that women practiced contraception by holding an aspirin between their knees — while everyone else sees someone who’s just sprouted a third eye on a stalk.
It also indicates big differences in the brains of right-wingers and progressives.
I never get jokes in e-mail from my progressive friends. It never happens. All I get from progressive groups are solicitations to contribute or alerts when Occupy Wall Street is planning something in my area.
However, the right wing mind works in lockstep. They religiously use e-mail lists of friends to pass things around. They immediately go viral, having a quality hitting all the right buttons, one in which the recipient always feels his world view reinforced by the like-minded.
And Jesus of America said to the unemployed masses: “There can be no gold for you because it is needed to pay for the scourging of the underwear bombers.”
“The U.S., which has a long history of violent plutocratic rule unknown to the textbook-fed, will stand out as the best-armed Third World country, its population ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-educated, ill-cared for in health, and increasingly poverty-stricken: even Social Security may be whittled down, impoverishing tens of millions of the elderly.
“As empires decline, their leaders become increasingly incompetent — petulant, ignorant, gifted only with PR skills of posturing and spinning, and prone to the appointment of loyal idiots to important government positions. Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed to invent outrageous events.”
Lately I’ve remarked on the lack of any obvious leadership or conscience from the official face of the US military. However, consider another important part of our culture of professional bootlicks — those who cover the US military — with these types of stories:
The Pentagon halted its cooperation with Marvel Studios’ blockbuster movie The Avengers because the Defense Department didn’t think a movie about superheroes, Norse Gods and intergalactic invasions was sufficiently realistic in its treatment of military bureaucracy …
“We couldn’t reconcile the unreality of this international organization and our place in it,??? Phil Strub, the Defense Department’s Hollywood liaison, tells Danger Room.
So who’s worse? The Pentagon being trivially uncooperative and routinely illogical with Hollywood moneybags. Or Spencer Ackerman, his job, in a manner of speaking, to suck the Department of Defense’s cock for Wired copy, weekly or even daily.
So we can all know the fun details of such things mentioned above.
Al Qaeda’s barrel-scrapers continue to be portrayed as capable of posing a huge threat to this country. Now virtually destroyed by US operations, a handful of al Qaeda piss ants in a couple countries continue to putter with things that don’t work for shit.
The CIA foiled a plot by al-Qaida’s affiliate in Yemen to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner around the one-year anniversary of the killing of its former leader Osama bin Laden, The Associated Press reported.
American officials said the plot involved a bomb with a design that upgraded the underwear bomb taken aboard a jetliner over Detroit on Christmas 2009. That explosive device failed to detonate …
The AP reports the improved bomb had a more refined detonation mechanism, but was still intended to be hidden in a passenger’s underwear …
In an exclusive meeting, a senior U.S. intelligence official told NBC News that Hassan al-Asiri — the so-called “master bomb-maker??? for al-Qaida in Yemen — posed the single most dangerous threat to the United States …
Asiri designed the first underwear bomb that failed over Detroit and he was also the maker of the printer ink cartridge bombs that were discovered before they were shipped to the United States.
Refining the detonator on the underwear bomb. Imagine the painstaking and brilliant work that such a project must involve. Where does al Qaeda find such innovative men of action?
Richard Clarke, who advised President Bill Clinton and tried to advise both presidents Bush on counter-terrorism and cyber-security, points out that “Sophisticated cyber attackers could do things like derail trains across the country…They could cause power blackouts – not just by shutting off the power but by permanently damaging generators that would take months to replace. They could do things like cause [oil or gas] pipelines to explode. They could ground aircraft.???
“Without computer-controlled networks, there is no water coming out of your tap; there is no electricity lighting your room; there is no food being transported to your grocery store; there is no money coming out of your bank; there is no 911 system responding to emergencies; and there is no Army, Navy and Air Force defending the country . . . All of these functions, and many more, now can only happen if networks are secure and functional.
“A systematic [attack] could come from a terrorist group, a criminal cartel or a foreign nation . . . and we do know of foreign nations that are interested in our information infrastructure and are developing offensive capabilities that would allow them to take down sectors of our information infrastructure …
One possible scenario would feature a demand leveled by a foreign government or terrorist group. When the U.S. government refuses to comply, this adversary demonstrates its capabilities by reducing a region of the United States to chaos. ‘I think the capability to do that probably exists in the hands of several nations,’ Clarke states. ‘I think it could exist in the near future in the hands of criminal and terrorist organizations.'”
“Envision all of these things happening simultaneously – electricity going out in several major cities; telephones failing . . .” — Signal magazine, 1999
“I’m talking about people shutting down a city’s electricity . . . shutting down 911 systems, shutting down telephone networks and transportation systems. You black out a city, people die. Black out lots of cities, lots of people die.” — Clarke, the New York Times, 1999
A key House committee has voted to cut food aid, health care and social services like Meals on Wheels to protect the Pentagon from a crippling wave of budget cuts come January. — AP
If there are any men or women of stature [at the Pentagon] aghast at the length of the conflict and how millions upon millions of their countrymen have been economically disenfranchised and cast into ruin on the home front while they have continued to meaninglessly fight on, we will never hear it … We do not need or train good military leaders. They are only needed to ensure the machine continues to grind.
Jesus of America sez ‘Guns, not butter. The rest just goes all for naught.’ And I’m going to push this until I see numbers.
While fresh out of any semblance of outrage from leadership, we have replaced it with quite the talent for knee-jerk indecency.
