06.23.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 1:24 pm by George Smith
Continuing with the issue of retired NSA director Keith Alexander almost immediately going to work as a million dollar security consultant to the 1 percent, a bit from today’s International Business Times:
“He’s already out pushing hard,??? an anonymous industry source told Politico. “He’s cleared. If something does pop, he can get in the door and get a briefing. That’s part of his stock and trade.???
For all of Alexander’s expertise, though, there are still questions over whether his fee ($1 million per month) is simply too much, even for firms that have so much to lose.
Now notorious for building the US cyber-war machine, Alexander also developed offensive operations to weaken security on the global networks while creating a growing market for malware and unreported vulnerabilities. He takes all his taxpayer-paid for expertise and pull as an information/reputation commodity to be sold to Wall Street and the 1 percent.
An expensive commodity, at that.
How does anyone but Keith Alexander’s consulting firms and the 1 percent in US and global banking who may take his services benefit from any of it? They don’t.
But there’s no money or will in doing anything for anyone or anything below that level, anyway. Cynically, if you protect the financial system and its titans you’re protecting only the stuff and people worth protecting.
Alexander was always going to go where a story he has been developing for years, that catastrophic cyberattacks were coming to the US financial sector, to those too big to fail, has fallen on the most willing and able to pay corporate ears.
Continued from the IBT:
Others have been less welcoming to Alexander’s foray into the private sector. To Bea Edwards, the executive and international director of the Government Accountability Project, Alexander seems to be saying that his decades’ worth of knowledge from the world of classified information is available to the highest bidder.
“In the person of Keith Alexander, we’re seeing the de facto merger of corporate financial power and government outreach … “Some subset of corporations is paid to develop the cyber-attack and defense capability of the U.S. government, and another subset pays the graduations of the contracting agencies (the NSA and USCYBERCOM) for an inside route to the technology.
Edwards refers to the synergy in which cyber-defense contractors like the firms that hired Edward Snowden, Booz Allen, or the Lockheed Martins, provided leased workers, at no deal for the taxpayer, to staff Alexander’s cyber-war machine-building operation. And then, in turn, once retired from government work, he leases himself to the top in corporate America.
That’s a helluva retirement.
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06.22.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 10:22 am by George Smith
The City News Service informs of Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper’s drive to get a voter referendum on splitting California into six new states on the ballot in November 2106. This involves a signature push throughout the state this weekend, usually at grocery stores, one to secure the names of a little over 800,000 voters.
“We need to reboot and the Six Californias initiative would bring government much closer to the people,??? Draper told the CNS.
If you go the link and the map, you’ll note that state “Silicon Valley” is the only one to keep a catchy world-trademark name.
In LA County, we would be in West California. And, of course, there is Jefferson.
From CNS:
Venture capitalist Tim Draper said he wrote the initiative because he “wanted people to have a choice, to be local to their state government and to be able to get a refresh so that schools, streets and waterways could improve, poverty would decrease and businesses would want to keep jobs here.???
Yes, all the tech titants could be free of everyone else in Silicon Valley.
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Posted in Cyberterrorism at 9:50 am by George Smith
Pointed out by Bill Blunden, author of Behold a Pale Farce, a much recommended here book on cyberwar and the national cybersecurity industrial complex, retired NSA director Keith Alexander is cashing in his chips. Most profitably, too, if his consulting price for a month of services at $1 million gets a lot of takers.
From Bloomberg:
As the four-star general in charge of U.S. digital defenses, Keith Alexander warned repeatedly that the financial industry was among the likely targets of a major attack. Now he’s selling the message directly to the banks.
Because that’s where the money is.
Continues Bloomberg:
Alexander, 62, said in the interview he was invited to give a talk to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, known as Sifma, shortly after leaving the NSA and starting his firm, IronNet Cybersecurity Inc. He has met with other finance groups including the Consumer Bankers Association, the Financial Services Roundtable and The Clearing House.
The ex-NSA chief is leasing office space from Promontory Financial Group LLC, a Washington consultancy that focuses on the banking industry. Eugene Ludwig, Promontory’s founder and chief executive officer, joined Alexander at a meeting with Sifma, Wall Street’s largest lobby group.
Alexander offered to provide advice to Sifma for $1 million a month, according to two people briefed on the talks. The asking price later dropped to $600,000 …
“What I’m concerned about is we’re going to have a 9/11 in cyberspace,??? Alexander told Bloomberg.
Keith Alexander — from the archives.
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06.19.14
Posted in Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 12:21 pm by George Smith
Billboard magazine and other music outlets have started promoting Ted Nugent’s new album, ShutUp&Jam!
The features news includes embeds to two new Nugent songs, one of which is entitled “Never Stop Believing.” The articles do not mention a word about the most interesting part of Nugent’s new music.
In the second verse of “Never Stop Believing,” WhiteManistan’s most popular bigot, the man who called the president a “subhuman mongrel,” sings:
And I got a dream
Like Martin Luther King
In my heart, I hear that man sing
So I climb up his mountain
And I shout it out loud
Because I got a dream and I thank God
There’s really nothing more to say about with regards to Nugent’s crazy world. Last year, you’ll recall, Nugent called his summer series of shows the Black Power tour.
No link, it’s easy enough to find.
Ted Nugent, in his own words, at WND. A routine sample.
And, the web.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 8:36 am by George Smith
What if Pablo Picasso had been advised by Upworthy?
Comment rescue from yesterday:
Today’s example, from Vox, cited at the New Yorker as being (admiringly) mentioned in an (internal) NYT report on disrupters “10 times.???
Headline: “The world is on the brink of a mass extinction. Here’s how to avoid that.???
One of the answers: Use smartphones to take pictures of animals in your travels and upload them to iNaturalist where people will identify them and it will help us understand the scope of biodiversity.
It’s a mediocre interview for clicktainment by Vox and writer Brad Plumer who has twisted out of shape, for eyeballs, a science paper because he is “[on] the apocalypse beat, more or less.???
It was done on the 11th, a short expose on a paper published in Science magazine, one with the much less baiting title: “The biodiversity of species and their rates of extinction, distribution, and protection???
It is here.
Read the abstract. It doesn’t come to at all what the Vox writer and “editors??? make it out to be. It is a careful multi-scientist global paper on species extinction and as much as they can conclude about change in biodiversity.
And today, on the menu at Upworthy:
If The Skeptics Won’t Listen To Thousands Of Scientists, Maybe They Should Try A Stand-Up Economist
Lead: “Sometimes it’s all about delivery. You know, like when Comedy Central is your go to source for national politics. So if you’ve sort of had it with graphs and numbers about climate change, you’ll enjoy this irreverent new take on the future of our planet.”
The “curator:” “A writer and an independent scholar, I’m dedicated to an empowered environmental citizenry! I celebrate art, science, and stories about animals, plants, soil, and even microbes.”
It’s true. Scientists generally don’t have the delivery of clickbait and Upworthy’s sincerity trolls.
And “trending” at Medium, the place to share your stories by the guy who invented Twitter:
It’s No Longer A Smartphone, It’s A Smartcamera
The truly disruptive feature of Amazon’s Fire Phone
The author: Partner @GoogleVentures. Columnist @TechCrunch. A man of few words. Except when writing. (With a picture of Hemingway.)
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Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle at 8:19 am by George Smith
Wire news now:
A U.S. official says Obama is expected to announce the deployment of about 100 Green Berets to Iraq to help train and advise the Iraqi forces.
The crippled philosophy. Bombing paupers, first with small bits, the only way to go. Have at it.
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06.17.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:50 pm by George Smith
I point you to a long piece in the New Yorker entitled “The Disruption Machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong.”
It’s a point-by-point dissection of the narratives by Clayton M. Christensen. You could call him one of the biggest pushers of “disruptive innovation” in the American economy. And the New Yorker writer, Jill Lepore, informs his material, all based on stories of allegedly successful startups that engage in disruption against bigger, allegedly inferior competitors, has crept into all facets of business life.
In the hands of the Silicon Valley, it’s now trying to take over the public work of education and medicine, every service, even places where it’s profoundly unsuitable, or its immoral philosophy of blowing everything up for the sake of some small new business getting its pile, has grown toxic.
You face it virtually everywhere in American life. Disruption is the key to everything. If you can’t disrupt or deal with being disrupted, you’re just more splatter on the highway to the future. You can rule the world through your smartphone and twiddling fingers or die.
Upworthy comes in for a mention, as does another clickbait “news site,” Buzzfeed, for the way they are viewed, with fear, by the giants of real news.
It’s not encouraging:
It’s readily apparent that, in a democracy, the important business interests of institutions like the press might at times conflict with what became known as the “public interest.??? That’s why, a very long time ago, newspapers like the Times and magazines like this one established a wall of separation between the editorial side of affairs and the business side. (The metaphor is to the Jeffersonian wall between church and state.) “The wall dividing the newsroom and business side has served The Times well for decades,??? according to the Times’ Innovation Report, “allowing one side to focus on readers and the other to focus on advertisers,??? as if this had been, all along, simply a matter of office efficiency. But the notion of a wall should be abandoned, according to the report, because it has “hidden costs??? that thwart innovation. Earlier this year, the Times tried to recruit, as its new head of audience development, Michael Wertheim, the former head of promotion at the disruptive media outfit Upworthy. Wertheim turned the Times job down, citing its wall as too big an obstacle to disruptive innovation. The recommendation of the Innovation Report is to understand that both sides, editorial and business, share, as their top priority, “Reader Experience,??? which can be measured, following Upworthy, in “Attention Minutes.??? Vox Media, a digital-media disrupter that is mentioned ten times in the Times report and is included, along with BuzzFeed, in a list of the Times’ strongest competitors (few of which are profitable), called the report “brilliant,??? “shockingly good,??? and an “insanely clear??? explanation of disruption, but expressed the view that there’s no way the Times will implement its recommendations, because “what the report doesn’t mention is the sobering conclusion of Christensen’s research: companies faced with disruptive threats almost never manage to handle them gracefully.???
That some of the corporate leadership at the Times would even be interested in hiring a former head of promotion from Upworthy is discouraging. It shows only that some leadership at newspapers is easily frightened by garbage, pure internet eyeball suckerbait, stuff that has no beneficial role at a publication like the NYT.
And make no mistake, as referenced last week, Upworthy is unreservedly daily dogshite, nicely wrapped and sugar-frosted for instantaneous eating, a business where its “contributors” or “curators” post viral swill. The only requirement is that it test well and come as hand-wringing 1-to-5 minute doses of mechanized sincerity delivered by smiling faces who profess to be able to change with world through their cheer, tireless effort, and the magic of Internet.
Two more numbing examples from today’s menu:
Trying To Follow What Is Going On In Syria And Why? This Comic Will Get You There In 5 Minutes.
Here’s the “contributor’s” lead: “Wars are complex. They come out of nowhere, and all of a sudden, people you never heard of are killing each other on the evening news.”
The author, of course: “I love living in a purple city in a purple state (Virginia is for lovers!) because my neighbors represent a wide range of viewpoints, from libertarians to socialists, all striving to live with compassion. I want to bring that respectful tussling to the wild world of the Internet.”
When He Meets His First Child, I Cheer. When He Gets To His Second, I Almost Lose It.
The lead-in:It takes Andrew 13 minutes to tell you how many kids he has. Kudos to you if you can keep your eyes dry that whole time. And along the way, he meets a buxom necrophiliac (1:50), a doughnut dad (3:00), the love of his life, and the mother of his future childre [sic]…”
Naturally, roll the author’s changing-the-world-through-the-pitiless-optimism-of-the-web: “I’m working on big ideas and a small garden. I believe there’s plenty of planet, plenty of money, and plenty of love to go around. People are my passion, and while talk is cheap, conversation is priceless.”
Understanding Syria after five minutes and a cartoon. Crying your eyes out for the want of a copy editor to fix the word “childre” on a website that employs few, pays little, but gets millions of hits for “big ideas” and an endless click-stream of people who share, are pursuing their passion and changing the world through the wonder of social media technology and sunbeams.
On a fundamental level one understands why the lowest-common-denominator delivery of happiness and life lessons works. It impresses people who put no thought into anything but who intensely dislike complicated and often painfully depressing news.
But to think that harvesting an audience of that measure, of believing that you can carry out a valid news function catering to it, that it is disruptive and innovative and to adopt its way, is insane.
It is custom-made groupthink perfect only for the Culture of Lickspittle.
A link to the New Yorker, again, is here.
Related: MasturBaiter: The new web journalism.
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06.13.14
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 2:46 pm by George Smith
As if it isn’t big enough already, you can observe how large elements in the media and sources at the Pentagon wish to relight the American war machine, in at least two places.
The bombing theater of Iraq. And doing something about Russia’s slow re-annexation of the Ukraine.
Today, at TIME (no link):
The U.S. confirmed Friday that Russia sent tanks and military equipment to separatist fighters in Ukraine.
The delivery of military equipment threatens to further escalate tensions between Russia, Ukraine and Ukraine’s Western allies …
Someone at the State Department told the magazine, “We are highly concerned.”
At which point two things should occur to you. First: What you mean by we?
And, second, the State Department has been nothing more than a toady (or appendix) of the national security machine since the Vietnam War.
Getting involved in anything on the old battlefields of The Great Patriotic War in the former Soviet Union is an idea magnitudes worse than the epic fraud and disaster that was the invasion of Iraq.
But Americans don’t know this. Most of us probably think Uncle Sam actually beat the Wehrmacht and so, forever, the world owes us a big thank you.
The Soviet Army destroyed the majority of Nazi Germany’s war machine. Without the meat grinder of the Eastern Front, the Second World War might have been very different for Americans on the landing beaches of North Africa, France and Italy.
Russians have very strong feelings about the Patriotic War.
Want to relight a big war? One where you could be badly hurt here? One where drones and bombing the paupers won’t be jolly good and risk-free?
Go, go ahead, trying antagonizing Russians by picking a fight on what they consider to still be their bloody patriotic battlefields.
And what else can you say about Iraq? Nothing, that’s what. We should have the good grace to admit we pulverized the place for no damn good reason and the result is not surprising.
Again, because, some famous last words from 2002:
“You can see them in the field, in subsequent years, dedicated young men and women, their weapons merged into an information network that enables them to cut out with surgical precision the cancer that threatens us all — heat-packing humanitarians who leave the innocent unscathed, and full of renewed hope. In their wake, democracy, literacy and an Arab world restored to full flower, as it deserves to be, an equal in a burgeoning global culture …???
Heat-packin’ humanitarians, aren’t we all?
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Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 1:18 pm by George Smith
What was the Poisoner’s black market for young American men? Apparently, Black Market Reloaded, accessed on TOR, before it was taken down.
A San Francisco Chronicle piece tells the story of another arrested man, one who had purchased what he thought were liquid poisons on BMR.
I’m not going to try to paraphrase it:
Court filings by FBI Special Agent Michael Eldridge allege that Chamberlain sought to buy abrin, a natural poison that is found in rosary pea seeds and is considered to be a potential weapon of terrorism, among other illicit chemicals, and to have the toxins shipped to his Polk Street apartment …
In February, Eldridge said, a New York City man told police and the FBI that he had bought cyanide and abrin on Black Market Reloaded so he could commit suicide, before apparently having second thoughts.
It turned out, the FBI said, that the same online seller had sent abrin to Chamberlain. When that man, a Sacramento resident, was arrested last month, he told the FBI that Chamberlain had previously sought to buy liquid ricin from another seller but balked at the high price. Ricin comes from castor beans.
Chamberlain “indicated that he was seeking abrin to ‘ease the suffering’ of cancer patients” and asked the Sacramento seller whether abrin could be detected in the autopsy of a dead person, Eldridge wrote …
Abrin, ricin, even nicotine and bomb-making show up: The stars of the death files of the old computer underground, now peddled on-line, or at least ersatz versions of them. Chamberlain, the story reads, complained that the BMR seller’s abrin did not work.
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06.12.14
Posted in Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 12:12 pm by George Smith
Steel Knees is a happy man today. A relatively small number of really angry WhiteManistanis in Virginia booted famous House Republican Eric Cantor for, essentially, not hating on illegals, “bloodsuckers” and “the takers” enough.
Nugent:
Now Virginia has lighted the way. Eric Cantor is now the revolutionary verb, and it is time to go Eric Cantor on the whole bunch of them. No more compromise. No more BS freebees. No more getting anything you don’t earn. No more spending like maniacs flying over the cuckoo’s nest. No more criminal invaders and no more bloodsuckers.
Charles Blow at the NYT sums it up:
While the beltway chatter grows over the political death of Eric Cantor, the first House leader to be unseated in a primary, it would be easy to lose sight of just how unsettling his demise is for our politics in general.
On one level, it is a glaring example — and condemnation — of the staggering levels of voter apathy that exist the further an election race is from presidential politics. Only about 65,000 people voted in the Republican primary in Virginia’s Seventh District on Tuesday. This is in a district of nearly 760,000 people …
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