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.
Still collapsing job markets include lousy minimum pay work at big box retail stores because nobody’s buying except the halves. Also, lousy minimum and sub-minimum pay work in childcare has been hurt. Economic collapse has forced families to rely on grandparents who do it for free. Or they can do it themselves because someone in the family has been de-jobbed again.
Also, gambling is off. Because the gambler cohort, those that go to Atlantic City on the party bus for the weekend, have been hit hard by firings. Plus, having seen their wages compressed and the cost of living escalate by a few inches, they’ve lost even the little gold they formerly threw away at casinos.
Hospitality work is also not happening. Because that Discover America dog I mentioned last weekend just won’t hunt.
“The gambling industry is not showing much growth,” says Gregg Mulholland, analyst with Sageworks, a financial information company. A spokeswoman for the American Gaming Association — which represents casinos and, therefore, only one-third of the amusement and gaming sector — says employment was largely flat …
With childcare costs increasing and income growth stagnant, more grandparents have stepped in to look after young children – roughly 40% to 60% of those living within 30 minutes of their grandchildren now provide some care …
Worth special mention is Apple. No one ever mentions how much job loss Apple is responsible for in this country — and I’m not speaking of the iStuff manufacturing sent to China — but the employment destroyed because of the ubiquity of GarageBand and similar things.
Now you may think the wide distribution of cheap digital recording software has been a boon. Think a little more deeply about it and consider how well served society is when everyone who can make music, but maybe shouldn’t, does it anyway.
The software contributed to a radical devaluation, not only of the making of music, but also in any employment associated with it, transferring what was left of the spoil, to Apple.
So while there has been much demonstrable creative destruction, the creative replacement of that which was ruined with compensating value has been much harder to categorize.
The salient graph:
Jobs in motion picture and recording have remained stagnant over the last three months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The slowdown in hiring is partly seasonal, as some of TV shows end their productions this time of year, says producer Jonathan Taplin, a member of the Academy of Motion Picture, Arts and Sciences. Digital music recording equipment like Pro Tools and Apple’s software package GarageBand, which was launched by Apple in 2004, have also replaced some studio jobs in the music industry, he says. “Digital technology is pretty much killing the standalone recording studio business,” says Taplin, who is also director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, an arts and media research group. “Every band has much higher quality tools on a Mac than we had with 24-track tape in the 1970s or even five years ago …”
Fuck the guy from USC, I’m using recording software I bought well over five years ago. On a PC, not a Mac.
What might have been more perceptive an observation is that each copy of Apple’s Final Cut Pro video-making software transfers a substantial amount of money to Apple without enabling many sucked into buying it to recoup their investment. Because the economy now dictates that all video and music be free.
Unless you siphon it though Apple iTunes and pay an enabler site to put it there. Then somebody gets theirs, it’s just not you. The enabler and Apple divide your tithe right before they plant you way out back and six feet under in the vast on-line digital market.
If Apple and the technologies of creative destruction give the working majority any more help like this — well, most just won’t need it ever again.
Done without Apple’s “help.”
“We are facing a very difficult transition from manufacturing to a service economy. We have failed to manage that transition smoothly. If we don’t correct that mistake, we will pay a very high price. Already, the average American is suffering from the failed transition.” — Joseph Stiglitz, economist and Nobel laureate.
Coulda always canceled and saved himself the extra grief.
I’d say get well soon, Ted, but you’d all know I’m not sincere. “And have many more,” now that’s a different matter.
This is another one that’s going to hurt Ted in the wallet. It’s one thing to be vile on-stage in some dive bar or casino in the hinterland, in a camera phone video uploaded to YouTube. It’s quite another to tell a woman off camera, in a fit of rage, that you’ll ‘fuck’ her for family-oriented network television.
Everyone will get a chance to see — finally — what Ted’s really like.
And as more and more people see it they’ll be having second thoughts about Ted’s fitness as entertainment at the county fairs. They won’t be buying that bunk about taking deathly sick children on their last fishing trips. In fact, they’ll be appalled by the thought of Ted with their children.
After a week or so of posting on how to take out the trash on Facebook, the ‘friend’ list is purged to less than 50 percent of its former size. Getting rid of one layer of picture/article/charticle spammers at a time, only to reveal still another, like the peeling of an onion.
Once you get going you realize you’ll have to give at least 90 percent of them the chop. Alternatively, you can demote individuals in your feed with Facebook’s option to see only their ‘most important’ updates. However, for the most efficient and highly rated Facebook spammers in your list, it may not work.
You’ll again wonder why I’m actually on Facebook.
Facebook is for bootlicks and gobble-wallahs, and like the other super social network — Twitter — it’s principal demographic is people who are easily offended by criticism and hard words from anyone who is not an officially designated celebrity or authority figure. Daily, Facebook astonishes with hordes of Americans imprinted with a stupid-from-eating-lead-paint-chips-as-a-child Norman Vincent Peale-like belief that, above all else, it’s important to be sunny no matter how wretched and intelligence-insulting conditions get.
The US military, through a West Point terrorism training school, released documents seized during the Osama bin Laden raid, a year ago this week. Readers know that despite the formidable achievement, for which the President deserves a great deal of credit, there has been no bin Laden dividend. The 99 percent has seen no benefit from his killing. The war, if anything, has accelerated with more drone assassinations and special operations work.
The original No-Prize was invented by Stan Lee of Marvel Comics. It was a way to say ‘atta-boy,’ a symbolic air prize totally without worth. And that’s the bin Laden doc release by the US government.
At the time of the raid the media, fed by government minders, dutifully reported that a “trove” of materials had been seized in the bin Laden compound.
Physically, perhaps it was true. However, the released of 17 declassified documents today, constituting over 170 pages of translated-into-English letters is a dud.
They are not particularly interesting. For example, in document “SOCOM-2012-0000004T” there is much trivial discussion on which media outlets in the US should get al Qaeda’s propaganda messages for the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Fox News is written off.
“[CNN] seems to be in cooperation with the government more than the others (with the exception of Fox News),” the letter reads, penned by American-turned al Qaeda man Adam Gadahn to bin Laden. The Arabic version of CNN, he writes, is somewhat better.
In the end Gadahn makes the recommendation that every news channel receive a copy of Ayman Zawahiri’s 9/11 anniversary speech.
“Except for Fox News, let her die in her anger.” It is inadvertently funny.
Gadahn also recommends a few journalists by name — all them of seemingly cocked up in some interesting way.
There is “Brian Russ” — he means ABC’s Brian Ross. And “Simon Hirsh,” presumably Pulitzer winner Seymour Hersh.
I leave only a picture for readers to determine why this is hilarious.
Were bin Laden and Adam Gadahn fans of re-runs of My Mother the Car? It is hard to know.
The other observation to be made is that being the preferred journalists of al Qaeda is like getting a recommendation from a colony of flesh-eating bacteria.
The remote possibility exists that some of the material has been doctored by the US government for the express purpose of humiliation.
Readers can zip out to Cryptome here, to see for themselves. But it’s mostly rancid old mutton, passed off as veal for a day or two in the mainstream media.
It shows again how short al Qaeda was on talent. It just adds to the picture that over a decade of war history had passed bin Laden and his terror men by.
Last year the picture was of bin Laden, alone in his compound, writing letters to his minions, missives ignored. Much like Hitler in the Fuhrer bunker near the end, moving formations that no longer existed on a room’s map table, no one daring to point out the obvious.
There are big differences, of course. In the grand scheme of history, Hitler still makes bin Laden look like a piker.
In sharp contrast, many Americans still know some of the famous names of US generals from WWII. Movies were made about them.
Nobody down ladder knows the names of the men who killed bin Laden. They may know the name of the dog on the mission — Cairo — because it was convenient publicity.
Americans can’t name the commanding generals in any of the theaters of war where there is action against al Qaeda or the Taliban. And they will never be able to do so because no one cares.
Glorious memorable movies will not be made. The war will go on, somewhere, always.
This is the way the military machine has made things. If there are any men or women of stature among them 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.
The nation’s top military officer told Harvard’s Kennedy School Thursday that despite the death of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the exit of longtime dictators from the world stage, and no mortal enemy in the form of a nation-state the United States is more vulnerable.
Army General Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told students at a forum on the Cambridge campus that even though the world appears to enjoy greater stability and interdependence, threats looming beneath the surface — from cyber warfare to the proliferation of long-range missiles — actually place American security at greater risk.
“The truth is, I believe I am chairman at a time that seems less dangerous but is actually more dangerous,” Dempsey said, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. “That’s the essence of what I like to call the security paradox.”
Dempsey, who took on the role as top military adviser to President Obama last fall, has been criticized for asserting that the international scene poses greater harm than at any time in his lifetime – even the Cold War when the destruction of much of humanity loomed as a possible consequence of the nuclear standoff between superpowers.
A week from now no readers will remember this man’s name, only that yet another bit of exaggerated insane trash was passed off as wisdom from an expert.
We do not need or train good military leaders. They are only needed to ensure the machine continues to grind.
Why this blog exists
A scholarly report issued by the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State entitled Carnage Interrupted: An Analysis of Fifteen Terrorist Plots Against Public Surface Transportation cites yours truly in the footnotes.
This is because I did primary research on the infamous London ricin plot.
The report, written by Brian Michaal Jenkins, a counter-terror expert and former Green Beret covers it, although under the label — Heathrow Express Ricin Plot.
“The trial of the defendants did not establish any link to al Qaeda or Zarqawi,” writes Jenkins. “Since all but one of the nine held for trial were acquitted, we can only speculate that at least some of them may have thought as part of the global jihadist enterprise.”
Or maybe not. For the text Jenkins eschews the political dimension of the case — which was its primary reason for being in the news in the first place.
The castor beans seized in no way could have been made into a WMD, or even a weapon that would have killed many. Jenkins grasps this.
In a reaction to a Scotland Yard officer’s claim that it “was going to be our 9/11,” Jenkins writes:
“This was a gross exaggeration of what was a terrorist fantasy, or at most, an amateurish scheme. The Heathrow Express plotters possessed no ricin and their planned method of disbursal was dubious.”
Jenkins still comes up a bit short on what ricin actually is, however. He writes that it might pose some hazard if smeared on handrails or doorhandles.
He knows ricin is not a contact poison and cannot be absorbed through the skin. But if there were open cuts on the hand?
No. If such were the case it would have been impossible to work in castor mills, work in castor plant fields, or handle castor mash — which was often packaged as fertilizer and used in mostly futile attempts to kill insect pests. Fatalities would have resulted.
In castor powder, which is all anyone has ever produced from castor seeds outside of fully-equipped biochemistry labs where people know what they’re doing, there is simply not enough ricin to make that a realistic hazard.
Eating it, however, is another matter. And there are times when people have tried to poison one another in domestic criminal cases with it.
The Heathrow Express/London ricin plot was a huge deal, politically. The Bush administration conspicuously used it to push for war in Iraq, making the claim that the UK poison ring — actually, Kamel Bourgass — was connected to al Qaeda in Iraq. It was in a slide used to present evidence that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was in league with al Qaeda.
Indeed, the UK prosecution’s initial strategy was try and tie the poison recipes of Kamel Bourgass to materials seized from al Qaeda hideouts in Kandahar and Kabul. They failed in this because that’s not where the poison recipes seized in the London ricin trial were from.
Nevertheless, the Carnage Averted monograph is a worthy read on a collection of failed terrorist plots.
Inspire magazine, while not meant to be an al Qaeda joke, has always been easy to brush off. It’s been an example of how al Qaeda has had a serious problem with recruitment filled as it is with wishful thinkers and fantasies on terror that will never come true. Al Qaeda, for practical purposes, is operationally dead. As far as the 99 percent and middle class America is concerned, it poses no serious threat.
Al Qaeda has been whittled down by American might over a decade of war. The US employs more money and manpower hunting it than it needs to destroy a handful of medium-sized nations.
Al Qaeda, while not gone, just does not matter. Jihadists may got lucky now and then in the future. But there won’t be any game changers with regards to the progeny of Osama bin Laden. The history book has closed on this chapter although the US war machine will continue to prosecute it.
Today then, news of the latest issues of Inspire — inspiring only laughter if you have any sense.
The men who launched al Qaeda’s English-language magazine may have died in a U.S. missile strike last fall, but “Inspire” magazine lives on without them — and continues to promote jihadi attacks on Western targets, offering detailed advice on how to start huge forest fires in America with timed explosives and how to build remote-controlled bombs …
But issue nine carries equally lethal advice, with “It Is of Your Freedom to Ignite a Firebomb,” which gives detailed instructions on how to ignite an “ember bomb” in a U.S. forest, recommending Montana because of the rapid population growth in wooded areas.
“In America, there are more houses built in the [countryside] than in the cities,” says the writer, who uses the pseudonym The AQ Chef. “It is difficult to choose a better place [than] in the valleys of Montana.”
Readers know US terror beat reporters are panderers. And stupid.
They choose not to point out the total cluelessness of the al Qaeda man.
More houses are built in the urban environment than in the woods. That’s a fact.
I live in southern California. In Pasadena. Where I can look outside and see the mountains, and the houses built right up to them and on their lower slopes. Every year southern California has fires, some of them set by arsonists. These fires burn down homes, frequently lots and lots of them.
Population of Montana: 998,199
Population of LA County: 9,830,420
Doh!
The al Qaeda men writing for Inspire have obviously never actually been to the United States.
They just wishfully think it would be good, and really terrorizing, if someone could like, uh, start a couple fires in … wait for it … Montana!
Where they’d be put out right away. Al Qaeda apparently cannot even scan net news archives for stories where fires do get out of control in states where lots of people live — like here, or … well. Do it yourself.
Inspire only shows two things — that al Qaeda is virtually destroyed and that US war-on-terror reporters are crap. The latter has been known for a long time.
The ABC news story, and others, note the new issues of Inspire are “riddled” with spelling errors.
One of al Qaeda’s most prominent radical clerics may have been killed in a drone strike last year, but his words appear to have lived on in a new issue of al Qaeda’s English-language magazine in which he calls for biological attacks against the U.S.
“The use of chemical and biological weapons against population centers is allowed and is strongly recommended,” U.S.-born Anwar al-Awlaki is quoted as saying in one of two new issues of the Inspire magazine.
Al Qaeda has never had any bioweapons capability. It is a fiction although the terror agency’s desire to have them is not.
What’s left of it, a small number of kooks and feebs worldwide, apparently continues to call for the wishful manufacture of biological weapons because its people, who are not very discerning, read everything about it in western news. And they have come to believe that because so many stories assert that it its elementary to produce biological weapons, someday it will be easy for them. Or it will fall into someone’s hands, magically, or something like that.
Reality, on the other hand, has not been kind to the group in this matter.
Everything wished for in Inspire has never happened. The only interesting issue was the one which covered, after the fact, the al Qaeda plan to bomb UPS and FedEx jets with bombs hidden in toner cartridges.
