08.27.12
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall at 9:01 am by George Smith
The balance of trade in non-military domestic manufacturing may have gone to hell upon sale to China but there’s one place were the US still rules supreme.
We’re the biggest sellers of arms, bar none, with special emphasis on sales to countries ruled by our toadies.
“A worldwide economic decline had suppressed arms sales over recent years,” writes the New York Times. “But increasing tensions with Iran drove a set of Persian Gulf nations — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman — to purchase American weapons at record levels.”
One can think of US arms manufacturing as a protected Keynsian jobs program. No other sector of the American economy enjoys such status. It is a near perfect example of industrial socialism in which the taxpayers assume all the investment and initial risk but are returned little to none of the profit made on it.
DD blog covered this phenomenon in the Economic Treason series last year, at Globalsecurity.Org and here.
At the time, I made the argument that every American was entitled to a royalty on arms sales since it is taxpayer money that pays for the innovation, development and primary manufacturing of the American weapons coveted by the various tin pot oil-producing countries on the southern side of the Persian Gulf.
And the royalty was calculated this way:
Again, it’s not unreasonable to make the argument that the stressed in the middle class ought to receive something back for the country’s primary business product/export, one its taxes bankroll and grow. A 20 percent war dividend for 2011 might look like this:
20 percent of 247 billion in arms sales = $49 400 000 000
20 percent of 164.7 billion for direct war = $32 940 000 000
Total war dividend clawback = $82 340 000 000
Bonus check cut for 49.3 million people on food stamps, adjustable for increases = $1670.18.
Since then the royalty check has increased.
The CRS report examining US arms sales was obtained by Steve Aftergood at Secrecy blog. And it is here in a post bearing the title: US Arms Transfer Agreements Reach Record High.
To alter a current and much overused trope from the presidential war: The Lockheed Martins and General Dynamixes didn’t make that, We made that.
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08.21.12
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle at 1:20 pm by George Smith
From here, months ago:
In modern America, there are plaster casters all over the place. In the culture of lickspittle it’s been turned into a serious career track.
And by this I don’t mean people who fluff rockstars so their tumescence can be lovingly preserved. I mean it far more metaphorically, as in those who act as fellatrices for various agencies and industries in our allegedly technologically superior country …
Fussell never imagined the explosion of things of this ilk on the network … Print kept the number of such pubs small because even though execrable, it still took a good deal of money and resources to do it right.
However, web publishing did away with all that and, today, in full cooperation with the culture of lickspittle and its glory, there are literally hundreds of digital pubs for those who get hard reading about the products of US weapons shops.
And because there is a big audience with such a pathology, the publications that serve them are essentially groupie mags — like Tiger Beat — only staffed with journalists who write daily swooning copy on what I’ve called The Empire’s Dog Feces.
The web publications compete viciously with each other for the stories of the day, even the insignificant. The quality of journalism is terrible. The publications pay their contributors in … gum, little or nothing at all except the opportunity to be published and be in the Google news dragnet.
So it comes as no surprise when a few of them fall for jokes:
News flash: The Pentagon is replacing the classic stabbing bayonet on rifles with a tomahawk “designed for quick chopping motions??? complete with a twist-off head providing room for storage. And, the Department of Defense is ordering troops to stop wearing the popular TapouT MMA T-shirts because of security concerns.
Believable? Maybe, but not true.
With a hint of truth these cheeky fake news stories recently duped some serious blogs. Both Gizmodo and Yell magazine happened to mistake the posts on The Duffel Blog, a five-month old satirical website, for real news.
The owner of the Duffel Blog, which is wildly successful, tells NBC News:
“I do want to make people laugh,??? Szoldra said, “but at the same time I do have a little bit of a following, a bully pulpit if you will, where I can highlight something that I think is worth making fun of and a lot of time it’s better to make fun of it than it is to just complain about it.???
Good boy. But no, it is never not good to crap on shit.
Last week, here:
If you’re in a tech firm you can tell a Wired reporter you piss iced tea and they’ll publish it without blinking.
And it gets easier as you proceed down the ladder.
Some nobody at Gizmodo:
“The problem with the US military is that sometimes their contraptions get so wacky that I can believe anything they say,??? Gizmodo’s blogger wrote. “My mistake, people. Sorry about that.
And after twenty years of covering the ‘so wacky’ you know fantasy, or satire, as it where, when you see it. Instead of taking it for inside dope.
The Duffel Blog.
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08.06.12
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism at 9:07 am by George Smith
Pete fell out and who was left?
Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy Peter Pry, at the right-wing FrontPage magazine, on EMP doom and his group of lobbyists trying to save us from it:
Peter Pry: Our Task Force is an experiment in returning to an earlier era, when the private sector played a much bigger role in U.S. security, as in the War of 1812, which was not won at the Battle of New Orleans, but on the high seas by American privateers who crippled Britain’s merchant shipping. I like to think of our Task Force as a group of expert intellectual privateers, operating on a shoe string, but achieving decisive results by raiding and sinking the myths, propaganda, and bad ideas of lobbyists and bureaucrats who would leave our nation vulnerable to an EMP catastrophe.
FP: Is there anything the average American can do, or is this Washington’s problem?
Pry: Call and write your Congressman and Senator and tell them to support the SHIELD Act (HR 668), sponsored by Rep. Trent Franks, and the legislative initiatives of Congressman Roscoe Bartlett to protect our national electric grid from EMP.
–Contribute to Congressman Roscoe Bartlett’s re-election campaign. Bartlett, who has been the national leader on EMP preparedness, is fighting to keep his seat because his district was gerrymandered.
Also noted: Republicans Fight for Chick-fil-A’s First Amendment Rights.
Cult of EMP Crazy — from the archives.
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07.25.12
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Cyberterrorism at 1:06 pm by George Smith
From the wire:
Iranian nuclear facilities have been struck by a musical cyber virus, according to an e-mail believed to have been sent by an Iranian scientist to a Finnish digital security firm.
Mikko Hypponen, a chief researcher at the F-Secure firm, posted the e-mail on the company’s blog. According to the message, the Natanz and Fordo nuclear facilities have been hit with the virus, which plays the heavy metal song “Thunderstruck,” by AC/DC …
Other than playing songs, the malware has shut down computer systems and disabled Siemens hardware.
Viruses which play music randomly for the annoyance of it aren’t new.
And the behavior of the US military — which has used idiotic loud music against others previously, isn’t either.
It’s always AC/DC, Let the Bodies Hit the Floor by the Drowning Pool, or something similar, the standard tuneage of the dumber-than-they-think-and-look musclebound.
Since the cat is out of the bag on who is writing and spreading computer viruses in Iran, there’s no actual incentive not to do these kinds of things. In fact, a DD Blog No-Prize for the first reader who spies a story in which a pundit or expert congratulates our men on the psychological brilliance and audacity of it.
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07.13.12
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism, Imminent Catastrophe at 2:06 pm by George Smith
Extreme heat, power blackouts and wildfires are no reason to mull over the consequences of global warming. Keep your eyes on the ball, folks! Instead they illustrate how frail US civilization is. And they let us have just a little taste of what life might be like after electromagnetic pulse doom.
If you thought embarrassing failure in the Republican presidential primary was any reason to keep Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy chief Newt Gingrich off the pages of the Washington Post, you were mistaken.
Excerpted from the WaPost:
Without power, the comforts of home become worthless. You sit in the sweltering heat, realizing you are living in a box that, without electricity, is a trap. You pray for the “juice??? to return before your groceries go bad. You either make do in the heat or find refuge with friends who have electricity …
I write this now because of my concern for national security and our power grid, which are susceptible to doomsday-level damage if hit by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) strike …
In 2009, my friend — and sometimes co-author — William R. Forstchen published a truly frightening book, “One Second After.??? (I wrote the foreword.) The story is fiction but based on hard facts. It is a cautionary tale about the threat of EMP strikes and major solar storms, known as coronal mass ejections.
William turned to bipartisan congressional studies published in 2004 and 2008 and interviewed many experts. His book made the New York Times bestseller list and helped to trigger what some call the “prepper??? movement …
The Cult of EMP Crazy — from the archives.
A beginner’s guide to the immense library of unreadable Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy Bodice Ripper novels.
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06.28.12
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle at 10:08 am by George Smith
The labs of the military, where the lame are made to see, the blind to talk.
From Wired (UK):
The US army has successfully tested a laser device that shoots out 50 billion watt-powered bolts of lightning.
“We never got tired of the lightning bolts zapping our simulated targets,” admitted George Fischer, a physicist leading the project at the Picatinny Arsenal research lab in New Jersey …
The successful model tested features a series of adaptations that should ensure it can survive tough conditions in the field and stay powered-up for long stretches.
Not a trick question: What has the Picatinny Arsenal brought to science?
Answer: Nothing. Unless you call stuff like this science.
Trivia: I once had an old relative who worked at the Picatinny Arsenal. He used to tell me he was a chemist. He didn’t know his ass from a hot rock.
That’s so nice, Wired dudes. Can we have an article about Nikola Tesla, next?
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06.27.12
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 8:24 am by George Smith
Earlier this year, on the publication of al Qaeda’s magazine, Inspire:
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 …
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!
Inspire only shows two things — that al Qaeda is virtually destroyed and that US war-on-terror reporters are crap.
From ABC News, then:
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 …
Readers know — not a single William L. Shirer in the entire press army covering the war on terror.
Today:
WOODLAND PARK, Colo. – A stubborn and towering wildfire jumped firefighters’ perimeter lines and doubled in size in the hills overlooking Colorado Springs, forcing frantic mandatory evacuation notices for more than 9,000 residents, destroying an unknown number of homes and partially closing the grounds of the sprawling U.S. Air Force Academy.
Heavy smoke and ash billowed from the mountain foothills west of the city. Bright yellow and orange flames flared in the night, often signaling another home lost to the Waldo Canyon Fire, the No. 1 priority for the nation’s firefighters.
Interstate 25, which runs through Colorado Springs, was briefly closed to southbound traffic Tuesday. All told, officials said, evacuation orders affected as many as 32,000 residents …
Throughout the interior West, firefighters have toiled for days in searing, record-setting heat against fires fueled by prolonged drought. Most, if not all, of Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana were under red flag warnings, meaning extreme fire danger.
In central Utah, authorities found one woman dead Tuesday when they returned to an evacuated area, marking the first casualty in a blaze that consumed at least two dozen homes. Sanpete County sheriff’s officials said they hadn’t identified the victim, whose remains were found during a damage assessment of the 60-square-mile Wood Hollow Fire near Indianola.
The nation is experiencing “a super-heated spike on top of a decades-long warming trend,” said Derek Arndt, head of climate monitoring at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
Massive wildfires are a fact of life in the mid-west and west. Global warming has made them worse but they’ve always been part of the landscape. Sparks from cars, guns, lightning, arsonists, careless campers — many things touch them off.
Southern California has its red flag days every year. There is probably not anyone who lives here who hasn’t seen a helicopter dropping dyed fire retardant or been close to, if not too close, to a big wildfire.
A wildfire crawled through the south side of the San Gabriel mountains the first year I was here. The smoke plume from it dropped ash like a light snow on Pasadena for days. Coals set palms and rooftops on fire.
A smoke cloud from a wildfire near Venture turned the highway into Santa Barbara on a Sunday afternoon into what seemed like midnight to me and a friend a couple years ago.
Massive wildfires destroy lots of property. Casualties always remain low, hardest hit being the firefighters. People usually have time to get out of the way. Terrorizing is a poor way to describe them.
Firestorms that incinerate cities have been caused by massive strategic bomber raids. They were the property of the old US Army Air Force, Curtis LeMay and Bomber Harris of the United Kingdom during World War II.
The Japanese mounted a silly campaign to cause fires using incendiary balloons floated in the jet stream in World War II.
The ineffective Japanese fire balloon campaign was more effective than Inspire.
The US had a small project to develop incendiary bats to be dropped over Japanese cities in World War II. A most excellent, authoritative and amusing book on the affair, which I have, is here.
The bats were kitted with white phosphorus encapsulated in a decaying gel strapped to a foot, put on racks, and packed into a bomb
which opened in mid-air. The only test resulted in a building burned down at the project site after an experimental bomb was released over a target. The bats flew out, declined to go where they were supposed to, flew back to roost at the base — their home, and set a fire.
The bat bomb’s scientist, and the bats, had roots in Pasadena.
“Fletch grinned when faced with my mastiff,” it reads. (The greater mastiff bat is the largest bat in the US.)
Continuing, from Bat Bomb:
(Fletch) had never seen a bat that large. “Man,” he said appreciatively. “Just think what Doc could do with a plane load of those puppies. Where’d you get ‘im from, Africa?”
“Pasadena,” I said. “Ain’t he just a dilly!”
On March 9 and 10, 1945, Curtis LeMay hit Tokyo with incendiary raids.
Deaths went over 100,000. More than a million were made homeless.
What’s left of al Qaeda and the US war on terror press corps — all of them, douchebags.
I hear they’ve even recruited a guy from Norway. Look out!
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06.01.12
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle at 1:36 pm by George Smith
Is there anyone who doesn’t see electromagnetic pulsing on television, in comic books or movie screens a couple times a week?
From the wire — no link:
New Regency has picked up The New West, an adaptation of a comic book written by Jimmy Palmiotti, with Len Wiseman now on board to produce …
Palmiotti, co-writer of DC Comics’ All-Star Western comic (art by Phil Noto), wrote the two-issue New West set in a near-future Los Angeles where an electromagnetic pulse bomb causes all technology to stop working. In this hostile environment, a disgraced former LAPD detective must rescue a kidnapped mayor with only a horse and a sword.
Unintentionally hilarious because no one would actually want to rescue the mayor of Los Angeles for much of any reason in southern California.
Phoned in rubbish by those in Hollywood who regard audiences as so many factory-caged chickens.
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Posted in Crazy Weapons, Cyberterrorism at 7:38 am by George Smith
Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the [Stuxnet] cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that.
From the New York Times. Google.
Earlier this week:
I’ve emphasized this is a good thing. Vigorous anti-virus company competition in the global industry makes finding and neutralizing state-designed viruses a business asset. So the social good on the Internet is served by messing up, terminating or exposing various aspects of cyberwar operations.
So making the paranoid mullahs more paranoid is good, eh?
In the Nineties I set out in my book Virus Creation Labs to tell some of the story of the anti-virus industry. As part of the job its programmers were keen to discover the identity of various virus-writers and they became good at it. Now they have hard news the US government, one of their clients, has been writing computer viruses they have to treat.
Finding some of the virus writers was easy work. The original hackers who wrote them often revealed themselves, anyway. They liked to brag about it. There was no thrill in the activity if people who knew about viruses didn’t know they were yours. Since there was no money in it back then it’s easy to grasp the motivation.
Sometimes it took more analysis of code on the part of the industry to narrow it down to one individual, perhaps unnamed but recognized as the writer.
With the US government now exposed as involved in virus-writing there are different pullers at work in exposing the perpetrators of the operation.
A company may depend a great deal on government contracts. So what to do, what to do, when malware inevitably crawls into non-target computers in non-designated-enemy nations and your analysts and coders have a good idea of who’s behind it?
You develop an antidote and distribute it to everyone. But do you spill the beans? You have a conflict of interest, moral and ethical hazard.
Doing the right thing might cost business.
Or if you’re a security company not in the US does it matter at all? You know who’s behind the attacks and you have a nice story to tell based on your pulling apart viruses. Lots of people might want to hear it.
Be the whistleblower.
Virus-writers, professional or amateur, criminal or state-operated, don’t operate in a vacuum. No matter how classified or expert they think they are, they make mistakes. The code is never perfect. As the complexity of an operation rises so does the potential for error.
Do the state’s virus writers go to anti-virus conventions? Do they chat it up with the industry as virus-writers from many many years ago did?
The anti-virus industry knows. Perhaps some have held their tongues even though they don’t wish to.
Is American virus-writing outsourced, in part or in toto, to arms developers or other small businesses doubling as cybersecurity vendors?
Questions, questions.
When I wrote Virus Creation Labs there was always a small but hard-headed segment of people in information technology (and the computer savvy public) who believed anti-virus companies wrote viruses to help their businesses.
There was never any evidence of it. In fact, it was a ludicrous idea as their was never a shortage in virus writing and distribution.
In the late Eighties a small operation of the US Army made an offer looking for virus-writers. It was met with opprobrium in the a-v industry as well as general computer security circles. Nothing appeared to come of it although the publisher of my book claimed he had worked for a US military operation in NATO on the production of viruses. (He wrote many viruses for all his books on the subject, too.)
There is much more money in virus-writing now. And there is no reason to believe the national security companies, particularly those with government contracts in defending against cyberwar, don’t also want to be in the offensive side of the business.
They do.
They would love to write malware for Uncle Sam for taxpayer moolah.
Some would view it as fun, too, just like the old timey amateur virus-writers.
And the opportunity for early sales pitching is there. The cyberwar hype machine has been operating for so long the pump is primed in national leaders who don’t delve very deeply into these things. Many believe all the wild claims about cyberwar. If someone offers them malware options in attacking an enemy they will take it. And now it is known they have done so.
So when your secret war using malware is no longer secret, what is to be done? Is malware just like lobbing tear gas rounds or random cluster bombs with made in some comoany in the USA clearly embossed on some of the parts, only much less violent and directly hazardous to civilians?
If political leaders openly speak about how cyberwar threats can put lives at risk in the US what’s the difference when we’re caught doing it to someone else? Shouldn’t the president appear to be more thoughtful in such affairs rather than someone giving the OK to fuck up trust on the Internet even more for the sake of going after a pariah country? Do you think it might have been better if someone not in government or the military or intelligence had explained to him how computer viruses work?
Will the worldwide computer security industry work to expose and defeat, say, US cyberwar operations even more vigorously just as it pursues botnets and the work of cybercriminals? Will they now begin to spill the beans when the trail leads right back to a western government office?
Will they let us know when they have suspicions that some employees who’ve either worked for them or become ‘friends’ appear to have advanced the next step of their career in state-sponsored virus-writing?
Will diminishing returns now be a part of state-sponsored virus-writing? That is, is the US government’s virus-writing operation impeded now that the cat’s out of the bag and everyone knows it’s doing it?
Or do people not care? Just another day of bad business as usual on the Internet. And so what if it was against Iran? They had it coming and it’s better than bombing.
And we always trust our guys, anyway. Not a chance of a reliability problem or a crazy Bruce Ivins among ’em.
Just don’t be in the wrong country or line of work. And if it splattered onto you in … Hungary? Well, ha-ha, oops! Sorry ’bout that. Couldn’t be helped. Contact the American consulate.
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05.30.12
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 1:40 pm by George Smith
Robert Windrem used to be a national security affairs journalist who wrote books and did television. He was often very good and twenty years ago I saw him as a brief lecturer at a Knight Fellowship seminar on nuclear proliferation for reporters given at the University of Maryland. (I was a journalist granted a fellowship to attend it.)
But now he’s a much older man. Journalists sometimes don’t age well. Once cutting edge, then out of it and turned to shite when subjects and the times advance.
Today Windrem tackles the Flame virus for MSNBC.
It’s an opportunity to talk with people eager to give the United States credit for it. And to brag some more about how sophisticated and everything else it is:
As the United Nations and Iran warn that the newly discovered Flame computer virus may be the most potent weapon of its kind, U.S. computer security experts tell NBC News that the virus bears the hallmarks of a U.S. cyber espionage operation, specifically that of the super-secret National Security Agency …
“It was U.S.,??? said [one anonymous] official, who acknowledged having no first-hand knowledge of how the virus operates or was introduced into the Iranian computers …
U.S. intelligence officials declined to discuss the virus. “We have no comment,??? said one …
The virus was first discovered and announced over the weekend by a Russian cybersecurity organization after reports of massive data losses in Iranian government computers …
[I guess you could call Kaspersky Labs a “cybersecurity organization.” No one seems to have informed Windrem that the global corporate anti-virus business has been around for a long time and has a sizable US sales and advertising footprint.]
“From reading press reports, this appears to be penetrating networks to surveil, as opposed to destroy, as was the case with Stuxnet,??? said Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counter Terrorism Center and now an NBC News analyst …
If this is indeed a U.S. cyberwarfare operation, said computer security expert Roger Cressey, the target is likely to be Iran’s nuclear program and its decision-making apparatus.
“Whoever has developed this is engaged in very sophisticated intelligence gathering on computer networks throughout the region. Clearly, Iran is a top priority for this program,” said Cressey, former chief of staff of the President’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board under George W. Bush and now an NBC News analyst …
[Roger Cressey is a long-time flunky associate of Richard Clarke’s at Good Harbor although now he is at Booz Allen Hamilton. Both are sources of cyberwar hype because defense against it is a core business operation. Windrem does not disclose this. Notice this is a good gig. You can be a paid “analyst” for a news operation on the same subject as your core business role and the news operation won’t tell the rubes.]
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said that the work of Kaspersky Labs helped Iran uncover the infection and remove it from the centrifuge control program.
[I’ve emphasized this is a good thing. Vigorous anti-virus company competition in the global industry makes finding and neutralizing state-designed viruses a business asset. So the social good on the Internet is served by messing up, completely terminating or exposing various aspects of cyberwar operations.]
Cybersecurity officials have told NBC News that the [Stuxnet] infection, while heavily publicized, was not as effective in disrupting Iran’s nuclear program as has been portrayed in some media accounts.
And that’s never been a surprise.
One of Windrem’s sources tells him the virus attacks make Iranian officials “paranoid.”
They’ve always been paranoid, though. So making them more so means better?
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