We are watching these corporate forces which are supra-national … reconfigure the global economy into a form of neo-feudalism. We are rapidly becoming an oligarchic state with an incredibly wealthy class of overlords … [it is called] inverted totalitarianism, it’s not classical totalitarianism, it doesn’t find its expression through a demagogue or a charismatic leader but though the anonymity of the corporate state that purports to pay fealty to electoral politics, the Constitution, to the iconography and language of American patriotism, but internally has seized all levers of American power … as to render the citizen impotent.
After World War I “American society became enveloped in the psychosis of permanent war where in the name of anti-communism we could effectively banish anyone in the society who questioned power in any serious kind of way.”
From two to twenty-four minutes will give you the full measure. “In theological terms, these are forces of death … I know what happens when wheat prices increase by 100 percent, children starve,” Chris Hedges tells Bill Moyers, on his view of US financialism.
It’s very discouraging. It’s also impossible to pull away.
The Atlantic continues to proudly publish the work of the most senseless and therefore fit for the job. And the reason everyone sees the work is because the Atlantic and Google are engaged in eyeball
prostitution and news search poisoning.
Today, for The Atlantic, someone named Colin Daileda reflects on why the military is so unrepresentative, something everyone else pretty much figured out twenty years ago. The average college student isn’t high on joining the service for endless wars, the environment does not hold the military in high regard.
Daileda never gets around to the obvious. There must be some other obscure reason the military is not particularly representative of US life in the officer corps. Nope, not about college being a broadening education not conducive, even antithetical, to inculcating an interest in militarism and military leadership. For this piece, it’s all about the difficulty of having a fraternal ROTC experience if you’re a day student.
He starts with the howler:
Big-city campuses once produced superstars like Colin Powell.
The Cult of Apple, and everyone else who emulates it, banks on trivial applications and spying — or the power to tell everyone where you are all the time.
From the wire, recommendations on smartphone apps for use after an auto accident. Now I don’t know about you but in the immediate aftermath of an auto-accident, having an iPhone waived in my face by the collaborator in the affair would be less than optimal.
In fact, walking north on Lake yesterday afternoon I spied to younger people exchanging their insurance information the old fashioned way. Both cars were drivable but one was so badly bashed you could tell the insurance company would declare it totaled. It looked like a tense situation.
Excerpted, on today’s hot trivial innovations:
We took a look at two of the more popular ones available: Help I Crashed My Car for Android users and Car Accident Report for the iPhone.
What we like: Both apps allow you to pre-load emergency contact info, personal data, and vehicle information including make, model, and insurance information so it is at the ready when you need it. Both also track your location using GPS and include complete checklists of what to do and in what order after a crash. They include an accident report screen you can fill out with details, with fields for information about other vehicles and drivers.
One cool feature with Car Accident Report is integration with your iPhone camera, which allows you to take photos of the scene and send them along with notes, diagrams, and recorded audio interviews via email. Help I Crashed My Car (pictured right) includes useful links to rental car companies and area auto body shops.
Just another reason, among many, to keep silent, wait for a traffic report cop to show up and merely exchange paper with the person you’ve danced with.
The president’s opinion piece, placed on an editorial page usually hostile to his administration, was aimed at Senate Republicans who had opposed an earlier version of the bill on the grounds that it would create a new regulatory bureaucracy …
Meeting stiff opposition from conservatives, the bill in its original form could not garner the 60 votes needed to break a Senate filibuster. So yesterday (July 19), Lieberman introduced a watered-down version of the bill that removes the mandatory provisions and instead makes compliance with new cybersecurity standards voluntary.
The revision offers inducements for companies that choose to comply, such as protection from liability relating to a security incident …
Digital security experts are divided over whether the bill is necessary, and even whether the dramatic scenes depicted by Obama in his opinion piece are even possible ..
“Has a major attack happened? No,” said Steve Santorelli, a security researcher at Team Cymru in Lake Mary, Fla., who’s worked in the past for Microsoft and Scotland Yard. “Are they scanning and exploring? Almost certainly someone is, but it’s not clear exactly who or why.”
“There’s going to be an attack on specific trains loaded with what just happen to be specifically dangerous chemicals so that it or they jump the rails and cause a catastrophe?” asked George Smith, an expert on national-security technology at GlobalSecurity.org in Washington. “This belongs strictly to the last ‘Die Hard’ movie.”
“They could have run a simulation based on the plot of ‘Independence Day,'” said Julian Sanchez, a research fellow specializing in technology at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington. “That would not be a ‘sobering reminder’ that alien invasion is ‘one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face.'”
“There is little to zero evidence reservoirs and water systems can be significantly damaged by cyberattack, even if one grants the minor possibility of remote trifling with pumping systems,” Smith said. “Water purification and supply is a nationally distributed matter. There is no way to universally degrade it in the United States.”
A number of people were cited on what manipulation through SCADA might be able to do. The arguments remain the same.
Because something is vulnerable, often just potentially so, everything is vulnerable everywhere. And we have a peeping Tom at my apartment building so just think if he were at your place and became more ambitious, wanting to get into your rooms!
Because something, read everything, is computerized, and it is so easy to act maliciously through the net, everything is at risk.
Often the concerns are sincere. Often many are simply manipulative, too. We can agree it is good to always be mindful of security. However, there was a point, one we’re now past, when the story-telling turned abusive and strained.
Example:
Despite the fact that the facility’s computers were not connected to the Internet, Stuxnet got in and changed the software on programmable logic controllers (PLCs) operating uranium-processing centrifuges, causing them to spin out of control and setting back the Iranian nuclear program by more than a year.
“Many of the fundamental problems are caused by software vulnerabilities in PLCs that are impossible to fix,” Santorelli said. “They were never designed to be secure because the folks that developed them, like everyone else, never really saw this threat coming when the systems were built a generation ago,
“It’s sobering to think that the same PLCs that Stuxnet attacked are also in the rides that we take our kids to in theme parks every weekend,” Santorelli added.
So because a complex computer virus the US government developed and sent into the world, children at Disney’s and Dorney’s through the US are menaced by stuff our many anonymous enemies might make.
Security hawk arguments always work the same way.
Because we have done something, or can do something, and insist that it is trivial to duplicate, everyone else can and will do it to us. And the consequences will always be worse. All that is man-made is eventually vulnerable will be attacked.
The entire business strategy of Amazon revolves around devaluing labor, compressing prices, and taking the swag difference for itself.
With Mechanical Turk, it’s getting people to work on-line for free or almost so for the sake of small social parasite businesses. With Amazon shopping, it’s to put warehouses around the country, hire people at lousy rates and treat them poorly, so those with their consumer buying power still intact can have their stuff.
Having destroyed a lot of publishing, Amazon is striving to be Wal-Mart.
Now the idea to build more sweatshop warehouses so you can have diapers and toilet paper without going five hundred yards to the supermarket.
From the wires:
Same-day shipping has been the bane of Amazon’s existence and the single leverage brick-and-mortar retailers held over its online challenger. But Amazon may start offering same-day delivery as soon as next year, according to various reports, which could further alter the retail landscape.
Amazon has not confirmed the rumors but retail insiders believe it’s an inevitable move for the online retail giant. The Seattle-based company has been planning to add new distribution centers across the U.S. in states such as New Jersey, Texas, California, Virginia and Indiana and these new warehouses will be able to ship online purchases to consumers living in that state within hours. Same-day shipping by Amazon would be another blow to brick-and-mortar retail stores already battling the phenomenon of “showrooming,” an industry term for when customers examine products in person but buy the same goods online, often at a lower cost.
In 1999, TIME magazine made Bezos man of the year. In 1965 it did the same for William Westmoreland.
Eric Raum, who works for the United Service Organization, helped produce the video. On his blog, Raum explains how it all came about:
“A few weeks ago, a friend of mine here in Afghanistan, Randy Moresi, approached me about the song ‘Call Me Maybe’. I had just returned to Kandahar from the U.S. and had been taken back by how big of a hit it was, as we often miss out on the latest and greatest while in the ‘Stan and I hadn’t heard it before. She said that people were creating covers of the song, and that it would be a lot of fun for the guys and gals out here if we could create a military version. With a day off looming, we got to work trying to get things organized.”
So how do you pick who’s going to get the good video cameras, the dance move coaching, the hi-fi recording and the Final Cut Pro editing job? Rhetorical.
Meanwhile (you knew this was coming):
KABUL, Afghanistan—The Taliban said they detonated a bomb on a fuel tanker Wednesday and then opened fire on other NATO supply trucks in a morning attack that destroyed 22 vehicles loaded with fuel and other goods for U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan.
Elsewhere in the country, a suicide bomber killed three Afghan soldiers at a checkpoint in the east, while militants killed nine more government troops in an ambush in the south. Three NATO service members were also killed in insurgent attacks.
The violence comes as Afghan forces are taking charge of security in more areas across the country ahead of the planned withdrawal of the U.S.-led coalition’s combat forces by the end of 2014. To show they remain a resilient force, insurgents are conducting targeted attacks, even in relatively peaceful parts of the country.
Such gay music. Good for morale. But it’s a shame to waste it so mindlessly on delusions.
The BBC delivered a piece today which discussed Google as an enabler of piracy, a giant company with no “moral viewpoint” on the activity although it loudly professes the support of copyright.
I suspect that many of you reading this will come down on Google’s side. After all the music industry is hugely powerful, and has been ripping off consumers for years, right? Who are [UK the record industry] to take the moral high ground?
In the US and the UK the major labels are not nearly what they once were. They are not all powerful and their ability to develop and break artists has been irrevocably crippled by the destruction of much of the revenue they used to be able to make on the sale CDs, vinyl and tapes. This is partially reflected in that there is very little actual artist development. It’s one album, and if it doesn’t spawn a hit, the career is over.
But don’t forget that Google now earns about three times as much in the UK as the entire music industry. And if you think the call for action against the firm comes exclusively from bloated record industry executives who deserve no sympathy, listen to Alastair Nicholson.
He has been running the UK hip-hop label Son Records for more than a decade, battling to keep afloat. Visit his office, and you’ll find no flunkies delivering flowers or a boardroom decorated with rock memorabilia – just one man in an attic flat.
Exactly.
I put it to him that it wasn’t Google’s fault if the web was awash with free music and that was what people were searching out.
“You’re right,” he said. “There’s any number of people distributing music for free, I’m not trying to lay that at Google’s door.” So how would he describe Google’s stance, I asked. He thought for a bit, and then said: “There’s a lack of a moral viewpoint.”
The article goes on to point out what’s obvious to many who make, or try to make, popular music. The idea of all music being free, and that one must never pay for it because you are supporting the Man (down with the record labels!), has become the refuge of idiots. What the attitude has done is sweep away all opportunity for small labels to make any kind of money selling music. The only agencies to retain it are the old record companies which can still mount advertising budgets and promotional spends to lift acts above the noise and protect some potential for earnings.
“But the result of their actions is that the only future for a small music label is to cozy up to a corporate giant,” reads the BBC piece.
We now have a generation of young people who, just like me at their age, love music. But they’ve come into a world where the expectation is that it must be free. And it has made a cosmic difference. It is now not hard to find artists in their mid-to-late thirties who will routinely say that they would have never make it in the business, or last long enough to get a lucky break, if they had to do it all again today.
All thanks to the creative destruction process and mercilessly enforced freetardism.
In the Google-mediated world of winner-takes-all search and recommendation the above video was momentarily shoved into the “suggestions” that one got after viewing “Mean Future.”
It has 19 million views and is by f(x) a South Korean dance pop act wildly popular in Japan, China and its native country. It’s also the epitome of mega-corporate factory-manufactured no-expense-spared pretty-puppets-on-strings focus-group-vetted trash.
Why was it shoe-horned into my space? Who knows precisely. But it is part of the Culture of Lickspittle and has something to do with a kind of graft-by-algorithm Google properties impose on users. With Google, the door never swings both ways.
You get to piggyback the mega-popular even though your contribution — in terms of an audience would be infinitesimal. And that’s because when you add all the infinitesimals worldwide they eventually turn into a significant number.
However, the mega-popular, somehow, through the magic of Google recommendation, never never get chosen to piggyback you.
You get your own digital slum with high walls, so nobody else can see in.