Gary Stein, the US Marine who dared, DARED, to put up a Facebook page and publish his one sentence Tea Party slogans here, the story goes, is threatened with being given the boot from the Corps.
Why, for Heaven’s sake?
Gary Stein, by the evidence of his own hand, isn’t exactly the brightest guy on the block. The Tea Party page doesn’t deliver anything you haven’t seen before, furnished hot and furious but in the same dull way favored by all good Tea Party Patriots.
A sampling:
“The is the Tea Party not the Me Party”
How’s that “Hope and Change” thing working for you?
You don’t raise the taxes to meet the budget…. you cut the budget to meet the taxes… its (sic) common sense budgeting… its (sic) the Tea Party Budget.
Sorry about that last post… We have fixed the issue… Let just be very very clear… Racism is not now, never has, and never will be acceptable here at AFTP. Any racist comment will be deleted and you will banned! -Gary Stein
Scintillating.
Gary Stein’s page, contrary to his post about the Tea Party not being the “me” party, is really about his popularity now.
Not his fault. But he’s not exactly avoiding the perks of exposure.
A Marine sergeant who started a Facebook group that is openly critical of President Barack Obama and posted comments saying he will not follow the unlawful orders of the commander in chief is facing possible dismissal from the Corps.
The Marines on Wednesday told Sgt. Gary Stein — a Camp Pendleton Marine who started the Facebook page called Armed Forces Tea Party — that he is in violation of Pentagon policy barring troops from political activities.
Stein, a nine-year member of the Corps, said he started the page to encourage fellow service members to exercise their free speech rights
Gary Stein deserves to stay a Marine. And his opinions, along with those who comment on his Facebook page, are fine. They are all as boring as he is, if more spittle-spraying. It’s cyberspace. That can’t be helped.
Pages and pages of people’s one line comments, all misspelled, cursing the president and Democrats. Real dangerous outside-the-box thinking and free speech. Such insubordination. Such bravery to say what you truly believe, such uprightness.
When all is said and done there will be a book contract in it. Gary Stein could be the next Joe the Plumber, fer sure.
History means a lot on the cybersecurity/cyberwar beat. Particularly not knowing it.
If you’re reporter on the cyber-disaster line you probably don’t remember what went on five years ago. And, under no circumstances, do you recall or even care what transpired before that. Short attention/retention is your thing. To be otherwise threatens the job security, making it harder to work.
So most have no idea how truly deadening and repetitive is the messaging on the subject.
Names change a little. But the claims are always the same. The sky is about to fall.
Lots of reasons for it in the US psyche. Almost too many to write about thoroughly in even a year’s worth of blog posts.
Today, among others having to do with being self-serving, there’s the national trait, or character flaw, of a kind of bragging grandiloquent importance coupled with the bright seam of American paranoia toward the outside world.
And it’s all hung on the hooks of bad days from national history.
Add a strong dose of the American belief that sometimes bullshit magically transforms into not-bullshit if a few people with well-known names in Congress say it. (This being part of abuse of argument from authority and the American techno-shaman reliance upon truth being a matter of majorities quoted in the press, mentioned a few hours earlier.)
Lawmakers and administration officials have warned of potentially catastrophic consequences if Congress doesn’t pass cybersecurity legislation this year, but some observers question whether the rhetoric is overblown.
“Think about how many people could die if a cyber terrorist attacked our air traffic control system and planes slammed into one another,” Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) testified at a Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee hearing last month. “Or if rail-switching networks were hacked — causing trains carrying people, or hazardous materials — to derail and collide in the midst of some of our most populated urban areas, like Chicago, New York, San Francisco or Washington.”
At the hearing, committee Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said he feels like it’s Sept. 10 2001, on the eve of a devastating terrorist attack.
“The system is blinking red – again. Yet, we are failing to connect the dots – again,” Lieberman said.
Senior administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and FBI Director Robert Mueller, performed a classified demonstration of how the government would respond to a cyber attack on the New York City electrical grid in front of dozens of senators earlier this month.
“The simulation was realistic and illustrated just how dangerous inaction on cybersecurity legislation can be,??? Rockefeller said. “If we don’t take these steps now, we’ll be back at this again at some point in the future, only it won’t be an exercise.???
The hearing and demonstration were part of a push for Congress to pass the Cybersecurity Act, a bill authored by Sens. Lieberman and Susan Collins (R-Maine) that would give the Homeland Security Department the authority to require that critical private computer systems meet certain security standards.
From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, on September 9, 2003:
Cybersecurity expert warns of post-9/11 vulnerability
Almost two years after the devastating attacks of 9/11, former Bush White House adviser Richard Clarke sounded the alarm in Pittsburgh about a cyberattack that could be just as damaging to the national psyche, arguing that the federal government remains “slow” and “very 20th century” in its preparation for computer-based terrorist threats.
Clarke, in an interview yesterday on Carnegie Mellon University’s campus, singled out the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, led by former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, for being sluggish in making cyberspace a true national security priority. The department, Clarke noted, has yet to appoint a director and several key managers to its National Cyber Security Division — a group asked to implement a protection plan Clarke developed before leaving the Bush administration in February.
The problem, Clarke said, is that Homeland Security leaders still “think of risks to our society in terms of things that explode and incidents that have body bags. In the 21st century, as the power blackout of Aug. 14th proved, a great deal of damage to our economy and disruption to our way of life can be done without anything exploding or anybody being killed.”
Clarke’s insistence that the country pay attention to cybersecurity has made him a polarizing figure in the computer industry and Washington D.C., where he has worked for the last four presidents and advised three of them on intelligence and national security matters.
He left the White House as Bush’s cybersecurity czar in February, to become a consultant. Known for his contempt of bureaucracy and his critique of pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures, Clarke emerged after 9/11 as the digital Paul Revere, warning that the country’s electrical power, finance, telecommunications, transportation, water and especially the Internet are all vulnerable to cyberattack.
In making his case for shoring up the nation’s electronic infrastructure, Clarke is getting support from Pittsburgh and specifically, CMU. With Clarke’s assistance, CMU computer scientist Roy Maxion sent a letter last year to President Bush warning that “our nation is at grave risk of a cyberattack that could devastate the national psyche and economy more broadly than did” the 9/11 attacks.”
The letter, cosigned by Maxion’s CMU colleague John McHugh and more than 50 of the country’s top computer scientists, laid out a nightmarish scenario involving the sudden shutdown of electric power grids, telecommunications “trunks,” air traffic control systems and the crippling of e-commerce and credit card systems with the use of several hundred thousand stolen identities. “We would wonder how, as nation, we could have let this happen,” the letter said.
Maxion and his co-signers proposed a five-year cyberwarfare effort modeled on the World War II Manhattan Project, requiring an investment ranging from $500 million to $1 billion per year. “The clock is ticking,” the letter said.
Some critics maintain that Clarke and institutions such as CMU, which was awarded $35 million in federal funds last year to fight cyberterrorism, are hyping a threat that does not really exist — especially in the case of al-Qaida, the organization that carried out the attacks of 9/11.
Dorothy Denning, one of the country’s top cybersecurity experts and a professor at the U.S. Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, Calif., said she did not sign her name to Maxion’s White House letter because “I had a certain amount of reservation about whether or not it needed to be bought to that level of attention.”
Denning has not “seen the kind of devastating attacks people are worried about,” and she hasn’t “seen terrorists actively pursing” the Internet as a weapon. Clarke, Denning added, is right to point out the “vulnerabilities in our infrastructure that could be exploited” by everyday hackers and admitted that “bad things could happen.” But “until those things do happen, no one knows what the cascading effect might be.”
Another skeptic, George Smith, is more harsh in his appraisal of Clarke’s admonitions.
“I can’t think of a single Clarke prediction or warning that was right or of any lasting value,” said Smith, senior fellow with Alexandria, Va.-based defense think tank GlobalSecurity.Org.
He added: “In 2003, it takes no great intellect to say the nation is in great danger from the electronic frontier. The fantastic claim always gets attention, diverts the mind from thornier but mundane problems … Far easier to say al-Qaida is looking to turn off the power. You don’t ever have to prove if there is even a small nugget of truth to it.”
Terrorists, Smith said, “are interested in creating bloodshed and terror. The Internet doesn’t rise to this level of impact in a way that a truck bomb does.”
Referring to the e-mail virus that has been plaguing computer systems of late, Smith argued that “you can get three or four hundred copies of SoBig in your e-mail box a day — a thousand, two thousand — and it just has no physical impact no terror juice to it.”
But Clarke, who was in Pittsburgh yesterday to speak at a computer intrusion detection conference, said he has been in this position before, warning of national security threats that some would not take seriously. Clarke, a counterterrorism coordinator under President Clinton, was among those who worried about Osama Bin Laden’s capabilities before the events of 9/11.
“An awful lot of people, unfortunately, don’t believe (a cyberattack) will happen,” he said. “And as with terrorism itself, we learned from 9/11 that you can yell and yell and yell and imagine something happening and say it is going to happen, as I did with regard to al-Qaida, and no one believes you enough to act until it happens.”
As for al-Qaida, Clarke claims that some of its followers have master’s degrees in computer science, and that “there is lots of evidence that al-Qaida has downloaded sophisticated hacking tools because we have seized their computers and know what’s on them. So, I do think there is grounds for concern.”
But focusing on al-Qaida is missing the point, he said. “I don’t think it is terribly important who the enemy is. It doesn’t matter. What you need to worry about is the vulnerabilities.”
There are some encouraging signs that the country may be safer from cyberattacks than it was before 9/11, according to Clarke.
There is anecdotal evidence, he said, that the companies that control much of the country’s electric power generators, telecommunications lines, rail terminals and shipping containers are taking the voluntary security steps asked of them in Bush’s National Plan for Protecting Cyberspace, developed by Clarke and released earlier this year.
Bush’s plan relies on U.S. business, rather than the federal government, to shore up the nation’s computer security infrastructure. Clarke, in fact, came to Pittsburgh twice last October to drum up support for the plan, making the point that for U.S. businesses the increased costs of preparing for an attack do not have to drain a company’s productivity.
Some critics, responding to requests from the Bush administration that U.S. firms make themselves more secure, argued that companies have little incentive to pay for such measures in a slow economy.
Others said the plan itself lacked federal firepower.
“If (Clarke) had made it to correspond with the urgency of his warnings, it would have been a strong strategy with teeth in it, capable of compelling the private sector to improve security practices in many different ways,” said Smith, the senior fellow with think tank GlobalSecurity.Org. “However, when unfurled, it had no power. It might as well have not been written.”
But Clarke maintained yesterday, in an interview, that U.S. companies and the federal government are spending more money on cybersecurity and that the viruses that plagued computers this summer are forcing CEOs to pay more attention to the problem. Clarke, during his speech yesterday at CMU, even expressed confidence that this issue is making its way into pop culture, citing the recent movies “Terminator 3” and “Matrix Reloaded.”
In the latter, Keanu Reeves’ character Neo takes a tour of Zion, the last human city to survive outside the computer-generated Matrix, and is told that Zion’s citizens do not think about the machines that power the city until the machines stop working.
Paraphrasing Neo, Clarke said, “People need machines. But, machines need people, too.”
“[James A. Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies] said the memory of Sept. 11 looms large for many of the lawmakers pushing cybersecurity legislation,” reads The Hill piece from March 17.
From the point of view of judgment by reputation, you would take whatever Joe Lieberman says and, for safety’s sake, put it in the trash.
So far this week Kroger and SafeWay, two of the nation’s biggest supermarket chains (I shop at Ralphs in Pasadena, a Kroger property), have forsworn Beef Products, Inc’s pink slime.
Supermarket chains Kroger Co. and Stop & Shop said Thursday they will join the growing list of store chains that will no longer sell beef that includes an additive with the unappetizing moniker “pink slime.”
The chains joined Safeway, Supervalu and Food Lion, among others, who have said they won’t sell beef with the filler.
“Our customers have expressed their concerns that the use of lean finely textured beef — while fully approved by the USDA for safety and quality — is something they do not want in their ground beef,” Kroger said in a statement. “As a result, Kroger will no longer purchase ground beef containing lean finely textured beef.”
As a result one would expect the company of Eldon Roth to shortly be in ruins. Unless it can maintain a niche selling pink slime into prison cafeterias, to pet manufacturers, or to the base kitchens serving US military men overseas.
There are others, like Wal-Mart, which have still not eschewed the purchase of pink slime. Corporate America, however, is not particularly ballsy when it comes to going against widespread consumer revulsion.
And the image of finely textured beef — pink slime — is now forever repugnant.
Today I’m reprinting material from many years back, a piece I wrote for the Wall Street Journal, and a bit from Rob Slade’s old Springer-Verlag book on computer viruses.
This in an add-on to the Voice of America blog post on cyberwar and Iran falling prey to the now over twenty year old joke.
Indeed, the editors and reporter Doug Bernard at Voice of America could have avoided the entire thing.
In e-mail yesterday, one of the sources for the story — it’s not too hard to figure out who (look for the “cyber doom” quote) — remarked in e-mail he would have warned VOA’s journalist about it if it had been mentioned in interview — but it wasn’t.)
VOA News did not respond to two of my notifications to them on the matter.
The Gulf War virus hoax story remains relevant, even though I wish it didn’t, simply because the nature of it plays so well to mainstream discussions on cyberwar. Almost all these greatly rely on exaggeration, fantastic claims and the painting of apocalyptic scenarios which make the alleged discombobulation of an Iraqi air defense system in 1991 seem quaint.
Again, since the Gulf War virus hoax writings are now so old, you can’t find the originals on the web. (Well, you can find some material but it’s not at the fingertips.)
Reprints begin below.
Truth is the first casualty of cyberwar by George Smith, Wall Street Journal, September 8, 1998.
Reprinted with permission of The Wall Street Journal c 1998. Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Concern is growing in many quarters that society’s reliance on computers has made it extremely vulnerable to attack via keyboard. Journalist James Adams has written a new book, “The Next World War,” which claims that information warfare will be the battleground of the future. At the Pentagon, military theorists ponder how to defend America against hackers in the employ of a foreign power who might use the Internet to turn off the electricity, paralyze the armed forces, cause corporations to crumble and write dirty words on your Web site.
Before you run screaming from your computer and haul the old manual typewriter out of the closet, look closely at the source of these cyber-scares. It turns out that many of them are information-age ghost stories that get spookier with every telling.
Mr. Adams’s book passes along a couple of hoary tales. The first revolves around the idea that the National Security Agency developed a computer virus for use in the Gulf War. Supposedly secreted in the hardware of computer equipment destined for Iraq–printers, in the most popular variation–the virus was somehow designed to bushwhack Iraqi air defense computers hooked to the same network. This is implausible on its face: A printer has neither the hardware space nor the capability to spontaneously transmit programs, which is what computer viruses are, to other computers on a network.
The printer-virus story is very similar to an April Fool’s joke published in a 1991 issue of Infoworld magazine. The story was subsequently picked up in “Triumph Without Victory,” U.S. News & World Report’s book on the Gulf War. Many have fallen for it besides Mr. Adams. In 1997, a Hudson Institute researcher gave it credence in an analysis of “Russian Views on Electronic and Information Warfare.”
The second beguiling myth perpetuated by Mr. Adams and many others is that of the electromagnetic pulse gun. Since at least 1992, teenage hackers desperate for media attention have been spinning elaborate tales about this exotic weapon, usually said to be cobbled together out of a few hundred dollars worth of electronic trinkets, radio antennae, bailing wire and automobile batteries. This electronic rifle is allegedly capable of destroying computers by firing an assortment of electromagnetic waves. Mr. Adams reprints part of a 1996 interview in Forbes ASAP in which a hacker insists these are the “poor man’s nuke.” At a hackers’ convention in Las Vegas, one participant– appropriately named “Ph0n-E”–even showed off a bogus contraption that he claimed was a pulse gun.
Obviously, the genesis of this idea lies in a 1962 nuclear test whose electromagnetic pulses famously blocked radio communications. But no one has been able to overcome the basic physics problem of packing these pulses into a gun: Any such weapon would have an effective range of only a few feet while requiring a power supply so large it would severely burn, if not kill, whoever fired the weapon.
Indeed, no genuine pulse gun has ever been produced for examination. But that hasn’t stopped Congress’s Joint Economic Committee from holding two unintentionally amusing hearings, in June 1997 and February 1998, on the matter. Apocryphal claims have even spread that unnamed British financial institutions have had their computers electrocuted by such weapons.
Some other cyberwar myths making the rounds:
In 1997, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s commission on reducing government secrecy issued a report containing a chapter devoted to computer security. In a boxed-out quote, the commission uncritically reported: “One company whose officials met with the Commission warned its employees against reading an e-mail entitled Penpal. . . . Although the message appeared to be a friendly letter, it contained a virus that could infect the hard drive and destroy all data present.” Actually Penpal is a notorious Internet hoax. In this instance, the pranksters took in a commission whose members included former intelligence agency chiefs John Deutch and Martin Faga. The spring issue of the U.S. Army War College’s scholarly journal, Parameters, contained an article by Lt. Col. Timothy L. Thomas that soberly mentioned a computer virus called Russian Virus 666 allegedly capable of putting computer users into a trance in which they could be made to suffer from arrhythmia of the heart. The virus’s satanic name should have been a tip-off. Yet while no one would give credence to a military publication that wrote about, say, salvaging weapons technology from UFOs, readers seem to leave logic behind when the subject is computers. In the December 1996 issue of the FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin, two academics, Andra Katz of Wichita State University and David Carter of Michigan State, discuss the “Clinton virus” which was “designed to infect programs, but . . . eradicates itself when it cannot decide which program to infect.” To the chagrin of the authors, the indecisive “Clinton virus” was revealed to be another Internet joke.
Oh well, look at the bright side: Cyberwar is cheap. Dueling jokes, myths and hoaxes cost almost nothing to produce and even less to spread.
Mr. Smith is the editor of The Crypt Newsletter, an Internet publication about computer crime and information warfare.
Computer security and virus expert Rob Slade also addressed the Gulf War virus hoax in his book, forthrightly entitled “Rob Slade’s Guide to Computer Viruses,” published by Springer in 1995.
In a section on virus myths:
In early 1992, there were reports of a virus that shut down Iraq’s air defense system during Desert Shield/Storm. This seems to have started in Triumph Without Victory … and the serialization of the book by US News and World Report. The articles were rerun in many papers … and the article on the virus that ran in my local paper is specifically credited to US News & World Report. The bare bones of the article are that a French printer was to be smuggled into Iraq through Jordan; that US agents intercepted the printer and replaced a microchip in the printer with one reprogrammed by the NSA; and that a virus on the reprogrammed chip invaded the air defense network to which the printer was connected and erased information on display screens when “windows” were opened for additional information on aircraft.
[Longer technical discussion omitted.]
There is … a much more telling piece of evidence supporting the mythical status of what became known as the Desert Storm virus. Infoworld (April 1991) carried an article reporting a computer virus that US authorities had used to shut down Iraqi computer systems. The Infoworld article, to careful readers, an obvious April Fool’s joke (supported by the name of the virus, AF/91). The article ended with the warning that the virus was out of control and was now spreading through system in the Western world. It was a spoof of the new Windows 3 program, the popularity of which was startling industry analysts.
Although the Triumph Without Victory story was confirmed by sources in the Pentagon, the similarities to the Infoworld AF/91 prank article are simply too great. This is obviously a case of official “sources” taking their own information from gossip that had mutated from reports of the joke …
One of the other rules of thumb in thinking critically on these matters: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not just someone’s say so.
Voice of America has opened up a new blog called Digital Frontiers.
Reads the banner: “This is the first of a series of Digital Frontiers features, exploring how international tensions translate to the online world.”
That’s nice.
VOA journalist Doug Bernard, writing from Washington, DC, in the first post from Digital Frontiers, leads with:
On January 17th, 1991, as the 34-nation coalition of Operation Desert Storm prepared for its first aerial bombardment of targets in Iraq, the U.S. military sprung a surprise.
Iraqi radar screens suddenly blinked and went dark, momentarily blinding Saddam Hussein’s military. The “Kari??? radar control system had been infected with a computer virus, planted and controlled by the Pentagon. “It was a French system,??? notes intelligence historian Matthew Aid of the Iraqi radar control. “They gave us the schematics and we found a way to insert some buggies into their system as the first wave of American bombers streaked toward Baghdad.???
It worked brilliantly. Iraq’s defenses were paralyzed, allied bombers faced no serious opposition, and the U.S. became the first-ever nation to launch a documented cyber-attack.
In a post entitled, “The Coming Cyberwar with Iran?” the piece goes on to muse about what is and what is not real about cyberwar.
Yes, there is some irony in the hard stone that the very first example of a real cyberattack used is a now notorious joke in computer security circles.
Did U.S. infowar commandos smuggle a deadly computer virus into Iraq inside a printer? Of course not. So why does it keep getting reported?
“ Many have been enthralled by the Gulf War virus’ siren call, almost all in efforts to hold up some proof of the magical power of information warfare. ???
A creepy enthusiasm for tales of weird weapons rises as war approaches … In this environment, where everyone charges full speed ahead for the hot scoop or astonishing apocrypha, even the oldest hoaxes can return for one more bow.
In a February piece for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, a retired air force man mused on the subject of information warfare and how it might be used to strike Iraq down. Dabbling in a little history, the author recounted how in Gulf War I the U.S. drew up plans to take down an Iraqi anti-aircraft system with “specially designed computer viruses [to] infect the system from within. Agents inserted the virus in a printer shipped to an Iraqi air defense site.”
Special Forces men were also said to have infiltrated Iraq, where they dug up a fiber-optic cable and jammed a computer virus into it. “It remained dormant until the opening moments of the air war, when it went active…” wrote the columnist. Iraq’s air defense system was vanquished.
Frankly, this is a great story. It’s amusing to remember how it kicked up a storm in 1991 after its initial appearance as an April Fool’s joke in Infoworld magazine.
The gag asserted the National Security Agency had developed the computer virus to disable Iraqi air defense computers by eating windows — “gobbling them at the edges…” The virus, called AF/91, was smuggled into Iraq through Jordan, hidden in a chip in a printer — the latter being a distinguishing feature of many subsequent appearances of the hoax.
Chat board gossip on it echoed for days, not only from people who thought the joke quite funny, but also those who missed the original citation and engaged in laborious discussion on the imagined technology of the virus.
Inevitably, a large media organization got wind of the story and pounced without bothering to track down the tale’s provenance.
U.S. News & World Report published news of the Gulf War virus in its coverage of the war, a narrative that also found its way into “Triumph Without Victory,” the magazine’s subsequent book on Desert Storm.
The Gulf War virus, wrote U.S. News, attacked Saddam’s defenses by “devouring windows” Iraqi defenders used to check on aspects of their air defense system. “Each time a technician opened a window … the window would disappear and the information would vanish.” The virus was “smuggled to Baghdad through Amman, Jordan” in chips inside a printer.
From there, the bogus story was reported by the Associated Press, CNN, ABC Nightline, and newspapers across the country.
When queried about the tale’s uncanny resemblance to the Infoworld joke, Brian Duffy, the primary author of the U.S. News article (and now executive editor of the magazine) stubbornly defended his sources — “senior officials” all. In a follow-up Associated Press article outlining the imbroglio, Duffy maintained he had “no doubt” that U.S. intelligence agents had carried out the Gulf War virus attack, but admitted similarities to the Infoworld joke were “obviously troubling.” Duffy’s sources, were, of course, anonymous.
Many have been enthralled by the Gulf War virus’ siren call through the decade, almost all in efforts to hold up some proof of the magical power of information warfare.
In the March 1999 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine, in a piece on cyberwar, the publication wrote: “In the days following the Gulf War, stories circulated that [cyber] weapons had been unleashed on the Iraqi air defense system.” The nefarious printers were again used containing “chips [with] programs designed to infect and disrupt…”
A Hudson Institute analyst peddling a paper on Russian thoughts on cyberwar fell for it and when confronted aggressively argued that it was true because, well, just because. [As a result, she fell into disrepute and never published much again.]
Other appearances include an allegedly seminal book on computer combat entitled “The Next World War.” In this instance, the miraculous Gulf War virus failed to do its job because the U.S. Air Force accidentally bombed the building where Iraq stored the virus-laden printers. The author went on to found an infosecurity firm known for its publicity-happy hyperbolic proclamations on cyberwar. [The firm eventually declared bankruptcy.]
Why was the hoax so successful?
The easy answer is to simply call everyone who falls for the joke a momentary idiot. But the Gulf War virus plays to a uniquely American trait: a child-like belief in gadgets and technology and the people who make them as answers to everything. Secret National Security Agency computer scientists made viruses that hobbled Saddam’s anti-air defense without firing a shot! Or maybe it didn’t work but it sure was a good plan!
In this respect, the joke is ageless. People are just as able to nebulously theorize about the tech of it and its implications in 2003 as they were in 1991. Will an updated version of the nonexistent AF/91 virus be used against unwired Iraq? Stay tuned… April 1st is less than a month away.
Now over two decades old you can still find uninformed US military men, who’ve read about the alleged thing in some “authoritative” source that passed it on years ago, passing it on while adding their own measure of brio.
In the same way myths and apocryphal stories pick up additional dander over time: “They gave us the schematics and we found a way to insert some buggies into their system as the first wave of American bombers streaked toward Baghdad.”
Thrilling!
“The term cyberwar is really just a marketing gimmick,” says the same man, peddling a book “considered the definitive history of the super-secret National Security Agency, or NSA.”
Pulled from YouTube, it’s a segment from the now very old movie, “The Groove Tube.” I thought this was hysterical when I was … about fourteen or fifteen.
“Among other characteristics, it had the strength of steel, the flexibility of rubber, and the nutritional value of beef stew. This revolutionary substance, developed at Uranus, is Brown 25.”
Perhaps the people at Beef Products don’t realize whatever they do they’re now part of a national joke focused on stuff that makes people go “Ewww, gross!”
“Things come out a little differently” for the makers of pink slime. Thirty eight years after the “Uranus Corporation,” art into life.
[The] U.S. Department of Agriculture has decided to give school administrators a choice regarding the use of “pink slime” in school lunches. For the next school year, administrators can choose to order beef without “pink slime.” This alternative plan was created because of what the USDA dubbed, “customer demand.”
After word got out that schools would continue to use the product, officially called “Lean Finely Textured Beef,” parents and the general public were outraged. Thousands of people signed petitions asking the government to stop buying “pink slime” for school lunches …
Bad publicity did the trick. A good deal of it developed after a television food show lampooned the Beef Products, Inc. material.
“This is not fit for human consumption,” he says. “But what if I told you in America they’ve come up with a bit of technology that can turn this into something that ends up in your school food.” Cut to kid in audience sticking his tongue out and making a face.
It’s great television.
Beef Products, Inc. responded with its own video. And it has not been nearly as effective.
The dry professors trotted out to talk about pink slime have no presence or even much immediate likability. Which might have boomeranged if people — in any number — saw the response. But they didn’t.
One would conclude the USDA decision to allow schools to opt out of using pink slime innovative meat product is viewed with alarm at the company. It was a revenue stream that is threatened by public revulsion, driven by a vociferous consumer group, mothers who would not want their children to unknowingly have it.
With exception of Harley-Davidson, which still makes motorcycles in the US — that always being the entire point of its attraction even when bikes were known as shit when I was you, they all get their cult consumer audiences by making stuff overseas. Or by wiping their feet on employees.
Starbucks is number 2 on this list. On the firm:
With Starbucks, this means that even if you personally think $5 coffee is a joke, you should notice why so many pay that premium:
Consumers carry Starbucks coffee as a badge brand. “People look at you differently if you’re carrying a Starbucks cup than if you walk into a meeting with the Dunkin’ Donuts cup,” says Turkle, the MIT professor and psychologist.
And Starbucks works hard to make customers feel like they’re part of something bigger. You’re joining a community centered on comfortable lounge areas and free Wi-Fi, part of a company strategy to create a “third space” for people to spend time besides home and work, says Maleeny, of Ogilvy & Mather.
Starbucks has cultivated a cult-like loyalty that continues to pay off for shareholders.
You can’t make a living working at Starbucks unless you’re living with someone else, or else holding down a job elsewhere, too.
DD knows. There are lots of Starbucks in Pasadena. You can move back in with your parents if you work at Starbucks. Which, as a matter of fact, some of their workers do here because, by the hour and after taxes, they don’t make so much more than that 5 buck cup of Joe for snobs.
What the American 1 percent and their nationwide shoeshiner support staff really love — in a cult-like way — is labor that’s the equivalent of indentured servitude.
“I wanted the views. I have to do things like torture myself to keep people watching,” says Colleen Ballinger, a 25-year-old comedian whose stage name is Miranda Sings, about her decision to upload her cinnamon challenge attempt. Ms. Ballinger makes money from a percentage of advertising on her YouTube videos. She has 90,000 subscribers to her YouTube channels and a total of 22 million views on her videos.
Corgan lamented changes in the way music is consumed that would’ve made it impossible for him to break into the record industry, much less become a prominent rock star.
After claiming that he would need to set himself on fire on YouTube to get noticed as an unknown act … He compared some artists to sex workers, saying that once you’ve score a record deal, “you’re just the fresh stripper.”
Today, at less than half the price of the guitar app T-shirt, you can still far more simply, legitimately and aggressively tell the world you’re a douchebag with something that dates at least to old Q-Mart vintage, the Shit Cap.
