Kristof at 22 seconds. He does all the right things.
No one epitomizes America’s vapid culture of lickspittle better than the New York Times’ Nick Kristof. (Well, maybe some others do. But it’s a lede.)
Today he’s overawed by the power of Internet petitioning in changing the world for the better.
I get five or six Internet petitions a week in my in-box. I used to sign a few of them. Now I send them all to the spam folder. Kristof isn’t so stupid that he doesn’t know how quickly Internet petitioning, whether it’s through an enabling site or through abuse of a mailing list, gets old.
Foxconn, which makes Apple’s iKit, employs over 400,000 people in its factory complex. By comparison, the population of Pasadena is about 140,000.
Kristof is all excited because he’s found some grade-schoolers in upper class Brookline, MA, who’ve used an on-line petition to shame Universal into changing its website on its Dr. Seuss-based Lorax movie to include an environmental theme. (Rats! The environmental theme-y-ness didn’t make it into the Super Bowl commercial! Fail!)
He thinks it’s a big deal. And it allows him to publicize the swell and happy childrem.
It’s small beer. Someone had a heart, or realized they could gain some p.r. at Universal. For a minute or two and only that long.
But Kristof has a habit of touring the swell places of the land, finding some group or person from the upper class, and then dutifully praising them for small and nice but unremarkable things.
Some of his examples are worth brief mention. However, some reflect reality, in showing that on-line petitions haven’t revolutionized the world.
Although the people who have launched enabling sites for them, like Change.org, have made successful businesses of it.
The opportunities for Web naming-and-shaming through Change.org caught my eye when I reported recently on sex traffickers who peddle teenage girls on Backpage.com. I learned that a petition on Change.org had gathered 86,000 signatures calling for the company to stop accepting adult ads.
My next column was about journalists being brutalized in Ethiopian prisons. A 19-year-old college freshman in Idaho, Kelsey Crow, read the column and started a petition to free those journalists — and in no time gathered more than 4,000 signatures.
Does that matter? Does Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, care what a band of cyber citizens thinks of him? Skepticism is warranted, but so far Change.org petitions have seen some remarkable successes.
A few years ago Craig’s List was shamed, if that’s the word to use, into removing its adult ads section. More accurately, a southern state’s attorney general frightened them into it. However, the prostitution industry is still represented on Craig’s List, just in the personals. That’s progress.
I checked if Backpage had been shamed into removing its similar ads.
Nope. Kristof has used his position at the New York Times to pressure the firm, so any subsequent on-line petition qualifies as the pundit putting his fingers on the scale.
If Backpage eventually removes its adult advertising, it may have more to do with trouble brought to bear by a New York Times Sunday opinion writer. Kristof unleashed his opinion on Steven Hatfill after the anthrax mailings. It didn’t require an on-line petition for the FBI to read it and subsequently be moved to make Hatfill a “person of interest” in the case. Kristof was successful in publicly petitioning them, so to speak, to go after the wrong person.
Kristof mentions two other cases, the backing down of corporate giants Verizon and Bank of America over odious plans for bilking customers with new fees.
He attributes it all to on-line petitioning. I, and perhaps others, recall it a bit differently. Old media and new media were filled with really bad publicity for days. Did it all spring from one on-line petition? It stretches the credulity to write that this was so.
Just like it stretched credulity to claim that Facebook freed Egypt. A couple weeks ago people were still being shelled with tear gas. Old Hosni was gone but Egypt had stubbornly refused to transform into a European social democracy.
Kristof writes of Change.Org:
“We’re growing more each month than the total we had in the first four years,??? said Ben Rattray, 31, the founder. He said that 10,000 petitions are started each month on the site, and that each success leads to countless more copycat campaigns.
That’s a lot of petitions, 333/day. Are you feeling the ground shifting beneath your feet as people on the Internet bang their keyboards and iKit apps in outrage, vanquishing all the problems no one else has been able to deal with for decades?
Perhaps an on-line petition could have stopped OWS from being ejected from its Washington, DC, over the weekend in “nuisance abatement.” If only they had headed quickly to Change.Org.
Twitter-tweeting, Facebooking, Kristof recommends: “Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.”
Reality television is the perfect place for monetizing kooks. In this case it’s National Geographic’s Doomsday Preppers series on what I’ve called End Timers. I caught a commercial and won’t be tuning in. (It begins airing Tuesday.) Topics common to the blog have already shown all one needs to know.
The central focus, of course, is the collapse of the power grid, the end of American civilization and the people determined to be ready for it. One of the reasons for this belief is, of course, because it has been published ad nauseam in the news over the last decade.
Whether it’s an electromagnetic pulse from a barge-launched a-bomb, a cyberattack on the national infrastructure, or man-made plagues and totally unrealistic terror onslaughts, it’s been pounded into gullible heads, often several times a week, as probable, easy to do and often imminent.
The prepper movement shows all the collateral damage it has wrought on the suggestible and unbalanced.
Conspicuously, this increasingly nuts demographic is almost entirely white, far right, heartland, fundie Christian religious and breast-beatingly patriotic.
It is not a surprise that cable television feels this niche large enough to monetize. Death cults/apocalypse believers have always been part of the American experience. However, until social media, micro-casting and the Internet there wasn’t an easy way to cynically gather all of them up into a nice exploitative package for advertising.
Up until the last decade small fringe book publishers catering solely to the militias and violent survivalist far right used to be the only place for it.
Watch too many of them and you’re deeply discouraged.
While all the individuals in the videos appear painfully sincere with the aim being to give advice to help survive the travails said to be coming, all they’re really successful at is showing how idiosyncratic insanity can be mainstreamed as entertainment. They leak intolerance like a fine sweat. Eternal damnation for the lazy, the unprepared, all the outsiders. is a constant current.
“The first wave of death will be those with chronic disease,” she informs. A second wave of death will overtake the more healthy and it will be caused by diseases and lack of sanitation incubated and spread by the weak and sick. I didn’t last long enough to get to any more waves.
In another video the prepper survivors are advised to keep a book of hymns and prayers on hand because music helps one through the hard times. A dulcimer, an instrument from the Appalachian hill country, is recommended. It served the poor in the olden days and will again.
I’m always astonished there’s any audience for corporate p.r., in this case a bit of self-congratulation of Corning dressed up as an infomercial. However, I’ve learned that if you tie a tune to something on YouTube that will scoop up surfers searching for corporate commercials, you’ll get view counts. The world is full of lickspittles, those who delight in the brainless warm and fuzzy world corporate advertising displays.
Beautiful laptops, activity tables and super-phones for the haves. All made at Foxconn or places like it.
Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.
People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,??? he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.??? — the New York Times
“Israel, Finland and Sweden are more prepared than larger nations to fight a conflict in cyberspace, according to a McAfee-backed cyber-defence study,” reports the Register. (No link.)
Next:
The study, Cyber-security: The Vexed Question of Global Rules, is based on interviews with experts in the nascent field by by McAfee and Security & Defence Agenda, a defence think-tank. No metrics are involved in the study, which even McAfee admits is largely subjective. Brussels-based SDA based its conclusions on “in-depth interviews with some 80 world-leading policy-makers and cyber-security experts” …
Yes, the vexed question of global rules. Indeed it is proof they have scoured the corporate IT landscape for the talent to write a title only those paid to do so would read. And found it in Wallonia.
My favorite unique social protest group, the Ukrainian FEMEN, again in a collection of photos, this time in Zurich, Schweiz (the well known country for stealth banking and corporate wealth tax evasion), protesting the Hockey World Cup.
A collection of photos taken of FEMEN, a unique Ukrainian social protest group, at the World Economic Forum in Davis, Schweiz, is here at Cryptome.
Do go there at once to see them full size and — ahem — in the flesh.
The Davos World Economic Forum is where all the parasites and arch-villains masters of the global economy and idea farm meet each year to discuss how things are to be messed up in the coming months.
I think you’ll agree, though, the action to not be missed was all outside and of more humble origin. It was good to be a policeman on that day.
Those now dispensing judgment from on high are not gods, though they must feel like it. The people striking mortals down with drones are doubtless as capable as anyone else of self-deception, denial and cognitive illusions. More so, perhaps, as the eminent fictions of the Bush years and the growing delusions of the current president suggest …
These power-damaged people have been granted the chance to fulfill one of humankind’s abiding fantasies: to vaporise their enemies, as if with a curse or a prayer, effortlessly and from a safe distance …
[One] danger is acknowledged in a remarkably candid assessment published by the UK’s Ministry of Defence, which also deploys drones, and has also used them to kill civilians. It maintains that the undeclared air war in Pakistan and Yemen “is totally a function of the existence of an unmanned capability – it is unlikely a similar scale of force would be used if this capability were not available”.
The author also seems to argue that by not being put at risk, as Americans were when they had to dispense with the Japanese and the Germans in WWII, there is no deterrent to use.
However, deterrence can be thought of as deferred, put off to some future date as vengeance since the only way those attacked can retaliate is through terrorism, should the created enmities last long enough.
However, the use of terrorism on the US, or on clients, is always seen in this nation as a reason to turn loose more drones.
And I’m still waiting for someone, other than here, to dig into the issue of the haves bombing the have-nots. Strictly speaking, it’s a war of impunity against paupers. Drones will never be turned loose on those who have the money to immediately take action.
In this, Iran has a deterrent should they get the bomb. And Pakistan has the ability to make a similar threatening noise.
Through diplomatic channels it becomes plausible to suggest to American leadership that unless the war of impunity ceases, there are other far less pleasant methods of escalation than standard state-sponsored terrorism they’re prepared to let us come to grips with. Maybe such a thing would be a bluff. And maybe not.
In the old Star Trek episode — Mirror, Mirror — the evil Kirk had something called the Tantalus Field, a weapon to disappear enemies with impunity. The good Kirk chose not to use it to get himself out of a jam although in the hands of his alternative evil Federation girlfriend, it was.
Readers will recall the absurd public relations program launched a month or so ago, one designed to increase tourism and therefore spur economic growth and jobs in the hospitality industry.
You see, it’s recognized we have a bad rep. Lotsa people don’t wanna come here anymore. They don’t dig being run through the anti-terrorism infrastructure.
So the public makeover was sold as a rebranding — visit the United States of Awesome Possibilities.
Say hello to “the United States of Awesome Possibilities??? as it looks to visitors from abroad to help lift it out of the economic doldrums.
By soft-pedaling patriotism, the newly-formed US national tourism board tasked with getting more tourists — and their money — onto US soil is reinventing the nation as a hip new land of diversity and possibilities.
“We’re rebranding America for the first time,??? said Jim Evans, chief executive of the Corporation for Travel Promotion, ahead of the World Travel Market that opened Monday in London.
“Over the last 10 or 12 years, people have seen America as unwelcoming as we’ve focused on security …
Today from the wires, two young Englishes, refused entry at Los Angeles International because of exuberant Twitter tweets reported on the national anti-terror tip and squealer network.
A pair of U.K. tourists were arrested after landing in Los Angeles on terror charges after joking on Twitter they were going to ‘destroy America’ and ‘dig up Marilyn Monroe.’
Leigh Van Bryan, 26, was detained last Monday after landing in Los Angeles with his friend, 24-year-old Emily Bunting, according to the British Daily Mail.
Bryan was flagged as a potential threat after tweeting this message about his upcoming trip to Hollywood “@MelissaxWalton free this week for a quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America? x???
Bryan and Bunting told officials the term “destroy??? was British slang for “party.??? Despite the explanation, they were held on suspicion of planning to commit crimes and their passports were confiscated, the Daily Mail reported.
Bryan was also questioned about another tweet quoting the animated show, “Family Guy:??? “3 weeks today, we’re totally in LA p****** people off on Hollywood Blvd and digging Marilyn Monroe up!???
Bryan’s luggage was searched for spades and shovels as a result.
Boost jobs in travel and tourism. This industry is one of America’s largest employers, but the U.S. has lost significant market share. By making it easier to visit the U.S. through improved visa processes, we can win back market share in travel and tourism and create hundreds of thousands of jobs.
But as head of Obama’s expired jobs advisory council Immelt was nothing if not an odious fellow, unmoored from all reality except his own private Idaho.
Apparently homeland security and the TSA never got the memo and sent the Englishes home as undesirables.
The only way to keep the bully from punching you in the nose whenever he likes is to kick him in the nuts. You might get thrashed anyway, or maybe not. If you can land a few shots he may decide the price he has to pay to bloody your nose is too high.
In any case, the bully will continue to violate your sovereignty, so to speak, until forcefully discouraged from doing so.
The United States drone strategy is only pursued against people and countries who, largely, cannot effectively defend themselves. There is no way for them to give us a good one right in the nuts.
And so today we read from the New York Times, the continued use of drones in Iraq whether they like it or not. Further, the paper notes this was revealed in a call for bids to operate the drones, issued by the State Department. That is, bombing paupers is ripe for mercenary defense contracting.
Mr. Asadi said that he opposed the drone program: “Our sky is our sky, not the U.S.A.’s sky.???
The Pentagon and C.I.A. have been stepping up their use of armed Predator and Reaper drones to conduct missile strikes against militants in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. More recently, the United States has expanded drone bases in Ethiopia, the Seychelles and a secret location in the Arabian Peninsula.
Over the weekend, Pine View Farm pointed out a story on a navy drone, one developed to be used without a remote pilot’s chair.
Published at the Los Angeles Times, the story follows in the mainstream media tradition of never stating the obvious, mostly because it’s embarrassing or unpleasant.
A couple years ago Hollywood produced a summer blockbuster on an autonomous drone. It was a a bad sci-fi-ish adventure/buddy movie called Stealth.
The drone, named “EDI” (pronounced “Eddy”) talked, went rogue, stole all its music off the Internet, and saved the day at the end.
A Wikipedia entry on it drily notes it was a “colossal box office bomb.”
Crap movie. Unlike being stuck in the real, you could walk out of the theatre and tell your friends not to see it.
For the movie, the enemy actually had forces — fighter planes and anti-aircraft flak, not that it did much good.
However, in the real world the US employs drones exclusively in places and on people who can’t defend themselves. Iran included, the high altitude stealth drone being an exception to the rule that cost the country something when it malfunctioned. However, overflying Iran with Predators — which do the lion’s share of the drone work — would seem not to be done.
Increasing amounts of money on robotics technology is used on places and peoples with essentially nothing, either for themselves or in the quiver.
And none of the allegedly wise people who get talked to for these kinds of news stories bring up this matter. Instead they go on about side issues — like “what if a theoretically artificially intelligence-equipped drone makes a wrong killing decision?” Never mind there is already a long history of wrong decisions routinely made by the people directing them.
So as the robots become more sophisticated they are used on those left farther and farther behind in the global economy. This is all written off as pro-active work making Americans secure, guaranteeing there is always some further price to be paid for being in a desperate situation and hating America for all its freedoms (to bomb).
Whether the drones get some petty bad guys or not hardly matters. It just matters that there be an increasing market and budget for them.
???More aggressive robotry development could lead to deploying far fewer U.S. military personnel to other countries, achieving greater national security at a much lower cost and most importantly, greatly reduced casualties,??? aerospace pioneer Simon Ramo, who helped develop the intercontinental ballistic missile, wrote in his new book, ‘Let Robots Do the Dying.’ ???
Well, the air force and navy — the new autonomous prototype drone is being tested off an aircraft carrier — aren’t doing any dying now.
The only dying, and it’s fairly obvious to all except perhaps the ballistic missile expert, is done by those where the drones are overhead.
The pirates off Somalia can’t fight back against robotic or manned systems. They can’t fight back in Indonesia or Yemen or in Afghanistan. And the drones operate in Pakistan where there is largely no Pakistani army to say boo to them.
So it’s all rubbish.
There isn’t a conventional force the US is going to fight which could inflict any serious casualties because those with such armed forces aren’t won’t be pushed into a war with us and, further, we most probably won’t be fighting them. These wars are all by the wealthy country with the biggest world military against those who have nothing except their poverty and enmity. (If there is some manner of war with Iran, you watch how quickly it turns into bombing with impunity. And that thought may have something to do with why the mullahs want an atomic bomb.)
This is what made much of the Stealth movie silly. The scriptwriters, unlike our national security experts, had to at least try to sell something on the screen that seemed slightly real. There had to be an enemy to expose the heroes, even the robot one, to danger. They failed but, hey, they gave it a shot.
Our theoreticians don’t even make the pretense of trying. They’ll just take the money whether it’s eventually a colossal bomb or not.
