The recently released Department of Defense Non-Lethal Weapons Reference Book shows the current listing of mostly useless gadgets, some of which can kill or maim people, currently fielded for the US military. Some have bled into US police forces as a result of the weapons manufacturing boom and national militarization brought on by the forever war on terror. And we know how bombing fear and anxiety worldwide has worked out. Good for share value at the Raytheons!
In the past the military’s non-lethal wish list was crapped up with really bad notions proffered by a variety of boffins from the national labs and small business America. These encompassed the idea you could use or develop exotic chemicals to spray on people and hardware.
This meant sticky foams, suds and various agents to allegedly corrode metal or disable people. Over more than a decade none of this panned out.
Or a very few sensible people figured out spraying toxic chemicals around, in effect — trying to imitate industrial accidents on a small scale as a way of destroying equipment and controlling crowds, was a genuinely nuts thing.
So that’s gone.
In the place of it, a doubling down on trivial engineering applications in dousing people with pepper spray or blinding them with green lasers.
Does the US military (and, by extension, the police forces of this nation and those who buy from us) really need a Claymore mine redesigned to blast protesters with little hard rubber balls?
One could easily make a decent case against it.
There is also a fetish for using loud noise broadcasting devices to control crowds and deter terror frogmen. (“What terror frogmen?” I hear you ask. Exactly.) In any case, earplugs render the dollar investment a total waste.
In the totally notional area, the US military still wants to use non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse rays. This bit of wishing has been going on for almost twenty years.
As always, it wants to put nullifying electric rays in drones, on small naval vessels, everywhere you can imagine for spraying at all the alleged cars, boats, planes and other whirring things of those on the other side of the barriers of Fortress America.
However, these projects are all dubbed “conceptual.”
In the real world that translates as: Can’t make them work. And this is for various reasons, all having to do with over-reliance on magical thinking and limitations imposed by the laws of physics and nature.
They’re kept alive mostly as high button corporate welfare for electrical and aerospace engineers. They would be as productive if paid to dig holes and fill them back up the next day.
You’d want to shoot yourself if you had to write stories like this one, at Career Bilker, every week. In examining trends from the economy that makes zip you must come up with fake-enthusiastic crap about where up-and-comers need to go.
The answer, to everyone’s misfortune, is into services.
And the hardest services are the worst for compensation, so to make a list which dresses this up, there must be a comparison with other jobs based on expressing their annual gains relative to themselves — by percentage.
3. Customer account representative: Manages orders primarily for large and repeat customers. Provides service and support to customers, providing information on products, orders in process and other information.
Annual salary: $25,000
Increase: 7 percent
9. Customer service adviser: Handles and resolves complex customer queries, complaints, special orders or in-store returns via email, telephone and/or in-person contact.
Annual salary: $26,000
Increase: 6 percent
12. Home health aide: Assists in providing simple or uncomplicated patient care in caring for elderly, convalescent or disabled people in a patient’s home.
Annual salary: $25,000
Increase: 5 percent
The piece is odious on so many levels it’s difficult to know where to begin in the castigation of it.
For example, just above the “home health aide’s” gain of 5 percent in earnings is “top information technology officer” with a net annual gain, 6 percent, deemed comparable.
The latter makes over six times the former, at $160,000.
Only a moron could make such a list/comparison. Or an entity that’s part of the rip-off services economy turning out worthless content packaged as career guidance.
The list of jobs — twenty deep — is evidence of a broken economy, one that produces nothing of any substantial worth to most of its members. It’s also intelligence-insulting deceit using trivial statistics.
The highest paid jobs are in insurance, process management, finance or degree’d shoeshining in maintenance of computer networks and software for the 1 percent.
The lowest paid jobs are those that provide much more in terms of basic human needs — home health aides and physical therapists.
During my friend Don’s final days he relied on hospice care. And home health aides and physical therapists are part of that. They did the finest work daily and, in this country, they are not paid nearly enough.
“Justin Thompson is a writer and blogger for CareerBuilder.com and its job blog, The Work Buzz,” reads the tagline. “He researches and writes about job search strategy …” in the rentier capitalist economy*.
* — Marxism joke.
The President’s weekly address and a tacit admission: ” … we’ll be able to rebuild an economy that’s not known for paper profits and financial speculation, but for making products like these, products made in America.”
A good speech but having more American businessmen to the Whitehouse to discuss how to make stuff here rather than in ha ha ha China won’t fix it. The pickings, on display, are too slim: “a padlock, a pair of boots, a candle and a pair of socks … “
The work would take a decade, at least.
And in case you missed it — the Mitt Romney Blues — one from the album you damn well better rush out and buy right now: Vulture Capitalism — the Greatest Hits.
The Atlantic’s blogs are IQ tests for people who believe themselves smart but lacking observable evidence to back up such confidence. They’re intelligence exams, very simple, and they work like this: If you read or take them seriously, you flunk.
When the media gets focused on war it cranks out crap on all the allegedly wonderful things the US military will bring to bear. The professional bootlicking takes the form of reporting on the many and fine capabilities the armed forces will use to cover any contingency.
Back at the beginning of the Iraq disaster I came up with a column at the Village Voice called Weapon of the Week which worked off this. The idea was to unleash a counter-balancing superciliousness.
If Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. Navy has a backup plan to save one-fifth of the world’s daily oil trade: send in the dolphins …
Iran could block the strait with any assortment of mines, armed speed boats or anti-ship cruise missiles but according to Michael Connell at the Center for Naval Analysis, “The immediate issue [for the U.S. military] is to get the mines.??? To solve that problem, the Navy has a solution that isn’t heavily-advertised but has a time-tested success rate: mine-detecting dolphins …
The invasion of Iraq was the last time the minesweeping capability of dolphins were widely-touted. “Dolphins – – which possess sonar so keen they can discern a quarter from a dime when blindfolded and spot a 3-inch metal sphere from 370 feet away — are invaluable minesweepers,” reported The San Francisco Chronicle. In 2010, the Seattle Times reported that the Navy has 80 bottlenose dolphins in the San Diego Bay alone …
And when was the last time you heard of a mine sinking a navy vessel in San Diego harbor, USA? Never! So those dolphins musta been doin’ a heckuva job, Brownie!
The surveillance includes sophisticated drone aircraft — and a sophisticated mammal.
“We’ve got dolphins. … They are astounding in their ability to detect underwater objects,” he says.
The U.S. Navy sent dolphins to the Persian Gulf as part of the American invasion force in Iraq. Keating confirms they were “present in the theater,” but he declines to talk about whether the animals were used or not.
But there’s a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation …
Consider what happens when a business engages in ruthless cost-cutting. From the point of view of the firm’s owners (though not its workers), the more costs that are cut, the better. Any dollars taken off the cost side of the balance sheet are added to the bottom line.
But the story is very different when a government slashes spending in the face of a depressed economy. Look at Greece, Spain, and Ireland, all of which have adopted harsh austerity policies. In each case, unemployment soared, because cuts in government spending mainly hit domestic producers. And, in each case, the reduction in budget deficits was much less than expected, because tax receipts fell as output and employment collapsed …
America certainly needs better economic policies than it has right now — and while most of the blame for poor policies belongs to Republicans and their scorched-earth opposition to anything constructive, the president has made some important mistakes. But we’re not going to get better policies if the man sitting in the Oval Office next year sees his job as being that of engineering a leveraged buyout of America Inc.
“America is not, in fact, a corporation.” A remarkable sentence to have run in the New York Times since the ideology that it is is held by many more than Mitt Romney. America has, in fact, been run like a predatory corporation for the benefit of those running the world’s other predatory corporations for the last decade, at least.
And the corporate motto, as ably shown in this old video, has been: Go fuck yourself.
Panetta: The reality is that there is the cyber capability to basically bring down our power grid to create … to paralyze our financial system in this country to virtually paralyze our country. And I think we have to be prepared not only to defend against that kind of attack but if necessary we are going to have to be prepared to be able to be aggressive when it comes to cyber efforts as well. We’ve got to develop the technology, the capability, we’ve got to be able to defend this country.
60 Minutes has also been the go-to place if you want to make an unchallenged claim on cyberwar. Here it is from 2010:
“Can you imagine your life without electric power?” Retired Admiral Mike McConnell asked correspondent Steve Kroft …
“If I were an attacker and I wanted to do strategic damage to the United States, I would either take the cold of winter or the heat of summer, I probably would sack electric power on the U.S. East Cost, maybe the West Coast, and attempt to cause a cascading effect. All of those things are in the art of the possible from a sophisticated attacker,” McConnell explained.
“Do you believe our adversaries have the capability of bringing down a power grid?” Kroft asked.
“I do,” McConnell replied.
The actual measurable reality is that this has been repeated thousands of times over the last fifteen years. In this it is like the story of electromagnetic pulse doom, which also features of hundreds of stories over the past decade asking you to imagine what your life would be like without electricity.
As a matter of observation, it’s the only thing the authority figure defense establishment salesmen and fearmongers can think of to get maximum attention. What’ll we do without power? We’ll all die! And it can happen now!
“China could launch a devastating computer-run sabotage operation by attacking U.S. oil refineries, many of which are grouped closely together in areas of Texas, New Jersey and California.”
“A [Chinese] computer attacker could penetrate the electronic ‘gate’ that controls refinery operations and cause fires or toxic chemical spills . . . ”
Same year, ITN Network from England
“In the City of London, if you were to hit two or three places – nor more than that -they would be able to turn the city off and that would stop the banking system and it would stop the share-trading system . . . Identifying the crazed, skilled cyber attacker is perhaps the single most difficult task that the cyber spooks face at the moment,” said Peter Sommer from the London School of Economics for ITN.
Same year, a State Department memo
“Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security David Carpenter told [an] audience of business security specialists that they must educate themselves about the mounting threats of cyber-crime. He said terrorists are constantly devising new ways ‘to cripple business, government, and infrastructure,’ and inventing new methods of ‘creative destruction.'”
1999, Richard Clarke, talking to the Associated Press:
“We could wake one morning and find a city, or a sector of the country, or the whole country have an electric power problem, a transportation problem or a telecommunication problem because there was a surprise attack using information warfare.”
1999, the Los Angeles Times
George Tenet, CIA director is quoted: “Potential targets are not only government computers but the lifelines we all take for granted — our power grids and our water and transportation systems.”
Another Pentagon wargame scenario, this time called Zenith Star, is invoked. The standard pro forma claims are issued: “enemy hackers supposedly had triggered blackouts . . . They paralyzed 911 systems . .
.
” . . . a team of NSA hackers proved that they could easily disable power, telephones and oil pipelines across the country as well as Pentagon warfighting capabilities.”
Richard Clarke, quoted in the New York Times, early 1999
“I’m talking about people shutting down a city’s electricity . . . shutting down 911 systems, shutting down telephone networks and transportation systems. You black out a city, people die. Black out lots of cities, lots of people die.”
Scripps News Service, 1999
While our information warriors are said to be the mightiest in the world, the Scripps Howard piece also reads: “A nation that would have no chance challenging America’s conventional or nuclear forces might well prevail in a computer attack.”
“Among the most sophisticated are India, Syria and Iran [anonymous] experts say.”
” . . . But a cyberattack on a country’s power grid, while militarily defensible, can cause more calamities than a missile and far more ‘collateral damage’ to innocents than it causes harm to an enemy’s forces or ability to fight.”
Occasionally, an official — long since gone, would gamely try to rephrase matters. From an obscure thing the Defense Information and Electronic Report, 1999.
“[The term Electronic Peal Harbor] connotes this ‘lights-out’ idea,” [Jeffrey Hunker, an official during the Clinton administration] said for Defense Information. “It tends to oversimplify the threat, which ranges from existential terrorism to overt acts to overthrow the military. . . . It trivializes the real [danger], which I think is much more than what’s been understood.”
Richard Clarke, again in the LA Times in 1999
“An enemy could systematically disrupt banking, transportation, utilities, finance, government functions and defense … It’s cheaper and easier than building a nuclear weapon.”
For NPR in 1999, GOP whacko REp. Curt Weldon, long since run out of Congress
“[Curt] Weldon says a successful hacker could disrupt civilian life, striking hospitals or train systems …
WELDON: “It’s not a matter of if America has an electronic Pearl Harbor, but when.”
The Christian Science Monitor, when it was still a real newspaper, and not a minor news website due to reader indifference, in 1999
“. . . Operation Eligible Receiver demonstrated the potential vulnerability of the U.S. government’s information systems. The National Security Agency hired 35 hackers to launch simulated attacks on the national information structure. The hackers obtained ‘root access’ – the highest level of control – in 36 of the government’s 40,000 networks.
“If the exercise had been real, the attackers would have been able to create power outages across Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, and New York.”
Federal Computer Week, a brigadier is interviewed, 1998
“A digital enemy can bypass the military and take down critical infrastructure — automated power plants, stock markets and transportation systems — and disable this nation without firing a shot . . . Call it a virtual Cold War . . .”
WIRED, May 1997
1. “We will have a cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor at some point, and we do not want to wait for that wake-up call,” attributed to former U.S. Deputy Atty. General Jamie Gorelick.
2. “I-war can be the kind of neat, conceptually contained electronic Pearl Harbor scenario that Washington scenarists like — collapsing power grids, a stock market software bomb, an electromagnetic pulse that takes the phone system out.”
This article went on to get a credit in the last Bruce Willis Die Hard movie over a decade later.
Authoritative, accurate and long, it captures the establishment record on the matter.
It is the meme of turning the United States off via remote control. Again and again and again.
It is the only way to get unthinking people to accept how, maybe, enemy nations, bad actors, disgruntled insiders, anyone on the other side of the barricades of Fortress America, will take the country down without immediately getting bombed into rubble.
Now, it’s also more and more about protecting the 1 percent from the imagined predations of the paupers.
How else to interpret something like “to paralyze our financial system in this country …”
Nobody in the great mass that is not the 1 percent or in the service of the same cares about attacks on the American financial system. They do, on the other hand, wish our financial system would stop attacking them.
This is Leon Panetta doing the dance for the 1 percent, signaling the masters that he’s doing his best to see more swag comes their way in defense contracts for protecting cyberspace.
Keenly aware of conventional U.S. military dominance in the region, Iran has adopted what strategists describe as an “asymmetric” approach.
Missiles mounted on civilian trucks can be concealed around the coastline, tiny civilian dhows and fishing vessels can be used to lay mines, and midget submarines can be hidden in the shallows to launch more sophisticated “smart mines” and homing torpedoes.
Iran is also believed to have built up fleets of perhaps hundreds of small fast attack craft including tiny suicide speedboats, learning from the example of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels who used such methods in a war with the government.
Sri Lanka, the island country which a long time ago was known as Ceylon — most will instinctively know, doesn’t have a Fifth Fleet.
“Assymetric,” of course, is the sickeningly overused jargon-word used to make something sound intellectual and fancy for stupid people — in this case, the description of the natural state of affairs that exists when a really small or lousy (or small and lousy) military is compared to ours.
It’s assymetric! We spend 100,000 times as much or even more as Iran does on our military, forcing them into assymetry! A comparison chart of the US and Iranian navies appears to be greatly assymetrical! That is, it lacks symmetry!
This is only to say the best minds aren’t our military theorists and national security experts. A number of whom are consulted for the news piece linked above, furnishing stuff you could have come up with for much less. Which also informs us their purpose is not really to provide any great value. It never is, the real function being to add a pseudo-scholarly quality to the assessment of war.
After all, where are we if we do not have our natsec think tank experts and retired military men to tell us such things? Rhetorical, obviously.
“They [Iran] can cause a great deal of mischief… but it depends how much pain they are willing to accept,” one of these personnel, Nikolas Gvosdev, “professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island,” tells the news agency.
The US Naval War College, for those from abroad who don’t, is not quite the same thing as the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, MD.
The former’s website is here. Located in the capitol for old swank money in Rhode Island, Newport, its website announces the school recently awarded someone you don’t know the “Hattendorf Prize.”
The Hattendorf Prize!
“The Hattendorf Prize was established on 7 December 2010 and first awarded in 2011,” informs Wiki.
Anyway, the “Nicholas Gvosdev” also posts at SITREP, the GlobalSecurity.Org blog to which this place syndicates posts.
The Atlantic Community has launched a new series of essays looking at the future of European security, specifically in resourcing and procurement …
Well, you’ve had enough of that to get the idea.
So now you know what you need to about potential war with the Iranian navy and our national security scholars for today. Iran loses 99 percent of its assets right quick in a shooting war over blocking Hormuz.
It was harmless and goofy, good for color stories in the news and on television for years.
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.
Now consider for a moment what author Paul Fussell had to say in his book, Bad, on truly wretched publications and their audiences, well before the advent of digital publishing:
“[Down] to magazines aimed at the mentally ill, like Majesty: The Monthly Royal Review, for people who get an erection when they think of the Queen Mother — or rather her privileges, furniture and jewels — and Soldier of Fortune, for people who fantasize about plunging a trench knife into a foreigner of color, generally smaller than themselves.”
Fussell never imagined the explosion of things of this ilk on the network called the web. 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.
Tasers that elicit excruciating spasms in one person at a time? Foam pellets that send an entire crowd fleeing in agony? Pfft. So 2011. Where non-lethal weapons are concerned, the future’s all about sonic microwaves that can make swimmers puke mid-stroke, and aircraft with laser beams that can redirect an entire enemy plane mid-flight.
Or, at least, those are the deepest, darkest wishes of the Pentagon agency responsible for non-lethal weapons.
The military’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate’s “Non-Lethal Weapons Reference Book,??? leaked online last week by PublicIntelligence.org, is a terrifying treasure trove that describes dozens of ways — some already in-use, others in development or still mere fantasy — for military and law enforcement officials to make you wish they were using the real bullets.
A total of 14 weapons, according to the reference book, are currently being fielded. Some of ‘em, you’ve heard of. Good old tasers, which the guide helpfully reminds us “can penetrate 2 inches of clothing??? in order to “totally disable an individual,??? and guns that shoot 600 rubber pellets filled with pepper spray …
This, of course, from the famous publication that’s done everything humanly possible to own the beat.
However, there are lots of rivals and this week’s best came from Digital Trends, a Yahoo news agency:
The United States military has been making great strides with the development and use of unmanned drones for some time now. Military drones are generally used to gather intel and perform reconnaissance missions into enemy territory or other hostile environments. Thankfully, such technology allows for a vast array of benefits, perhaps most importantly eliminating the need of placing soldier’s lives in danger during recon missions.
Yes, thankfully, such technology allows for a vast array of benefits when one is doing the modern version of Fussell’s “plunging a trench knife into a foreigner of color, generally smaller than themselves.” Which, of course, is letting a guided missile off the chain at some nonspecific group of paupers who can’t shoot back on the other side of the globe.
It’s hard for me to imagine someone actually writing this type of copy without immediately lapsing into superciliousness and slurs. Nevertheless, there are people who do it every day.
While most drones utilized by the military take the shape of airplanes, the new Argus-IS is a different breed of drone that takes the form of a helicopter. While planes require space to take off and land, the Argus-IS does not.
That, of course, isn’t the only attribute that makes the Argus-IS a formidable new piece of military tech. We all know how fond the military is of acronyms and the Argus-IS, which stands for Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance-Imaging System doesn’t disappoint. However, it’s not the Argus-IS’ long name that impresses, or even its ability to hover in place or take off without a landing strip, what truly sets the Argus-IS apart from other drones is its 1.8 gigapixel camera …
Currently, the Argus-IS is undergoing testing, but will reportedly be deployed in Afghanistan by the end of the new year.
Pucker up those lips. The editor will warm the mix.
Some fop at the Atlantic, partnered with the National Journal, entitled a representative piece on the spectacle of Iowa Republicans: 11 things you might not know about Santorum.
No link.
Google the man’s name and you get a headache of varying proportion, thereby defining the reality of “low information voters.”
However, the press exacerbates, creating a fantasy, inventing article after article, all sort of portraying Rick Santorum as something he is not: a decent thinking human being.
This in contrast to what he is: A mild-looking psychopath theocrat with a beamish smile.
The only way to describe this media malpractice is by paraphrasing something I posted as a one-liner at Pine View Farm earlier today.
Media handling of Rick Santorum is like someone looking at the little boy next door who tortures the pet cat once or twice a week and, instead of being moved to strike him down, idly says they think he’d make a good vet when he grows up.
If you met the person at the Atlantic, Molly Ball is the name — some staffer used for SEO whoring, who wrote such a 90 second thing, you’d punch her (and the magazine’s editor) into a double concussion — as a public service — for practicing cynical nihilism and off-the-cuff inhumanity in grasping for web eyeballs.
No one not a dipshit/moron, frankly evil or insane could cast a vote for a person like Rick Santorum. He is an example of the worst old white paranoid and ignorant America can produce. There is nothing in his biography to be proud of other than the tale of a mediocre student aligned with the religious right, educated at big yawningly mediocre schools for the sub average and athletically favored muscle-bound — Penn State and Pitt. Who started his career as a flunky/low rent fixer for the steroidal fakes in second-tier professional wresting.
Rick Santorum is an insult to people his age, like me. His success is a symptom of why this country is experiencing epic fail. In the class room at university, or on any wrestling mat in Pennsylvania in the Eighties, I would have stomped his face and dislocated his shoulder in less than 60 seconds. From science to mathematics to any subject in liberal arts, I buried him, like tens of thousands of Americans who would have never thought to conflate theocracy and corporate monarchy with democracy. So would have readers of this blog.
Rick Santorum doesn’t believe in science. He despises sex unless it’s his crabbed vision of it. He hates the idea of women’s reproductive rights in modern America. He wants war with Iran and believes in various right wing GOP conspiracy theories. He uses his religion to damn everyone not like him. And he’s a toady for the 1 percent in corporate America. This only scratches the surface.
That Rick Santorum gets any votes is a measure of pathology, proof there’s an incurable necrotic tumor in the demographic that, even if elimination doesn’t cure the patient, still must be disintegrated by beams of ionizing radiation. Because it’s the right thing to do, from a scientific standpoint as well as a humanitarian one.
“The Switchblade is a pretty cool piece of kit, it is a nice culmination of technologies … that have come to the fore for very small but lethal technology,” says the man in the video.
You can’t satirize the US national security business.
