The drumbeat in support of government monitoring and control over private networks becomes deafening when the drummer is Bush-era cybersecurity chief (and now executive vice president of Booz Allen) Michael McConnell …
It may be in consultants’ interest to create an atmosphere of fear when it comes to the Internet. But mindless saber-rattling is hardly in America’s interest. Some basic work is needed to improve security of the government’s own networks. Beyond that, if we want to make private networks more secure, the answer involves calmer approaches: investing in research and development, spurring the creation of safer software and educating our citizens and companies about computer security.
(Susan Crawford, a professor of law at Cardozo School of Law, specializing in Internet policy and communications law, is a Bloomberg View columnist.
Smilin’ Mike, cyberwar flogger-in-chief, from over a year ago.
But Kristof never did although years later he lamely conceded that he had managed to “afflict the afflicted.”
Kristof kept his place at the toniest estate in journalism, polishing his reputation as a hand-ringingly sincere butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-the-mouth wise man who wants nothing but the best for everyone.
Today Kristof gets around to doing something that must have caused that person a bit of pain — naming the Republican Party as an obvious security threat, one greater than the foreign bogeyman we’ve grown accustomed to hearing of on a daily basis.
IF China or Iran threatened our national credit rating and tried to drive up our interest rates, or if they sought to damage our education system, we would erupt in outrage.
Well, wake up to the national security threat. Only it’s not coming from abroad, but from our own domestic extremists.
We tend to think of national security narrowly as the risk of a military or terrorist attack. But national security is about protecting our people and our national strength — and the blunt truth is that the biggest threat to America’s national security this summer doesn’t come from China, Iran or any other foreign power. It comes from budget machinations, and budget maniacs, at home …
So let’s remember not only the national security risks posed by Iran and Al Qaeda. Let’s also focus on the risks, however unintentional, from domestic zealots.
The rest of the column devotes itself to budget-cutting on education because — in addition to despising science — Republicans don’t like any money for things the wealthy have no use for. Which includes reading programs for children.
While various tech nerds think it’s cool, it’s virtually unlistenable. You have to endure a little more than you’ll want to get to the robot guitar part.
You’ll hear it’s patently awful but a good pick for a robotic contraption being as it does away with 98 percent of the expression present in typical electric guitar performance. It’s the guitar line for Marilyn Manson’s “The Beautiful People,” a machine-like and very stiff riff that doesn’t require the device to do anything real guitarists more frequently do — like bend notes, use finger vibrato, work the volume or tone knobs, etc.
GE’s Greenville plant, where all 22 gas power-plant turbines will be exported this year, is hiring 125 people in 2011. — SF Chronicle
Yesterday, arch rent-seeker Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric CEO and Obama’s job czar, headlined the “Campaign for Free Enterprise??? job summit. In typical fashion, Immelt had little concern for free enterprise or job creation. Since the beginning of the Obama administration, GE has realized that lobbying for big government, subsidies, and tax credits is far more profitable than competing and profiting from merit.
GE has chosen to specialize in rent-seeking behavior and has directly receiving millions of dollars from Obama’s stimulus and much more cash indirectly. GE notoriously paid zero taxes in 2010. — OpenMarket
The charge from labor-friendly liberals and free-market conservatives has been the same: the appointment [of Jeff Immelt as jobs adviser] represents pure crony capitalism. The leaders of the largest U.S. multinationals are hardly the best suited to give advice on domestic job creation, the line goes, when they spent the last decade eliminating 2.9 million jobs at home and adding 2.4 million overseas. And in particular, the chief of GE, No. 6 on the Fortune 500, shouldn’t be charged with heading that effort, considering the company’s sprawling lobbying agenda in Washington. — Fortune
The chairman of President Barack Obama’s jobs and competitiveness council said Wednesday there is no magic potion to jobs creation. — Newsday
Then the Obama administration sends Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, which paid no federal income taxes last year, to lecture U.S. business firms to “stop complaining about government.” –letter to the Allentown Morning Call newspaper
Cisco Systems plans to cut 15 percent of its staff and sell a set-top box factory as part of a plan to cut annual expenses by $1 billion as the network equipment maker tries to revive its fortunes.
The company said on Monday that it will cut 11,500 jobs, compared with the several thousand that analysts had predicted. The cuts come after Cisco’s chief executive John Chambers said in April that the company had “lost its way.”
Cisco will notify U.S. and Canada-based employees who are losing their jobs in the first week of August. The layoffs in other countries will take place later in compliance with local laws and regulations, Cisco said.
Cisco outsources about 90 percent of its manufacturing to contract manufacturers … [to the same factories in Asia that produce all of Apple’s iKit.].
Portraits of sociopathic minds in action. Two guys, one who is part of a “jobs council” but whose most notable achievements are off-shoring and tax evasion, the other one who maintains on the premier news program in the US that tax relief will create jobs while making plans to reduce his labor force by fifteen percent.
You think they’d make graduate students a little smarter, particularly if they’re going to contribute something to the home of all good boys, The Atlantic.
We live in the time of Google the Great, whose all-seeing eye has ushered in a golden age of musical democracy. Out at your local bar, and faced with an enchanting, but obscure, slice of music, you can call up an app, hold your mobile device aloft like a scepter, and all the vitals — song, artist, album — are swiftly known to you.
“Google the Great” … “musical democracy” … “hold your mobile device aloft like a scepter” …
Scintillating observation from a high-button fellow admiring his iGadgets.
Nugent, a supporter of GOP candidates and critic of Obama, told The Arizona Republic recently that “politics are extremely personal” as he defended [Tom Petty’s] right to ask Bachmann to stop playing American Girl.
Nugent happens to think Bachmann is a “great American,” and told The Republic she can use one of his songs. But Nugent is waiting for Texas Gov. Rick Perry to jump into the race and says Stranglehold would be appropriate for Perry because it’s “the ultimate soundtrack of defiance.”
In the mind of Americans, “Born to be Wild” probably rates higher on the defiance song list.
Anyway, it’s selective news. Nugent is presented as reasonable.
And he never is, this just another example where some noxious tar baby is repackaged as a voice of experience and reason.
YOU REMEMBER THE NIGHT THAT YOU LEFT ME
YOU PUT ME IN MY PLACE
GOT YOU IN A STRANGLEHOLD NOW BABY
GONNA CRUSH YOUR FACE
The last two lines are a pretty accurate representation of what national GOP policy is. But since they’re blunt and frightening to old white people when they come blaring out of the loudspeakers at somewhere over 90 db, the song’s unusable.
But none of this is important in a national newspaper for a story that gets reprinted in lots of little and medium-sized ‘burg rags.
The title — Stranglehold — is a bit of a tip-off. But things have gotten so dense nationwide, the soft touch doesn’t work. Only spelling it out in detail does.
This is still a fine campaign song. Would look and sound great on television news or a comedy show.
One favorite of the business press is the love of small business success stories. Because of economic failure and mass unemployment, they’re totally irresistible, particularly when they purport to finding someone who has made it after being fired.
The most notable case in recent news revolves around the woman seen all over the country in television ads for Chase Ink credit cards, the Jamie Dimon creation.
Beer and cupcakes, says the woman named Marlo, who started a bistro to serve them. That was the ticket.
It’s advertised as a tale of revenge, satisfaction and triumph against all odds. Marlo was fired, so she started Sweet Revenge before the cash ran out. And the business almost failed.
No one was interested. You can’t give free food and drinks away in NYC, apparently. I believe it.
Anyway, it took a fluke — delivering cupcakes to Martha Stewart and a subsequent guest appearance — to save the operation.
It was publicity no money could buy. And what isn’t mentioned in the story is that, knowing how the media works, I’m positive the press ignored Sweet Revenge, even though it was a unique idea, until it showed up on Stewart.
Anyway, these kinds of things are, as here, peddled as answers to corporate America’s animosity toward US labor.
Start your own business! That’s how we’ll all innovate our way to success.
It’s totally unworkable in a country the size of the US. Delusional, actually.
It requires miracles and astonishing strokes of good luck on the order of grains of sand on an acre of beach to make it work for millions of unemployed, even assuming they’re all perfectly disposed to being entrepreneurial.
In the last edition of the series, I mentioned Bob Graham, the ex-WMD Commission chairman who carved out a niche for himself as top salesman for the bioterror defense industry. Graham’s eternal message has been that apocalyptic bioterrorism is coming, so spend more now on bioterror defense.
Graham also fell into the role of professional committee chairman.
If a president has to put together a fig leaf commission to “research??? something, Graham is always picked. Because no one wants him for anything meaningful outside selling bioterror defense spending.
So life as a professional Washington chairman soaks up the rest of his time, along with publishing contracts for books no one who isn’t paid to would read.
Then it’s always back to selling the dread of bioterror …
Having dumped that load of well-earned steaming hot superciliousness one other thing needs to be added. In the ten years of the war on terror, Bob Graham has never been right about anything.
Graham’s lesser Siamese twin in this matter is ex-GOP Senator Jim Talent, whose only legislative contribution came during the Clinton administration as part of Newt Gingrich’s Contract On For America and its subsequent Welfare Reform Act.
Jim Talent’s signal contribution, bless his heart, was to make it harder for the poor to get food stamps. This made him a darling of the Heritage Foundation on the subject of entitlement.
Like Graham, Jim Talent is nothing but a shill for the bioterror defense industry. And in that role he recently contributed horrible, what amounts to virtually fraudulent testimony, to Congress.
Removing bioterrorism from the category of WMD will neither be quick nor easy, but it is vital to both America’s economic and national security. I would remind you that bin Laden had a background in construction. It shouldn’t be surprising that he chose to attack buildings in America, because he understood what damage could be wrought by flying fully-fueled, wide body airplanes into those structures. Al Qaeda’s new leader is just as determined to attack America. His formal training was in medicine and infectious disease—one more reason we worry about bioterrorism. But this is not just about al Qaeda.
If the FBI is correct in its assertion that Dr. Bruce Ivins was the sole perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax letter attacks, then a single individual with no training or experience in weaponizing pathogens, and using equipment readily available for purchase on the Internet, was capable of producing high-quality, dry-powdered anthrax. The only difference between producing enough material for several envelopes and enough material to attack a city is just a matter of a few months production work in a laboratory, rather than the few hours of late night work cited by the FBI investigation.
The bottom line on the feasibility of bioterrorism is quite clear.
This is Jim Talent arguing with distinctly unusual illogic that Bruce Ivins, one of the nation’s foremost experts on anthrax, working in the nation’s foremost laboratory on biodefense, with the best access to gold standard anthrax spores in the world … proves that anyone — those completely without training — could do the same.
Here’s a fellow who has never had a single serious course in microbiology in his entire life, a man who wouldn’t know a Gram stain from a grass stain, as an “expert” on bioterrorism and how one makes diseases into weapons before Congress of the allegedly most advanced country in the world.
It’s flabbergasting in its audacity.
But it’s consistent with the bioterror defense industry lobby. Its people will say anything, twisting facts until they’re totally unrecognizable, just to further the message that more money needs to be sent to its clients.
Talent references his new organization, the private sector WMDCenter, here.
By lobbying standards, it’s a small and relatively insignificant shop. And although it pretends to be bipartisan, it’s not. There’s very little interest in anything it does on the left side of the aisle.
Compared to the Chamber, and other standard GOP-aligned lobbying groups, like KochPAC or AHIP, WMDCenter is very small beer.
Anyway, the website of the WMD Center is not particularly informative — this from a group allegedly about educating the public on the pressing danger of bioterrorism.
It publicizes only that it’s in the process of preparing a report card on the Obama administration’s progress in buttressing the nation against bioterror.
These report cards are rigged exercises, designed to give the government crappy grades. And they’ve done it before.
Last year, when Graham and Talent were still funded by the US government as part of the old WMD Commission, they gave the president an F on bioterror defense. Just before their funding from the US government ran out.
In Schuylkill County I grew up with people are now the Michele Bachmann demographic. They became the Tea Party.
Matt Taibbi profiles Bachmann in Rolling Stone this week.
He astutely notes that in 2011 America, laughing at the dumbshits on television for being dumbshits only makes them stronger. And before you know it, the most camera-genic and determined among them is running for President.
When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don’t learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you’re a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they’re even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies.
Given how Bachmann’s stature rises every time she does something we laugh at, it’s no wonder she’s set her strangely unfocused eyes on the White House. Since arriving in Congress, she has been a human tabloid-copy machine, spouting one copy-worthy lunacy after another. She launched a fierce campaign against compact fluorescent lights, claiming that the energy-saving bulbs contain mercury and pose a “very real threat to children, disabled people, pets, senior citizens.” She blasted the 2010 census as a government plot and told people not to comply because the U.S. Constitution doesn’t require citizens to participate, when in fact it does …
[And they listened to her. The census enumerators saw it, even in Pasadena.]
Even other Republicans, it seems, are making the mistake of laughing at Bachmann. But consider this possibility: She wins Iowa, then swallows the Tea Party and Christian vote whole for the next 30 or 40 primaries while Romney and Pawlenty battle fiercely over who is the more “viable” boring-white-guy candidate. Then Wall Street blows up again — and it’s Barack Obama and a soaring unemployment rate versus a white, God-fearing mother of 28 from the heartland.
It could happen. Michele Bachmann has found the flaw in the American Death Star. She is a television camera’s dream, a threat to do or say something insane at any time, the ultimate reality-show protagonist. She has brilliantly piloted a media system that is incapable of averting its eyes from a story, riding that attention to an easy conquest of an overeducated cultural elite from both parties that is far too full of itself to understand the price of its contemptuous laughter. All of those people out there aren’t voting for Michele Bachmann. They’re voting against us. And to them, it turns out, we suck enough to make anyone a contender.
MSNBC, for example, is just about the best thing that happened to Michele Bachmann.
From the Nation’s Chris Hayes to the the Post’s Gene Robinson, the “good boys” are always on the network, always on hand to laugh at the lunatics for the sake of some good sport while the country slowly burns.
The lunatics, who know this only makes them stronger, went and got elected in 2010 and continued sacking the country.
Good boy Chris Matthews is one of the people who regularly tries to pour all the all the contempt he can on Bachmann. It never seems to occur to him that, on TV, he appears as a creature just as easily despised.
And that’a made clear in the clips featuring him and Bachmann in my “Act Naturally” vid here.
Good news, lads. The Hitler Downfall segment is removed. No more YouTube ad monetization!
