01.31.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 12:28 pm by George Smith
A fair career summary.
Straight from the NSA:
The ongoing cyber-thefts [by China] from the networks of public and private organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, represent the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.
The 60 Minutes public relations tour:
John Miller: Could a foreign country tomorrow topple our financial system?
Gen. Keith Alexander: I believe that a foreign nation could impact and destroy major portions of our financial system, yes.
John Miller: How much of it could we stop?
Gen. Keith Alexander: Well, right now it would be difficult to stop it because our ability to see it is limited.
One they did see coming was called the BIOS Plot. It could have been catastrophic for the United States. While the NSA would not name the country behind it, cyber security experts briefed on the operation told us it was China. Debora Plunkett directs cyber defense for the NSA and for the first time, discusses the agency’s role in discovering the plot.
Spying on the paupers and piss ants:
“Well, my concern on that is specially what’s going on in the Middle East, what you see going on in Syria, what we see going on– Egypt, Libya, Iraq, it’s much more unstable, the probability that a terrorist attack will occur is going up. And this is precisely the time that we should not step back from the tools that we’ve given our analysts to detect these types of attacks.???
So here’s a partial summary of the NSA’s great achievements:
1. Infiltrating World of Warcraft because they think terrorists use it.
2. ‘Stopped’ imaginary Chinese destroy the world by BIOS kill plot.
3. Snooping on the calls of Somali pirates and making relational plots of them.
4. Employs people who can solve Rubik’s cubes in 95 seconds.
From here:
Most of the country, at my level certainly, is still struggling with the economic deprivation and outright calamity of the Great Recession. Although corporate America has rebounded nicely, there has been no recovery for most.
And for Keith Alexander and the NSA, as well as the rest of the defense infrastructure, they saw only expansion. How unfortunate for them that Edward Snowden has spoiled it a bit.
Keith Alexander lives in the world of the plutocracy. Cash money for the day isn’t an issue. Bare bones survival isn’t on the menu. Instead, he and the structure have spent much of their time expanding operations and dreaming up threatening stories and messages to be delivered by the shoeshine men in the press, digging around in their big data suck for things which they, in encapsulated isolated delusion, believe threaten the existence of the country.
At DefCon 2012, Keith Alexander, a tech chicken-head biter just like you, delivering the call to national security corporate stooge-ism to save our futures and the American economy from Chinese cyberwar.
From the wires, reposted here:
The annual Defcon hacking convention has asked the federal government to stay away this year for the first time in its 21-year history, saying Edward Snowden’s revelations have made some in the community uncomfortable about having feds there.
“It would be best for everyone involved if the feds call a ‘time-out’ and not attend Defcon this year,??? Defcon founder Jeff Moss said in an announcement posted Wednesday night on the convention’s website …
In defense of national security corporate stooge-ism, General Keith was there, anyway. He was heckled.
Meet the new boss, Mike Rogers, same as the old boss.
From The Predator State, by James K. Galbraith, 2008:
“[The] practice is clear: We live under government that as a matter of principle does what it wants.”
And General Keith Alexander of the National Security Agency was a soldier in the cause.
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01.30.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 7:51 pm by George Smith
This evening Northrop Grumman, the sixth largest arms manufacturer in the world, is in the news for a lawsuit made by an employee who worked on its never-fielded system to protect commercial air-liners from shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.
In 2006 this project was worth big money and the Department of Homeland Security issued a report on the subject, one that was posted on Steven Aftergood’s Secrecy blog. DHS complained the material was sensitive and Aftergood took down the paper.
I wrote about it here:
And upon perusal, it is possible to see why DHS might want to control its dissemination. The anti-MANPADS systems under consideration, manufactured by BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman for addition to commercial airliners, don’t work.
A few days after FAS’ posting of the report, Associated Press filed a story on it.
“It could be 20 years before every U.S. passenger airplane is outfitted with a system to protect it from small portable missiles, according to a government report obtained Monday by The Associated Press.Under a test program, BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman developed laser-based systems over the past two years that still don’t meet the reliability standards set by the Homeland Security Department . . . ” wrote the AP.
The upshot:
False alarms would cause the complete halt or disruption of commercial air traffic and the emptying of airports and surrounding areas in a search for terrorists. False alarms would cause notification of what is called the Domestic Event Network. The problems associated with false alarm of an anti-aircraft missile attack on a commercial jetliner could be said to be substantial, economically back-breaking, or worse than terrorists.
In any case, Reuters reports on Northrop Grumman’s anti-MANPADS project and the lawsuit over it:
A lawsuit by a former Northrop Grumman employee alleges that the defense contractor defrauded the U.S. government over a contract to provide commercial airliners with a missile defense system.
The suit, which was originally filed in 2009 by Leo Danilides, was unsealed in federal district court in Chicago on Thursday…
The suit was filed under the False Claims Act, which lets people collect rewards for blowing the whistle on fraud against the government …
Northrop received a contract in 2006 to provide improvements for work it had done in two earlier phases of the project “and “create a commercially feasible system,” according to the lawsuit. It said the plaintiff, Danilides, had worked on the program “for many years.”
The suit alleged that during the Phase III part of the project, for which it said the company was paid $62 million, “Northrop pretended to be exerting its best efforts when it was doing virtually nothing to improve the design and reliability of the Counter-MANPADS system.”
“Northrop failed to perform critical tasks, and then profited by keeping the money that was supposed to have been spent doing that work,” according to the allegations.
“Far from providing its ‘best efforts’ as required, Northrop was providing no efforts.”
By 2008 the contract had ended with no results and the government did not pursue more research.
Another reason why you read this blog: the nightmare years of the past decade when the Department of Defense and national security spending slipped out of civilian democratic control and oversight. And very few people cared.
Now look where we are.
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Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Fiat money fear and loathers, WhiteManistan at 12:17 pm by George Smith
Plastic 3D gun maker and wanna-be BitCoin wallet developer Cody Wilson has been given a quarter of a million dollar book deal by Simon & Schuster for his story:
“The whole point to me is to add to the hacker mythology and to have a very, very accurate and contentious portrayal of what we think about the current political situation, our attitude and political orientation, a lasting remark,??? he says. “It won’t be a manifesto. But culturally I hope to leave a couple of zingers…a touchstone for the young, disaffected radical towards his own political and social development, that kind of thing.???
Wilson says his proposal received highly mixed reactions from publishers, some of whom saw his attempts to create new ways to circumvent gun control laws as immoral.
The proposed title is Negative Liberty. At Forbes, Wilson claims that soon the government will be trying to jail him.
Cody Wilson — from the archives.
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01.29.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Fiat money fear and loathers at 1:45 pm by George Smith
“Bitcoin is freedom. It’s very American.” — Tyler Winklevoss.
I couldn’t agree more. Although not for identical reasons.
The Winklevosses, just a notch or two under Tom Perkins as great public images. And that’s one of BitCoin’s biggest liabilities. It’s few human faces, when seen and heard, are kinda repugnant. Grease for making the hoarding rich richer is one helluva message.
The price of one BitCoin in North Hollywood, today — 873 dollars.
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01.28.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 3:55 pm by George Smith
The President is alleged to be going populist in a few hours for tonight’s address. I expect that if so, at best, it will be tepid, carefully pressed and laundered to reassure WhiteManistan and the wealthy.
It won’t matter. Before the thing is over they’ll have accused him of feeding class warfare, anyway.
“Mean Future” was made before he was re-elected. All of it was true. Two other things happened one very bad, one very good.
There are more long-term unemployed and people with jobs on food stamps now than then. Many having just given up on finding work because the economy isn’t creating them.
But Obamacare is working and more people are getting health care for the first time, at least from my experience.
Still very timely, they underline American delusion about place in the world and a resistance to recognition of increasingly bleak conditions.
Nothing has changed. When the issues can be easily communicated in two and four minute tunes, it’s stunning to see people tip-toeing around the edges in their efforts to seem fair and non-threatening.
Yes, I know the rent is steep/But the whores and beer are really cheap! (Pennsy Dutch accent: Evy-sing’s all right!)
Krugman blogs:
My post on Americans starting to recognize class realities has brought some predictable reactions, which I’d place under two headings: (1) “But they have cell phones!??? and (2) it’s about how you behave, not how much money you have …
A lot of Americans — quite arguably a majority — just don’t have the prerequisites for middle-class life as we’ve always understood it …
The sad thing is that our fetishization of the middle class, our pretense that we’re almost all members of that class, is a major reason so many of us actually aren’t. That’s why the growing appreciation of class realities on the part of the public is a good thing; it raises the chances that we’ll actually start creating the kind of society we only pretend to have.
He’s talking, again, about American delusion. Look, it’s hard to admit you’re near the bottom and prospects are dim.
As for possession of cellphones, or more accurately, even smartphones: Have they been magic wands to economic empowerment?
Rhetorical. Arguably not, or you’d see it. If you live and shop where I do you certainly don’t. Almost everyone has a smartphone and they still need help with the food bills, insurance and keeping the car running, if they have one.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 3:20 pm by George Smith
About time, too, since the rest of us have been on the losing end for as long as I can remember.
Tom Perkins’ interview on Bloomberg is as good as example of digging yourself in deeper as one is likely to see.
Perkins: “I am your classical self-made man, if you will.”
Later, the interviewer asks: “Do you worry that you are divorced from reality?”
It’s a long interview. Impromptu of nothing except a complaint lodged against Paul Krugman at the Times, Perkins gets slightly testy about people making fun of opulent watches for assholes and displays his own, stating … well, you have to hear it. Or watch this brief Bloomberg piece on YouTube showcasing his fine example and uploaded to maximize the awful spectacle of the Perkins interview.
Updating readers on old information: Perkins sold the Maltese Falcon super-sailing boat a few years ago because he was more interested in his “underwater airplane” which proved difficult to launch from the thing.
In it’s place he bought the Dr. No and it is all explained with grand pictures at the link.
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01.27.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 4:56 pm by George Smith
Billionaire Tom Perkins rant in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal that the 1 percent were facing rising levels of hate potentially resembling that which led to to the notorious Nazi pogrom against the Jews, Kristallnacht, didn’t quite generate the desired outcome.
Today it was marked by a multitude of published comments, almost all of them extremely negative. Perkins, quite rightly, was lampooned as a deeply weird and paranoid man, a trait he shares with a surprising number of America’s 1 percent who have occasionally popped off with similar comments in the age of Obama.
Krugman, for example:
Extreme inequality, it turns out, creates a class of people who are alarmingly detached from reality — and simultaneously gives these people great power.
The example many are buzzing about right now is the billionaire investor Tom Perkins, a founding member of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Perkins lamented public criticism of the “one percent??? — and compared such criticism to Nazi attacks on the Jews, suggesting that we are on the road to another Kristallnacht.
You may say that this is just one crazy guy and wonder why The Journal would publish such a thing. But Mr. Perkins isn’t that much of an outlier. He isn’t even the first finance titan to compare advocates of progressive taxation to Nazis. Back in 2010 Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and chief executive of the Blackstone Group, declared that proposals to eliminate tax loopholes for hedge fund and private-equity managers were “like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.???
They can and all too often do surround themselves with courtiers who tell them what they want to hear and never, ever, tell them they’re being foolish …
I also suspect that today’s Masters of the Universe are insecure about the nature of their success. We’re not talking captains of industry here, men who make stuff. We are, instead, talking about wheeler-dealers, men who push money around and get rich by skimming some off the top as it sloshes by.
So reader Christoph was pretty much on the money yesterday when he commented:
We may have to accept the possibility, that money itself and the power that comes with it when amassed in great magnitude do actually corrupt peoples brains and turn them into a mentally unstable state.
This mad paranoia runs through American wealth. Krugman mentions the ire of it against Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal.
And While Ted Nugent is no billionaire, he mouthpieces for them on a virtually weekly basis, comparing Obama to a “brown shirt,” often condemning entire swaths of the US government, or anyone democratic, for that matter, as evidence of Nazism reborn. Most recently, Nugent compared movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, who is Jewish, to Joseph Goebbels.
A similarly paranoid streak runs through the central characters in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The story would not exist without the mentally ill grievance of John Galt and his anger toward all the parasite poor and government men out to steal his accomplishments and money.
Note ridiculous signs, made and distributed by Tea Party-supporting plutocrat slush fund men. You don’t think the sods carrying them could have actually made them, right?
“The 1 percent are not causing the inequality, they are the job creators … It’s absurd to demonize the rich who create opportunities for others,” Tom Perkins told a journalist on Bloomberg television about an hour ago.
They are the job creators. Good grief, another gift.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Fiat money fear and loathers at 1:19 pm by George Smith
NYT:
One of the most prominent players in the Bitcoin universe, Charles Shrem, was arrested by federal prosecutors on Sunday and accused of helping grease the wheels for drug transactions on the now defunct online bazaar Silk Road.
Mr. Shrem was the founder and chief executive of a popular website, Bitinstant, where Bitcoins could be bought using dollars. The criminal charges unsealed on Monday by the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan claim that Mr. Shrem used his company to convert money anonymously for people interested in buying narcotics on the Silk Road site, and also personally bought drugs on the site. He was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport …
[And the famously wealthy Bitcoin speculators, the Winkle-Nuisances]
Bitinstant stopped operating last summer, but the site was viewed as a pioneer in the industry, and Mr. Shrem had recently said that he planned to restart it. The company won early backing from Winkelvoss Capital, which is run by the Winkelvoss [sic, since corrected] brothers, who were early players in Facebook.
In a statement, Winkelvoss [sic] Capital said, “We were passive investors in BitInstant and will do everything we can to help law enforcement officials. We fully support any and all governmental efforts to ensure that money laundering requirements are enforced, and look forward to clearer regulation being implemented on the purchase and sale of Bitcoins.???
In the past few weeks, various reports have indicated that 90 percent of all Bitcoins are held by hoarders.
The current and ridiculous price of one BitCoin in Pasadena: between 970 and 1040 dollars.
Like corporate stock that rises in value when employees are fired en masse, BitCoin speculators rush to push up the value when bad stuff happens.
It is the perfect money for our time, a gift for wealthy tech sociopaths.
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01.26.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 9:12 pm by George Smith
Made-in-China telecaster, used Atomic Reactor amplifier missing parts (but still takes a guitar line level into the effects return), 10-year old Adrenalinn III for time-based effects and stereo out, 26-28 year old Scholz R&D Rockman Sustainor, 15-year old Bag End 12″ on loan, 30-year old Hiwatt Custom 50 bought when I was at Lehigh.
Guitar to Sustainor for clean, edge distortion (not its highest gain setting by any means), then out to Adrenalinn III for stereo effects — one of the most important, a 12 millisecond delay in stereo for a doubled-in-a-small room very hard echo. (Trust me, that’s rock and roll.)
Then it goes to the Atomic as the main feed and the HiWatt (which pushes the Bag End 12″) for the stereo image.
It’s important to have a cheap EQ in the effects send and return of the Scholz Sustainor. This was my choice, bought years ago.
Some think the Scholz Sustainor, now a very old piece of gear, as only something that furnishes a typecast period piece Boston sound, totally inferior to modern digital modeling equipment. Not so. I use both with no prejudice.
An equalizer the Sustainor’s effects loop de-Bostonizes the sound, if desired.
My settings push up the bass below 400Hz. (The result, with the single coils in a telecaster-type guitar, a mid-scoop that retains body without making the treble ear-shattering. The goal is tight — but not always, heh, rock and roll tone with full bass and solid sound from rhythm to heavy lead. The classic Scholz equipment equalization, which is very good but idiosyncratic to the Boston sound, creates a huge bulge between 500 and 700 or so Hz, the very middle of the electric guitar’s sonic power. It’s perfect for many classic rock lead applications and rhythm sounds that make good pads while getting out of the way of the singing. But it’s not perfectly ideal for waxing quickly between rock and roll — the Beatles, the Stones, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Creedence Clearwater Revival — and arena rock, the Eagles “Hotel California.”)
The Sustainor internal EQ section carves a lot of everything below 400 out for the sake of sitting perfectly in a full range studio mix. As a side undocumented trick, an EQ, even a very cheap one, can put this all back in the Scholz effects return and can be used to push the “clean” settings of the Sustainor into mild overdrive.
So what can this rig do? It’s a jerry-bilt set up, unplanned, done from expedience.
The WhiteManistan Blues Band goes from jangle electric folk and some country to raging boogie and hard rock in 50 minutes of tunes. And it’s a two-man band, the kind of group I was in the early-70’s when I cut my teeth on combo rock. The White Stripes and Black Keys did not, by any means, invent the two-man band.
When you are in a two man band you have the freedom of choices others don’t have and also challenges they don’t.
For example: You can play really loud live (half of what we do). And annihilate the need for a bass player.
Or you can mix it like a lot of pop music. And annihilate the need for a bass player.
Or you can try to do it all, with a span from folk to loud hard rock in a full stereo panoply (the other half of what we do) compensated to combine the best of a raw sound with the dynamic range of a stereo mix.
It’s not easy. Everyone has to roll their own. It comes with experience, an ear, or ears, and what works for you.
Stay cheap.
Note to prospective made-in-China “Fender” telecaster owners: Pick-ups and electronics are stock and not substandard. At really loud volume the single coils are not micro-phonic (a common criticism by know-nothings, prone to atonal squealing caused by vibration of pickup winding) or inferior to domestically-made pickups at all. (Keyword: Squier.)
Pardon the errors: An earlier version of the post screwed up the frequencies by orders of magnitude. Since corrected.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:22 pm by George Smith
This is a tune and video that only gets more excellent and fitting in our modern country. And, of course, you should spread it around and hit up the count, helping it toward 1k of big views on YouTube.
From the Wall Street Journal letters page, Tom Perkins, famous tech venture capitalist, sings out his pity the billionaire blues in a most peculiar manner:
Regarding your editorial “Censors on Campus” (Jan. 18): Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its “one percent,” namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich.”
From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a “snob” despite the millions she has spent on our city’s homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.
This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?
Tom Perkins
San Francisco
For discussion and adding linkage: Pity the billionaire screeds comparing the poor fighting back against inequality to Hitler-ite fascism.
Tom Perkins’ 130 million dollar yacht, the Maltese Falcon, registered to another country and long kept out of frequent American port visits due to “tax implications,” according to the video.
And here it is, escorted by much smaller yachts, dashing under the Golden Gate bridge.
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