07.16.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 3:46 pm by George Smith
Tech Tip 1. Start unliking stuff in your movies, music and tv tracks. Facebook’s Open Graph search in league with corporate America and random busybodies will only use it against you. No good will come of it. Seriously, do have any real ‘friends’ who like you for your canonical list of movies and books? Your corporate ‘likes’ are of no value to you. Why should anyone else get value from them? You think Facebook and corporate America will get friendly with you some day and just dispense a benefit in return, one you never saw coming? While you’re unliking stuff, use your smartphone and call your doctor to say you won’t be needing any more refills on the prescription for stupid pills.
Tech Tip 2. Block someone. FB is not a democracy of free speech. Mark Zuckerberg would secretly laugh at you for thinking so. America is not about free speech, it’s about corporate fascism. And neither is your “timeline” about free speech. It’s your virtual backyard micro app, one you have slight control over. So when a stranger you’d never share a drink with starts getting on your nerves in a “share” comment line and doesn’t take a hint, block. Block with vigor, block with elan. It makes you feel good, too. Refresh the page and watch their silly little face or avatar replaced by a blank silhouette. Now they can’t see you! It will take a moment for them to grasp what has happened, just as they were sharpening another rudeness. It will spoil their fun for a bit and you’ll have enjoyed stepping on someone. Trust me. I’m a professional.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 9:56 am by George Smith
Economics Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz neatly explains corporate American rent-seeking behavior in a New York Times piece examining the Supreme Court’s ruling that an American company cannot patent existing human genes.
It involved a company called Myriad and patents on two genes thought to be at the root of breast cancer. With the establishment of its patents, the company established a monopoly on potential early breast cancer diagnosis, pricing a very basic need in such a way that only the privileged could afford it.
Stiglitz defines and explains:
[Some] of the most iniquitous aspects of inequality creation within our economic system are a result of “rent-seeking???: profits, and inequality, generated by manipulating social or political conditions to get a larger share of the economic pie, rather than increasing the size of that pie. And the most iniquitous aspect of this wealth appropriation arises when the wealth that goes to the top comes at the expense of the bottom. Myriad’s efforts satisfied both these conditions: the profits the company gained from charging for its test added nothing to the size and dynamism of the economy, and simultaneously decreased the welfare of those who could not afford it …
Myriad’s effort to patent human DNA was one of the worst manifestations of the inequality in access to health, which in turn is one of the worst manifestations of the country’s economic inequality. That the court decision has upheld our cherished rights and values is a cause for a sigh of relief. But it is only one victory in the bigger struggle for a more egalitarian society and economy.
This fits nicely with a larger discussion I’ve been attempting here over the past months.
Yesterday, I briefly touched upon how the tools of technology (in a specific case involving YouTube, those made by Google) allow the establishment of rent-seeking behavior by mega-corporations as massive owners of intellectual property.
Google/YouTube’s arrangements do not increase the size of the economic pie available to all. But by enabling corporations to take entire control of content created by others that may use only a part of their intellectual property in the artistic endeavor, simply by flicking a software switch to scan for IP property signatures within uploaded files, it has enabled easy rent-seeking on the backs of others.
Individuals at the user level on Google properties have no access to such power. And, in fact, find that for practical matters their content is almost impossible to monetize from their end.
On the other hand, corporate tech software has enabled the global control of the aggregate pie so that it can be squeezed of whatever is available. Yes, Google is now evil.
Rent-seeking — from the archives.
Systemic rent-seeking strikes at the very heart of democratic institutions in 2013 America. And that is because, fundamentally, it is about disenfranchising the many for the monetary benefit of those with all the capital.
Because it is quickly producing a less stable society, and in the case discussed by Joseph Stiglitz shows an easily provable damaging effect on women’s health, it can kill people. In the long run, it is an obvious security threat.
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07.15.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 3:34 pm by George Smith
More accurately, the owners of capital are the only ones capable of leveraging benefits from the new technological order. Jaron Lanier has apparently written a book on it, as have others. But most don’t have to read a book to have it explained because they’ve experienced it first hand.
Take, for example, YouTube, the use of visual and audio content, and digital rights tracking.
YouTube/Google runs a scanner that the big mega-corporations contribute content signature IDs to. (They also use personal reporting, aka the “fink button.”) When one hits a match, your video is flagged. At that point a number of things can happen.
It can be simply tracked and later monetized with overlay advertising.
Or the holder may ask it to be flagged and removed, at which point the user gets a penalty stroke.
In practice, the monetization part allows the holders of capital, or the owners of copyright, to extend ownership to creative and novel pieces which use only a portion of their content for purposes of entertainment, enlightenment or fun socio-cultural art.
So if you have recorded a song and made a little video for it, something a minute and a half to two minutes long, which partially cuts from a famous movie as a bit of humorous tribute, you can have it taken off you by the faceless super-corporation that owns one piece of it.
The average person, little people, have no way to monetize their creative work in cyberspace in this manner. They simply don’t.
And this opens up new streams of revenue, streams which require no work except content matching, for those who are already among the 1 percent.
That is the power of the Google digital ecology. It distributes the risk of digital creation to all the grains of sand in the world making content. And reserves the monetization of all of it to itself or business partners.
It’s no model for a viable future unless by such a future one means a handful or super-corporations and business entities that get almost everything from the virtual economy while everyone else sees nothing.
The reason for that is simple. The average person doesn’t have the capital to make a difference, except through blind luck. The numbers, in terms of raw popularity and ranking in search, are just never there. However, by controlling the entire pool of such things through the digital tools of universal aggregation, you can extract worth from everyone else without returning a thing. Except maybe a threat in a digital notice.
Search DD and “Rumble” to see an illustration. Note overlay.
Fair dinkum or not? You tell me.
Rigging counts and the winner-take-all virtual economy — from the archives.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 11:08 am by George Smith
From Krugman, today, on the GOP push to kill food stamp programs:
But these days almost half of food stamp recipients are non-Hispanic whites So [food stamps are] not all about race … What is it about, then? Somehow, one of our nation’s two great parties has become infected by an almost pathological meanspiritedness, a contempt for what CNBC’s Rick Santelli, in the famous rant that launched the Tea Party, called “losers.??? If you’re an American, and you’re down on your luck, these people don’t want to help; they want to give you an extra kick. I don’t fully understand it, but it’s a terrible thing to behold.
List of states, by population, from least to most, that total the number of people on food stamps in the US:
Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, Iowa, Connecticut, Oregon, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Kentucky. That’s 26. Counted here last year.
Image collection for “food stamps.” Illustrative and not in any good way.
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07.14.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 12:05 pm by George Smith
Still no escape from WhiteManistan. America’s original sin, the foundation belief that the chosen make their own rules, obviously needs more disassembling. A lot more.
The rest I leave to Frank at Pine View Farm, who calls it another result of America’s original sin.
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07.12.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 10:09 am by George Smith
Plate 6, Hoagies for Guantanamo. Seven years ago this summer, politicians and retired military men launched a public relations campaign to assert the US was not mistreating prisoners at Guantanamo. In one instance, the alleged good treatment included the serving of hoagies from Subway.
Full size.
“Much of the international community views the Guantanamo Detention Center as a place of shame and routine violation of human rights. This view is not correct. However, there will be no possibility of correcting that view. There is now no possible political support for Guantanamo going forward” — US Army Gen. (Ret.)Barry McAffrey, republished from the FAS Secrecy blog.
Senator Dick Durbin (D – Ill), attesting to the professionalism of the US army men in handling one detainee. Big smile: “They handed him a Subway sandwich. He lit up and started talking.”
The US is still torturing prisoners at Guantanamo. It’s called force-feeding.
Old Fine Art from the War On Terror — the series.
OFAWOT
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Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 9:19 am by George Smith
Plate 4, Irhabi007. Seven years ago, now jailed aspiring al Qaeda chemical and biological terrorist Younis Tsouli, aka Irhabi007, password-protected this .pdf jihadist translation of Maxwell Hutchkinson’s The Poisoner’s Handbook by combining the initials of the Islamic Media Center and part of his handle to make “IMC007.” Tsouli believed himself to be a secret agent.
Full size.
Plate 5, Chemical Terrorism — Easy to Do!The same summer, a U.S. Army expert on chemical attack, James A. Genovese, was using this as a slide in a presentation on the alleged capabilities of terrorists.
Al Qaeda never launched a chemical or biological attack in the United States.
A word about the series, Fine Art from the War on Terror. In pictures taken from the archives of DD blog, it attempts to show the attitudes, beliefs and thinking from a time when the bad news on what terrorists could allegedly do came daily.
There are probably no similar examples on the web. Share with your friends.
Real life: Careless overuse of pesticide chemical bug bombs in NYC cause catastrophic fire at beauty salon.
OFAWOT
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07.11.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 6:08 pm by George Smith
Plate 3, from the summer of 2006 when the Mubtakkar of Death and Botox Shoe of Death were in the news — dangerous example of what al Qaeda was planning.
Neither materialized.
But al Qaeda would have been pleased. The United States was spooked.
And so — the obscure Ayman Zawahiri Thumb’s Up!
Really bigger.
OFAWOT
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Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 2:35 pm by George Smith
Plate 1, The Botox Shoe of Death, un-reduced scan of the original from the summer, seven years ago. Made by your host at height of war on terror. The Washington Post newspaper ran a story on how al Qaeda was planning to strike with biological weapons, including botulism, citing one then newly discovered enemy web memo on the matter. They did not inform readers of the fine print which imagined putting botox on the shoes, a gaily laughable proposition.
Actual size — really big.
Plate 2, The
Mubtakkar of Death. About the same time as the al Qaeda Botox Shoe of Death Plan, journalist Ron Suskind revealed an al Qaeda plot in TIME, the Mubtakkar of Death, which was allegedly a cyanide bomb for use on the NY subway. But Ayman Zawahiri spared NYC, it was said.
I had to analyze whether the Mubtakkar was real. There was no evidence that it was although an al Qaeda drawing of a theoretical poison gas bomb that was not like the described Mubtakkar was found in the hands of DHS and distributed around the country as something to look out for. As GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow I was asked to go on NPR to discuss the alleged weapon. The segment was cancelled because I would not tell the host a scary story.
While there is a famous distasteful video of al Qaeda putting a puppy to death with poison gas, there is no public record of the terror organization ever deploying a cyanide bomb although an apocryphal tale, known only to a few, says an attempt was made at one in Afghanistan and that it did not work.
Actual size — really big.
Scan with an aged paper, almost like papyrus, look. Both prints suitable for framing or silk-screening onto T-shirts as educational slices of real American history.
Proof that truth is stranger than fiction. Suitable for any modern iteration of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
OFAWOT
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, Shoeshine at 10:58 am by George Smith
NSA director, Mr. Keith Alexander, encouraging young hackers to save the US from economic crippling and mass loss of life in the immediate future at the 2012 DefCon meeting in Las Vegas.
From Reuters:
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 …
Moss, who is an advisor on cyber security to the Department of Homeland Security, told Reuters that it was “a tough call,” but that he believed the Defcon community needs time to make sense of the recent revelations about U.S. surveillance programs.
They need time to make sense of the recent revelation about US surveillance programs. Adorable.
It’s all eyewash and balderdash, anyway.
The NSA and Keith Alexander, of course, will be there. Everyone will. And that’s because everyone knows guvmint security agencies have money, lots of money.
The real affair is the $2000/ticket Black Hat conference, on July 31, a two day affair just before DefCon. The latter, on August 2 is $180 to get in.
Jeff Moss, DefCon founder, maintaining good public relations.
Keith Alexander — from the archives.
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