06.10.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks at 11:00 am by George Smith
Not a good look.
From the wire:
Despite the fact that a Texas woman admitted to sending ricin laced letters to President Barack Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg last week, the woman is now apparently trying to pin the crime on her husband.
[An] FBI affidavit says Richardson failed a polygraph test and investigators found inconsistencies in her story. No charges have been filed against her husband. His attorney says the couple is divorcing and the letters were a setup.
And this isn’t the thing to say, either:
Richardson’s court-appointed attorney, Tonda Curry, said there was no intention to harm anyone and noted that it’s common knowledge that mail is checked before it reaches the person to whom these letters were addressed.
“From what I can say, based on what evidence I’ve seen, whoever did this crime never intended for ricin to reach the people to which the letters were addressed,” Curry said.
What? Someone thinks there’s mitigation because everyone knows the President doesn’t read his mail? Pathetic.
What about the poor sods who do actually have to deal with the greasy powder falling out of the letters?
This is going in a video.
Procedural note: I don’t know about you but I’ve come to hate news websites that pull the endless load routine. It’s an increasingly grasping tactic employed by corporate America to tie up eyeballs.
When I run into them the scripting overhead becomes a burden on the machine. And, henceforth, upon encountering such sites, material will be taken without attribution other than “from the wire” and will not contain backlinks.
What are your thoughts on websites that practice the never-ending load?
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06.07.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, Made in China at 3:49 pm by George Smith
The massive leaks on the Obama administration’s cyber-spying and cyberwar initiatives to the Guardian come at an incredibly damaging time for the President.
In the run-up to this week’s talk with Chinese premier Xi Jinping in California the US government carefully laid the stage with selective news leaking on rampant Chinese cyber-spying. The cyber-spying operation, it was claimed, was aimed at everything, from priceless corporate intellectual property to the Department of Defense’s most expensive weapons systems.
There was the creation of a stealth corporate national security lobbying agency called the Intellectual Property Commission, its aim to recommend how the nation could protect its business stuff and ideas from Chinese predation. Millions of jobs had been lost, it claimed, billions of dollar in profit made gone.
It has all been a carefully wrought publicity operation, a deliberate and studied massage of the media to get out a message, one to shame and embarrass China’s rulers.
That was never going to work.
And this week, someone — in cahoots with the Guardian, has leaked explosive material on the US government’s cyberspying and cyberwar activities. Turns out, it’s not particularly surprising the National Security Agency (NSA) has been into everyone’s stuff domestically, all in the name of the war on terror.
Moreover, it appears this release has been strategically timed to come just at a delicate time for the Obama administration. News would have filled with just more of the same on Chinese cyberespionage.
Now the news is filled with information on NSA snooping.
Truth be told, the US has been in terrible position to lecture people on proper conduct in cyberspace since releasing the Stuxnet virus into Iranian networks in an effort to physically damage its nuclear program.
It set off an escalating cyber-arms race. This, in turn, triggered retaliations against US networks and greased the black market for the hoarding and clandestine sale of security vulnerabilities.
And for what? What has the exceptional nation, the one that can say do what we recommend but we reserve the right to do as we please, achieved?
What has the scooping up of all this private data accomplished?
Terrorism just isn’t that common in the US. The use of the biggest digital vacuuming operation in the world hasn’t accomplished much, looking at the black box from the outside.
For example, technically, the government would seem to have been able to sweep up all the on-line and credit card purchases of castor seeds as they happened or shortly after and, therefore, have had a database with the three latest perps in it.
But the FBI still went the wrong way a couple times, had to seize computers and finds the information within hours after descending on places. James Everett Dutschke, who bought on-line, was only identified after Paul Kevin Curtis’ lawyer fingered him. And it was Shannon Richardson who summoned the FBI to New Boston, not credit card purchases of castor seeds.
Anyway, a couple years back Tim Weiner’s history of the FBI, “Enemies,” mentioned the agency getting access to national e-mail through a program called Stellar Wind. It probably used the NSA as the technical collection means. This is more of the same. Only the names, data-mining software applications and corporate security contractors change.
More broadly, this is another issue where, if the national security megaplex can do something that means more for itself, it will do it.
The American people were never asked if they wanted everything about themselves in cyberspace and on the telephone shoved into a massive database, for the sake of safety during the war on terror. No one you know was consulted or asked for permission. It was just done.
And when you read the shock in some places on the net now, in this country anyway, you’re reading the opinions and feelings of the shoeshine upper middle class types who haven’t been sloughed off the US economy yet. They are so put out.
If you asked the people I see in the supermarket in Pasadena every evening about it (and I’ll be walking out to it in a few minutes), they wouldn’t know what’s being discussed. FISC? PRISM?
What’s NSA stand for?
They haven’t had the time or luxury to know. Their snooped-on smartphones are their connection to cyberspace and there’s not anything in this great mass of people that poses an existential national security threat.
So what does Keith Alexander make per year as the 4-star who’s head of the National Security Agency? He’s famously claimed that Chinese cyber-spying is resulting in the “greatest transfer of wealth in history.”
Who’s wealth, precisely?
It is fair game to discuss his compensation in relationship to these issues because nobody involved in this game is in the bottom three-quarters of the economic scorecard. The people implementing the mechanics of this kind of massive digital spying are all from the top, or employed in the national security servant class.
Alexander’s salary: somewhere between 230,000 and 290,000/year.
I don’t know anyone who makes that kind of money.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 8:43 am by George Smith
It’s been obvious for a long long time WhiteManistan, the Republican Party, and all the Ted Nugent-ized people operate with punishment toward those deemed their lessers always in mind.
Not news, but it’s nice to see Krugman write it:
Medicaid rejectionism will deny health coverage to roughly 3.6 million Americans, with essentially all of the victims living near or below the poverty line. And since past experience shows that Medicaid expansion is associated with significant declines in mortality, this would mean a lot of avoidable deaths: about 19,000 a year, the study estimated.
Just think about this for a minute. It’s one thing when politicians refuse to spend money helping the poor and vulnerable; that’s just business as usual. But here we have a case in which politicians are, in effect, spending large sums, in the form of rejected aid, not to help the poor but to hurt them …
[Republican] spitefulness appears to override all other considerations. And millions of Americans will pay the price.
“What it might do, however, is drive home to lower-income voters — many of them nonwhite — just how little the G.O.P. cares about their well-being, and reinforce the already strong Democratic advantage among Latinos, in particular,” he adds.
Cold Civil War 2, hatred of the black President and the neo-Confederacy roll on.
Sic semper tyrannis!
Is WhiteManistan un-American? From the archives.
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06.06.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Phlogiston, Rock 'n' Roll at 10:52 am by George Smith
From a web “health facts” story — left-handed people are so weird.
Left-handed people suffer more fright during the watching of horror movies, readers are informed. And there are more fibers connecting their left and right brain halves, a condition called “asymmetric,” which is said to make one more prone to schizophrenia and attention deficit disorder.
On the other hand, there’s people like me, who are lefties but also largely ambidextrous:
Left-handedness has its advantages, too! The same atypical brain tendencies associated with mental health challenges may also contribute to greater creativity and cognitive skills among some left-handed people.
For example, a study of professional orchestras uncovered a disproportionate number of left-handed musicians.
The GMA review article also notes that lefties are reportedly more likely to excel at music, as well as math and language fluency. Lefties are also reportedly more likely to score over 131 on IQ tests.
Lefties are more prevalent in one-on-one sports, too. Part of my college scholarship money came from wrestling. I wrestled right and left.
I do not play a left-handed guitar. But the dominance of my hands in playing standard guitar is the reverse of that of a right-handed player.
My strong hand is on the fret board. The strong hand of the righty player is in picking.
Does it make a difference? A subtle one, I suspect, having more to do with tonality, composition and choices in material that’s played over a lifetime.
Screw ya, righty. You are so normal.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 8:10 am by George Smith
Wants you to believe China cyberspying on the US constitutes the greatest transfer of wealth in history.
Famous last words.
Inconveniently, right when the President is ready to meet with the premier of China to discuss cyberespionage, the biggest spy on Americans is shown to be … four-star general Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, pictured above.
From the Guardian:
The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.
The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.
The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.
From the Obama administration, yada-yada:
The White House has sought to justify its surveillance of millions of Americans’ phone records as anger grows over revelations that a secret court order gives the National Security Agency blanket authority to collect call data from a major phone carrier.
Politicians and civil liberties campaigners described the disclosures, revealed by the Guardian on Wednesday, as the most sweeping intrusion into private data they had ever seen by the US government.
But the Obama administration, while declining to comment on the specific order, said the practice was “a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States”.
The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.
Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.
Readers may or may not recall part of the campaign on cyberwar, cybersecurity and cyberespionage has involved visits by Verizon executives, as well as leaders of other US big businesses, for talks exhorting them to support instantaneous information sharing about what’s going on on their networks with the National Security Agency.
I wish I could say I regret that cyber-spying has embarrassingly blown up in the administration’s face, at exactly the worst time.
But I’m not.
Like the Stuxnet virus deployed into Iran, this is another item putting the US hype generated on cyberwar into the cold water of a real world perspective.
There is what the US government and the national security megaplex say others are doing to us. And then there is what they are actually doing to us.
Keith Alexander and the Shoeshine Cult of Cyberwar — from the archives.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror, WhiteManistan at 8:46 am by George Smith
In orange vests, they hang around big airport runways as alleged pro bono anti-terrorism squads, making sure the bad guys don’t show up with MANPADS.
CNN:
It’s unlikely you’ll ever meet any of these para-police officers, wearing their bright orange vests and ID tags. But if you’re one of the millions of travelers who fly into Chicago every year, you might want to thank them — because they’re helping the FBI, Transportation Security Administration and other authorities protect you from terrorists.
Another in the occasional media favorite: exaggerating the hobbies/roles of middle-aged white guys in service to the nation. The silver-lining: They’re not home much to embarrass their kids.
Someone tell them the war on terror’s kinda over.
Modern day equivalent of the middle-aged white guys who always wanted to use their metal detectors on the grounds of the community swimming pool after hours.
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06.03.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 1:03 pm by George Smith
Because President Obama will be meeting China’s premier, Xi Jinping, will be meeting in southern California this week, count on the press to deluge everyone with pieces on the latter country’s cyberespionage, always said to be stealing our economic future, precious military designs, and everything.
Today the New York Times fulfills the role by finding two students at Yale Law School, both who were about four — or maybe younger — when talk of cyberwar and digital Pearl Harbor plundering the nation first started.
Because they have no history or background in cybersecurity or cyberwar, they are therefore the most senseless and fit for the job.
Write Jordan Chandler Hirsch and Sam Adelsberg of Yale, for the Times:
In confronting today’s cyberbattles, the United States should think less about the Soviets and more about pirates. Indeed, today’s cybercompetition is less like the cold war than the battle for the New World …
Among those who view these hostilities as the cold war redux, some are proposing a more strident response. Earlier this year, the United States military announced the formation of 13 units dedicated to offensive cyberstrikes and endorsed pre-emptive cyberattacks. And late last month, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former ambassador to China, and Dennis C. Blair, the former director of national intelligence, suggested allowing American companies to retaliate against Chinese hackers on their own.
This emergence of cyberhawks in both nations raises the odds of a hack’s [sic] becoming a cyberwar …
This is part of a slightly longer discussion in which the authors warn the country runs the risk of being like Spain sending the Armada against Elizabethan England.
“In these legally uncharted waters, only Elizabethan guile, not cold war brinkmanship, will steer Washington through the storm,” they conclude.
Elizabethan guile.
The only thing remarkable about the piece is that it’s at least the second time in about a week or so the Times has put the crackpot idea — from a lobbying firm for national security and corporate America called the Intellectual Property Commission — that American businesses ought to be empowered to conduct their own retaliatory cyberstrikes against China.
It’s an idea that’s truly excrement and has been treated primarily as such by experts and the tech press, or just about anyone not on the corporate/government cybersecurity payroll.
Nevertheless, the Times continues to push it on its opinion pages, today’s contribution by law students adding to it without actually having the nerve to express much of an opinion about it, one way or another.
What’s needed is Elizabethan guile, though.
Sam Adelsberg recommends Elizabethan strategy. Was about four when electronic Pearl Harbor was invented.
Jordan Chandler Hirsch. Here he recommends we give Israel fuel tankers so it can just go ahead and attack Iran without calling on us.
With future lawyers like this we’re in good hands.
The IP Commission — 1 Percenter stealth business and cyberwar lobby.
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06.02.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks at 11:13 am by George Smith
The smallest victim in the national micro-fad of bean-pounding.
Our unique and grotesque micro-culture of castor bean pounders is both thoughtless and cruel. They know when ricin mail hits the news the FBI will descend in force (with assault rifles) on a quiet neighborhood, yellow hazmat suits deploy, and a house or apartment will be ransacked.
But they do it anyway. We are left to believe they cannot make the mental connection between what they have seen happen and what is most probably going to happen to them! It’s sociopathic.
And so, buried in the news, there is the forlorn photograph of the Richardson family’s cat, being mercifully taken away by a city worker after the FBI blew the house apart at 111 Maple and there was no one left to care for it.
Our bean-pounders know the neighborhood will be turned upside down for days. They know they’ve stressed out the little people who’ve had to open their poison powder mail, not the targets. But it doesn’t make any difference. They have their schemes.
This hasn’t occurred in a national vacuum. American ricin bean pounders haven’t generated spontaneously, like the old myth that if you throw garbage and fish heads in a jar, seal it up and wait a week, flies and maggots will result.
“And you can go on the Internet and find out any one of a gazillion recipes on how to make ricin [said a homeland security expert] adding that it takes only a beginner’s knowledge of science to “weaponize??? it. — the Associated Press, yesterday.
Thanks for the received “wisdom.” What a wonderful thing to put in a news story. Bet the editors loved it!
To strenuously reiterate, the paradox is that the spending of over a decade screaming about how easy ricin is to make has some bearing on why we’re seeing what we are.
Some government officials now seem to realize this. But the media, largely, still doesn’t. For the most part it simply can’t write pieces that don’t include how deadly ricin is and that recipes are on the internet.
And this is shameful because, of course, they now must realize that Americans are suggestible and that there will be a certain number among them, even if small, who act out on this.
Is the person responsible a menace to their neighbors in New Boston, Texas? No, they weren’t. Although the presence of an FBI force changed it for the weekend.
Mostly, those into bean pounding are hazards to themselves.
And they certainly don’t merit the money that must subsequently be wasted upon them in the quick reaction force investigations that come down.
Our press and national security ways had a hand in this, even if unintentional, having steeped the country in a paranoid almost valueless lore on terrorism for years.
So, unimaginable and ridiculous stories, virtually custom fit for sitcom drama or movie scripting, replete with bizarre social media pictures that beg for republication, become a new norm.
Back and forth, two pieces of work, from the NY Post:
[Shannon Guess Richardson’s] son, Brenden Guess, 19, told The Post that his mother was paranoid that her husband was trying to poison her with ricin.
“She thought he was injecting it into her food and drinks,??? he said, adding that she became suspicious after discovering on his computer an order for castor beans, from which ricin is derived.
“She told me she was trying to be as careful as possible. She didn’t eat unless it was straight from the store to her hand, basically.???
A family friend said Nathaniel previously posted dozens of pictures of his guns — which have since been taken down …
Local authorities have since condemned the bean-pounding house.
Thanks to Frank at Pine View Farm who permits me to use the comments section of his blog as a preliminary scratch pad.
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06.01.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror, WhiteManistan at 10:03 am by George Smith
Welcome to the new weird. The fresh batch of ricin letters has uncovered a bean-pounder, or bean-pounders, even stranger than Tupelo, Mississippi’s accused ricin guru, guitarist and karate instructor J. Everett Dutschke. If you thought ricin mail was already bizarre, it just got a whole lot more so.
I consider it a given you’re either wholly or somewhat insane to pound castor beans and mail the powder to the president and other officials. And inside the house at 111 Maple in New Boston, Texas, something is very insane.
Shannon Guess Richardson of New Boston, TX, a ricin babe?
The FBI detained Nathaniel D. Richardson of New Boston after his wife , Shannon Guess Richardson, tipped authorities that she had found a suspicious material in Tupperware in her refrigerator as well as searches for ricin on the home computer.
The FBI picked up Richardson for questioned and dispatched its mobile evidence and WMD units to the Richardson household, which was flipped.
While castor seeds were found in Nathaniel D. Richardson’s car, under questioned he astonishingly claimed they were not his and that his wife had sent the poison letters to the President and Mayor Bloomberg. The FBI released Richardson yesterday, although he remains a suspect.
Richardson’s wife has now come under suspicion.
Shannon Guess Richardson had been married three times prior to Mr. Richardson. And with five children from the priors, plus another on the way, the marriage is headed for divorce. (Coincidentally, accused ricin mailer J. Everett Dutschke has been married three times.)
Of course, the upshot is that as in the case of J. Everett Dutschke, this is more dual use ricin mail, poison letters to frame someone you wish to be rid of, and for officials. But who is the framer and who the framed? Or is it a husband-and-wife ricin-mailing team that has now fallen into scapegoating?
This is what the FBI is attempting to determine.
Did Shannon Guess Richardson not like the President, too?
Domestically, castor seeds have occasionally been used in plots in which one spouse tries to poison the other. Most famously, a woman named Debora Green tried to poison her husband with ricin in the early Nineties. Green was only successful in making the man deathly ill although she did later burn down the family home, killing two of her children.
However, copy cat use of ricin mail to the President and others in framing an acquaintance or your spouse would appear to be totally unique at this point in American history. Is the primary motivation for the ricin mail a frame job, or getting crazy words out to the President and others? Or do they share equal weight?
In less than sixty days, at least three different individuals, in three different states (Mississippi, Washington and Texas) have sent ricin mail to the President and others. One is most certainly a frame job. The third may also turn out to be so.
Everyone knows that the President, and important people in general, never open their mail. (A reader puckishly remarked that nobody earning over $30,000/year in America opens their own mail.)
Everyone also knows, that thanks to the war on terror and anthrax mailer Bruce Ivins, mail to important people is rigorously checked for nasty things. This guarantees that ricin mail is quickly discovered, although the occasional letter may go awry from the collection, as one aimed at the CIA in the Matthew Buquet case seems to.
The discovery of ricin mail immediately triggers an FBI dragnet, with results as have been seen.
This makes the “why” of ricin-mailing unfathomable. Castor powder is obviously not good for framing others. And sending it to the President will inevitably result in embarkation on a long custodial trip.
Ricin mail is crazy and now, virtually always suicidal. Yet ricin mailers persist! They seem without mercy. Does it not occur to them that the only people who will handle their nasty-grams are those in exactly the same economic circumstances?
They are just cruel and irrational. In addition, it seems the detection and apprehension of them, while necessary, is one helluva a waste of taxpayer money.
Welcome to the empire in 2013, from land of the free to land of debris. There’s certainly a book in it.
Can haz castor seeds?
In an abrupt change from the war on terror years, officials have apparently realized that more than a decade of telling everyone that ricin is easy to make and that castor bean mash is deadly has been counterproductive.
In fact, one can add that this particular received wisdom has some bearing on why America seems to have more bean pounders than anyone else.
From Fox:
Officials cautioned that there is “a significant difference??? between a trained scientist weaponizing the ricin extracted from castor beans and an individual “taking some castor beans, running them through a coffee grinder, and soaking them in acetone??? – a crude and ineffective homemade process that officials said would only be liable to induce, in a recipient foolish enough to go so far as to swallow the contents, symptoms as mild as diarrhea.
Pure ricin has never been produced in a US case.
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