Some hackers, a special few — not all, are determined to push the outermost boundaries of innovation. So they busied themselves with the task of breaking into hotel rooms.
Now, at last, having definitively proven they can defeat the locks on posh hotel room doors, who knows what technological mileposts will be passed next? Whooosh! Feel the relentless wind of progress blowing dust and dog dirt in your face!
September brought a series of mysterious break-ins to the Hyatt House Galleria in Houston, Texas. In the latest, a 66-year-old woman’s laptop was stolen from her room, and the lock’s records showed that no key, be it the woman’s, the maid’s, or a duplicate, had been used.
Police told NBC News that they arrested Matthew Allen Cook on Oct. 31, after the stolen laptop showed up at a pawn shop …
The lock in question is from Onity, a major supplier of electronic and keycard locks for hotels like the Hyatt. Cody Brocious, a software engineer at Mozilla and hobbyist hacker, demonstrated a vulnerability in many of their locks in July, afterwards showing a refined technique onstage at the Black Hat hacker conference.
Brocious, news articles say, sold his digital hotel room door opening method to a locksmith training business for $20,000.
From the recent academic policy report, “US Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds”, page 8:
Attention in the past decade has focused not on labor-saving innovation, but rather on a succession of entertainment and communication devices that do the same things we could do before, but now in smaller and more convenient packages … These innovations were rapidly adopted, but they provided [only] new opportunities for consumption on the job and in leisure hours …
Pointed to by Paul Krugman, Reaganite supply-side economist Bruce Bartlett throws in the towel in a long essay for the American Conservative. It’s clear he wants to write another book about it. Presumably, it is meant to serve as a leader for offers.
The essence of it is the Republican Party is well and truly fucked, no surprise. And it purged him for not being of the body. And he’s clearly very upset that he was expelled, fired, blacklisted, and permanently crossed off the lists of former friends.
All the stupidity and closed-mindedness that right-wingers have displayed over the last 10 years has come back to haunt them. It is now widely understood that the nation may be center-left after all, not center-right as conservatives thought. Overwhelming losses by Republicans to all the nation’s nonwhite voters have created a Democratic coalition that will govern the nation for the foreseeable future …
The economy continues to conform to textbook Keynesianism. We still need more aggregate demand, and the Republican idea that tax cuts for the rich will save us becomes more ridiculous by the day. People will long remember Mitt Romney’s politically tone-deaf attack on half the nation’s population for being losers, leeches, and moochers because he accurately articulated the right-wing worldview.
Although Bartlett never says it rudely, he informs that all the shitting on everyone not white and nonsensical ideas about the economy have perhaps irreparably maimed the Republican Party in the electorate.
He suggests this could be ameliorated by trying to be more appealing to the black voter, since the Hispanic voter is totally lost.
Yeah, that’s going to happen.
Bartlett doesn’t actually go far enough. He concedes the GOP is doomed to be a blocking minority party, preserving power to interfere with things but not advance any national policy or people.
Because it has successfully proven itself to be suicidally capable of obstruction, it’s gone so far as to become a national security threat. Most notably, this in the area of advancing environmental disasters.
The GOP denies science and successfully derailed all action on global warming in the US at the federal level. It transformed actually trying to do something about a documented global problem into an electrified third rail.
Wait and see. Six months from now the GOP will have cooked up some crazy conspiracy theory and a raft of fake facts to argue that Sandy was normal. And on their tv, web sites and radio they will laugh and titter at everyone else so stupid as to believe what they witnessed just before the election.
I moved here in 1991 when the San Gabriel Valley was essentially conservative GOP. In the following years it turned blue.
From the time I arrived until 1998, Republican Pete Wilson was governor. And as part of the GOP, he implemented the party’s war on Hispanics with the horrible Proposition 187 to deprive illegal immigrants of any social, health or educational services in California.
Although it was passed by a reactionary white referendum its eventual effect was to permanently turn a substantial part of the state electorate against the GOP.
And now it has finally changed, irreversibly. California is a one party state. But not without cost. The GOP, as a blocking party, assiduously wrecked the place for two decades.
Raytheon, one of the world’s largest military contractors, opened the doors today to its newest missile factory, a state-of-the-art facility that will produce weapons for the United States and its [toadies].
According to Raytheon, the Huntsville, Ala. plant, located at the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal, will produce Standard Missile-3 and Standard Missile-6 interceptors. The first SM-6s should be delivered in early 2013, while the SM-3s should be ready a quarter later.
The facility is said to be among the most advanced missile production plants in the world, utilizing laser-guided transport vehicles for moving missile components around.
“At new Raytheon plant, America’s missiles come to life,” reads the Raytheon advertisement attached to the piece.
How many Standard missiles were fired at the enemy in anger in the last decade?
Zero.
Because al Qaeda and the Taliban have no air force or navy.
The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. “It’s hard not to break out laughing,??? says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. “If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be rises in wages,??? he says. “It’s basic economics.??? After all, according to supply and demand, a shortage of workers with valuable skills should push wages up. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of skilled jobs has fallen and so have their wages.
In a recent study, the Boston Consulting Group noted that, outside a few small cities that rely on the oil industry, there weren’t many places where manufacturing wages were going up and employers still couldn’t find enough workers. “Trying to hire high-skilled workers at rock-bottom rates,??? the Boston Group study asserted, “is not a skills gap.??? The study’s conclusion, however, was scarier. Many skilled workers have simply chosen to apply their skills elsewhere rather than work for less, and few young people choose to invest in training for jobs that pay fast-food wages. As a result, the United States may soon have a hard time competing in the global economy …
Whenever you see some business person quoted complaining about how he or she can’t find workers with the necessary skills, ask what wage they’re offering. Almost always, it turns out that what said business person really wants is highly (and expensively) educated workers at a manual-labor wage … So what you really want to ask is why American businesses don’t feel that it’s worth their while to pay enough to attract the workers they say they need.
In reading James K. Galbraith’s The Predator State, one would call this the dominance of American manufacturing by corporate reactionary predators.
This has installed a race to the bottom in labor in a country where unions have been destroyed in the private sector and no standards for fair compensation are allowed to exist.
Noticeably, one could see it during the summer when new and tough anti-illegal immigration enforcement in red states resulted in immigrant workers leaving US southern agriculture, where profitability and cheap prices have been maintained by making wages rock bottom.
Ralph and Cheryl Broetje rely on roughly 1,000 seasonal workers every year to grow and pack over 6 million boxes of apples on their farm along the Snake River in eastern Washington. It’s a custom they’ve maintained for over two decades. Recently, though, their efforts to recruit skilled labor, mostly undocumented immigrants, have come woefully short, despite intensive recruitment efforts in an area with high rates of unemployment.
The Broetjes, and an increasing number of farmers across the country, say that a complex web of local and state anti-immigration laws account for acute labor shortages …
“The United States farmer is still the most efficient in the world, and if we want to be in charge of our food security and our economy and add favorably to our balance of payments, we need to support a [slave] labor force for agriculture,??? said some douchebag to Time magazine.
Back in 2007, Galbraith explained it as predatory business practice in which agriculture, having no need to respond to standards in labor, pressed wages to the bottom. No one, except the desperate from Mexico, regularly wishes to work stoop labor in fields, being sprayed by pesiticides, for much less than a living wage.
“Imposing standard and enforcing them, is thus the general response to the Predator State,” which is just a collision of reactionary forces within business who seek to maintain competitiveness and profitability without technological improvement, without environmental control, without attending to product or workplace safety,” writes Galbraith.
“They are the forces behind deregulation, behind tort reform, and behind the assault on unions… ”
Galbraith asks, rhetorically, “Are their example?” Yes, the countries of northern Europe which have established wage protections and more successful economies despite regulation. Germany, for example, has more generous labor and wage agreements in automobile manufacturing, standards which are enforced. However, news stories in the US media indicate that when German automotive giants set up shop in the United States, they revert to predatory US business practice and rely on plants in anti-labor “right-to-work” southern states.
Arms manufacturing in the US is a different matter. It is protected and paid for by the US taxpayer.
“In short, the populist directive is to raise American wages, create American jobs and increase the fairness and security of our economic system, especially for citizens and legal residents, but also for all who seek work within our borders,” writes Galbraith near the end of The Predator State.
“You want higher wages? Raise them. You want more and better jobs? Create them.”
Raytheon missile manufacturing, of very little intrinsic social value other than decent jobs with pay, is an example.
Corporate America relies primarily on the equation in which compensation is always compressed and subtracted. My grandfather, who raised his family in a row home in the Frankford area of Philadelphia was a machinist who worked in manufacturing. Unlike the manufacturing workers being sought in the New York Times piece, he was able to earn a decent pay.
When I saw him, that was in the Sixties and Seventies.
Lads, you can do this at home! Take a Google satellite-view beach tour stroll along the northern part of Ambergris Caye in Belize and see if you can spy John McAfee’s center of adventure and intrigue.
The above snapshot may not be McAfee’s home north of San Pedro. But judging by a photo posted on his blog here, it is something of a match.
If you care to waste the time, try it yourself and see if you agree or find a better candidate. At max magnification, it take some time to scan the coast north of San Pedro for about six miles to approximately where John McAfee’s neighbor is said to have been murdered in news reports.
“Sam and I began our ungerground oddessey [sic], not on the day after Mr. Faul’s death, but on Monday, the 15th of October, early in the morning,” reads a recent entry.
As far as being on the lam and intriguing goes, it’s not a bad place to be.
The McAfee blog has been hit or miss. It could use some better copy-editing and style. And McAfee has informed readers all the stuff about drugs posted on another Internet site was a practical joke, so descriptions of what’s real and what’s not are of an undetermined elasticity. For example, McAfee exhibits his enthusiasm for forged press identifications in a photograph. His display of, one presumes, a forged laminate attributed to “The Molokai Island Times” of Hawaii, an inactive newspaper which apparently exists only as a Facebook website with 189 “likes” is here.
Readers will note the curious nature of a Colorado address on the “Hawaiian” document.
More recently McAfee has announced the arrival of a Financial Times of London reporter who will, presumably, investigate and report the truth of the events now surrounding the life of the ex-anti-virus king in Belize.
So over the weekend I read All In, Paula Broadwell’s slobberific biography of General David Petraeus. It was nothing special, just a typically crappy piece of fawning, noncritical journalism …
You can pretty much guess the rest of the plot from there. Every environment Petraeus enters is instantly bettered by his majestic personage … We see Petraeus giving stirring speeches, working past midnight until aides tear him away from his desk, and stoically receiving compliments from grateful colleagues …
Then it hit me – it was an interesting book, after all! Because if you read All In carefully, the book’s tone will remind you of pretty much any other authorized bio of any major figure in business or politics …
Which means: it’s impossible to tell the difference between the tone of a reporter who we now know was literally sucking the dick of her subject and the tone of just about any other modern American reporter who is given access to a powerful person for a biography or feature-length profile.
Since Petraeus’ departure both Democrats and Republicans have been mourning the loss of a public servant of extraordinary ability … But thanks to our ever-faster cycle of humiliation and rehabilitation, he has already been punished and paroled. It’s time to let Petraeus get back to work.
A public servant of extraordinary ability.
Others might say you could pick just about anyone to continue the bombing campaign executed by CIA drones in Pakistan, Yemen and anywhere else.
The problems facing the country are still very great. What to do about global warming. How should the country be prepared? How can the United States regain world leadership in health care, equality and the general well-being of its citizenry? How can it restore real educational opportunity in an advancing world? How can it restore an economy that works for everyone and dislodge the grip of predatory big business upon national policy-making?
Whether or not David Petraeus is around is not relevant to any of the above.
Petraeus was a big machine among the other big machines prosecuting a decade long war on terror, an adventure built upon many frauds, all created to further war industries, political agendas and replace the one big enemy lost at the end of the Cold War with a new and never-ending one.
Superciliousness is a reasonable reaction. The scandal is a somewhat fortunate convenience in bringing on his retirement.
The Salon piece informs Petraeus already has gained the services of a DC lawyer famous for getting seven digit book contracts for national figures. As is the pattern, the disgraced CEO, or leader of some kind, is given a compensatory reward in gold to see him off.
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and many other good books, has a Facebook account. And she posts regularly.
Yesterday:
Yesterday at a labor event I gave a brief talk on workers’ rights. Very brief: American workers have no rights.
Economic lesson No. 1: The reason business is in business is to make as much money as possible. Businesses are not social welfare experiments whose primary responsibility is to provide jobs and meet the demands of ever-shrinking labor unions …
There is good news. In the private sector, labor unions are quickly becoming extinct …
The evidence is clear: Labor unions have a history of destroying companies and jobs, and have done much to kill the economies of states like Michigan, Ohio and Illinois — all states that supported Mr. Obama.
Good news, lads! Good news! When we’re fighting the scrabbling crowds on Friday, no union workers in most places!
Trivia notice: The paperback edition of Kipper’s Game, Ehrenreich’s lone novel (science fiction, it did not sell), features a blurb taken from the old Crypt Newsletter on its back cover!
Electromagnetic pulse grenades are a favorite of sci-fi storytellers and videogame designers, a la Halo and Call of Duty. The Army evidently doesn’t want to be left out: It’s seeking a real-life version that can blast electromagnetic signals and fry insurgent bombs.
To be specific, the Army wants “High Power Microwave (HPM) grenades??? to “generate an electromagnetic pulse that could be used to defeat the electronics used to activate [homemade bombs] or that could be used to attack blasting caps,??? according to its latest round of research contracts with small businesses …
Less certain is how such a device would be used neuter a bomb detonated with minimal electrical parts, like the Taliban bombs that detonate when someone compresses a wooden pressure plate; whether it would inadvertently fry U.S. troops’ own electronic circuits; or how difficult (or expensive) it’ll be to develop an EMP grenade …
Keynsian socialist job program for small businesses run by the same crackpot electric engineers who’ve been trying to make them for the last twenty years.
“Certainly lobbing expensive EMP grenades throughout a building won’t prevent all IUD’s [sic] from unfortunately finding a target,” writes one unintentionally amusing commenter.
Reading and believing trash all the time makes it impossible for anyone to be anything but a second-rate person — something paraphrased from an old Official Boy Scouts Handbook.
An animated version of the fallen US spymaster [David Petraeus] has a part in what is expected to be the top selling video game of the year – freshly-launched military espionage action title Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.
Petraeus is promoted to US Secretary of Defence in the game, set in a fictional near-future, serving under a woman president who resembles Hillary Clinton …
Players following the game’s main storyline will come upon Petraeus taking custody of a terrorist prisoner on a virtual aircraft carrier called the USS Barack Obama …
Aside from the strategic implications, the Petraeus myth has inflicted a serious human cost. Since the former general’s flawed strategy was applied in Afghanistan, tens of thousands of American service members have paid for it with their lives, limbs, and emotional well-being.
It’s worth noting that when Gen. William Westmoreland told Congress how well the Vietnam War was going in April 1967, he was hailed as a hero and interrupted by applause 19 times. But years later, when an honest evaluation of his performance was made and the truth was laid bare, his name became a byword for military failure.
Before too many more get carried away lauding Petraeus with such superlatives as “one of the great American battlefield commanders,” let’s look at what actually happened in Afghanistan …
There is a very salient difference between Westmoreland and Petraeus. Westmoreland was brought down by the Tet Offensive. The latter was brought down by his penis and a jealous lover.
Which says more about how bad things have turned in this country, along with the annoying fact that more of the country’s citizens play a silly game about special operations in the war on terror than fight in it.
It couldn’t be clearer now that, from the shirtless FBI agent to the “embedded??? biographer and the “other other woman,??? the “fall??? of David Petraeus is playing out as farce of the first order. What’s less obvious is that Petraeus, America’s military golden boy and Caesar of celebrity, was always smoke and mirrors, always the farce, even if the denizens of Washington didn’t know it.
Until recently, here was the open secret of Petraeus’s life: he may not have understood Iraqis or Afghans, but no military man in generations more intuitively grasped how to flatter and charm American reporters, pundits, and politicians into praising him. This was, after all, the general who got his first Newsweek cover (“Can This Man Save Iraq????) in 2004 while he was making a mess of a training program for Iraqi security forces, and two more before that magazine, too, took the fall. In 2007, he was a runner-up to Vladimir Putin for TIME’s “Person of the Year.??? And long before Paula Broadwell’s aptly named biography, All In, was published to hosannas from the usual elite crew, that was par for the course.
“A physical fitness buff, Petraeus was accidentally shot in the chest at the firing range in Fort Campbell in 1991. His surgeon was Bill Frist . . . –Clarksville Leaf Chronicle
“He’s a fitness fanatic, a PhD in international relations from Princeton, an expert on counterinsurgency tactics and known for his ambition …” –Toronto Globe and Mail
“Petraeus, a counterinsurgency expert and an intensely competitive fitness nut …” –Slate
Lickspittle and bootlicking
“IT WAS A different war back in November 2003 … Petraeus’s office was 100 percent USA, with its military issue desk, topography maps, and his battle gear — a vest, helmet, and boots — mounted on a wooden cross and standing at the ready. His running shoes — Petraeus is a marathon runner — were neatly placed in a corner.
“And in the months that followed the invasion, Petraeus, armed with his Princeton doctorate and his reputation as a ‘warrior scholar,’ was credited with finding perhaps the best balance of hard and soft power in Iraq … Petraeus found a way to use his new assignment — and his intellect — to influence events on the ground despite being stationed in Kansas. –Charles M. Sennott, the Boston Globe
Compared to T.E. Lawrence, Robert E. Lee, Obi Wan Kenobi and Steven Jobs.
“[Petraeus] looks more like the real Colonel T. E. Lawrence, not the too-beautiful version played by Peter O’Toole in the movies. Like Lawrence, Petraeus is a little bit on the plain side, and he’s short like Lawrence, with the slightly stooped posture of a hardcore long-distance runner who simply can’t give it up despite his fifty-three years… A Washington Post article in November 2005 described Petraeus’s recall from Iraq as akin to Jefferson Davis deciding to pull General Robert E. Lee from the field of battle early in the Civil War…[Petraeus presided] over the Jedi Knights, which is the nickname given to the students of the college’s elite School of Advanced Military Studies—sort of the Army’s version of Top Gun. These are the guys whom the generals turn to when they want to take down some Death Star.” –Esquire
“By naming Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus as the top American military commander in Iraq, President Bush has done roughly what Apple Computer’s board of directors did when they brought back Steve Jobs in 1996: turned to a popular figure with a reputation for brilliant innovation to solve seemingly intractable problems.” –San Francisco Chronicle
PowerPoint slides of wisdom
“And so Petraeus also has his own version of [T.E. Lawrence’s] Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which in his case number thirteen. It’s a simple PowerPoint package of thirteen slides of lessons learned in the war.” –Esquire, again
A brilliant scholar. Did we say brilliant enough times? Well, he’s brilliant!
“Petraeus is regarded as an incisive leader and a ‘warrior-scholar.’ The 1974 West Point graduate also has a doctorate from Princeton University.” –CNN
“You see, David Petraeus is one of a rare breed of senior scholar-soldiers who knows—and can convince others, drawing on extensive historical facts…” –Family Security Matters
“Petraeus is a Warrior/Scholar in the classic tradition…” –typical random dimwit at a newspaper, the name of which I forgot to jot down
“There is no question that General Petraeus, your new military commander in Iraq, is a brilliant scholar and military mind … ” –Westwood Press
“David Petraeus. This man is probably the most brilliant person in uniform, genius IQ and Ph.D. from Princeton.” –Bloomington Pantagraph
“Members of his staff, that I know, say that he is the most brilliant man they know…” –The American Thinker
“Petraeus truly is a brilliant talent…” –The One Republic
“A guy like Petraeus is so ferociously creative and brilliant, sometimes that makes the buttoned-down senior military leadership nervous…” –The Guardian
“He’s a brilliant general who has already spent years in Iraq.” –Robertson County Times
“His cordial relations with the media, and the Newsweek cover story that depicted him as a potential savior for the Bush administration, rankled some of his superiors in the Pentagon…” Eudora News, Kansas, originally from the WaPost.
The hometown newspaper, overjoyed that someone, now a big deal, who lived there a long time ago will go to Iraq
” ‘David was always well groomed, one of the guys who had the right personality …’He was always on time, always had his homework done, always had a smile.'”
“…[A] flip through the general’s high school yearbook reads like a U.S. Military Academy admissions brochure: President of the ski club; striker on the 1969 championship soccer team; National Honor Society scholar; actor; linguist.
“In his West Point yearbook four years later, Petraeus was remembered as ‘always going for it in sports, academics, leadership, and even his social life.’ The accolades have continued. These days, Petraeus is seen as one of the Army’s premier intellectuals, with a doctorate from Princeton to bookend his West Point education. His drive and physical toughness — he’s an obsessive athlete and survived an accidental M-16 round to his chest…At 5 feet 9 and 155 pounds, the general has been compared to ‘an intensely compacted hank of steel wire.'” –The Cornwall Record
Hey, here’s a bit of wisdom from Shakespeare’s Henry V. Your horse would trot as well were some of the brags dismounted.
Rude, and it totally rules. The Echoplex effect is particularly cool.
I met Timesha 2 years ago while writing a story about the Mennonites of Belize. The Mennonites are austere and hard working, yet each Friday, many of the men allegedly went to a local bar in Orange Walk, drank, paid women for sex, and partied. I found it hard to believe, so I arranged to take photos at the bar on Friday mornings to help with my story. I showed up for five weeks straight before I finally got the photo I wanted …
Timesha works as a “bar girl??? in lover’s bar. She is not a prostitute. She is young and pretty and men may sit with her providing they simply buy her a beer. When the beer is finished, they must buy another or leave the table.
Emphatically proving that America’s rich white guys who flee to Belize aren’t like you and me. They really, really go for the impoverished girls, among other things, apparently.
To Have and Have Not is a movie with Humphrey Bogart and a very young Lauren Bacall, a very very loose adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s book of the same title, spottily rewritten for the screen by William Faulkner.
Briefly, it’s a poor man’s repeat of Casablanca, only Bogart gets the girl after being chased by the authorities in Vichy-controlled Martinique.
Bacall was 19 at the time. Bogart was 45 and the film capitalized on their romance in real life.
But The Hinterland isn’t quite the same thing. No Walter Brennan as the drunk buddy, for one thing.
