02.17.11
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Made in China at 12:37 pm by George Smith
Fresh off the news, President Obama is bowing before consulting the two smartest men in the world today, Nobel laureate/Pulitzer prize winner Mark Zuckerberg and King of All Music, Steve Jobs.
The goal: How to create more jobs.
Jobs, whose name is most appropriate because he has made many many jobs in China, will probably tell the President the problem is the large number of no-skill sitting around people in the US.
“Stop counting them, Mr. President!” he may advise. Future growth lies in more Harmonica or You’re Fired! apps and what not, particularly now that one of the rival cell phones brags it has 60,000 of them. Sixty thousand!
Nobel laureate/Pulitzer winner Mark Zuckerberg may tell the President that to create jobs … we must unleash the creative power of every American to make more social networking sites.
Neither of these guys are interested in making jobs for all these baggy and lumpy no-skill sitting around people. Which is only right.
Did you know Dick Destiny is on Facebook? I look just like Brett Favre.
Ha-ha! Those Facebook peeps are so clever.
Did you know that it’s easy to create a fake account of someone who’s not you on Facebook? And that if the person who is not you discovers it and complains by sending e-mail to Facebook they don’t even read it until the Attorney General of a state gets involved?
These are all just minor slip-ups, however. If they weren’t, Mark Zuckerberg would not be a Nobel laureate and Pulitzer winner.
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Posted in Cyberterrorism at 9:30 am by George Smith
From Cryptome, worth reading in entirety:
The exploits of Anonymous to hack the systems of firms providing spying services to governments and corporations suggest that the WikiLeaks mini-era has been surpassed.
Much of WikiLeaks promise to protect sources is useless if the sources are not whistleblowers needing a forum for publication. Instead publishers of secret information grab it directly for posting to Torrent for anybody to access without mediation and mark-up by self-esteemed peddlers of protection, interpretation and authentication, including media cum scholars.
The wit and brevity of Anonymous taunts are exemplary — min-talk max-action — compared to the overblown gravitas of WL aping MSM in valuing its mission over short-shrifted “sources.”
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Posted in Made in China at 9:12 am by George Smith
Some US commentators, most notably Tom Friedman, are not infrequently fond of holding up Singapore as a model for the US.
Why can’t we be more like Singapore, it’s the model of the future, Friedman thinks. Their kids can do fractions and stuff. And everyone shits money, they are so great.
There are allegedly no useless no-skill sitting-around people in Singapore, like here and everywhere else.
However, Tom Friedman is always wrong.
Singapore is a small island. Think of it as a wart on Malaya, always held up as an alleged beacon of progress. With little to support any such annoying claims other than it’s a place, much smaller than soCal, where the kids do far better on tests and the beggars are a bit less obvious or something. In other words, progress that looks a lot like the progress that holds sway here, only in infinitely smaller and more confined geography.
Today, from AP, good ol’ Singapore, why can’t we be more like it:
Singaporean Ramzi Mohamed is tired of sleeping in the living room of the two-bedroom apartment he shares with his mother and older brother.
His problem is that housing prices in the city-state are up almost 70 percent since 2006 while the 29-year-old gym administrator’s monthly salary of 1,200 Singapore dollars ($938) hasn’t budged in five years.
“When I was 20, I thought I’d have my own place by 30,” Ramzi said. “Now that I’m almost 30, I wonder if that will ever happen.”
Like tens of thousands of others living in the tiny island nation that boasts one of the world’s highest levels of GDP per person, Ramzi’s failure to realize his modest ambitions is no accident.
A flood of cheap immigrant labor — and stiff competition for manufacturing jobs from Asian neighbors like China and Vietnam — has kept wages stagnant for many and widened the gulf between a very wealthy minority and the island’s poorest. Housing prices have skyrocketed as rapid population growth outstrips supply.
At the same time, ostentatious signs of the wealth enjoyed by the elite have multiplied. That has put the government under pressure to loosen its tightfisted stance on welfare in the next national budget Friday as it tries to defuse criticism its policies have worsened the plight of ordinary Singaporeans.
New motto: Visit Singapore! It eats it unless you’re rich there, too!
I was asked to give a talk at a tech university in Singapore once. They wanted it for free and the plane ride was way too long in coach.
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Posted in Permanent Fail at 7:49 am by George Smith
From AP:
School districts around Wisconsin canceled classes Thursday as state lawmakers were prepared to pass a momentous bill that would strip government workers of nearly all collective bargaining rights.
The proposal from Republican Gov. Scott Walker has drawn thousands of teachers, students and other demonstrators to the Capitol in protest. The nation’s most aggressive anti-union proposal has been speeding through the Legislature since Walker introduced it a week ago.
Madison schools canceled classes for a second day as teachers prepared spend another day at the Capitol. Dozens of other school districts followed suit Thursday and closed, including La Crosse, Racine, Beaver Dam, Mosinee, Watertown and Stoughton.
The Legislature’s budget committee passed Walker’s bill on a partisan vote just before midnight.
Class war to destroy labor for the benefit of the wealthy, in Wisconsin. And lots and lots of people won’t take it lying down.
And most people could not help but notice the President has been lukewarm on it, much more equivocal that his voice of support for Egyptian protesters.
Whenever your host tested Fox News it was spending all its time portraying the middle class protesters in Wisconsin as public enemies.
DD grew up in a neighborhood in Pennsylvania where all Pine Grove Area school district’s teachers lived. The neighbors on both sides worked at the school.
Even if Wisconsin’s poor man’s Hosni Mubarak from the GOP gets his budget rammed through and strips them of their rights, they can still bring things to a halt by staging a teach-out. An immediate closing of Wisconsin public schools, or at least many of them, would be something to behold.
You can’t sic the National Guard on teachers. You can’t replace them and you can’t threaten them all with jail or mass firings unless prepared to collapse the school system. They have the power of a big collective.
Perhaps it is a moment when the GOP oversteps.
In Britain, there is now a solid anti-austerity protest movement called UK Uncut, aimed at pushing back against the government and big business tax avoidance, which has become a plague in that country.
Wisconsin public workers could lead the way in the US in their drawing of and holding the line. The powerful will need to be threatened by group actions they can’t change through decree.
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02.16.11
Posted in Ricin Kooks at 8:28 pm by George Smith
A judge refused bail to Jeffrey B. Levenderis, jailed when a container containing castor powder was found in what had been his refrigerator by a new tenant.
The short news item reads:
A federal judge said no Wednesday to the release of a man charged with possessing toxic ricin.
The judge ruled that Jeff Boyd Levenderis, 54, of the Akron area, failed to show that the community would be safe if he’s released before trial.
Levenderis was arrested in January after authorities said the deadly poison was found in his former home.
The government says he was trying to prove he could make ricin without killing himself. Levenderis has pleaded not guilty and his attorney says there’s no evidence he meant to harm anyone.
A message seeking comment on the judge’s no-release ruling was left for the defense attorney on Wednesday.
What makes this particularly odd and sad is that no one in the US has died from pounding castor seeds in at least the last fifteen years. It just doesn’t happen. So wherever Levenderis got the ridiculous claim, it was pure braggadocio.
Roger von Bergendorff, a castor seed powder maker, convicted on making ricin, did wind up in the hospital, although it remains unclear whether or not it was actually ricin that put him there.
Also incomprehensible is the claim that the man could not make an argument that he was not a threat. The castor powder containing ricin in the refrigerator had been around for some time, forgotten apparently. It posed no more threat to the community or even the home’s new tenant than a box of rat poison abandoned on a shelf.
The terrible reality in the US is that grinding castor seeds sends you to jail. There are no defense lawyers who can competently explain to judges and/or juries any facts about ricin and castor seeds which might ameliorate judgments.
And they are always over-matched by the federal government.
Judges don’t care. Neither do juries. No mercy is ever shown.
And the result has been that no matter how troubled or helpless the defendant is, their situation is always made immeasurably worse.
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Posted in Made in China, Permanent Fail at 12:49 pm by George Smith
UPDATED
Now dumbly obvious, from CNN Money:
One major pull on the working man was the decline of unions and other labor protections, said Bill Rodgers, a former chief economist for the Labor Department, now a professor at Rutgers University.
Because of deals struck through collective bargaining, union workers have traditionally earned 15% to 20% more than their non-union counterparts, Rodgers said.
But union membership has declined rapidly over the past 30 years. In 1983, union workers made up about 20% of the workforce. In 2010, they represented less than 12%.
“The erosion of collective bargaining is a key factor to explain why low-wage workers and middle income workers have seen their wages not stay up with inflation,” Rodgers said.
Without collective bargaining pushing up wages, especially for blue-collar work — average incomes have stagnated.
International competition is another factor. While globalization has lifted millions out of poverty in developing nations, it hasn’t exactly been a win for middle class workers in the U.S.
Factory workers have seen many of their jobs shipped to other countries where labor is cheaper, putting more downward pressure on American wages.
“As we became more connected to China, that poses the question of whether our wages are being set in Beijing,” Rodgers said.
Finding it harder to compete with cheaper manufacturing costs abroad, the U.S. has emerged as primarily a services-producing economy. That trend has created a cultural shift in the job skills American employers are looking for.
Replace “services-producing economy” with “services and virtual goods of little to zero social value” — like Wall Street financial instruments.
Closer to home, the “services producing economy” includes the likes of HBGary Federal, Palantir Technologies, and Berico, spying firms whose products are pitched to attack private citizens critical of big money America.
A DD reader posted in comment, a link to this post at a blog written by a another journalist targeted by the US Chamber of Commerce and the three corporate spying/security firms.
That post is here and it mentions a subject I discussed last week. The use of software and methods developed for the war on terrorism against private citizens.
That’s part of the “services economy” as the employees blithely discussed payment splits — 2 million dollars and/or 200,000/month — in this post here yesterday.
At the bottom of the CNN story is a quote from a Wall Street analyst, and a most disingenuous one, at that:
“I think it’s a terrible dilemma, because what we’re obviously heading toward is some kind of class warfare,” Johnson said.
Wrong bucko. There has been class warfare and it’s been the uppers that have mercilessly waged it against the middle.
And the dirty-tricking unethical behavior as a “service” to be sold to law firms, Bank of America and the Chamber of Commerce is just one small direct example of it.
Another even larger example is the Republican attack on what remains of unionized labor — state and federal middle class workers who need to be either downsized or have their benefits hacked.
This brings up another issue that’s nagged your host.
If Mark Zuckerberg’s marvelous Facebook was allegedly what catalyzed volcanic systemic change in Egypt, why doesn’t it work here where the populace has much greater access to social networking tools?
Rhetorical, obviously.
Via Digby, quoting from ThinkProgress, coincidentally one of the organizations to be attacked through the machination services of HBGary Federal, Palantir and Berico:
ThinkProgress has been following both Gov. Scott Walker’s (R-WI) recent “budget repair bill,??? which would effectively eliminate state workers’ right to collectively bargain, and his coinciding threat to deploy the National Guard to stop a walkout. Yesterday, the Super Bowl champion Green Bay Packers criticized Walker, saying that collective bargaining is “fundamental??? to the middle class.
Approximately 13,000 peaceful protesters flooded the state Capitol yesterday, including nearly 800 Madison East High School students who left school to protest Walker’s bill. Democratic lawmakers listened to testimonies from citizens for more than 20 hours, stretching into the early morning. Many people who hadn’t yet gotten to speak pulled out sleeping bags.
Responding to his inappropriate threat to use the National Guard against resisting workers, Walker said last night on Greta Van Susteren’s On The Record that the National Guard has contingency plans for natural disasters, and a worker “walk-off is part of [the] contingency plan???:
Wednesday afternoon, momentary TV check, Fox News in high gear hysterically attacking the Wisconsin protesters, teachers, the IRS and assorted middle class federal workers.
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Posted in Made in China at 3:05 am by George Smith
One of the biggest jokes on DD blog is the US media’s fascination with the Chinese military.
The US spends more than the top ten countries in the world — combined — on its military.
And it has been in active combat for the last ten years.
Yet you still see stone idiot news, lately on Chinese inventions, said to put us behind the eight ball.
There are many things that have put the United States behind the eight ball. Most of our own invention. Chinese military might isn’t one of them.
So today, the continuing story of the Chinese super missile with the name that rhymes with “dung.” Similar to stories about Soviet super missiles decades ago. And we know how that turned out.
AP:
A new “carrier killer” missile that has become a symbol of China’s rising military might will not force the U.S. Navy to change the way it operates in the Pacific, a senior Navy commander told The Associated Press.
Defense analysts say the Dong Feng 21D missile could upend the balance of power in Asia, where U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups have ruled the waves since the end of World War II.
However, Vice Adm. Scott van Buskirk, commander of the U.S. 7th Fleet, told the AP in an interview that the Navy does not see the much-feared weapon as creating any insurmountable vulnerability for the U.S. carriers — the Navy’s crown jewels.
“It’s not the Achilles heel of our aircraft carriers or our Navy — it is one weapons system, one technology that is out there,” Van Buskirk said in an interview this week on the bridge of the USS George Washington, the only carrier that is home-based in the western Pacific.
The DF 21D is unique in that it is believed capable of hitting a powerfully defended moving target — like the USS George Washington — with pinpoint precision. That objective is so complex that the Soviets gave up on a similar project.
It’s material for a Tom Clancy thriller. Fuck that guy and his ilk.
In the real world, Chinese kit — all the stuff lining the shelves of American stores, from all garments to all electric guitars once invented here to all flatware — is either really substandard, slightly substandard, or necessarily acceptable because no other products are available. Because we gave up all manufacturing of the same things for the sake of Wall Street and the immediate bottom line. And even if you didn’t want to buy it you have no choice because it would mean going naked, shoe-less and with no furniture or appliances in your apartment.
The only thing you’d have left would be the dry and canned food on your cupboard shelves. Because your refrigerator would be taken away, too.
And suddenly the same country is said to have a missile that puts the supercarrier fleet at risk in the Pacific Ocean.
Here’s a thought exercise.
Assume it’s as perfectly omnipotent as claimed. The Chinese plink a US supercarrier in some imagined confrontation off North Korea or Taiwan.
We still manufacture weapons. In fact, that’s about all we manufacture, other than hookers and beer, the latter of which is all owned by Belgium.
How many weeks past two or four will the rubble stop bouncing at military bases in China?
Another example of news for the purpose of creating the impression the US military is behind in some way, immune from the painful sacrifice that’s going to be shoved down all our throats.
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02.15.11
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 2:40 pm by George Smith
Unsurprisingly, more damning e-mails recovered from HBGary Federal by the Anonymous hacking group put to the lie CYA declarations that only one rogue employee, Aaron Barr, was involved.
Hundreds of e-mail show Barr’s collaboration with employees at Berico Technologies and Palantir.
Palantir, naturally, stands to lose something from this scandal.
It’s website brags about how the company was started by computer experts who value privacy and civil liberties above all. A claim that can now be regarded as insincere eyewash in light of the current attack on WikiLeaks/Glenn Greenwald scandal.
In a denial issued soon after the scandal began to break in the mainstream news, Palantir CEO Alex Karp issued a statement — here — attempting to separate the firm from the imbroglio.
Karp, on the matter:
Palantir Technologies provides a software analytic platform for the analysis of data. We do not provide – nor do we have any plans to develop – offensive cyber capabilities. Palantir Technologies does not build software that is designed to allow private sector entities to obtain non-public information, engage in so-called “cyber attacks??? or take other offensive measures. I have made clear in no uncertain terms that Palantir Technologies will not be involved in such activities. Moreover, we as a company, and I as an individual, always have been deeply involved in supporting progressive values and causes. We plan to continue these efforts in the future.
The right to free speech and the right to privacy are critical to a flourishing democracy. From its inception, Palantir Technologies has supported these ideals and demonstrated a commitment to building software that protects privacy and civil liberties.
The hacking group Anonymous provides a searchable database of HBGary Federal e-mails here.
Using it, it is an uncomplicated process to uncover Palantir employees working on the proposal to attack WikiLeaks, coordinated with the Hunton & Williams legal firm, the deal started by Palantir connecting the group with the Washington lawyers. The aim — to pitch the attack capability to Bank of America or, more broadly, apparently corporate America as a grand market ripe for services attacking critics.
Some samples, the first on the attack proposal from Palantir employee Matthew Steckman:
On Dec 3, 2010, at 8:52 AM, Matthew Steckman wrote:
> Updated with Strengths/Weaknesses and a spotlight on Glenn Greenwald…thanks Aaron!
>
This next e-mail, from an employee — John Woods, at Hunton & Williams:
On Dec 2, 2010, at 3:55 PM, “Woods, John” > wrote:
Richard and I am meeting with senior executives at a large US Bank tomorrow regarding Wikileaks. We want to sell this team as part of what we are talking about. I need a favor. I need five to six slides on Wikileaks – who they are, how they operate and how this group may help this bank. Please advise if you can help get me something ASAP. My call is at noon.
Here is another, describing the proposal as an “A Team doc”:
A-team doc
We need to blow these guys away with descriptions of our capabilities, IP, and talent. Make them think that we are Bond, Q, and money penny all packaged up with a bow.
Matthew Steckman
Palantir Technologies | Forward Deployed Engineer
And there is an e-mail indicating the project was green-lighted through Palantir CEO Alex Karp:
Apologies for taking this long to get back to you. Eli and I had to run this way up the chain (as you can imagine). The short of it is that we got approval from Dr. Karp and the Board to go ahead with the modified 40/30/30 breakdown proposed. These were not fun conversations, but we are committed to this team and we can optimize the cost structure in the long term (let’s demonstrate success and then take over this market :)).
The “40/30/30 breakdown” refers to the way profits would be shared on any deal through Hunton & Williams.
And here is a haphazard e-mail discussing pricing for the attack proposal. It varies from 2 million to 200,000/month.
Rob Rosenberger at vmyths/security-critics adds a post on the Barr matter, as well as another, here.
He writes:
Now comes a new era for the computer security industry … outrightalleged criminal activity within its ranks …
The global computer security arena is now so profitable and so willing to prostitute itself — with customers so eager to spend money and reporters so willing to write stories — that it shouldn’t surprise us to find outrightalleged criminals with a digital store front.
Addendum: Alert readers may raise their eyebrows. It’s been a long time since anyone referred to me and used my middle initial.
And the only reason it was employed on the Internet was because the publisher of my book on virus-writers insisted upon it in 1994. A few years later the man ran off to live in Belize and seemingly vanished by jumping up his ass.
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Posted in Bioterrorism at 11:09 am by George Smith
The National Research Council’s report today on the science of the FBI’s Amerithrax investigation upheld the value of careful rigorous work.
It stopped well short of condemning any of the FBI’s work on the case and did not particularly lend itself to cries for the exoneration of Bruce Ivins. It also generated enough confusion and furrowed brows among attending journalists to guarantee the mists swirling around the case would probably continue in subsequent stories.
The presentation, headed by Alice Gast, president of Lehigh University, got right down to business at, what was here, 8:00 PST in video stream.
The salient point was this:
The scientific link between the letter material and flask number RMR-1029 is not as conclusive as stated in the DOJ Investigative Summary.
And it left the reporters who’d covered the story from the beginning with a dilemma.
New York Times reporter Scott Shane was the voice of it when, at one point, he essentially asked Gast and her colleague David Relman, to put forward a conclusion that would be more distinct to non-scientists.
Were laymen to believe the NRC had concluded that it was not likely the mailed anthrax came from RMR-1029, the mother flask at Fort Detrick/USAMRIID maintained by Bruce Ivins? Or might it have been the other way around, that the FBI/DoJ conclusion was the best one to make.
“Do you think the FBI has done a good job?” he asked.
When it came up, DD laughed. Careful science would not furnish that answer.
As it stood, Gast and Relman explained repeatedly, the forensic science on the anthrax mailings, RMR-1029 and the FBI’s sample repository was an evolving process. Science was developed in conjunction with the investigation. And that science, while good (my opinion), could not alone furnish the definitive answer given the nature of it and the existence of another fermentation — produced at Dugway at a much earlier date, which was morphotypically the same. As far as could be determined. By the science.
David Relman explained further by discussing the 1029 flask at USAMRIID.
Roughly, the NRC concluded that the source flask was complex and heterogeneous. And every time one dipped into it one was not bringing out the same material, or leaving it perfectly as it was.
This meant that there would, of necessity, be error in the assays used to examine it and the FBI’s samples and that such lab work would not provide consistent results every time.
That being said, the NRC did not discredit the conclusions brought by the FBI.
When asked what it thought of the FBI/DoJ’s closing of the case, Relman replied:
We note the closing of the case with due interest.
The NRC report did put another spike through the heart of the idea that silicon was added to the mailings to Leahy and Daschle for purposes of weaponization and dispersion.
It won’t kill the crazies who continue to pursue the argument. But that’s more due to the nature of the people who cleave to it.
“Silicon was present in the letter powders but there was no evidence
of addition of dispersants,” Gast said.
And the report reads:
The bulk silicon content in the Leahy letter could be completely explained by the amount of silicon incorporated in the spores during growth …
The inability of laboratory experiments to duplicate silicon characteristics of the latter samples is not surprising given the uptake mechanism (in the anthrax microbe).
The NRC determined the anthrax could be dried in a number of ways and that the equipment and materials for doing so was available. Additionally, the time frame, or window, for such activity was variable enough that it could fit FBI conclusions. In other words, Ivins could have done it in the time frame outlined by the FBI and Department of Justice.
The report comments:
There are several methods for drying spore suspensions to produce powders like those found in the letters: these include chemical desiccation, air drying and freeze drying, any of which could require several hours to several days. Drying of surrogate spore preparations using various methods produced particle size distributions similar to those found in letter samples …
Further:
The committee finds no scientific basis on which to accurately assess the amount of time or skill set needed to prepare the spore material in the letters. The time might vary from as little as 2 to 3 days to as much as several months.
Arguments on the skill set required to make the anthrax have been commonly employed to argue that Ivins could not have done it.
Near the end of the conference one reporter asked about a Fort Detrick scientist who last year had gone before the committee to advise it on the science and techniques involved in producing the attack material.
This was probably a reference to Henry S. Heine, a supervisor of Ivins’ who had attempted to clear the suspect. I discussed it here, noting that the story had only been publicized at ProPublica by one of the journalists deeply involved in anthrax conspiracy promotion, Gary Matsumoto.
Relman averred that the committee had considered the information, disassociated it from the source, and that there was nothing more to be said.
Other items of interest which came to light in the NTC briefing:
1. The government examined the ruins and remains of Flight 193 for anthrax. No other information was provided.
2. The US government made three missions to unnamed foreign sites, looking for anthrax. Polymerase chain reaction assays determined samples to be positive from two of these sites but that no live bacteria could be produced from them. The third mission provided negative results.
These missions were shrouded in secrecy, although it was stated that intelligence agencies were involved. The NRC was kept from knowing much about them and the classification got in the way of any conclusions which could have been drawn.
Alice Gast said that, as a result, the National Research Council made a recommendation to review the classified materials.
The National Research Council’s conference at the National Academies of Science is on-line here.
The full report is here. A .pdf can be purchased or it can be read, for free, online through the website’s set up viewer.
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02.14.11
Posted in Permanent Fail at 3:17 pm by George Smith
Today, a collection of the recent columns on the destruction of middle class manufacturing in the US. As contrasted with the astonishing and immoral growth in weapons manufacturing.
At GlobalSecurity.Org here.
As collected its startling, dismaying and equally enraging. Unless you have no heart or belief in fairness.
It is another example, at its most basic, of class war. The upper class — the rich mega-corporations which are arms developers, have systematically been part of the greatest and most unjust transfer of wealth and fortune from a middle class in history. And the looting is on a growth curve.
On another level it asks the minor question: If you believe in God, why doesn’t he smite General Atomics?
It also asks the question, “Why did Louis Uchitelle ignore the elephant in the room in this story?”
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