The Apple juggernaut crushes all in its path, might makes right, the end justifies the means, those jobs aren’t coming back, no wire hangers, I want a glass screen in six weeks, put that thing in your mouth!
Inspiration: Frank Zappa & the Mothers’ “We’re Only In It for the Money”
Key gear: harmonica — Mojo Hand/Conqueror Root — made in China, Jay Turser Stratocaster funk guitar — made in China. The Deutschlandlied. How’d that get in there?
Boycott American goods!
Oh wait, you can’t. Nothing to avoid at the store.
It’s a familiar term. It’s what happens when an article you’ve written gets linked to by Matt Drudge.
An onslaught by tens of thousands occurs in the space of a few hours, with almost everyone in it bearing the triple handicap of being nuts, stupid and extremely right wing.
The server may topple from the weight. The e-mail box overflows with slurs and calumnies upon your house. The comments section will be flooded.
A train full of crazy people has arrived, ejected its passengers, now all ranting, cursing and waving nonsensical digital placards. They pay no attention to what you’ve actually published, chew the carpet for a few hours and then depart, never to return.
Tomorrow Drudge will loose his army of fools and cretins on some other person or random net posting. And the entire process will repeat.
In the meantime you’ll be deleting all the comments and mail espousing violence and bigotry.
What happens when a nation forgets their God and makes football of greater importance on Sundays. And worships the work of their own hands above God. This is what they deserve. But in the end, ??? Those who lead into captivity shall go into captivity???. This system that all these elites are devising to control the masses will become their own prison and it will be just the opposite. It will be used upon their own heads. Our only hope is for a massive solar storm to destroy all the satellites and GPS and Comm of all these totalitarians. The PEOPLE are safe without them and their CONTROL. We have GUNS. So there is another reason these Marxists phags are doing this. To assume total control. Got news for ya. Our GOD is going to take your power and destroy you. Patience of the Saints.
May a solar storm destroy you Marxist totalitarian phags.
Pete Hoekstra, an old Republican tool from Michigan who has occasionally appeared in this blog, is big news today for his Super Bowl ad. In trying to drum up fear of his opponent, it invokes the Yellow Peril with an Asian American actress speaking in stilted, jeering English, while on a bicycle riding out of the rice paddies.
It didn’t air here in Pasadena and I would assume most of the country did not see it. Until now. It’s a bit beyond words.
Hoekstra will never win re-election unless everyone in his district is a ragingly paranoid crazy person.
Hoekstra was chosen to receive the Team B report in Congress precisely because he is a well-known bigot. Although its authors wouldn’t put it quite that way.
They knew that because way back in 2006 Hoekstra was trying to convince everyone Muslim terrorists were everywhere in America.
And DD blog covered it briefly, here, along with a map of our allegedly Muslim-terror infested country.
I captured a picture of Hoekstra’s terror map back then and relabeled it “Al-Qaeda-Land.”
Kristof at 22 seconds. He does all the right things.
No one epitomizes America’s vapid culture of lickspittle better than the New York Times’ Nick Kristof. (Well, maybe some others do. But it’s a lede.)
Today he’s overawed by the power of Internet petitioning in changing the world for the better.
I get five or six Internet petitions a week in my in-box. I used to sign a few of them. Now I send them all to the spam folder. Kristof isn’t so stupid that he doesn’t know how quickly Internet petitioning, whether it’s through an enabling site or through abuse of a mailing list, gets old.
Foxconn, which makes Apple’s iKit, employs over 400,000 people in its factory complex. By comparison, the population of Pasadena is about 140,000.
Kristof is all excited because he’s found some grade-schoolers in upper class Brookline, MA, who’ve used an on-line petition to shame Universal into changing its website on its Dr. Seuss-based Lorax movie to include an environmental theme. (Rats! The environmental theme-y-ness didn’t make it into the Super Bowl commercial! Fail!)
He thinks it’s a big deal. And it allows him to publicize the swell and happy childrem.
It’s small beer. Someone had a heart, or realized they could gain some p.r. at Universal. For a minute or two and only that long.
But Kristof has a habit of touring the swell places of the land, finding some group or person from the upper class, and then dutifully praising them for small and nice but unremarkable things.
Some of his examples are worth brief mention. However, some reflect reality, in showing that on-line petitions haven’t revolutionized the world.
Although the people who have launched enabling sites for them, like Change.org, have made successful businesses of it.
The opportunities for Web naming-and-shaming through Change.org caught my eye when I reported recently on sex traffickers who peddle teenage girls on Backpage.com. I learned that a petition on Change.org had gathered 86,000 signatures calling for the company to stop accepting adult ads.
My next column was about journalists being brutalized in Ethiopian prisons. A 19-year-old college freshman in Idaho, Kelsey Crow, read the column and started a petition to free those journalists — and in no time gathered more than 4,000 signatures.
Does that matter? Does Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, care what a band of cyber citizens thinks of him? Skepticism is warranted, but so far Change.org petitions have seen some remarkable successes.
A few years ago Craig’s List was shamed, if that’s the word to use, into removing its adult ads section. More accurately, a southern state’s attorney general frightened them into it. However, the prostitution industry is still represented on Craig’s List, just in the personals. That’s progress.
I checked if Backpage had been shamed into removing its similar ads.
Nope. Kristof has used his position at the New York Times to pressure the firm, so any subsequent on-line petition qualifies as the pundit putting his fingers on the scale.
If Backpage eventually removes its adult advertising, it may have more to do with trouble brought to bear by a New York Times Sunday opinion writer. Kristof unleashed his opinion on Steven Hatfill after the anthrax mailings. It didn’t require an on-line petition for the FBI to read it and subsequently be moved to make Hatfill a “person of interest” in the case. Kristof was successful in publicly petitioning them, so to speak, to go after the wrong person.
Kristof mentions two other cases, the backing down of corporate giants Verizon and Bank of America over odious plans for bilking customers with new fees.
He attributes it all to on-line petitioning. I, and perhaps others, recall it a bit differently. Old media and new media were filled with really bad publicity for days. Did it all spring from one on-line petition? It stretches the credulity to write that this was so.
Just like it stretched credulity to claim that Facebook freed Egypt. A couple weeks ago people were still being shelled with tear gas. Old Hosni was gone but Egypt had stubbornly refused to transform into a European social democracy.
Kristof writes of Change.Org:
“We’re growing more each month than the total we had in the first four years,??? said Ben Rattray, 31, the founder. He said that 10,000 petitions are started each month on the site, and that each success leads to countless more copycat campaigns.
That’s a lot of petitions, 333/day. Are you feeling the ground shifting beneath your feet as people on the Internet bang their keyboards and iKit apps in outrage, vanquishing all the problems no one else has been able to deal with for decades?
Perhaps an on-line petition could have stopped OWS from being ejected from its Washington, DC, over the weekend in “nuisance abatement.” If only they had headed quickly to Change.Org.
Twitter-tweeting, Facebooking, Kristof recommends: “Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.”
Reality television is the perfect place for monetizing kooks. In this case it’s National Geographic’s Doomsday Preppers series on what I’ve called End Timers. I caught a commercial and won’t be tuning in. (It begins airing Tuesday.) Topics common to the blog have already shown all one needs to know.
The central focus, of course, is the collapse of the power grid, the end of American civilization and the people determined to be ready for it. One of the reasons for this belief is, of course, because it has been published ad nauseam in the news over the last decade.
Whether it’s an electromagnetic pulse from a barge-launched a-bomb, a cyberattack on the national infrastructure, or man-made plagues and totally unrealistic terror onslaughts, it’s been pounded into gullible heads, often several times a week, as probable, easy to do and often imminent.
The prepper movement shows all the collateral damage it has wrought on the suggestible and unbalanced.
Conspicuously, this increasingly nuts demographic is almost entirely white, far right, heartland, fundie Christian religious and breast-beatingly patriotic.
It is not a surprise that cable television feels this niche large enough to monetize. Death cults/apocalypse believers have always been part of the American experience. However, until social media, micro-casting and the Internet there wasn’t an easy way to cynically gather all of them up into a nice exploitative package for advertising.
Up until the last decade small fringe book publishers catering solely to the militias and violent survivalist far right used to be the only place for it.
Watch too many of them and you’re deeply discouraged.
While all the individuals in the videos appear painfully sincere with the aim being to give advice to help survive the travails said to be coming, all they’re really successful at is showing how idiosyncratic insanity can be mainstreamed as entertainment. They leak intolerance like a fine sweat. Eternal damnation for the lazy, the unprepared, all the outsiders. is a constant current.
“The first wave of death will be those with chronic disease,” she informs. A second wave of death will overtake the more healthy and it will be caused by diseases and lack of sanitation incubated and spread by the weak and sick. I didn’t last long enough to get to any more waves.
In another video the prepper survivors are advised to keep a book of hymns and prayers on hand because music helps one through the hard times. A dulcimer, an instrument from the Appalachian hill country, is recommended. It served the poor in the olden days and will again.
I’m always astonished there’s any audience for corporate p.r., in this case a bit of self-congratulation of Corning dressed up as an infomercial. However, I’ve learned that if you tie a tune to something on YouTube that will scoop up surfers searching for corporate commercials, you’ll get view counts. The world is full of lickspittles, those who delight in the brainless warm and fuzzy world corporate advertising displays.
Beautiful laptops, activity tables and super-phones for the haves. All made at Foxconn or places like it.
Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.
People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,??? he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.??? — the New York Times
Witnesses say a surveillance drone has crashed into a refugee camp in the Somali capital.
Drones have been used by the U.S. to attack or observe al-Qaida-linked militants in the Horn of Africa nation.
Refugees and soldiers in Mogadishu’s Badbado camp say they watched the drone crash Friday into a hut made of sticks, corrugated cans and plastic bags.
Sacdiyo Sheikh Madar, a refugee at the camp, says African Union peacekeepers came to remove it.
Police officer Ali Hussein says the drone was shaped like a small plane. A similar drone crashed into a house in Mogadishu last year.
Are we threatened by those who live in huts of sticks, corrugated cans and trash bags?
Our national security leadership apparently thinks an awful lot of stupid or just-don’t-care people do.
There’s a deep immorality here. If you don’t see it why are you reading this blog?
Formal addition of a new category: Bombing Paupers.
Best song, ever. Share and post it to places where it will be sure to infuriate. Some people need to be kicked and informed there are many who don’t share their views on US military and technological supremacy.
Working hard at it, another bog standard journalist churns out his bog standard feature on electrical doomsday, at the Boston Globe.
Contained therein, all the assertions and scenarios delivered by authority, again demonstrating what I’ve come to believe is a profound defect in the American national security mind brought on by US paranoia and the growth of the fear-based economy.
A few months back, I made the mistake of falling asleep with the television on, tuned to C-Span. While a torpid House hearing on finance lulled me to sleep, sometime during my REM rebound I found myself in the middle of a Day After-style nightmare. Turns out, I was emerging from my slumber during a forum dominated by EMPact America, a well-funded advocacy group spreading the word about the looming threats of an EMP attack.
These guys know how to scare the daylights out of you. The most prominent EMP hawk is Newt Gingrich, who peppered some of last year’s presidential debates with mini-lectures about the threat. “Without adequate preparation,??? Gingrich said at one EMP conference, “we would basically lose our civilization in a matter of seconds.??? There is real science behind the EMP fears, though some energy and national security analysts contend the EMP lobby greatly exaggerates the threat. (Boldface mine. It took years to force this unattributed concession.)
Analyst Sue Tierney is far more concerned about cyber threats. No bomb needed – just serious hacking qualifications, and these days it seems everybody knows a gloomy 17-year-old who’s got those. In what is widely believed to have been an Israeli-American covert effort, the Stuxnet computer worm was unleashed on the Iranian nuclear program in 2010, ruining about a fifth of the centrifuges the country uses to enrich uranium. It would be naive to think our country won’t eventually find itself on the other side of a similar attack.
Several years ago, Tierney was part of a National Academies task force charged with identifying the grid’s vulnerability to terrorists. With the World Trade Center in mind, the task force largely concentrated on trying to anticipate another Al Qaeda-style conventional attack. If Tierney were serving on the task force right now, she says, she would push for even more focus on guarding against cyber threats.
But the chairman of the task force, Granger Morgan, says that what continues to worry him the most is the havoc that bad guys could cause with relatively little technological savvy. “If I’m a terrorist, I can shut down the power system in a lot simpler ways than using a valuable nuclear device,??? says Morgan, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a noted authority on the grid. “All I need to do is destroy a bunch of major substations.??? Despite all the talk about strengthening security after 9/11, he says, “big transformers continue to sit there on pads out in the open, with only chain-link fences around them.???
Any way you look at it, these are real threats that need to be treated seriously. Don’t take my word for it. After Morgan’s task force finalized its report, the US Department of Homeland Security swooped in and classified the document. Federal officials didn’t want to give the terrorists any ideas. Not that they need any.
“Don’t take my word for it.” Good advice many sensible people will probably heed.
One would assume the Department of Homeland Security has classified many things. This being the case classification is not necessarily any imprimatur of a dangerous reality waiting to unfold.
Anyway, here again: National security experts like grains of sand on the beach, each with their version of doomsday. Always reliant on argument from authority in a country where the government and business interests aligned with security spending have spent the past decade destroying the legitimacy of such argument.
In a side note it’s worth mentioning the national publicity accruing to Newt Gingrich has actually hurt the relatively insignificant Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy lobby. It’s easy to see he’s utterly despised by a majority in Washington. So are his ideas.
Even though they may appear on C-SPAN, anyone can really if they throw a luncheon/talk in DC, EMPAct America is so out of power in recent months they resorted to employing a spammer to post backlinks to themselves in the comments sections. My spam filter kept catching them. Eventually they gave up on it. (Oops, spoke to soon. Just spied another in the spam filter for the old blog which stopped updating over a year ago.)
Found in my my inbox yesterday: “It is not difficult, nor does it take a nation-state, to compromise the North American electric grid.”
Taking up the first 130 words of a 1700 word piece on the potential for cyberattack, an Asbury Park Press reporter presents what’s standard practice — the fictional doomsday.
Power generators at a plant in New Jersey spin wildly out of control, then grind to a halt.
Other utilities step in to carry the extra load, but they, too, suffer internal malfunctions. Soon, cascading outages take out the power grid in the eastern half of the country – all carefully timed to happen in the dead of winter. Gas utilities are next.
But this isn’t like the week without power in parts of Central Jersey caused by downed limbs and trees felled by the freak October snowstorm. Power is out for much longer because the heavily damaged equipment is difficult to replace.
No heat, no running water, no toilets, no phones. Small generators die when fuel quickly runs dry. Hospitals, transportation, the banking system, the telecommunications grid – all down.
An apocalyptic fantasy or an actual threat? The prospect is something political and military leaders and security analysts have been raising alarms about for several years.
Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen, who retired in September, said during his tenure that cyberattacks pose an “existential threat??? to the United States.
Over the holidays I was a source for the piece. For the phone chat, which lasted long enough, the readers gets:
Yet not every expert buys the grim scenario of a downed electrical grid.
It’s almost progress. Most of the time such stories don’t contain anything but the presentation of a future doomsday and then three or four business interests or government men saying it’s all true.
But first, a detour. Which Doomsday will strike the country first?
The consequences of a successful attack against critical infrastructure makes these cost increases look like chump change. It would put people into the Dark Ages???, commented Larry Ponemon, chairman of the Ponemon Institute.
The Dark Ages. Sounds bad.
To a person, all the journalists I’ve spoken with (and there have been lots over the last decade) never step outside their beats to see how regular the warnings about doomsday are in every domain having to do with national security. If they do, these things either don’t register or are considered unimportant, not part of their world.
I’ve not infrequently asked something like which doomsday is it to be? All of them? One? Some? None? How can you tell from reading the usual public testimony of the experts?
I’ve come to believe there’s a defect in American thinking, one brought about by the conjunction of national paranoia after 9/11 and the fear-based economy. And that defect paralyzes the ability to think critically, to take time to consider the passage of recent history, context and perspective. It can also be said that it’s virtually impossible to get someone to look at things a little differently when their job and usefulness to higher ups depends on them always predicting disaster.
It’s far easier to just shut up and unquestioningly accept all the arguments presented from authority. The only silver lining, and it’s a really thin one, is that reality just often doesn’t give a shit about what’s printed in newspapers, shown on tv and emitted in policy documents.
And this is, at the root, fundamentally what the Asbury Park Press news report, a long one for the topic, does. It presents two views but the one that gets the most attention is the implication that electrical grid collapse is probably coming because we’re not doing enough about it. And this is the central feature of all future doomsdays. There’s never enough being done. We cannot imagine what trouble awaits if the warnings are not heeded now.
For this the reporter commits one sin. But it’s one I repeatedly touched upon in interview.
And it has to do with the claim that “cyberintruders” caused power blackouts in foreign cities.
This is the infamous story of the Brazil blackouts.
Reporter Ken Serrano uses it as one of three examples of infrastructure cyberattack, given to him by James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
It reads:
“A blackout in Brazil – it is hotly contested whether a cyberattack was responsible.”
Fair enough. Then the newspaper puts its fingers every so lightly on the scale.
Two or three paragraphs on Serrano writes:
In May 2009, President Barack Obama spoke about the risk of cyberattacks.
“We count on computer networks to deliver our oil and gas, our power and our water. We rely on them for public transportation and air traffic control,??? the president said. “Yet we know that cyberintruders have probed our electrical grid and that in other countries cyberattacks have plunged entire cities into darkness.???
Early in his presidency, Obama issued a preliminary cybersecurity strategy and this official statement was part of the news surrounding it.
One data point to demonstrate an argument cannot be made into two simply by passing it through different sources from authority, even if one of them is the president.
General interest readers are certainly unlikely to know such a thing. And they certainly do not understand nor should they be expected to know the genesis of all the myths and contested claims.
However, it is the journalist’s job to tell them. And the Asbury Park Press, for this feature, was apprised of the details.
In any case, eventually the “opposing view” is presented — in small print. (Read the story, note how all the bold print is employed. I had to grin a bit.)
Here is the opposing view, mine. And it’s a challenge none of the other sources polled for the story have any good answer for:
“If you make extraordinary claims, you need to produce extraordinary proof,??? said [George Smith, GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow) who has been writing about national security and technology issues for more than a decade.
As for a blackout in Brazil in 2007 being caused by a cyberattack, he said, “It’s been debunked. They’ve never produced any extraordinary proof.???
Many in our government have become very accustomed to never providing extraordinary proof to back up anything. It is a very bad habit, one that has had horrible results for the country.
And James Lewis, resourced for the story and formerly an employee of the US government, simply goes back to the stock play book to answer the criticism:
Lewis stands by his sources on the Brazilian blackout, adding that it involved an insider and software manipulation.
Translated: I know it because I have sources.
James Lewis often appears in the news to discuss matters of national cybersecurity and cyberwar. Often what he is reported to say is informative and reasonable.
But for the newspaper this was lame. Everyone knows the standard abuse — the government man, or the ex-government man, always has the inside information. Their say trumps everyone else’s, no proof necessary. QED.
“Lewis fears that it will take a catastrophe for changes to occur,” reads the newspaper. Then, the inevitable mentions of Pearl Harbor and 9/11.
Cybersecurity remains a topic for serious discussion at the national and the grass roots level. And the Asbury Park Press is part of that. However, it’s also a topic that is not served by now far too overused appraisals of what’s going to happen.
Footnote:
Reads another quote from the Asbury Park Press:
“Stuxnet demonstrated how all industries can be at risk,??? said Joe Weiss, a blogger on cybersecurity and consultant to companies using Industrial Control Systems.
That consultant was responsible for a recent viral news story, now withdrawn, on alleged attack on a heartland water system, commented upon here.
