On a slightly more elevated note, Matt Yglesias has some fun with a prominent libertarian, Peter Thiel, who looks at the contrast between rapid progress in information technology and less rapid progress in “stuff??? and blames .. the government.
In a way, I’m reluctant to make too much fun of Thiel because at least he points to something that I notice a lot. If you look at what futurists were predicting 40 or 45 years ago, they somewhat underpredicted progress in IT (except for the artificial intelligence thing), but wildly overpredicted progress in dealing with the material world. Weren’t we supposed to have underwater cities, commercial space flight, and flying cars by now?
By that standard, Peter Thiel waxes about every scientist who ever lived:
Peter Thiel, sitting directly next to me, is one of the most successful investors that Silicon Valley has ever known. He was an early ?? he was the first investor in Facebook. He was a founder and CEO of PayPal. He helped found Palantir, which has been a tremendous success. He has a hedge fund, Clarium Capital; an early stage venture, no not early stage, yes, early stage venture capital fund, Founder’s Fund; and many, many other things that I think we will have an opportunity to discuss this evening.
And then there’s Google’s Eric Schmidt, also odious but for different reasons.
Here Schmidt attributes all the freedom that hasn’t quite happened in the Middle East yet to social media, more precisely the Internet, which you hear about once or twice a day, if not more:
PETER THIEL: When you talk about the Arab spring, you can say that it’s evidence of Google and Twitter ??
ERIC SCHMIDT: I didn’t say that.
PETER THIEL: ?? liberating the world through information. But, the actual facts on the ground are that food prices rose by 30 to 50 percent in the previous year and you basically had people who had become ?? you had desperate people who had become more hungry than scared, who revolted. Then Eric goes around and says, let them eat iPhones, or maybe not ?? that’s not precisely what he would say.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Let’s just say that everything he just said is not actually true. Let’s start with the food revolution. The issues of food in the globe are all related to mismanagement by governments. Many, many people have looked at this. And even without synthetic foods and the other things that are being developed, we can feed everybody. It’s just bad policies. And that can be fixed with better governments, more representative governments, so forth and so on.
With respect to the Arab Spring, and having been there and spent quite a bit time talking to the people, these people were very courageous and they used the tools available to them to topple these sort of bad regimes that weren’t giving them what they wanted. Sure, food prices went up, but there was a long history of repression. If you go back, each of these groups had a couple of years earlier tried and had been squelched.
The fact of the matter is that the dictators who were overthrown had a failure to regulate the Internet. They regulated everything else, the telephone, the television and so forth.
ADAM LASHINSKY: So, on the margin, Twitter and Facebook and other social media devices contributed to greater freedom …
Most of you never read the Washington Times. This is too bad because it’s the official newspaper of the insane political party in this country, the GOP. It publishes opinions daily that are either complete fictions or hateful — often both — except to those with the politics of Ted Nugent.
Today, Frank Gaffney, one of the evergreen chieftains of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, Islam-o-phobe and birther, proclaims Michele Bachmann similar to Margaret Thatcher.
Movie theaters across America have recently showed a film depicting former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a woman whose visionary leadership and fortitude — particularly in the fight against Soviet communism — earned her the sobriquet “the Iron Lady …???
Fortunately, it turns out that as we confront our time’s most imminent threat to freedom, we have found America’s Iron Lady: Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. Her Thatcheresque qualities are evident in the fearless and visionary leadership she is providing in opposing Shariah’s most formidable champions, the Muslim Brotherhood …
At the moment, Mrs. Bachmann is not facing mere name-calling but outright character assassination. She has been singled out for special treatment despite the fact that she was one of five members of Congress (the others were Reps. Louie Gohmert of Texas, Trent Franks of Arizona, Lynn A. Westmoreland of Georgia and Thomas J. Rooney of Florida) who had the temerity to send to the federal inspector general formal requests for investigations into Muslim Brotherhood influence operations inside our government. That’s a threat every bit as dangerous as the communist subversion of a generation ago.
It is, of course, no accident that Mrs. Bachmann is being subjected to such vilification by the Islamists, their allies on the left and in the establishment media’s amen chorus …
Mrs. Bachmann’s response to her critics is vintage Lady Thatcher: “I will not be silenced.???
Bachmann and others, inspired by Gaffney’s regular toil to point out a government subversion that most people lack the vision to see, have attacked Hilary Clinton’s assistant at the State Department, Huma Abedin. The Islam-o-phobes have been trying to tar the woman for months in a McCarthy-esque hunt for enemies within.
Until lately the mainstream media has mostly ignored them.
It has had bad consequences. Light sanitizes. The absence of it encourages the spread of noxious fungus and microbial slime. The same people have been responsible for absurd GOP party planks and red state legislation seeking to ban the alleged creeping subversion of the US justice system by shariah law.
What happened when idiot voters either stayed home or decided to punish Democrats in 2010. Election of those who are “white and crazy.” Except for the stitch Nazi — that was, apparently, a bridge too far.
One of the last college football games Don Hunt and I watched together was Penn State/Houston in the Ticket City Bowl. Joe Paterno had been fired. The team limped into the holiday season and was subsequently destroyed by Houston. They looked like young men who wished to be put to death.
That day I told Don I bet the Jerry Sandusky atrocity would kill Paterno and it did, although the official cause was lung cancer. It wasn’t a hard wager to make.
Through much of the Eighties I spent Saturday afternoons as a guest of my family at Penn State home games in Happy Valley. I was a grad student at Lehigh which does wrestling and pretends a little at college football. So given the option of seeing the Nittany Lions during the fall and early winter, rather than the Engineers in Bethlehem — well, it wasn’t really a choice.
And over the years in which Paterno became the the most winning coach in college football you could always find me in front of the television on Saturday afternoons in season. I drank the Kool-Aid. I bought all the superlatives.
But James Holmes and Jerry Sandusky are the two biggest arch-fiends in America today. No one walks away from such associations.
And so Penn State and Joe Paterno have not. In one stroke, all the wins that put the Nittany Lions at the top of the heap were taken away. They were made non-entities in their conference for four years, a team no one good will want to play because it can only take the role of a hated spoiler. And PSU and JoePa are now statistically just good to mostly average, which is nowhere if you wish to outgrow the reputation of being enablers to the country’s most loathed sex offender.
Today you can still see Jerry Sandusky working the sidelines and exhorting the troops in the ten minute highlight reels Penn State fans have put on YouTube by the scores. And when they’re over one thinks about what Jerry was doing with young boys at the victory party in his home or posh hotel room later that night. There’s no way to get rid of the man in the film and videotape records of the glory years.
The school won’t recover from it in my lifetime. The entire economy of Centre County will take an enormous hit, especially in the fall. It will be as if you were living in a beach resort and woke up one day to find the sand and ocean taken away. Nothing left but flopping, dieing and rotting fish on mud flats. Television interest is already almost gone, I bet.
No more Happy Valley, no White Out, no more shouts of “We Are … Penn State” without smirks. Plain blue and white, black shoes, the linked official athletic wear of pedophilia and cover up. No one will wish to remember where they were during football season, from 1969 when Jerry Sandusky arrived, until news of the sex crimes erupted last year.
Books, magazines and merchandise sales will plummet. No more great enthusiasms for getting your picture taken with the almost life-size JoePa cardboard standees. Glorious statues, murals, trophies, autographed photos, promotional football cards and programs, all metamorphosed into embarrassment. Maybe there could be one last bonfire for all of it. (eBay auctions of PSU stuff are frozen up.)
Whenever someone says they played football for the old Nittany Lions, those being told will immediately wonder if the person knew Jerry the Molester, defensive architect of Linebacker U. As an ice-breaker, it will be right there with admitting you partied, say, with John Wayne Gacy.
It’s a shame for the kids who have to work out their exit plan now
the NCAA equivalent of a giant nuclear bunker-busting bomb has been detonated in State College.
We are watching these corporate forces which are supra-national … reconfigure the global economy into a form of neo-feudalism. We are rapidly becoming an oligarchic state with an incredibly wealthy class of overlords … [it is called] inverted totalitarianism, it’s not classical totalitarianism, it doesn’t find its expression through a demagogue or a charismatic leader but though the anonymity of the corporate state that purports to pay fealty to electoral politics, the Constitution, to the iconography and language of American patriotism, but internally has seized all levers of American power … as to render the citizen impotent.
After World War I “American society became enveloped in the psychosis of permanent war where in the name of anti-communism we could effectively banish anyone in the society who questioned power in any serious kind of way.”
From two to twenty-four minutes will give you the full measure. “In theological terms, these are forces of death … I know what happens when wheat prices increase by 100 percent, children starve,” Chris Hedges tells Bill Moyers, on his view of US financialism.
It’s very discouraging. It’s also impossible to pull away.
The Atlantic continues to proudly publish the work of the most senseless and therefore fit for the job. And the reason everyone sees the work is because the Atlantic and Google are engaged in eyeball
prostitution and news search poisoning.
Today, for The Atlantic, someone named Colin Daileda reflects on why the military is so unrepresentative, something everyone else pretty much figured out twenty years ago. The average college student isn’t high on joining the service for endless wars, the environment does not hold the military in high regard.
Daileda never gets around to the obvious. There must be some other obscure reason the military is not particularly representative of US life in the officer corps. Nope, not about college being a broadening education not conducive, even antithetical, to inculcating an interest in militarism and military leadership. For this piece, it’s all about the difficulty of having a fraternal ROTC experience if you’re a day student.
He starts with the howler:
Big-city campuses once produced superstars like Colin Powell.
The Cult of Apple, and everyone else who emulates it, banks on trivial applications and spying — or the power to tell everyone where you are all the time.
From the wire, recommendations on smartphone apps for use after an auto accident. Now I don’t know about you but in the immediate aftermath of an auto-accident, having an iPhone waived in my face by the collaborator in the affair would be less than optimal.
In fact, walking north on Lake yesterday afternoon I spied to younger people exchanging their insurance information the old fashioned way. Both cars were drivable but one was so badly bashed you could tell the insurance company would declare it totaled. It looked like a tense situation.
Excerpted, on today’s hot trivial innovations:
We took a look at two of the more popular ones available: Help I Crashed My Car for Android users and Car Accident Report for the iPhone.
What we like: Both apps allow you to pre-load emergency contact info, personal data, and vehicle information including make, model, and insurance information so it is at the ready when you need it. Both also track your location using GPS and include complete checklists of what to do and in what order after a crash. They include an accident report screen you can fill out with details, with fields for information about other vehicles and drivers.
One cool feature with Car Accident Report is integration with your iPhone camera, which allows you to take photos of the scene and send them along with notes, diagrams, and recorded audio interviews via email. Help I Crashed My Car (pictured right) includes useful links to rental car companies and area auto body shops.
Just another reason, among many, to keep silent, wait for a traffic report cop to show up and merely exchange paper with the person you’ve danced with.
“Heed these words, my disciples: When the crowd has not machine guns, it cannot protect itself from evil carrying a machine gun and a Glock.” — Chapter 2, The Compleat Sayings of American Jesus.
The president’s opinion piece, placed on an editorial page usually hostile to his administration, was aimed at Senate Republicans who had opposed an earlier version of the bill on the grounds that it would create a new regulatory bureaucracy …
Meeting stiff opposition from conservatives, the bill in its original form could not garner the 60 votes needed to break a Senate filibuster. So yesterday (July 19), Lieberman introduced a watered-down version of the bill that removes the mandatory provisions and instead makes compliance with new cybersecurity standards voluntary.
The revision offers inducements for companies that choose to comply, such as protection from liability relating to a security incident …
Digital security experts are divided over whether the bill is necessary, and even whether the dramatic scenes depicted by Obama in his opinion piece are even possible ..
“Has a major attack happened? No,” said Steve Santorelli, a security researcher at Team Cymru in Lake Mary, Fla., who’s worked in the past for Microsoft and Scotland Yard. “Are they scanning and exploring? Almost certainly someone is, but it’s not clear exactly who or why.”
“There’s going to be an attack on specific trains loaded with what just happen to be specifically dangerous chemicals so that it or they jump the rails and cause a catastrophe?” asked George Smith, an expert on national-security technology at GlobalSecurity.org in Washington. “This belongs strictly to the last ‘Die Hard’ movie.”
“They could have run a simulation based on the plot of ‘Independence Day,'” said Julian Sanchez, a research fellow specializing in technology at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington. “That would not be a ‘sobering reminder’ that alien invasion is ‘one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face.'”
“There is little to zero evidence reservoirs and water systems can be significantly damaged by cyberattack, even if one grants the minor possibility of remote trifling with pumping systems,” Smith said. “Water purification and supply is a nationally distributed matter. There is no way to universally degrade it in the United States.”
A number of people were cited on what manipulation through SCADA might be able to do. The arguments remain the same.
Because something is vulnerable, often just potentially so, everything is vulnerable everywhere. And we have a peeping Tom at my apartment building so just think if he were at your place and became more ambitious, wanting to get into your rooms!
Because something, read everything, is computerized, and it is so easy to act maliciously through the net, everything is at risk.
Often the concerns are sincere. Often many are simply manipulative, too. We can agree it is good to always be mindful of security. However, there was a point, one we’re now past, when the story-telling turned abusive and strained.
Example:
Despite the fact that the facility’s computers were not connected to the Internet, Stuxnet got in and changed the software on programmable logic controllers (PLCs) operating uranium-processing centrifuges, causing them to spin out of control and setting back the Iranian nuclear program by more than a year.
“Many of the fundamental problems are caused by software vulnerabilities in PLCs that are impossible to fix,” Santorelli said. “They were never designed to be secure because the folks that developed them, like everyone else, never really saw this threat coming when the systems were built a generation ago,
“It’s sobering to think that the same PLCs that Stuxnet attacked are also in the rides that we take our kids to in theme parks every weekend,” Santorelli added.
So because a complex computer virus the US government developed and sent into the world, children at Disney’s and Dorney’s through the US are menaced by stuff our many anonymous enemies might make.
Security hawk arguments always work the same way.
Because we have done something, or can do something, and insist that it is trivial to duplicate, everyone else can and will do it to us. And the consequences will always be worse. All that is man-made is eventually vulnerable will be attacked.
