Our veterans in particular, but all citizens generally, are beginning to realize that the US Government as well as State and local governments, are in violation of their constitutional charters more often than might be imagined. Today we begin a new Rolling Update focused on the Constitution of the United States of America, and also start a new Twitter tag. It is our view that respect for the Constitution, and the demand for Electoral Reform, go together.
While Obama worries about appeasing Israel and Jewish vote at home, as well as being pressured to support threats of an Israeli attack on Iran, the government of Israel beavers away as usual, creating new facts on the ground.
Here (portions of which are quoted below) is an editorial in Ha'aretz, one of Israel's leading newspapers, describing one way the Israeli government continues to plant seeds for the eventual cleansing of Palestinians from Jerusalem and the West Bank by exploiting the paralysis it created in what is absurdly known as the “peace process.”
Discussions on Jerusalem were postponed to a later stage of the final-status negotiations, but it was never agreed that this interlude be exploited to create facts on the ground.
Haaretz Editorial, 7 December 2011
As the diplomatic process has sunk deeper into hibernation, acts whose sole purpose is to tighten Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem have multiplied. Thus even as the Palestinians have given the Quartet a proposal on security arrangements and permanent borders in the West Bank, Israel is advancing proposals to change the master plans of neighborhoods over the Green Line.
Spinny Note: My favorite translations of Sun Tzu's classic are Thomas Cleary's for a political/phlosophical orientation and Samuel B. Griffith's for a military orientation. Readers interested in a modern application of Sun Tzu's ideas, and especially the art of using Cheng & Ch'i operations to unravel an adversary's decision cycle, will find them embedded throughout Col. John Boyd's seminal study of conflict, A Discourse on Winning and Losing, especially Patterns of Conflict and The Strategic Game.
One of the most pervasive features of computing culture are algorithms, the sets of processes or instructions contained in computer code that determine how a particular task will be completed. While algorithms power everything from your automatic coffee maker to your smart phone, because they are frequently hidden from their users, it can be easy to ignore these algorithms and their impact on how we gain access to information.
One of the areas where algorithms have the most impact is on our information search and retrieval practices. Online search is dominated by complex searching algorithms, the most well-known of which is Google's PageRank. While there are many different ways of thinking about these search algorithms, from the standpoint of digital literacy it is fascinating to see the extent to which these alogrithms have been accepted as reliable stand-ins for other forms of information seeking. One reason for this substitution is that they are, on the whole, quite good at finding and serving us the information that we want. Another is the long-standing cultural assumption that computers (and many other forms of technology) are objective means of accessing information.
The current President and Congress are destroying our Constitutional rights, our planet's climate, and the vestiges of a social safety net, and you are obsessing over a freak show of self-hating homosexuals and anti-intellectual intellectuals jumping through hoops in a corporate media circus with Ringmaster Donald Trump. Is this a good use of your time?
The “Bush tax cuts” are still called that, while Bush has been gone for years. The corporate trade agreements are rolling through at a pace Bush couldn’t have managed. While Social Security was protected by anti-Bush agitation, it now has its neck on a chopping block and the progressive position is that the taxes that pay for it should be cut — rather than expanded to apply equally to large incomes. President Obama has repeatedly blocked serious global efforts to address climate change. And you're concerned about which Republican buffoon doesn't know the difference between Iraq and Iran, or which other one thinks the United States has an embassy in Iran. Are you kidding me?
President Obama, the United States Congress, and the Federal Reserve are united in their generosity toward Wall Street and the war machine — both financial generosity and the equally generous provision of immunity from legal prosecution. In the Bush era we were locked in free-speech cages, and we raised hell about it. Now we're locked in jails, beaten, tear gassed, pepper sprayed, and otherwise brutally assaulted, and . . . wait! Look over there! Is that a presidential candidate who wants to publicly declare his desire to secretly murder Iranians? How outrageous!
For the love of everything decent, the current president is right now murdering Iranians, and it's not very secret. What in the hell is the matter with you people?
Illegality is over, says Harold Koh (“the good John Yoo”). This is the same guy who claims massive slaughter by bombing of foreign nations is neither war nor an act of hostility as long as no significant number of U.S. citizens die immediately in the process.
How can illegality be over, when the crimes have not been prosecuted and have in fact been legalized? The current Department of Justice, at the direction of President Obama, has radically expanded claims of state secrets and made greater use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. The current president has formalized, legalized, systematized, and normalized warrantless spying, lawless imprisonment (Bagram is booming!), prisoner abuse, assassination (including of members of the 5% of humanity we're supposed to care about), war making in direct violation of the will of Congress (Cf. Libya), and the radically expanded use of drones to do much of this dirty work. And you want me to care that some house-broken elephant who's been trained to parrot platitudes is in favor of child labor? Really?
It is not pleasant to face, but our children are done for if we proceed down either of the paths you are obsessing over the choice between. Behind curtain A is increased plutocratic militarization. Behind curtain B is the same damn thing. It's an evil choice. Choose which of your children should be shot. This one. No, wait. This one. It is not a choice we have time to dignify with our attention. It is not something we should waste 10 months of inaction and misdirected resources on.
We must do what has finally, finally, finally been begun. We must occupy public space.
We must move the entire culture. We must reshape this society. We must drag both political parties and everybody in them and the majority of the population which has long since grown sick up to the eye balls of both of them, we must drag everyone kicking and screaming to a better place, to a place where we do not choose between putting 65% or 62% of discretionary federal spending into war preparation without an enemy in sight. What kind of a range of options is that?
This government will halt the foreclosures only after we have halted the forclosures. This government will forgive student debt only after we have blocked its payment. This government will regulate Wall Street only after we have divested from it. And this government will stop dumping our hard-earned pay into wars we don't want and cannot survive only when we have made that path (that running of the gauntlet of K Street's opposition) easier for every type of misrepresentative than continuing on the current trajectory.
Self-government is not a spectator sport. Elections are not reality shows. There is much more at stake than a soap opera. The first step, and it is a more difficult step than sleeping in a tent in the ice cold rain, is to cease giving a damn what some individual who is stripping away your rights and the fruits of your labors really feels in his heart of hearts. Stop it. We do not have the time. Politicians who make speeches opposing everything they do must be pushed to match action to words, not treated as if words speak more loudly than actions. That attitude is what leads us to focus on what a gaggle of misfits with no power and less wisdom have to say about each other, just because they're on the teevee screen.
Get serious. Get independent. Get principled. And stay nonviolent toward everything in the world except your television.
Al Martin, former Navy intelligence officer and former Wall Street broker, former Iran-contra co-conspirator with Ollie's Follies, is starting to write about the possible use of the many civil unrest internment camps built in the US by Halliburton and related contractors. In his view, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), makes it possible for expanded use of the US military and expanded powers for law enforcement to “contain” the unemployed in work camps–which might be a good thing, in his view. [The bill passed the Senate but has not passed the House at this time.]
Our government, under a program called REX 84 (Readiness Exercise 84) runs over 800 detention camps nationwide. They are all fully operational and ready to receive prisoners should the US government institute martial law.
Phi Beta Iota: Variants of this stuff are for sale at Brookstone and Best Buy. The US has consistently refused to be serious about emission control, downlink security, and real-time processing. This is a “disaster” only to the degree that it reveals–once again–how immature the US “intelligence” archipelago of fiefdoms actually is.
Iranian TV has shown the first video footage of an advanced US drone aircraft that Tehran says it downed near the Afghan border.
Images show Iranian military officials inspecting the RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft which appears to be undamaged.
US officials have acknowledged the loss of the unmanned plane, saying it had malfunctioned.
However, Iranian officials say its forces electronically hijacked the drone and steered it to the ground.
Click on Image to Enlarge
BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the intact condition of the Sentinel tends to support their claim.
Iran's Press TV said that the Iranian army's “electronic warfare unit” brought down the drone on 4 December as it was flying over the city of Kashmar, about 140 miles (225km) from the Afghan border.
Nato said at the weekend that an unarmed reconnaissance aircraft had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan late last week when its operators lost control of it.
Pentagon officials have said they are concerned about Iran possibly acquiring information about the technology.
Phi Beta Iota: Our first impression has been that Iran has downed the UAV with an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) beam. This is much cooler. As with the Taliban in Afghanistan able to hijack the downlinks, the Iranians simply hijacked the entire aircraft. From where we sit, the Chinese (who ride electric power circuits into “isolated” computers) and the Iranians [Persians, more PhDs per capita than most] are laughing at us, while the Russians simply ignore us. Newsflash for the Pentagon: our technology is not that great. Classifying the idiot vulnerabilities does not work–something we have been pointing out for twenty years.
Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York):When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.
The US Air Force dumped the cremated, partial remains of at least 274 troops in a landfill before halting the secretive practice in 2008, the Washington Post reported Thursday.
No matter who is specifically to blame here, this story is certainly a powerful metaphor for what's wrong with worldwide society. Our systems have taken on a life of their own. They've become massive machines that no one is steering. And we've become fodder for them. Some people have more power than others. But mostly these machines are blind collectives that are beyond the control of any single individual or group. According to the article, senior Pentagon officials never authorized this decision and were unaware of it. But anyone who's ever been in the military knows that the culture tends to force underlings to get creative when it comes to fulfilling objectives. Orders are not always doable but they must be done anyway. And the culture is a collective entity.
What's likely is that the person in charge of the US Air Force mortuary at Dover Air Force Base was facing a dilemma created by his superiors. And the bottom line must have been money. I'm guessing that budgetary pressures, time deadlines, and political correctness (not calling attention to piles of body parts) were the motivating forces here. These conflicting forces probably left the head of the mortuary with only one option: dump the remains as quickly and cheaply as possible.
The article goes on to say that “an additional group of 1,762 remains . . . were also disposed of in this manner.” Knee-jerk reaction tends to drive us to search for an individual to blame. The Tea Party will want to blame Obama. The Democrats will want to blame Bush policies. The military will want to blame the lowest man on the totem pole. And the officer who applied all the pressure to the man who actually made the decision, probably has an airtight defense; because he probably never told him exactly how to solve the problem, and he probably said that he didn't want to know, or need to know (all discussed verbally and in private, no doubt); because the military also trains people to cover their asses at all costs! It's a basic survival skill.
The real culprit here is likely to be the collective. And collectives tend to dilute the responsibility of individuals. That's what makes collectives so dangerous. We would become extinct as a species without them, but they have grown so massive and powerful that top-down management no longer works. The solution, of course, is open-source intelligence.
We are no longer driving these collectives. No one is. They are driving us! Even the most powerful leaders are disposable. But the collectives that they manage go on and on without them. And if they try to reform them, they will be quickly ejected and replaced. Our collectives have become blind machines. And only truly open collective intelligence, collective wisdom, and other open-source systems can save us from them.
But we must remember that although this incident can be used as a metaphor for the problem, the incident itself is not a metaphor but a reality. Our collectives have become giant meat grinders. That too is a metaphor. But the networks of cause and effect it describes are all too real. Who did the heroes who were unceremoniously dumped in a landfill serve? Ultimately they served a blind collective and were discarded by the same.
A blame game or a witch hunt can't save future heroes from a similar fate. If the Pentagon wants to do justice to these men and their families, they must blame their own military culture, which is what led to this disgraceful and undignified end. They must start openly challenging the blind aspects of the collective they serve. And citizens (in whose name the collective operates) must support them in the effort.
A good model might be truth and reconciliation, which waives individual culpability in order to get at the truth of the matter. And in this case I think the truth will liberate everyone. The collective can't be tried and sentenced and sent to prison. The collective can't be embarrassed or humiliated. The collective has no need to avoid responsibility or defend itself, because the collective is an abstract entity with no life other than what we give it.
