Aka George Smith e-mail: webmaster at dickdestiny
I cover the IT security industry for IT-Harvest. I am the author of Surviving Cyberwar, a Government Institutes book available on Amazon. I have presented at conferences and industry events in 26 countries on six continents. I am a prolific source for journalists and news media.
I bet.
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Eternal war-footing and willful blindness to what’s happening on the homefront being two of them. The complete handing over to the military of how the US deals with the world and is perceived as a nation being still another.
Maybe Lady Gaga is famous worldwide. But the ubiquity of Predator drones and camouflage uniforms make them much much bigger.
The top commander of U.S. special operations forces said Wednesday that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida is bloodied and “nearing its end,” but he warned the next generation of militants could keep special operations fighting for a decade to come …
But the four-star admiral warned of the fight to come against what he called al-Qaida 2.0
Does al Qaida actually refer to itself now as 1.x going toward 2.0?
Rhetorical. It’s another fatuous American semantic invention from people who think only in terms of devices, be they digital or real world.
A few one line rebuttals for the one-liner claims in the Associated Press piece:
[With] new leaders like American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, who Olson said understands America better than Americans understand him.
Doubt it. Yeah, every older American whose been living in Yemen for years understands “America.” Righty-right.
Olson said others like al-Awlaki will probably refine their message to appeal to a wider audience …
Not if Inspire magazine and Adam Gadahn are examples. They’re both jokes.
“This idea of being able to wait over the horizon and spring over and chop off heads doesn’t really work,” he said, describing the “yin and yang” of special operations as including capture-and-kill raids as well as long-term engagement with host countries’ militaries.
Then why is that the entire national thrust? And how has propping up toady country leadership with military aid worked out over the last decade?
The latter involves U.S. troops “developing long-term relationships, learning languages, meeting people, studying histories, learning black markets.”
See above. There’s no evidence buying the locals off through the
new Peace Corpsworks. Arab Spring indicates many are pretty much done with thinking highly of us.
The article notes near the end that the next super-leader of special ops will be Bill McRaven, the overall commander of the bin Laden raid.
And where has the dividend of actually disposing of Osama bin Laden gone?
Here at home there was no dividend except for a couple days of cheering. Then it was business as usual. He might as well not been popped at all.
A good deal of this blog has been devoted to the Economic Treason and Empire’s Dog Feces tags over the past twelve months. Both deal with the only area where American manufacturing jobs are protected: arms manufacturing.
The rest of the country has been allowed to wither. The primary US export to the world is weapons. The country now leads in very little except minor innovations in the fields of smart bombs and unmanned flying killing machines which are of no benefit to anyone except the CEOs of the companies that make the things.
Imagine! The nation that invented rock ‘n’ roll and the electric guitar shipped all that stuff away and fired most everyone involved in making the equipment for it.
But the M1 tank, the F-16, the MRAPS, all the flying drones and idiotic robots and pathetic ray gun test systems — all that stuff is protected labor for which any price will be paid.
Imagine! This is a country that spends more on its expanding killer drone budget for obliterating small numbers of paupers and the even more unfortunate around the world than it wants to expend on ensuring that our food and drugs are safe.
Pine View Farm tips us to an article on the same in the Asia Times today.
An excerpt from the A Times piece:
If [the weapons shops] were disbanded, the economy would be crippled by soaring unemployment, plant closures, and bankruptcies.
Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power, writes:
Most politicians understand … that weapons production is currently the number one industrial export product of the US. They know that major industrial job creation is largely coming from the Pentagon. Thus most politicians, from both parties, want to continue to support the military industrial complex gravy train for their communities.
I’m considering starting a new blog category. Permanent Fail has filled up quickly. Now we’re into the Decline and Fall stage. It needs its own category.
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From the New York Times, Louis Uchitelle’s conclusion that losing the manufacturing base wasn’t such a good idea.
Quotes from various “experts,” easy observables by anyone on the street:
Losing an industry or ceasing to manufacture a particular product, in this case stainless steel flatware, has indeed become a fairly frequent event. Just in the last few years, the last sardine cannery, in Maine, closed its doors. Stainless steel rebars, the sturdy rods that reinforce concrete in all kinds of construction, are now no longer made in America. Neither are vending machines or incandescent light bulbs or cellphones or laptop computers.
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Concern is increasing that this decline has gone too far. “I think there is a growing recognition that a diminished manufacturing sector will undermine our economy,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics. (Unintentional knee slapper by ‘economic expert.’ Correction: “Has undermined the economy through mass unemployment and diminished buying power.”)
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How did the nation get into this situation? It gambled, in effect, that by importing more from foreign suppliers and from American companies that had set up shop abroad, consumer prices for manufactured products would fall, without any sacrifice in product quality. Low-wage workers abroad would make that happen.
American manufacturers, on the other hand, would be the world’s best innovators, developing sophisticated new products here at home and producing them, at least initially, in their domestic factories.
The first part of the arrangement worked very well. Consumer prices did fall as imports flooded in — from foreign manufacturers, of course, but also from factories newly opened abroad by American multinationals … The second part of the arrangement, however, has been more problematic. As it turns out, the United States is not the only path-breaker.
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The loss of manufacturing capacity, measured in lost workers, is startling. From the high point in the summer of 1979, through last month, employment in manufacturing has fallen by 8.1 million, to
11.6 million, with most of the drop in just the last decade. While consumers have benefited from lower prices, made possible by unrestricted imports, on the other side of the ledger are tens of billion of dollars in lost manufacturing wages.Something else is gone, too. “We had a storehouse of knowledge and skill built up in these workers and we can’t use it now,” says James Jordan, president of the Interstate Maglev Project, promoting a high-speed rail technology that uses special magnets to levitate and propel trains. Maglev was invented in the United States … [but not used here].
Uchitelle’s piece, of course, forgets one big thing.
The US still manufactures weapons. Lots and lots of weapons. And that’s about all.
Furthermore, weapons manufacturing is not constrained by any of the things which have destroyed domestic product-making in the US.
It is not subject to death spiral pricing competition; its workers are not constantly downsized for cheap overseas slave labor. And it is underwritten entirely by the US taxpayers even if the taxpayers can afford it less and less.
There is no network of Walmart superstores pillaging the business, offering equivalent dirt cheap Chinese made kit for every missile, armored vehicle, landmine and drone manufactured in the States.
Diminished buying power and lost wages have no effect on US weapons manufacturing. Sacrifice is for everybody else.
Uchitelle’s story frets that the US will cede “innovation” due to loss of domestic manufacturing. Unless you count Mark Zuckerberg, future Nobel laureate, Pulitzer prize winner and global bringer of freedom to oppressed populations worldwide.
It has not lost “innovation,” if that’s what one calls it, in arms manufacturing.
There are General Atomics drones for every future possible application in global assassination, new varieties of cluster bombs, elaborate grenade launchers for blowing up people hiding behind rocks, and robots galore, to no discernible effect, for the forever war in Afghanistan.
It’s a great game for those on the winning side. For most of us, however, not so much.
The most highly read story on the blog early this year has been Not Made in China: US Bullshit Manufacturing. (Basically because of Internet random event. A high traffic sight, WhatReallyHappened, linked here after a few Twitters. Paradoxically, I don’t use Twitter anymore, being obsolete in my mental processes.)
From it:
[While] what production of durable goods in the US that remains is charted, it — along with the fortunes of the middle class and the new mass of unemployed — cratered in 2009. However, military production did not.
It went through a minor dip and then soared.
This is immoral. It destroys any argument on fairness and shared burden and consequences being a part of US society.
It is also economic treason.
The related series: US Bullshit Manufacturing.
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This quote from the New York Times piece channeling a recent article in the journal, Science, is all you need to know:
“With 15 to 20 percent of biology teachers teaching creationism,” he continued, “this is the biggest failure in science education. There’s no other field where teachers reject the foundations of their science like they do in biology.”
When I was in high school in the Seventies in very conservative Pine Grove, PA, this was not an issue.
One might say it has evolved, driven by extreme religious right GOP efforts to use science as a wedge issue, not only because its findings conflict with its ideology but because people can be rallied by insinuating their faith is under attack by the other side which believes the hated “elites.”
PGAHS had a fine biology lab and equally good instruction. It prepared my entire class, most of which was headed toward a college education.
One of the academics interviewed by the Times did not think more education was an answer. And that’s because the right rejects evolution outright.
“At least 25 percent of high school teachers in Minnesota explicitly teach creationism,” says one professor to the Times.
This would have presented me with a dilemma in 1972.
Walk and try to find a school where there wasn’t a creationist (PGAHS had only one high school biology instructor) or have my time wasted.
And when the president went on television to say we need more interest in science I just laughed. If people who were in a position to do something about that in this country now we would be able to reverse this atrocious statistic and run the creationists out of town.
The paradox is that American science hasn’t been up to this job. For many years the denial of science was taken as just a laugh-it-off kind of thing in University-land.
Who’s laughing now?
One has only to review the history and continuing existence of Michael Behe in the biology department at Lehigh University, my old alma mater, for a working example.
So we don’t live in a country where just more rational discourse has any effect. We live in a country that is in decline, that has lost a self-correcting capability, and this is one symptom of it.
When half the political establishment detests science and actively works to undermine it, it’s a driver of decline.
Over at Armchair Generalist, Jason Sigger has embedded a bit from Bill Maher. Here five trivial people, Maher included, argue global warming and evolution.
At this point there are only two solutions to the behavior.
The nice one is that you don’t give the Republicans an opening. You don’t invite them if you plan to discuss it. It’s not entertainment. It’s just more of the problem.
If Republicans — or any random heevahavas — get to open their mouths they present myths and falsehoods, now packed with the maddening implication that it’s they who have the scientific outlook because it is they who have evaluated all the data and are now being criticized for it.
They cling to the idea that the rightness of something is determined by the number of people who adopt it. And since their tribe is the one to adopt non-belief in science, that is what’s right.
The not-nice solution is to wind up and knock the grinning Georgia politician’s teeth out when he starts up on cable television.
“It’s a mystery how these people get dressed in the morning,” concludes Armchair Generalist.
They are a collective disgrace.
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The American habit of brainlessly bragging about all things always produces something like this:
It looks and acts like something best left in the hands of Sylvester Stallone’s “Rambo,” but this latest dream weapon is real — and the US Army sees it becoming the Taliban’s worst nightmare …
After years of development, the XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System, about the size of a regular rifle, has now been deployed to US units on the battlefields of Afghanistan, where the Army expects it to be a “game-changer” in its counterinsurgency operations.
And for those who get erections watching clips from Futureweapons on YouTube:
The gun’s stats are formidable: it fires 25mm air-bursting shells up to 2,300 feet (700 meters), well past the range of most rifles used by today’s soldiers, and programs them to explode at a precise distance, allowing troops to neutralize insurgents hiding behind walls, rocks or trenches or inside buildings.
“This is the first time we’re putting smart technology into the hands of the individual soldier …”
Use of the XM25 can slash civilian deaths and damage …
The next weapon, always promised to be game-changing and nice to civilians. And then the war grinds on, and civilians keep getting killed, the Taliban doesn’t give up, the bodies stack up, the government remains corrupt, its soldiers turncoats, etc …
But the promos sure look great.
Just can’t curb the bragging and delusional thinking over weapons technology.
Bugsplat was going to change everything, too. Not to mention the sensor-fused cluster bomb, the … and the …
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Here’s a story, straight from Popular Mechanics, written by and for guys who get hard-ons thinking about machines that blow foreigners up, preferably those smaller, darker and poorer.
Featured prominently on Google News, which was probably paid to display it, here are the great quotes:
How small can air-to-ground weapons get? Air Force officials are publicly suggesting the development of 1-pound munitions that could kill an individual in a crowded area without harming innocents standing nearby.
So, guys, you go stand right next to the wooden target on the test range, then. Any takers? Thought not.
[The small flying cluster bomb/anti-tank mine] spins like a maple seed as it descends, scanning the area for its targets using laser and infrared sensors.
Like a maple seed. I bet the p.r. person at Textron who came up with that description got a raise.
The 9-foot torpedo, petite enough to be carried by unmanned submarines and drone helicopters, is currently under development at Penn State University, in association with the Naval Undersea Warfare Center.
Petite. A 9-foot torpedo is petite. Who could write such s—? Someone not to be invited over for drinks and barbecue, that’s for sure.
Now, if you know some androids who throw parties where they eat bags of arsenic and roofing nails for kicks …
The work of that segment of the economy unhurt by the Great Recession. If you were in the business of making petite torpedoes and anti-tank mines that spin like maple seeds, things have been great.
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All the special people are Tom Friedman’s friends and mentors. And they always have a book or a lecture or a plan to fix everything. Usually after they’ve spent decades as culprits to the current mess.
Plus, there’s the other thing: Tom and all his friends do not, under any circumstance, feel any pain. That’s for everyone else. The rich and famous only advise. All others are told to STFU and eat their peas.
DD doesn’t know why he read Friedman’s column on Sunday. Was it an accidental click? An inner desire for punishment? Had I not enough inspiration to get my daily crank on?
No idea.
Here’s Tom on one of his special friends and our problems, prescribing reindustrialization after he’s spent his entire career pushing for everything to be moved to China:
“The Frugal Superpower: America’s Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era” is actually the title of a very timely new book by my tutor and friend Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert. “In 2008,” Mandelbaum notes, “all forms of government-supplied pensions and health care (including Medicaid) constituted about 4 percent of total American output.” At present rates, and with the baby boomers soon starting to draw on Social Security and Medicare, by 2050 “they will account for a full 18 percent of everything the United States produces.”
[Certainly an assertion the Catfood Commission can put to good use.]
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After all, Europe is rich but wimpy. China is rich nationally but still dirt poor on a per capita basis and, therefore, will be compelled to remain focused inwardly and regionally.
Mandelbaum argues for three things: First, we need to get ourselves back on a sustainable path to economic growth and reindustrialization, with whatever sacrifices, hard work and political consensus that requires.
Yes, always with great sacrifice and hard rock work for everyone down the line. And then these guys can write another book about it.
This quote from Matt Taibbi describes the practice much better than I can:
On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans.
Friedman’s one for the lynching party in “The Patriotic Class War Song.”
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Predictably, Raytheon’s pain ray has generated quite a bit of bad publicity along with the usual brief corporate news pieces in which a local TV station or paper sends a reporter to be a trial gimp.
The reporter invariably giggles and jumps out of the way as Raytheon technicians or jailers look impishly on. See the wonder that’s taken a decade for the US military, in conjunction with an arms developer, to come up with! It’s a revolution.
From Associated Press:
A device designed to control unruly inmates by blasting them with a beam of intense energy that causes a burning sensation is drawing heat from civil rights groups who fear it could cause serious injury and is “tantamount to torture.”
The mechanism, known as an “Assault Intervention Device,” (or AID) is a stripped-down version of a military gadget that sends highly focused beams of energy at people and makes them feel as though they are burning. The Los Angeles County sheriff’s department plans to install the device by Labor Day, making it the first time in the world the technology has been deployed in such a capacity.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California criticized Sheriff Lee Baca’s decision in a letter sent Thursday, saying that the technology amounts to a ray gun at a county jail. The 4-feet-tall weapon, which looks like a cross between a robot and a satellite radar, will be mounted on the ceiling and can swivel.
It is remotely controlled by an operator in a separate room who lines up targets with a joystick.
The ACLU said the weapon was “tantamount to torture,” noting that early military versions resulted in five airmen suffering lasting burns. It requested a meeting with Baca, who declined the invitation.
What much of the news has missed is that Raytheon has been trying to peddle the pain ray into prisons for years. And it has long had a big influence in the LA Sheriff’s Department, where Sid Heal presided over a long career as the local point man for bringing stupid applications in cutting edge technology, rays and various gadgets, into the force.
Mostly unsuccessfully.
The folks who keep planes from crashing into one another over at the FAA were none too pleased to read about that little UAV demo conducted by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department this weekend, with the agency telling Sheriff Lee Baca and company to keep their drone grounded pending the result of an investigation. What’s more, the department could actually face disciplinary action for the SkySeer’s inaugural flight — FAA spokesperson Laura Brown commented that although the agency wasn’t “peeved,” they were “definitely surprised” that authorization had not been requested for the trial. Commander Sid Heal, point man for this program tasked with
spying on Angelinoslocating criminal suspects …
In 2008, Heal retired but not before indicating to New Yorker magazine that he was interested in a Raytheon consulting offer, based on peddling the pain ray. Here, from earlier this week.
Those who’ve followed the ADS story know that Heal and, by extension — the Sheriff’s Department, have longed for the pain ray for some time.
If you read the AP piece to its conclusion, you see the now standard assertions — built up over the years — that the pain ray can’t possibly hurt anybody. Plus it will only be used by people who are trained to exquisite fineness in its use, never afflicted with the cloudy or bad judgment which is usually part of the human condition.
Sure they’re intelligence-insulting, but it’s the way of the p.r. campaign for the thing.
Many authoritarian Americans are always keen to believe whatever rubbish is presented to them, as long as its couched in magical terms which assure that breakthroughs in technology have made a burning weapon something that doesn’t physically burn. It’s all in your mind. Or your nerve endings. Or the top layer of your skin.
Whatever, who cares, its prisoners we’re talking about and if you’re in jail in the US, you deserve everything bad that comes your way. And this is a good flavor of bad, its chief scientists/engineers at Raytheon — all of them — say so.
The pain ray is a weapon for using in cases where people can’t shoot back or launch any kind of counterattack. It’s critical the target be helpless. Like many reporters sent by news agencies for testing.
The ADS — or AID — is not a survivable piece of gear and it’s why it was peddled to the US military for use against unarmed crowds. The US military brought it back from Afghanistan without firing a shot, for logical reasons.
Winning hearts and minds is not the pain ray’s strong suit.
Paradoxically, when the Active Denial System was first marketed it was called the Sheriff and part of the idea was that it was great because it wouldn’t actually kill people, thus pissing off victims and civilians less.
“Sell the Sheriff to the sheriffs!” was probably on a Raytheon sales memo somewhere.
All you need to know about the delirious history of the pain ray – at Globalsecurity.
This morning’s post by Digby was depressing but spot on, particularly if you grew up where DD did:
Maybe we need to realize that our old arguments about how Americans are so accustomed to living the good life that they would resist the natural consequence of this new feudalism aren’t going to work. This anti-tax fervor has passed out of the political realm and into the religious. When people would rather that their kids choke on dirt than pay taxes, I’m guessing that pointing out that their unwillingness to pay taxes will result in tainted meat and dangerous drugs won’t convince them. Living in a primitive state is a sign of their devotion.
For a hard core in Pine Grove, Pennsyltucky, in the late Sixties and early Seventies, this was exactly how they thought. However, better minds generally prevailed in the running of the state.
That’s not so any longer and it’s why the peoples of other western nations now laugh at the idea of America. They know that come the November elections, the United States government will — after a mercilessly brief period — go back to fast-tracking the less-than-half- of-the-country-delusion that being the biggest banana republic, ever, is great.
All because the president wasn’t quite strong enough.
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