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Haditha, and the dogs of war

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If you take any group of people, arm them, scare them to the point of paranoia by throwing bombs, and firing guns at them, and you are going to get people killed. More often, innocent bystanders, than any of the perpetrators of the violence. It is going to happen. it will always happen. Only fools believe that it won’t happen, and only cowards cover it up. Mix that up with civilian control of the war and you will get massacres and coverups. There is no reason, and no reasonability in war, only raw uncontrolled emotions. The worst kind of emotions, hate, anger and fear. The same ones the GOP is fond of cultivating in the general population. And it unsustainable, and uncontainable, it will explode.

That’s just one of the Dogs Shakespeare refers to “Cry ‘HAVOC’ and let slip the dogs of war!”

It’s one of the reasons War should always be the LAST resort of Politician’s and not the first one. And should never be unleashed by someone who has never been in a war.

Xenophobic Far Right rewriting history

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I have chosen to use the words ‘Far Right’ rather than the Republicans, as it has become very clear that the current Far Right government of the U.S. is not what the Republican party stands for.

I now come to the conclusion that the Far Right is in control of the government in Australia as well as the U.S.. And they share the same propaganda tools, fear of terror and are manipulating the same general xenophobic stories. I discovered this after to an Australian tourist yesterday. And he was complaining that foreigners were moving into Australia and into tight communities bringing in their own culture. With intention of changing Australian culture. Now this had the familiar ring of the the immigration issues in the U.S. (really everywhere)

The Far Right has used this fear of culture change to scare the public into surrendering their freedoms for the appearance of some security. The whole argument that foreigners are attempting to change the culture that they are moving into, wither it’s in the U.S., Australia, Ireland or England by establishing communities as some sort of ‘foothold’ for some imagined invasion is bogus, and just a propaganda tool of control.

Historically ‘enclaves’ have always existed when populations merge. Anyone moving into a culture will naturally seek out familiarity. It’s more or less like dipping your toe into a pool of water to see if it’s war enough. The Irish in America, or Italians formed communities in the U.S. a hundred years ago. There are still ares in New York call “Little Italy” for instances. It did not then, nor does it still indicate that the Italians were seeking to change the American Culture. They may have added a little flavor (who doesn’t love Pizza?) and the Irish brought Corned Beef. But the enclaves that my new Australian friend fears do not represent an invasion. And while it turns out that his origins are really English, and his intention was to immerse himself into the Australian culture. Others from more diverse cultures may have a bit more of a culture shock, and require more time, and culture “therapy” in order to adapt. Will they leave cultural artifacts in the Australian (or Irish, or U.S) culture, maybe, but their assimilation will happen, and if allowed, it may only bring with it the better parts of that culture. After all, the Australian culture does not represent the Aboriginal origins of that Island, neither does the culture of the United States of American represent the native Indian culture that was it’s origin.

And that’s really the weapon of fear, it all boils down to a fear of change. The real tool of the Far Right, and the conservatives that represent the Republicans. And the history as rewritten by the Far Right is that these Invasions of culture must be fought, and turned back like any invader. When in reality these cultural staging areas have existed for countless generations. And have never constituted an affront to their host countries.

Stop fearing change, it will happen with you, or without you. Really the only fear we should have is of fear itself. We can help the assimilation of these new friends in our society, through education and socialization, and not by Fear, and alienation.

A brief historical of the WWW

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Just so no one forgets a few elements of the history of the WWW, often referred to as the World Wide Web.

1) In reality there was a beginning to WWW before HTTP servers appeared on the internet.

and only later did HTTP, or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol appear, along with HTML, or Hyper Text Markup language, a derived, or DTD from SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language)

2) The original ‘Web’ browser was Mosaic as it place all of the WWW protocols under one browser. And linked these together to what we now call the World Wide Web, a real “Mosaic” of the Internet protocols.

I know this as I was developing Gopher and Anonymous FTP servers when HTTP was developed. And you can still find some of the protocols still listed in the URL of your favorite browser

http://
gopher://
ftp://
https://
shttp://
archie://

The Usurpation of Honor, the roots of Tyranny

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A few days ago I stumbled on an article (an article I can’t find now) that detailed a subtle change in the oath of secrecy that is rendered at the CIA and NSA. The article went something like this. The original oath;

I swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States, and that I will obey the lawful orders of the President of the United States

had been changed to;

I swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States, and that I will obey the lawful orders of the President of the United States

Now this is very subtle, and makes the assumption that the President is issuing legal orders. But is it strikes at the heart of the oath. The uses of the word ‘lawful’ removes the honor that is required of the oath taker. That he or she is required to understand the meaning of lawful, with regards to the Constitution of the United States. It also strikes blow a for tyranny in that it is tantamount to an oath of loyalty to the President and not to the laws of the United States. An oath of fealty to President Bush.

In my search to find the original article I came upon this as further evidence that I was not misplaced in my fear that something was amiss in the subtle change

…the oath represented more than a simple, ceremonial formality; rather, it provided overarching guidance and a standard of moral conduct, as opposed to dictating specific, limited criteria.

And the limited criteria represented with this change was to relinquish the responsibility of the individual to interpret the legality of orders from the president and place into presidential control all liability for the interpretation.

It’s roughly the equivalent of a soldier saying “I was only following orders” at the Nuremberg trials.

And then I stumble upon this article Sworn fealty to the president as the answer to everything and realized that this subtle change was exactly what Bush requires from his staff, his ‘serfs’. Loyalty, not to the constitution, or the truth, or to the American people. But loyalty to GW Bush. The same loyalty that would be due any tyrant, by that tyrant.

It also goes far in explaining the purge at the CIA. All the previous staff having sworn using the old oath, the one requiring the oath taker to interpret legality, are being purged and replaced with personnel sworn to fealty to Bush.

That should scare everyone. We are not worried about a dictator in the U.S. we already have one.

The GOP is cracking up, Paradigm change in the wind

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I can’t begin to tell you where all these links lead you. I can only tell you where they lead me. The first article Revisionist History Is yet another attempt to spin the history of the Iraq War in President Bush’s direction, but it created a question from the near right Neo-NeoCon about Why this war is so hated And I took time to comment there. But the arguments on both sides did not present a clear listen, from either side of the equation. And it only reminded me that any investigation into any event should be confined by ‘motives and passions’. and not by any ‘beliefs’ or philosophy one has.

It did illustrate the desperate measures the GOP it taking to spin history in a positive manner, and how badly it has worked. Many right wing blogs are now questioning ‘things’, unlike before, the unquestioned belief that the president was the source of all truth. The right has begun to question.

Yet another spinning article about Bush-hatred a threat to national security misses the point entirely. Bush is only a man, a man who should be constrained by the constitution, the laws of the United States. But who, in this article, is being elevated to the level of Godhood. My perspective, if Bush hatred is so great, then he should step aside in order to reunite America and prevent this disharmony. I don’t hold out any hope that the good of america will ever cross Bush’s mind.

NSA domestic Spying and data mining

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There has been a lot of talk about the NSA domestic spying. The fact that AT&T Sprint, and others have been sending internet traffic, and phone calls to the NAS is not in Doubt. The issue is what they are doing with the data and phone calls.

Data mining is problematic, and probably always will be. The problem has to do with reducibility of content, and decisive targeting of probable results sets. In business, data mining focuses on business issues that can be, more or less, narrowed down. Discovering the percentage of persons with blue eyes who purchase your product might be interesting, but probably not useful unless you can link this data to an artifact that Blue eyed individuals purchase more of your product. Discussing terror takes on subtle difference wither you take it from the context of the “the grandchildren terrorizing their grandparents”, or the “we will be terrorizing the Capitol building” . Both word elements will trigger an automated scan, either vocal, or digital, but neither will be useful until connected with pertinent relevant data and reduced to comply with in the context of the target required.
What is the percentage of usage of the word terror in current conversations, and text? And how much reduction does it take to get to something useful? Does your filtration, remove valuable information.

You could simplify this issue by considering the general issues of the IT world. The distilling of facts into information.

I used to work in the Telecom world, and we had a cell phone fraud unit that, in order to catch fraud established a phone pattern recognition system. Not unlike the NSA’s own requirement. But unlike the NSA it’s target was focused on fraud. A requirement the telco applied to good customer service. But unlike the NSA privacy was not an issue. The design of the data mining system dissociated personal identification from phone numbers. The system only established a cell phone calling pattern for each phone number in the system. There was nothing to connect the user of the phone to the number at all. What was being detected was, change.

For everyone, there can be an associated pattern, a group of familiar phone numbers, a common event.
Calling your wife on your way home from work is a pattern. And can, over time, establish a rhythm, a pattern to the phone usage. And should that phone suddenly start calling Brazil, the call no longer fits the established pattern, and would trip a warning, which would be forwarded to a fraud investigator.

This is mealy an example, and evidence that the NSA did not need to acquire the amount and types of data that they requested in order to look for terrorist. They were spying, and listening in on Americans, and for that matter everyone else on the internet.

Time to dig out that old PGP encryption key.

The real Nuclear energy

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When people talk about nuclear energy, they are, by ignorance, lumping all nuclear energy into Fission Nuclear energy. There is another, Fusion, and unlike Fission, it has more potential, and far fewer risks.

Years ago in a Technology Forecasting class, I made a bold prediction that;

there will be commercial fusion power by the year 2000.

I was wrong, to the disappointment of the world. But I did qualify my prediction with the speculation that that first fusion plant would be a converted experimental reactor. And now my prediction may be forming, a bit latter than predicted. But when the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) does manage to get constructed it is expected to become commercially viable. Hence the Moment of truth for nuclear fusion scheme now that the Experts ‘cleared hurdle in fusion research’

Here’s hoping for a Nuclear Fission free past, and a new clean nuclear Fusion future.

Aer Lingus and representative government

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I was listening to a discussion of the privatizing of Aer Lingus last night. I was struck with a comment made by some ‘expert’ on the matter of privatization. The comment went something like this.

Some ministers were blocking the privatization efforts because there are no votes in it.

 


and I was gob smacked. He had put is finger on why no one is happy with the government. The public is only now recovering from the Eircom fiasco when the government gave away the phone company to the banks, and other profiteers, screwing the citizens of Ireland who had invested in eircom, only to be ripped off by corrupt politicians, the same politicians that are engineering this rip-off of the Irish airline.
 
But this points to another more serious problem, representative. This ‘expert’ knew that the general public, the voters of Ireland, do not approve of this privatization effort. They know full well that no good will come of it. But the politicans have so little regard  for the voters that put them into office that they will completely ignore their constituents, and operate only in the best interests of the profiteers and banks. It’s no wonder that this government has extended the length of the freedom of information act so far into the future, they can all be safely in the Bahamas when the facts come out.
 
I will now predict that within 2 years of this privatization, there will be no Aer Lingus. And the Irish flying public and many of the airports in Ireland will no longer have any air services available.

The Phony war on American Christianity

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The so called war on American Christianity is GOP propaganda, clear and simple. If you want to stir up the fundamentalist, bring up a war on Christianity. The current email propaganda I have been subjected to goes like this.

There is a war on Christmas

“We can no longer say Merry Christmas” . Now it has to be Season’s Greeting ”

This isn’t true, we are just as free to say Merry Christmas as we ever were. If the greeting card companies are printing more ‘Season Greeting’s’ cards it’s to maximize profits it’s hardy a war on Christmas. However if right wing talk show hosts say it is a war, well surly it must be so? Not likely, just more GOP propaganda. Something to fire the passions of the wingnut fringe.

“In God We Trust”

“In God We Trust” is our national motto. This is not some Christian,
right wing, political slogan.. We adopted this motto because Christian
men and women…….on Christian principles………….
founded this nation….. and this is clearly documented.

Actually It is clearly documented In God We Trust

is the current national motto of the United States of America and of the Great State of Florida. It was so designated by an act of Congress in 1956 and officially supersedes “E Pluribus Unum” (From Many, One) according to section 5114 of title 31, United States Code. President Eisenhower signed the resolution into law on 30 July 1956.

So the motto was not the official motto for most of the history of the U.S. and was not because Christians founded the nation. Besides the point that Muslim, Jews and Christians all pray to the same God, does not make this motto Christian. As noted in the case of MADALYN MURRAY O’HAIR et al. v. W. MICHAEL BLUMENTHAL, SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY, et al. (462 F. Supp. 19 — W.D. Tex 1978), the court opined: “Its use is of a patriotic or ceremonial character and bears no true resemblance to a governmental sponsorship of religious exercise.”
I personally prefer E Pluribus Unum, From many Nations, one Nation. It’s what America is, the combination of all nations. And this brings about the rest of this propaganda email

American Culture

We are happy with our culture and have no desire to change, and we really don’t care how you did things where you came from.
This is OUR COUNTRY,
our land, and our lifestyle…we have our own culture, our own society, our own language and our own lifestyle. We speak ENGLISH, not Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, or any other language. Therefore, if you wish to become part of our society, learn the language!

The answer here is that Many people are surprised to learn that the United States has no official language. And as for culture, that too has been the aggregate of both it’s immigrant and native populations. The fact that most of the culture reflects western European culture, does not take away from the multicultural nature of our restaurants. The United States has, over the majority of it’s history, been a culture composed of the best features of it’s population. It has never been chained to any particular cultural eddies and back-currents. Mind you learning English will go further to an immigrants integration into the ‘American culture’ but as that culture is always changing you must keep on your toes.

This propaganda is indicative of of the Republican strategy of the old ‘One Two’ punch, Stir up anger, and emotions, then direct the anger at a target. I believe that the next email I receive will be one of ‘It the Democrats that are to blame for the polluting of our culture’. Or it’s the Liberal’s fault, or some named politician that the GOP Neocons are against. The fact that this propaganda is playing on the emotions of the conservative voters tendency to resist change in any form, a belief in ‘the good old days’ and that the ‘radicals’ are destroying America, is just that, propaganda. There is always going to be change, no one can stop it. The GOP only wants to get people to take their eye off the ball so they can continue their practice of corrupt political cronyism. A near royalty of political dynasties, dynasties which we as americans overthrew to become the United States of America.

Update: There does seem to be a move to formalize English as the national language here, but President George W. Bush has long opposed making English the country’s national language probably because he doesn’t speak english 😉

Michelle Malkin: Bush Critic, incites impeachment

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Michelle is inciting the Right Wing Bloggers to call for an Impeachment.

DENY, HEDGE, SPIN

This White House has another burgeoning debacle on its hands.

Message to (bush) apologists: Stop blaming the messengers. It’s only going to make those poll numbers you worry so much about worse.

Message to the White House: Stop blaming the messengers. Do us all a favor by ending this travesty and apologizing. And please don’t fire Mario Martinez for telling the reporter the truth.

Mass Media, and the Internet’s blogger truth.

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I have been reading plenty about the fears that the Television and print media are loosing ground to the Internet and bloggers as a source of news. And as I posted earlier I knew that I was missing the point as well. The mass media just like most of the reporters now are just repeating ‘stuff’ and not reporting the whole story. They never put the information into context, never illuminate the information into anything other than a mental monotone of words. It’s no wonder that no one listens to them any more, or worse yet listens and then gets it wrong.

Years ago I was on a Jury in a manslaughter case. (Trust me you do not want to be on a jury for capitol offense trial) I always thought that the nature of lawyers was to get at the truth in the case. But both the Defense and the Prosecution did more to withhold the truth than illustrate the truth. Both presented facts, in general terms, but what they left out was all the contextually important facts. We as a jury had to recreate the actions of what had happened. We had sat through a whole week of the trial, and then we spent more than a week deliberating, and analyzing what really went on.

This is what has happened to our very ‘legal’ and proper news in the mass media world. The lawyers have prevented the reporters from doing analysis of the news to prevent liability. So there is no real reporting, only information droplets dispensed from their sources are presented. Always legal deference can be applied. It’s always ‘Their’ information, ‘Their’ facts, or the ‘what your see is what you get’, the camera never lies. ‘We just report the news as we see it.’ And should things like ‘Bias’ be accused, well that’s not even a legal issue. You can’t call them a liar if they DON’T report the facts, only if they report the facts wrong.

And this brings us back to the Blogs. People are seeking the analysis that is missing from the news, they are seeking point, counterpoint. They have the news illustrated and illuminated to make sense of the world. Bloggers on their own are only responsible for their own opinions. Viewers of Blogs usually only visit blogs that generally reflect what the viewer is seeking. They receive the illustration painted in colors that are familiar to them. And if the mass media, afraid of the loss of revenue, seek to regain their viewers. The first place they will have to start is to, fire the lawyers, and get back to news analysis, and proper investigative reporting.

Mindless reporting, Scare Tactics

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It’s almost as if no one in the Media, or for that matter, any reporter, makes any connections with the facts. As an example:

Connecting these two articles,

Mac OS vulnerabilities increased 200 percent McAfee rains on Apple’s smug parade

and again

Cold water thrown on Apple TV claim

Leave it to McAfee to rain on those new television commercials Apple Computer is running about its virus-free computing.

and this article?
Vista to hit anti-spyware, firewall markets

New security features in Windows Vista will largely eliminate the need to run separate antispyware or firewall software, according to a new analyst report.

Spyware-killing Vista could take out rivals

The first two articles, while feeding on themselves, never makes the connection that McAfee, or for that matter any anti-virus company is facing elimination at the hands of the Microsoft Monopoly Monster. And that for them to survive they, like President Bush, must find a new enemy, and a new platform that needs their protection. It has very little to do with Apple needing virus protection. And everything to do with scare tactics as a marketing tool.

The GOP’s New Cold War

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Unsatisfied with being a hypocrite a liar and a traitor Dick Cheney’s speech spurs new Cold War. The GOP and the Bush administration must be desperate to boost it’s polling numbers by seeking out the ‘Old Enemy’, the tried and trusted Ronald Reagan Evil Empire. At least when Bush begins threatening to use Nuclear Weapons, the Russians can fight back. It does makes for a better scare tactic against the American people.

Who knows Cheney probabally gave the Russians, Stephen Colbert’s address as his own so when they try and nuke him, they’ll be doing he a Bush a favor.

Update: Well there must be a World War III in the planning stage in the White house after all.

Net Neutrality, and opinions, on Ethics.

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David S. Isenberg is worried that for once he has disagreed with Cory,
Tim Wu and Cory Doctorow on Network Neutrality

Disagreeing with Cory should be common. He’s only another person with an opinion.

As for Net Neutrality regulation, you will never know till you try, if it will work or not.

Anytime congress passes a law, someone’s rights get removed. But would you remove the restriction over which side of the road you drive on?

Many of the restrictions we place on ourselves are based on an understanding of our human nature. We know that we are greedy, we place restrictions on our greed.

Since corporations are treated as a ‘corporate body’ and hence treated in the courts as if the corporation were a human. You must treat that person based upon what you believe that persons ethics are founded on. Since Corporations have no moral soul, the observations of it’s ethical behavior are, that it has no ethics. And hence controls placed on the corporate person are greater than that placed on a human person.

Cory’s problem is that that he personalizes the issues from his own point of view. He believes that as an ethical person, he should be allow to control his own actions. And for the most part he can, except for his tendency to run off at the mouth. But he is not a corporation, who’s only ethic is profit. And has no moral compunction to control that motivation. Laws are passed to provide the moral lessons to corporations.