certainties of modern life, indeed

from "certainties of modern life upended in japan," in the new york times, we read:

In a country that prides itself on its orderliness and predictability, these are very anxious times. While their brethren in the north pick up the pieces of lives smashed by an earthquake and tsunami, residents of Tokyo, which suffered relatively little damage, are wondering whether to trust government reports that the city is largely out of harm’s way.

it goes without saying that things have been turned upside down in japan, but that is hardly a new phenomenon in a country that lives under constant threat of quakes. and it hasn't been all that many decades since what we call "man's inhumanity to man" was irrevocably scorched into the psyche of a generation of survivors.


japanese know what it's like to get the shit kicked out of them.


what's more at issue here is somewhat weakly referred to as "trust in government," when a more honest appraisal is that they have found they were sold out by a government that was seduced by a western way of doing business, and sacrificed to the gods of commerce for a handful of gold pieces.


earthquakes are nothing new but being hung out to dry in the worst nuclear disaster in history is another matter altogether. these developments out of the nuclear plant were plainly predictable, left to the fates, while the connivers were well away from the scene of the crime, and counting their loot.


and make no mistake: what happened here is like what will happen again in all of our lifetimes, unless the public stands up and demands that corporations and the immoral thugs that run them are brought to heel. until there is no profit motive driving industries like nuclear power, there is no way to ensure that corners won't be cut, or compromises made, the wring an extra nickel of profit out of the enterprise.


whether nuclear can ever be made a safe source of electricity is doubtful -- at least with current tecchnology, and especially under a system that rewards dishonest players with financial rewards for shoddy and dangerous work. until the incentive to cheat and profit is removed, how can we trust corporations with the health and safety of the human race?


for the japanese, we hear about how we should pray. that seems a bit weak under the circumstances. what is needed is action on the part of all of humanity to foreclose the possibility that powerful interests will never be able to wreak havoc on a people as have the slimy capitalists of japan.

"Haley's comet" or windy city vomit?

the porcine, jowly good-ol-boy, haley barbour, dragged himself out of the mississippi muck to wallow in barak obaby's stompin' ground -- the place of big smells -- and unleash a dose of hot oral emissions. barbour was a big stinker during the reagan era, before he went back home to be a cornpone demagogue, rousin' up the rednecks and evoking the former glories of th'suth.

we'll hear lots of him, fiddlin' dixie in the months to come. i don't have a fix on whether he can move the brethren and get the nomination -- but if nominated, he would run; and it elected, he'd definitely serve the same corporate paymasters that his whippin' boy obama serves -- six of one, half-a-dozen of another...

still, the politico headline was a bit of a grabber -- so much so, it lingered on the google news aggregator for an extra day, so what kind of hot hominy is haley spewing today?

"In a searing speech blasting what he called Barack Obama's big-government solutions, Haley Barbour accused the president Monday of throwing away decades of pro-growth policies in favor of 'unlimited faith in limitless government.'
Sounding more and more like a presidential candidate, the Mississippi governor ripped into Obama's economic credentials during a speech in Chicago, the president's hometown.
In his lengthy and policy-heavy speech — delivered with the help of a teleprompter, leading Barbour to crack, 'I hope you’ll forgive the use of this teleprompter, but this is President Obama’s hometown, and, I just figured, “when in Rome …!” — Barbour blamed Obama for the languid economic recovery." Haley's comet crashes into the W.H. - Kasie Hunt - POLITICO.com

now, that's about as close as you can come to the original, down-home, secret recipe: southern-fried horseshit! when it comes to economic credentials, how much credibility you gonna give to the hacks like haley, who said tax cuts would pay for themselves, while leaving no corporate behind unkissed in the doling out of federal pork?

the GOP mantra: let us untie the hands of corporations, and free them from onerous regulations that stifle their beneficent, job-bestowing instincts, and introduce uncertainty in their aggressive efforts to expand and spread prosperity around through the tried-and-true trickle-down, drizzle-dick theory.

how much longer are people going to put up with this noxious nonsense? if we put any less regulation on corporations we'll end up just as toasted as the luckless bastards downwind from the fuckashithead nucular plant. when are people going to stop buying the defective goods barbour and his goons on both sides of the aisle are selling? obambi isn't any worse than the GOP when it comes to corporate welfare and continuing to let the banksters run the economy into the ground.

when barbour stops talking nonsense and starts talking about putting the wall street banksters in the penitentiary -- life without parole -- then maybe his fat ass will be worth listening to. for now, the only thing that's unlimited is the american public's stupidity -- which governors like barbour deserve so much of the credit for!

time to bring out the clowns

when you rip the shiny, disneyized facade off the air-conditioned nightmare that henry miller first described some decades ago, what lies beneath the glitz and the glamor we call the contemporary world?

well, we're catching a glimpse of the jury-rigged chop job that passes for critical infrastructure, the real landscape of devastation and ruin that lies behind the curtain of media-manufactured, mass-marketed mush.

you had a sense of unbridled optimism about a wonderful world of the future back in the 1960s. progress was on the march, living standards were rising, historic injustices were being consigned to the dustbin, and it seemed like blue skies and smooth sailing as far as one could see...

today, in the ruins of post-quake, post-tsunami japan, the nuclear catastrophe begins to arise in all its hideous glory, menacing an entire nation, its whole people, where just a few days ago life went on in blissful ignorance of the demons lurking within everyone's midst -- unseen, unspoken.

all it took was a series of theoretically impossible events, following one upon another, to breech every defense laid in place to defend against the unthinkable.

japan's nuclear facilities at fukashima were supposedly design with multiple, redundant defenses against every potential point of failure, but from the conception through to failure, each one buckled and collapsed in turn to leave the building catastrophe in their wake.

there is the great human cost to consider, as millions are vulnerable to the caprice of the winds, carrying radioactivity across japan -- and beyond. then, the consequences are manifold, a cascade effect of  relationships between nations, economies, the works.

across the globe, stock markets tumble as the true extent of the disaster becomes evident, and the full effects begin to be apprehended by the powers that be. all at once, we begin to witness the fragility of this house of cards that we call the contemporary, globalized world.

one gets the feeling that things that were just barely being held together with bubblegum and bandaids is becoming unhinged. the US economy, the perennial "safe haven" for investors, has been so completely sacked by corporate criminals that it looks primed to take a tumble once too many people clamber on at once. asian economies will take a rude hit as the ripple effects start to radiate outward through interdependent networks of states. unease, unrest, opportunism -- a mixture of truly volatile forces come into play all at once.

i also look at the world's energy future, which is now under even more pressure. the panacea of nuclear power now looks like the deal with the devil it is. economies which were looking to diversify their mix of sources, boosting the clean, non-polluting nuclear reactor, will now have to look the limits of human ingenuity straight in the face. we're not anywhere near as smart as we pretend to ourselves we are -- by half too clever to fully anticipate and prepare for the catastrophe that's inevitable.

it's all so sad, as we watch many dreams wither and wash away. i think it's high time, however, that the human race faced the inevitable limits of our boundless and irresponsible desire for more, bigger, faster --and then more still... human societies, especially in the west, and primarily in the US, have been seduced by the insatiable oligarchs to want and consume ever more, totally out of proportion to any credible need, and far exceeding the capacity of the earth to provide the raw materials and consumables needed to run the incessant, voracious, insatiable machine that we've created to satisfy naked avarice.

the japanese disaster and its fallout are the first thread being pulled loose from a garment that will unravel day by day, leaving exposed the true wasteland that lies behind the gleaming skylines of our mighty civilization.

dancing with the cars

when the weekend comes, instead of plopping down in front of the tube and wasting away the few precious hours when i'm not locked up at my job, i always find it rewarding to go into the city to see what other people are up to.

lately i've been packing up some gear and heading downtown to see what goes on at the regional convention center. much money has been spent to revitalize the urban core, and to an extent it has been successful, given the crowds usually found in the vicinity -- with all the major hotels, government buildings and ritzy entertainment venues.

what follows is my travelogue -- and i never even heard about the st. patrick's day blowout down the hill!

talk about tiny dancers! these kids can really move, though. and judging from the full-size ones i'd see later, they're well on the way

most of today's visitors were here for the car show, which was held in the adjoining exhibition space. i'm too cheap to shell out $9 to enter -- and what's the point? the real action was out here in lobby!

i hope she's been saving up, cuz these cars ain't cheap!

waiting their turn on the dance floor.

she looks about as thrilled by the cars as i am.

this is more like it. i didn't know whether i'd be allowed to shoot or not -- just slipped in the back of the stage and started working. cameras these days are just awesome!

a quiet moment before the next routine.

i got a little bolder and walked into the hall so i could shoot from the front. 

i gotta hand it to 'em: they really work hard on their dances -- and at least there's more of a point to it than cheerleading.

i got a kick out of these three putting in a little last-minute preparation before they went on stage.

back to the cars -- kids were all over these things. too bad, by the time they get their licenses there won't be any fuel left!

i'm a sucker for these airborne shots!

it's nice to have a dream... but why this one?

dissent will not be tolerated

hillary's boy overstepped his bounds when calling the punative confinement of american hero bradley manning stupid and counterproductive. now he has to resign, according to a report:

Washington (CNN) -- P.J. Crowley is abruptly stepping down as State Department spokesman under pressure from the White House, according to senior officials familiar with the matter, because of controversial comments he made about the Bradley Manning case.
Crowley will step down as early as Sunday afternoon, the officials said, because White House officials are furious about his suggestion that the Obama administration is mistreating Manning, the Army private who is being held in solitary confinement in Quantico, Virginia, under suspicion that he leaked highly classified State Department cables to the website Wikileaks.

one frankly wonders what crowley was thinking. it can't be that he believed his comments would be acceptable to a government that polices its messaging with such fervor. the whole point of the wikileaks persecutions, after all, is to restrict public information, and release it only in easily digestible nuggets for nincompoops.

we, of course, are similarly expected to toe the company line, even if in private one can still think one's own thoughts. did you ever, for example, question the boss' underlying political assumptions about distribution of wealth and corporate welfare?

there's overwhelming pressure to look at cars, sports and TV -- whatever it takes to help you ignore the increasingly desperate plight of average persons, such as yourself.

this is why, i suspect, a rally in support of workers' rights draws about 1/1000ths the participants as a "wine expo" held in the same city on the same day (as happened here a couple of weeks ago).

in the aftermath of the great earthquake of 2011 in japan, as the ensuing nuclear calamity that still unfolds in that country, you can see great numbers of people in their desperate search for entertainment and diversion here in the US. where we should be in a state of collective shock at the implications of this disaster on the US -- over energy, environment, economically -- no one here seems to get it.

a government like we have here, run as we must assume by intelligent and responsible adults, continues to dither away at minor nuisances like the unauthorized release of embarrassing diplomatic smalltalk, at the same time the assumptions of what it will take to maintain a sustainable future for "advanced" societies are increasingly becoming doubtful.

twitter in the shitter

it seems that for the popular microblogging site twitter, you just can't win.

in back-to-back wire service stories out tonight, twitter is getting spanked by the US feds both for being to secretive and not secret enough. it's almost enough to cause motion sickness.

from bloomberg comes news that a federal judge here in the government's backyard (alexandria, va.) has sided with the government's contention that twitter must release account data of three people targeted in the witch hunt against wikileaks.

in affirming the earlier decision, "[U.S. Magistrate Judge Theresa] Buchanan on Dec. 14 ordered Twitter to give the government records and information related to the accounts of several identified individuals and anyone else linked to Assange. Prosecutors asked for subscriber names, contact information, billing records, user activity, Internet Protocol addresses and source and destination e-mail addresses."


the judge also rejected arguments that the government should be compelled to  unseal all records in the court file related to prosecutors’ efforts to get information from Twitter and any other companies." tough luck, guys.


on the other hand, the federal trade commission came down hard on twitter for making it too easy for hackers to guess administrative passwords on the site, allowing the hackers to make posts impersonating president obambi, and well as former CNN presenter rick sanchez.


 "i am high on crack right now might not be coming into work today," someone posted under sanchez' screen name. at least they had a better sense of humor than the FTC.


the PCMag story on this tempest in a shit-pot went on to explain, "Twitter is banned for the next 20 years from misleading consumers about the extent to which it protects the security and privacy of non-public information, the FTC said. Twitter must also establish a comprehensive information security program, which will be assessed by an independent third party every other year for the next 10 years."


twenty years is a long time in the dot-com biz, and it's almost unfathomable that someone misusing 140 characters could motivate the government regulatory apparatus to come crashing down with all its weight on twitter over the actions of some low-level moron.


this is all, however, quite unexceptional in today's america. on the one hand, twitter gets reamed  because the company "deceived consumers and put their privacy at risk by failing to safeguard their personal information," the FTC said.


at the same time, when twitter takes responsibility to safeguard its users' private usage information, the government is all over its ass about it: disclose, and don't tell anybody! and that last is the clincher: the entire wikileaks imbroglio is about unreasonable, unnecessary government secrecy -- a betrayal of the values of openness and transparency that are at the core of the US system of government.


the conspiracy that should be investigated is the one that runs a shadow government that isn't under the law -- it operates by decree, and serves the interests of its wealthy patrons instead of the public whose assent legitimizes its very existence. this government, to protect its own "privacy," doesn't mind playing with the lives of those few brave souls who chose to expose rather than abet the grotesque machinations of a rogue regime.


i don't use twitter -- never have even used the site. just like everything else in "cyberspace," the government demands unfettered access to everyone else's secrets, while jealously guarding its own.


alas, to the american public, the privacy of the twitter password is probably of greater importance than the openness of their government, and the nightly humiliation of bradley manning might seem like just a frat-boy prank, compared with aiding the "enemy" whose identity is never revealed.


if people were to discover exactly who that unnamed enemy is, they might be very surprised.

wikileaks vs wicked government

have run across an essay on aljazzera english by haroon meer entitled "lessons from anonymous", wherein he details some of the more salacious and telling revelations discovered in the cache of some 70,000 HBGary e-mails pilfered by the pro-transparency hacker collective known as anonymous.

it's all worth reading -- some already reported, some not. i found much to ponder in the excerpts regarding a firm known as endgame systems, a company so secretive that the CEO dictated that the company's name must never appear in any HBGary press release. this is hardly surprising, given that this outfit seems to exist primarily to abet governments in the commission of cybercrimes -- both foreign and domestic. check out the excerpt:

Endgame Systems, a company with almost no public footprint were also thrust into the spotlight, when several of their previously well-guarded reports and company presentations were shared amongst the emails.
In an early email to Aaron Barr, Endgame Systems made it clear that they had "been very careful NOT to have public face on our company". The CEO of Endgame Systems was clear: "Please let HBgary know we don't ever want to see our name in a press release."
So what exactly do the secretive Endgame Systems do? The company started by ex ISS and CIA executives promises (in private) "to provide our customers with the highest quality offensive CNA/CNE (Computer Network Attack/Computer Network Exploitation) software in the world".
Their overview makes it clear that they serve "the special requirements of the United States DoD and Intelligence Community".
Their leaked PowerPoint deck advertises subscriptions of $2,500,000 per year for access to 0day exploits, with slightly more affordable "intelligence feeds" effectively selling information on vulnerable servers by geographic region.
With a single report (and a big enough chequebook) you can find out all the servers vulnerable to attack in the Venezuelan government, along with the software required to exploit them. [Downloadable file]

the other day, i wrote about a businessweek story detailing how foreign governments or their proxies seemed to have almost unfettered access to the computer networks of some of the US' largest corporations. one might've come away from that piece thinking that the US government was failing to provide even elementary countermeasures against the sophisticated and well-managed exploits of the infiltrators.

it is pretty naive, i recognize, to think that the US government's clandestine services, on the other hand, aren't at least somewhat competitive in the field of cyber-terrorism and more garden-variety cyber-crime. there certainly is plenty of raw talent on offer, with the problems apparently the same ones that afflicts the US government (and country) generally: arrogance and overconfidence.

while, as the aljazzeera post recounts, aaron barr saw himself having almost superhero stature as cybersleuth, his oafish exploits and complete lack of self-discipline turned his great payday into a colossal humiliation, revealing to the clueless masses how widespread government-private chicanery is -- even while our national leaders have the nerve to lecture the rest of the world on ethics and moral rectitude. it is to laugh.

we live in a nation ruled by liars and hypocrites, whose ham-handed efforts to purvey falsehoods and silent dissent are exposed at every turn. meanwhile, the american hero bradley manning is left to rot in solitary confinement, humiliated daily, as retribution for his alleged role in exposing our hapless masters to the ridicule they so richly deserve.

meanwhile, one can only conclude that the unseen forces from abroad who are actually waging a cyberwar against the US and its corporate masters are succeeding wonderfully against a rival that is all hat and no horse, as they say in texas. is there any question why the US empire is quickly fading to black?