Sun’s sizzling X-rays photographed BBC (David L)
Hunter-gatherer past shows our fragile bones result from inactivity since invention of farming PhysOrg (Chuck L). Everyone should weight train!
Nothing Changes as Much as the Past CounterPunch (Chuck L)
Financing Climate Safety Jeffrey Sachs, Project Syndicate
The Challenge of Non-Lethal Force at Sea Center for National Maritime Safety. Mainly about China.
China’s trade growth seen falling short of target in 2014 Reuters
Japanese cabinet approves Y3.5tn stimulus Financial Times
Latest from the Greek front: A nightmare scenario for Greece and Europe failed evolution
Fury with MPs is main reason for not voting – poll Guardian
Ukraine/Russia
5 Things That Could Save Russia From Recession in 2015 24/7 Wall St.
Russia Debt One Grade Above Junk With Downgrades Coming, How Likely is Default? Michael Shedlock. One big caveat: the 1998 default was voluntary.
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
NSA IOB Report Dump – Still Missing Files Patrick Durusau
Proposal of New Provisions Applicable to All Services of the secret TISA negotiations Association of Whistleblowing Press
If you still trust Tor to keep you safe, you’re out of your damn mind Pando. Paul Carr does not mince words!
As Medicaid Rolls Swell, Cuts in Payments to Doctors Threaten Access to Care New York Times
Black Injustice Tipping Point
wilfully obtuse Abagond (Judy B)
How the Trans-Pacific Partnership Sells Out American Women CounterPunch (Chuck L)
Entering the Secret Garden of Private Equity Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times. More on this next week…
Break Up Citigroup Simon Johnson, Project Syndicate (David L)
Job Engine Running Low on Gas Wall Street Journal
Class Warfare
The road to Americans serfdom via the housing market: The trend towards renter households will continue deep into 2015. Dr. Housing Bubble
Profit from Crisis: Why capitalists do not want recovery, and what that means for America USAPP
Arthur needs to take his cat to the vet Lambert
David Bromwich · Working the Dark Side: On the Uses of Torture London Review of Books. Today’s must read.
Antidote du jour (Diane K):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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stuff you already know, tied together..this is part of my weekly communique on gas & oil fracking emailed this morning:
the media and the blogs have been covering a lot of the economic issues that will arise with falling oil prices, such as job cuts in the oil industry, losses by financial firms that invested in oil companies, state budget troubles for oil dependent states, and the losses that will be incurred by pension funds and others that are heavily invested in oil…one financial problem that seems to be off the radar are the complex financial derivatives tied to oil…these include futures, or contracts to buy oil at a set price some date in the future, options on futures, or the right to enter into a specific futures contract at a given price over the life of the option, structured notes tied to crude oil prices, and a plethora of more exotic and complex contracts that are no more than sophisticated bets on the fluctuation of oil prices over time…the nominal market for oil related derivatives is huge; it’s probably 5 times the size of the market for oil itself, and while most of the players are banks, some oil companies are speculators, too; BP is said to trade 10 times the paper oil than they sell of the real black stuff….total derivatives held by the largest US banks have a paper value of $280 trillion, about 15 times the value of our GDP…normally, it would be the least of our concerns if the high-stakes gamblers lose a pile of money…but the week before last, legislated funding for government operations was running out, and the lame-duck session of Congress took up & passed a budget bill which was dubbed by the press as the "Cromnibus", or a combination of a CR (continuing resolution to fund the government) and an omnibus budget bill…in the horse trading that went on during budget reconciliation, a provision to deregulate derivatives owned by banks written by Citigroup was inserted into the bill by Rep. Kevin Yoder of Kansas, effectively repealing the section of the Dodd Frank financial reform legislation that required the big banks to spin off the most risky portion of their derivatives business into non-FDIC-insured subsidiaries….as a result of this bill’s passage, banks are now allowed to leave the riskiest derivatives in the same corporate entity as other banking functions such as savings that are insured by the FDIC…saver’s deposits up to $250,000 are supposed to protected by the FDIC, but the FDIC fund has just $46 billion to cover $4.5 trillion worth of deposits, which itself is an amount dwarfed by the derivatives outstanding, and under the bankruptcy reform act of 2005, should a bank fail, derivatives get paid first…and while derivatives are normally hedged against one another such that overall profits and losses are minimal; the models the banks used when building these financial products (which are traded automatically based on quant algorithms) may not account for a 50% downward price move in prices, and should they fail, we’d have another unpredictable and unresolvable financial crisis on our hands, and likely another bank bailout..
…”weekly communique”…
If you truly have something valuable to say, you should probably do podcasts.
This square foot pile of words–devoid of paragraphs, with precious few capitals and this strange new “…” punctuation–is virtually unreadable. The only message is, “Avoid me if you value your vision and your sanity.”
Effective “communication” is going to take a little more effort.
Katniss, i”m doing a weekly links aggregation for our local group and the “communique” part of it is just my summary…the derivatives piece above was a bit of a tangent..
as far as my syntax goes, i’ve been writing this way for 50 years and never learned to type properly, so mine is an old dog news tricks situation…if i had to take the time to find the shift key each time it was deemed proper, i’d lose my train of thought…
Katniss has a point. Perhaps you could make an edit pass afterwards, or hire an editor.
when i have prepared my work for formal posting (ie, such as the Monday DataDives i did weekly in the summer of 2013 for this site), i do make an edit pass, and use shorter paragraphs…i just never figured a comment left here would provoke such nitpicking, virtually ignoring the content…
let’s try this:
As a result of this bill’s passage, banks are now allowed to leave the riskiest derivatives in the same corporate entity as other banking functions such as savings that are insured by the FDIC. Saver’s deposits up to $250,000 are supposed to protected by the FDIC, but the FDIC fund has just $46 billion to cover $4.5 trillion worth of deposits, which itself is an amount dwarfed by the derivatives outstanding, and under the bankruptcy reform act of 2005, should a bank fail, derivatives get paid first…So while derivatives are normally hedged against one another such that overall profits and losses are minimal, the models the banks used when building these financial products (which are traded automatically based on quant algorithms) may not account for a 50% downward price move in prices, and should they fail, we’d have another unpredictable and unresolvable financial crisis on our hands, and likely another bank bailout..
understand that?
I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who has to say it fast or lose it!
I’m sympathetic because I also am not a natural punctuator and my sentences sometime can go on and on but you definitely should put some spacing in between thoughts.
Some of that stuff definitely feels important like 46 billion to cover 4.5 trillion with derivative payouts being given priority. It sounds exactly like the housing crisis part 2 where tax payers get left holding the bag(taking losses for their bank accounts) while the banksters get bailed out first ……again…..for gambling with other people’s assets.
I may have read it wrong though because the paragraph felt long and complicated.
I agree that your prose does not flow well but the message is clear and concise.
This is the next fleecing of the public coffers that will be completely “legal” but morally akin to financial rape or genocide.
I want to suggest that NC have an annual “tipping point” date guestimate along with major contributing factors. When is the first domino going to fall and what others will it set off in the process? I am thinking sometime in 2015 the world economies are going to tank and negotiations about what to do clearly draw lines and spark increased military posturing and small skirmishes. It might not result in a total realignment of countries but pressure will be brought to realign the existing global finance system.
rjs, your paragraph clarified stg. I had not known. Although I’ve followed the indications that this stuffing of the depository was going to be allowed to protect the banksters and the investment chain, I know nothing about the many tricks written into the derivatives in question. So thank you. If all we have is 46 billion to cover just the deposits at 4.5 trillion we are in trouble even before the derivatives. Everyone is trying to bail on oil without losing too much money so they can go off to invest their salvaged money in something else. Gee, what would that something be? Not stranded oil reserves. No more CO2. That money, whether from derivatives payoffs by us, or some “savings” the oil producers and traders have accumulated, should go asap into alternative fuels. And alternative transportation. In order to keep a world economy going. The alternative, where losses would stop everything dead, are just too terrifying. Witness the great financial crisis gone critical.
And Jeffrey Sachs today above: in the near future the new global financial system will allocate the world’s “savings” to the most productive uses. He’s talking about a sustainable future that does not misallocate “savings” but the whole use of the word “savings” is such a misrepresentation. Does Jeffrey want to jettison the central banks? And go back to private savings? Then we’re gonna have to go back 100 years at least. According to Sachs finance will loom large in the design of a sustainable world which allocates savings productively. If he could have avoided this archaic line of economic thinking, his article would have carried some weight. As he probably knows, savings is a pitiful source of funding. And he might have approached the truth had he said national revenues would be allocated. Because that will be the bulk of the financing without a doubt.
Well, maybe revenues is the wrong word because that can be construed as savings. I don’t see how the transition to a sustainable economy can be done by any other method than a mobilization of credit. Yes. Print the money as necessary. And if it’s global, then by definition, everybody agrees to print. So no problem.
I don’t think printing up money is bad in and of itself. It all depends on what you spend the money on. It could be true that money not printed and therefore not spent when it is needed is the worst misallocation.
The James Joyce school of communique writing.
Guardian link above does not seem to work. Here is the one I found:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/dec/26/fury-mps-not-voting-poll
More on almonds, which were discussed in comments recently.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/us/water-source-for-almonds-in-california-may-run-dry.html
Some modern day Mencken needs to take on our 21st century millionaire husbandmen.
“Today’s Palestinians are probably mostly descendants of this Jewish population which clung to their soil. At one time, David Ben-Gurion supported this theory.” I gather that DNA studies support this point: the Palestinians have a higher percentage of their descent from the Jews of the classical era than do the Ashkenazi. Not that it matters much, I suppose.
I just watched a television documentary on this very subject on Arte. The history is long and intertwined. Christians, Jews, Muslims.
It’s blasphemous to believers that Jesus and Mary Magdalene’s blood descendants today believe in another religion, something other than Judaism or Christianity, and have no royal French blood.
That was not coded by Leonardo either.
Why would it be blasphemous?
God is God. Quite frankly, I think it ought to be the other way around where it’s blasphemous to fight because someone’s relationship with God is different then yours. I mean we’re all different people. It makes sense to me that we’d all have different relationships.
Speaking as someone who tries to adhere to the teaching of Christ with the larger message to me being …..compassion…….tolerance……..forgiveness.
Monotheistic deities are far from tolerant, and forgiving only when they please. All in all nasty dangerous creatures, judging by the violence and bloodshed exacted in their name.
Monotheism, like any other form of exclusivity, is an attractive nuisance and, like any attractive nuisance, ought to be secured against others — and if one’s religion involves being a nuisance to others, the rights of others to be free of it ought to prevail.
Speak for your own deity. ;) ( I also can respect the choice not to pursue a relationship. I’m strong supporter of free will.)
Pretty sure MyLessThanPrimeBeef was being ironic. Occasionally, it’s a good idea to turn up the snark-0-meter a notch or two. With MLTPB, the tip off should have been at the word, “It’s…”. :-)
Brooklin Bridge, you read my mind. I was trying to see the world form others’ perspective.
The Counterpunch article by Uri Avnery seems to forget the anti-Nazi Jewish partisan and resistance organisations which existed during WWII. I’m surprised that the Israelis didn’t “hero-ise” them. Maybe that sort of resistance looks too much like the Palestinian resistance against Jewish oppression!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_partisans
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_resistance_under_Nazi_rule
“Resistance”? Isn’t that just the revisionist name for “terrorist”, or is it the other way around?
“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”
There are many human traits baked into our genes. First is the feeling that we will exist forever. Second is the divide between them and us. Third is the need to move on. Our resistance is their terrorism. Humans must defend their families against invaders. Human history is the movement of people and their conflicts.
In Vietnam I rode in the back of trucks past abandoned Khmer temples built by a people driven out by the Vietnamese. Two years later the AO was retaken by the communists after the Americans pulled out.
The movie “Army of Shadows” faithfully depicts that that the French would naturally resist occupation by the Germans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_of_Shadows
The Donetsk News Conference by Alexander Zakharchenko explains the people’s right to defend their homeland against invaders. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH35raTPVu8
The new capitalism is so centered on gaining more wealth and power for the few that it denies human nature and the reality that we live on one earth.
Poor Mr Garner: the LRB piece says “He said ‘I can’t breathe,’ and repeated it many times before he died as the police were fumbling with handcuffs.” It’s not my impression that he died “as the police were fumbling with handcuffs”.
I checked on WKPD and found “When an ambulance eventually arrived on scene, two medics and two EMTs inside the ambulance did not administer any emergency medical aid or promptly place him on a stretcher. According to police, Garner had a heart attack while being transported to Richmond University Medical Center. He was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital one hour later.” That’s hardly conclusive since “police” are interested parties.
Has there been any sort of disinterested investigation that has established when the poor chap died?
Regarding Origins of the Police, which I submitted, see also Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged. (I am interested to see if this is posted; twice before my posted never appeared.)
wilfully obtuse
I think this borders on ‘blame the victim’. We talk a lot about how TPTB set people against each other. The push-pull of identity politics is very strong for many. Its frustrating that ‘people who should know better’ are so obstinate but writing these people off is not conducive to change either.
The best comment to the ‘wilfully obtuse’ post that I saw was one that ascribed the effect to “malignant narcissism”. These people suffer from a psychological state that is fostered and deepened by propaganda like ‘exceptionalism!’ and ‘best of all worlds’ neolib thinking.
Reform-minded people have always faced popular reluctance due to strong adherence to ‘the system’. Imagine if Jesus had simply complained that people were too brainwashed? No one would’ve listened. In fact, that would’ve just discouraged any who desired change. Like it or not, most people want to know: what’s your solution and what does it mean to ME?
Reformers always need to put the system on trial and appeal to people’s better nature. And look for allies, not push people away.
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Aside: OWS and other recent reform movements have failed to address the popular view that they are selfishly motivated: that they agitate for change because they themselves WANT something. What change they seek and why it is beneficial to ALL has not been adequately articulated. TPTB portray them as complainers because they haven’t communicated a vision that appeals to ordinary people.
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“Reformers always need to put the system on trial and appeal to people’s better nature. And look for allies, not push people away.”
Maybe some people need to be pushed away?
Mr. Block and The Profiteers
by Ernest Riebe, 1919
“The Mr. Block species of workingman is found in every country of the globe. He varies only in the quality of the wood. A wonderful kind of hardwood is found in America. The American Block believes in a system of society in which the means of life are controlled by a group of men known as the profiteers. He may occasionally kick against the individual profiteers but never against the profiteer system. Under the rule of the profiteers millions have to live in a state of semi-starvation.
Mr. Block’s whole life is occupied with the task of making billionaires out of millionaires. He himself has only the bare necessities of life and sometimes not even that much. A wiling slave of the profiteers he defends the system under which he himself has to suffer. Owing to the extraordinary quality of wood it is almost impossible to make an impression on Mr. Block.”
Some might object to the word “slave” in the above quote from 1919, as not applying to today’s situation. Oh really?
BBC exposes inhumane working conditions in Apple factories
I personally want to come back happy…….don’t particularly care what skin color God wraps me in.
I tend to think that people see what they want to see when it comes to identity politics. I also think that willfull ignorance applies to people who apply the word racism to everything simply because you disagree with them or because they do see racism everywhere. It was very enlightening to hear that there are groups out there that believe that racism is innate during the Obama/Clinton kerfluffle. I disagree. I believe it is learned. It’s a culture thing and the sides participate in it thanks to the system that loves to pit people against each other. So instead of mourning a HUMAN cut down in the prime of his life by authoritarians given too much power, essentially being allowed to be judge, jury and executioner, we’re told by the oligarchy to divvy up and pick sides. Well I side with the AA community on this one. The police overstepped their authority whether it be because of fear or racism matters less to me than the results……a dead human being with all his potential lost.
The term racism is often and intentionally misused to refer to xenophobia, in order to resist the development of a common culture among the “differentiated” classes, which would circumvent market principles, a grave crime under neoliberalism.
On the LRB article on torture: please note that torture has used in the Intel community, the military, the police, and the prison system for much of our history. Yes, it has not always been used by those systems but most of those institutions used in those techniques when you they thought it necessary. 9-11 brought torture out of the closet. Monsters like Cheney who are sadists could now come out of the closet and torture on a massive scale. The key to understanding this movement is to see that torture was done in as public a way as possible as a way to intimidate potential enemies. I think it is was Chomsky who once said that the USA actually won the Vietnam War because it succeeded in destroying Vietnamese society for a generation as a cautionary tale to anyone imagining they could oppose the will of the Exceptional Country. I suggest to you the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not fought to to be “won” but as a form of cultural genocide–to destroy civil society in that country. To any close observer of the Occupation of Iraq in his own own was glaringly obvious.
So war, violence, and torture is used to make people fear the security services as well as for fun and profit for the various contractors involved not to enhance our security. Police shootings and chokeholds are encouraged by the political leadership to make the public know they mean business not because of legitimate law-enforcement reasons.
“The key to understanding this movement is to see that torture was done in as public a way as possible as a way to intimidate potential enemies.”
“I think it is was Chomsky who once said that the USA actually won the Vietnam War because it succeeded in destroying Vietnamese society for a generation as a cautionary tale to . . . [other countries]”
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a very vain sailor I used to know thought he’d give the Navy Seals a go, as anything ‘elite’ felt the rightful reflection of his sleek surfer’s physique and iron man intellect. To join up, however, one must draw the correct conclusions from the following thought experiment: if a crying baby “threatened” a mission, could/would you kill it? I’ve assumed ever since that elite forces are made up of those who’ve answered yes, they could murder a sobbing, or perhaps merely babbling infant, not only with a searing missile from on high or from a bleeping arcade with a drone, but mano a mano, for Uncle Sam. You’d think afterwards you’d need something much stronger than founding fathers juice to restoreth your soul, but maybe at that point patriotism is the last bit of razor crag you’ve got to cling to.
” but mano a mano, for Uncle Sam”
Which countries do you think has elite forces populated w/ “folk” who would distinguish themselves w/ the alternate answer?
Interesting question, Opti. It begs another one by way of answer: has “elite” become a synonym for “sociopath?
Surely some % of that population is attracted to that profession because they take satisfaction in killing people for whatever justification, in some cases just as a socially condoned opportunity for death sport. Is that % any different now than decades past?
Not sure.
Is it an “American phenomena” to differentially harangue about or is it part of the human condition? I think the latter.
I know of an example related to me just two weeks ago in fact, wherein a friend’s nephew, a fairly freshly minted “elite” (in the jr. officer rank) who happens to be opting out of the military.
His unit was cycled though various functions including as a rapid response team. Following the asides related about his career, I know untold resources were spent training him. That said, his unit had yet to be deployed in theatre, or if they were it was briefly to train twisting knobs on equipment in an air-conditioned shipping container on the confines of a base.
In any case they apparently took him up on his retirement request as he is not on a current deployment order issued for his unit subsequent to his filing paperwork. He confides that if they were not on an indigenous troop “training mission” but rather were being deployed to “see action” he would reenlist. He wants to experience combat which I unfairly or not think in unvarnished language means he wants to go kill people currently called “the enemy”. (Admittedly where they are going, the hostiles are fundamentally very fckdup people from my POV, but their local sensibilities really, really are not our deal).
As a side bar, this young man comes from a ultra catholic “conservative” family background that although having had a sense of trepidation were nontheless quite proud of his desire to be an “elite” member of the military and “take care of business over there”. Personally I find the hyper-religiosity and the desire to “see action” to be a profound contradiction.
Personally, the diatribe makes it sound like SEALS take delight in mindlessly killing. My husband served with them as a communicator, they were for the most part a pretty decent bunch of guys and are trained to think on their feet. Killing people is a last resort, unless the mission is to take someone out. As it is ,essentially what this commentary leaves out is that if the mission is compromised that THEY and THE PEOPLE WITH THEM die as a result of the compromise. I’d be thoroughly surprised if a good portion of the population weren’t willing to sacrifice someone else to save themselves if the situation were to arise. Generally, survival is a pretty strong instinct to fight.
If I answered that all elite forces worldwide and even galaxywide had vowed to stand at the ready to strangle infants in their cribs, would that make the thought experiment in question any less of a portal to the darkside?
Yes,
1. you imply that this sort of hypothetical behavior is differentially in the domain of “elite” military serving the wishes of “Uncle Sam”, rather than a global or galaxywide “elite” military sensibility.
I call BS on that notion.
2. Unfully formed hypotheticals like this ultimately are meaningless “how many angels can dance on a pinhead” exercises because you really don’t know who will behave in what manner in any circumstance.
Do you believe a random group of civilians would answer differently? Who actually knows?
How would you answer? Then, how would you actually behave put in the loosely framed hypothetical?
So I call BS on gaining any insight with poorly formed hypotheticals.
I find hypotheticals useful to kick the tires on a given ethical proposition, but since you don’t like them, let me put it another way: if everyone else is torturing is that an excuse for you yourself to torture?
…or did I misinterpret your initial question which I took to inquire whether I was so naive to think that the US is the only country to ask of its elite forces that they be prepared to kill a baby if necessary? If so, then what did you have in mind?
1. My story itself was not a hypothetical, remembered in reaction to Banger’s claim that the current torture regime as a longer history than meets the eye. So if a bias against specifically US elite forces shines through, it is a function of the facts as I heard and interpreted them. But after considering your question, I found I would happy universalize my ethical stance.
2. it’s true the individual decisions one might make in given instances are ultimately unknowable, but in these situations one is being specifically required to imagine one in particular and promise a certain course of action in order to attain membership in an elite group. This affirmation is a condition (although certainly not a verifiable one since the applicant could lie and no one would be the wiser) of admission which proves ones loyalty to the patriotic fraternity via a willingness to sacrifice innocence and life, if deemed necessary to preserve the former. While reactive pathways from which to choose are infinite, in a stressful situation the mentally rehearsed one would be the most likely trod, just as one morally precluded would be unlikely to be chosen.
And yes, you could make the case that this is all mental monk masturbation,
but have you noticed how often Cheney, Brennan, Obama etc have saluted precisely the patriotism of torturers? There’s an oath in every file.
incidentally, the sailor in question took that hypothetical as seriously most applicants surely do, and turned away from the military entirely.
Bourgeois natalists are absolutely unqualified to go on any sort of “mission” where the result matters more than the pwecious feewings and beweefs of Pwogwess. They are, however, supremely qualified to invoke the fundamental attribution error and pretend that everything BUT the outcome is what matters.
Well now, killing a crying baby is never done for Uncle Sam, whoever that is. Nor for freedom, or liberty, or democracy or any other grand idea. It’s done when it’s necessary, or done because you choose. Killing is done for the guys in your squad, done to finish a mission, or done to define yet again for yourself just how mentally tough you are. Or it’s done because it’s fun, for a certain type of military animal. Don’t you look away. These kind exist, and I’ve met some of them.
The lessons our military learned from wars of the 20th century was to not draft citizen soldiers off the street because no matter how much you train them, most still won’t do the work with a willing heart. Nowadays, our military geniuses know to start with people who already have an interest in a lifestyle of smashing things and maiming and killing people. Folks who want to work with deadly weapons. Want to use them for their intended purpose, which is the fun of killing and blowing stuff up, and winning praise and self esteem for doing so. Basic training can turn these types into pretty effective psychopaths, while their brains and bodies last. And there’s always more waiting to sign up.
But the real volunteers in an all-volunteer military are the ones who want the weapons life the most, who self-define themselves as killers and then push themselves on from there. Hannibal Lector is a rank amateur compared to some of these guys. “Can you violate the human genetic code and kill an innocent baby with your bare hands? Just to keep it quiet?” Do you have the makings of a serial killer? Can you step completely outside of yourself and whatever civilized persona you still possess? Can you turn your civilized persona off and on like a light switch?
They like to describe it as being mentally tough, but it has to do with being able to completely externalize yourself, to be absent from your humanity on demand. You have to be able to step on a human life the way you’d step on a cockroach. Just a little crunch and you walk away — uncaring, unscathed. Who wants to be such a person? Who wants to never ask themselves afterwards, “What have I done?”
Some people. Some people do, more than anything. And there’s a place for them, there’s work for them, and it isn’t in an asylum.
The conundrum for our advanced civilization is that there are specialty trades like this in existence, and if one country has ’em, you’d better have some, too, because sooner or later theirs will come on to your turf to do that thing they do. So some of your tax dollars go toward finding and honing these kind of people. Cost of being in business, here in this world.
re: TOR
and hacking in general.
Interesting honeypot results at SANS, most of the hacking attempts on this honeypot appear to be coming from China. Not surprising.
https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Honey+Pot+Entertainment+SSH/19121/
“Based on the above I’m quite comfortable in saying that blocking anything coming from AS4134 would not be a bad idea. “
Nitzan and Bichler (nice pictures there):
There is a distributional struggle for power . . . macroeconomic policy, whether old or new, cannot offset the aggregate consequences of this distributional struggle. Not by a long shot. Till the late 1970s, the budget deficit was small, yet America boomed. And why? Because progressive taxation, transfer payments and social programs made the distribution of income less unequal. By the early 1980s, this relationship inverted. Although the budget deficit ballooned and interest rates fell, economic growth decelerated. New methods of upward redistribution have caused the share of the Top 1 percent to zoom, making stagnation the new norm.
Does MMT enable Capital when it frames the discussion around the canard of insolvency? Do the Koch bros. really need for idiots to believe that Sovereigns can’t afford nice things? Rent by crisis continues regardless. The fact that the Emperor has no clothes isn’t the issue when he’s pissing on you.
I thought they did Picketty one better. Good description of how capitalism really works. It “accumulates” power. And it does it thru cutthroat competition. Even when that competition does not achieve any sort of social progress. So recessions just shake down the competition. Nevermind if that competition had a great product or vision, etc. And extort labor. If you won’t take lower pay you don’t get a job. This is the rationale behind the “recoveries” of the last 3 recessions – or more precisely “Jobless Recoveries” – right? How can the drive for relative power by the capitalists, for their survival, be anything but the need for security? Why don’t we look at the real problem we are all suffering in this stupid country? That real problem is everyone’s security and well-being. And I don’t mean military security – that one has been emphasized because it is so lucrative for the neocons and neoliberals they can’t give it up. Too bad.
From Paul Carr’s article in Pando:
Since “‘Almost everyone involved in developing Tor was (or is) funded by the US government”, and Tor developers control the details of those directory authorities; if you use Tor, you might as well just send a copy of all of your Internet traffic to them.
And the Tor developers are vicious. They silenced one critic by doxing him and contacting his place of employment, and they silenced another – a Tor user – by threatening to dox him. They dug up old dirt on Jeremy Sapienza as part of their smear campaign. When it comes to Pando, they are unhinged, responding with threats and fantasies of violence.
(If this comment ends up being a duplicate, fee free to delete it. When I tried to post earlier, I got “Website is offline. Error 524: A timeout occurred.”)
Here is the correct link for:
• Almost everyone involved in developing Tor was (or is) funded by the US government
You forgot to mention that the one person they doxxed was also running personal attacks primarily against two female developers within the TOR community for about a year with multiple sock puppet identities. He was asked to back off and stop the personally insulting (and very sexist) ad hominems multiple times by one of the women and refused. She finally took the low road and publicly stated that if Twitter had done their job and stopped the personal attacks, she would not have had to taken this personally regrettable action. The reason she contacted his work place was because she was able to prove that he was running these attacks from his work place during working hours. In other words it was an individual that doxxed the harasser, not “the TOR Developers” as a group.
After a year of his personal insults I would say that she “lost grip”, but then again I’ve seen women in bars lose it in less than 4 hours and punch guys out, so I don’t consider what she did particularly vicious, although it is a little ironic considering her professional career.
Pando has not been 100% honest in these articles, for example, they failed to mention that the issues discussed in their article today hinged on the exit points having to meet a 51% level… they reached slightly less than 1% before being eliminated within a couple of days after first appearing. With regards to this, they also failed to mention that if you choose set up exit points then it takes about 60 days of being up and online before they are considered trusted exits.
I don’t necessarily trust the Onion Browser concept, but I do know that Pando has been hammering the TOR Group for quite some time now with lots of rhetoric and not a lot of hard facts. For example, the best I’ve seen that they’ve been able to do is cite the fact that TOR and the Onion Router system is based on NSA research and gets some govt financial support; this has long been public and well-known; in fact when initially introduced to the public it was a major selling point, just as selinux was also initially researched by the NSA and, although a little complicated, as a Linux Sys Admin I can tell you it is a very secure way to lock down your individual systems and standard with Redhat-based systems (required on many DoD installs).
There are always two sides to every story, the one I just mentioned is as true as Pando’s side… in fact, maybe even truthier :)
Andrea Shepard, one of the core Tor developers, threatened to dox a gay man (and Tor user) who was writing under the pseudonym Tarzie – which effectively silenced him – because “I had the queer nerve to find something homophobic”. The Tor community also “started targeting a lovely cycling activist who stood up for JB named @lastwheel. This is scapegoat witch hunt.”
Regarding JB, or JbJabroni10, Alexa O’Brien pointed out that “JbJabroni10 trolled everyone. 7 sock pup? Mute.” Also, “His main targets were men: Greenwald, Snowden, Appelbaum, Weev, Thomas Drake.” The comments that crossed the line for Shepard was when he alluded that her goth look and colored hair were as fake as her anti-establishment persona, which Shepard interpreted as a sexist attack on her looks.
Meanwhile, Shepard befriends and defends Andrew Auernheimer, a white supremacist who called “gas chambers: a universal social good“, and who led a particularly notorious harassment campaign against Kathy Sierra.
After JbJabroni10 was doxed, Andrea Shepard, one of the core Tor developers, threatened to dox a Tor user because he criticized Shepard’s homophobic comments. The Tor community also “started targeting a lovely cycling activist who stood up for JB named @lastwheel. This is scapegoat witch hunt.”
Regarding JB, or JbJabroni10, Alexa O’Brien pointed out that “JbJabroni10 trolled everyone. 7 sock pup? Mute.” Also, “His main targets were men: Greenwald, Snowden, Appelbaum, Weev, Thomas Drake.” The comments that crossed the line for Shepard were allusions that her goth look and colored hair were as fake as her anti-establishment persona, which Shepard interpreted as a sexist attack on her looks.
Meanwhile, Shepard – when not fantasizing about violence, notably using one of the tools of modern imperialism – befriends and defends Andrew Auernheimer, a white supremacist who called “gas chambers: a universal social good“, and who led a particularly notorious harassment campaign against Kathy Sierra.
Bromwich is the poster boy for Chomsky’s point about elite indoctrination at the Ivy League.
First we have the fixation on presidential agency.
“Obama was unwilling to part with an insider so potentially useful”
“Obama’s signal to the CIA and the armed forces that he, too, was willing to transgress”
“his decision to grant all agents immunity”
A bashful empty suit greased into Harvard by Khalid al-Mansour, Law Review editor who emitted zero publications, the invisible man of Columbia, wurlitzered to prominence for a single mawkish speech and now a dispirited pitchman whose working life is a Road Runner cartoon of hair’s-breadth escapes from lone nuts, this poor shnook, we are told, is in charge. The cognitive dissonance will make your head pop like a zit.
“torture: it was understood as an atrocious practice which no one should defend and no one should want to get away with”
What? Bromwich hasn’t even fallen off the turnip truck yet. Impunity is US law, written into the Central Intelligence Agency Act and tucked away in the classified codex when it got too embarrassing. It overrides the constitution’s speech and debate clause, as when Leahy and Rockefeller “chose” to do nothing. It overrides peremptory norms, at least at home.
Then there’s Bromwich’s puzzlement about that “curious detail.”
Continuity-of-government exercises are not a yearly ritual. COG’s the constitution of this state, and Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Meyers are its founding fathers. COG reinforces de facto impunity for police lynching and torture with domestic national security authorities.
re: Secret Garden of Private Equity
Welcome news. Especially like the accompanying illustration. The more sunlight on private equity the better.
Power is a greater motivator than money. Money and wealth are admired for the status and power that flows from it rather the delight that expensive goods and services bring. Thus it is no surprise that capitalists seek ultimate power over all of us. This is why neofeudism is pretty much inevitable at this point not least because it appears that the majority of the American people still are the choosing to take the blue pill.
The question remains how long can the men with the money control the men with the guns. This also feeds into the torture and drone killing regimes. It used to be only extremely marginal people, economically, socially, or racially, could ever expect such treatment. Now, more and more of the population can rationally imagine itself vulnerable to torture or State-sanctioned murder. This has not only empowered the security aparat materially, it has empowered them psychologically, as once-forbidden actions now seem like tantalizing possibilities. Their current paymasters better watch out or the spooks and cops will start seeing themselves running this place and reaping all the rewards.
I think money is ALL about power at a certain level. Heirarchy of money, as you go up the income scale:
1) meeting needs
2) meeting some simple wants
3) having some economic security as in some savings for emergencies and the future, meeting a few more wants
4) freedom (not having to waqe slave)
5) power
It’s easy for most to only think about money on levels lower than 5 because they will never have #5 kind of money, and it’s not at all realistic to imagine they will. But overlooking #5 makes them naive about just how evil those with lots of money often are. They want absolute power, they are sick @#$#s.
5 Things That Could Save Russia From Recession in 2015
Is this in the links as an example of effective propaganda? The last paragraph:
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H O P
The Automatic Earth has a good post about propaganda in 2014.
http://www.theautomaticearth.com/2014-the-year-propaganda-came-of-age/
Really interesting link. 2014 has indeed been the year of propaganda or maybe TPTB just don’t care enough anymore to even fake credibility.
This year I can really see how blatantly obvious and relentless this mass shaping of public opinion has become.
All the more reason for TPTB to shut down the internet as a free and open exchange of information, ideas and perspectives.
They have no reason to shut it down. The people tend to accept the propaganda. People I’ve talked to recently generally distrust the media narrative yet, when it comes to specifics they show they’ve accepted the whole thing. People know they’re being manipulated yet accept it.
The premise — ‘save Russia from recession’ — is wrong, because Russia almost certainly is already in recession. But the GDP stats needed to confirm this won’t be available till summer or fall of 2015.
His advice about ‘stabilizing the ruble’ is also wonky. If a currency depreciates to the point of looking like a bargain, capital starts flowing in instead of out. Argentina received big foreign direct investment flows after it let the peso fall by two-thirds in 2002.
Western advice — worth price charged!
Plus, most of the dollar-denominated debt is corporate. A failure to pay that would have little effect on the debtors in our Cold War II climate – but would hurt those that are owned in the West (immediate write-downs of the full amount). And no mention of China’s offer to enter into swaps or the BRICs moves to create an alternate financial system.
One might also wonder what effect would there be on oil prices if Russia sent a warship into the Gulf? what if they added some angry rhetoric as well?
I don’t understand why Russia is doing a financial restructuring which sounds as tho’ it is being done to attract neoliberal investors while at the same time Russia is entering into financial agreements and organizations with China and the Brics which seek to eliminate the US Dollar as their reserve currency. Russia is playing both sides. I would guess it is to keep its oar in with the EZ because “old” Europe is a very rich importer and very technologically capable. Germany and France especially. The interesting thing is how all this ties in with oil. The Brics will have Russian oil and gas, and Turkey will be a swing state politically because Putin conceded that Europe could build their own southern pipeline from Turkey; the USA will probably get control of Venezuela and the fields around Cuba – and will keep Saudi Arabia et al. The south China Sea oil seems to be China’s already and etc. Europe has always had the best market for Iran, hence Saudi Arabia’s present state of agitation, but Iran can supply China and India. And all this shuffling around about whose oil will be sold to whom – allocations – needs to be obfuscated and politicized lest we all realize that the world of fossil fuels has come to a screeching halt already.
Through his massive QE, Japan’s Abe has precipitated a global currency war with both predictable and unforeseen ramifications. This linked article by John Mauldin from back in November discussed some of the foreseeable implications and is still timely IMO (although the price of oil has already fallen well below his forecast of a month ago). One of his predictions is that China will likely devalue its currency to compete with Japan, and that the Russians will be taking payment for their energy and basic materials exports to China in a currency that will be depreciating against the U.S. dollar.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmauldin/2014/11/25/on-the-verge-of-chaos/?&_suid=1419744873911007247984013520181
Russia’s only sin is that she can’t print as much the global reserve currency as she desires.
Oh, the bane of having to earn or borrow it from the empire!!!
Propaganda is almost by definition “willfully obtuse”. Those that mislead the public in that way are the one’s that deserve reproach.
(see my comment regarding “willfully obtuse” above)
I thought this was interesting…….
President Putin’s goal since the middle of the first decade of the new century has been to rebuild Russian influence and power, and that ultimately led to this year’s incursions into the Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
You’ll notice there is no mention in the paragraph about the billions we poured into the region to essentially replace the government who had a relationship with Russia. It’s all mean ol’ Putin’s fault for protecting an area that we want control of.
“Break Up Citigroup Simon Johnson, Project Syndicate”: Breaking up Citigroup would be a good start, but J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America are both larger, and should also be broken up. Wells Fargo is almost as large as Citigroup, so it’s another good candidate for a break up. Here are the 50 largest U.S. bank holding companies. I don’t see why any of the ones with more than $1 trillion in assets are allowed to remain intact. Heck, even the ones larger than $500 billion are ridiculously bloated:
http://www.ffiec.gov/nicpubweb/nicweb/top50form.aspx
Of course, the chance that anything will be done about these behemoths is pretty close to zero.
Actually, that’s a list of the 105 largest U.S. bank holding companies, not just the top 50. The file name seems to be obsolete.
Related to today’s must-read and yesterday’s story on the origins of the police.
Foucault Reads Kafka ~Tube o’ Theory
Apropos yesterday’s story about the formation of the police, and today’s must-read on torture:
Foucault Reads Kafka
Bromwich is the poster boy for Chomsky’s point about elite indoctrination at the Ivy League.
First we have the fixation on presidential agency.
“Obama was unwilling to part with an insider so potentially useful”
“Obama’s signal to the CIA and the armed forces that he, too, was willing to transgress”
“his decision to grant all agents immunity”
A bashful empty suit greased into Harvard by Khalid al-Mansour, Law Review editor who emitted zero publications, the invisible man of Columbia, wurlitzered to prominence for a single mawkish speech and now a dispirited pitchman whose working life is a Road Runner cartoon of hair’s-breadth escapes from lone nuts, this poor shnook, we are told, is in charge. The cognitive dissonance will make your head pop like a zit.
“torture: it was understood as an atrocious practice which no one should defend and no one should want to get away with”
What? Bromwich hasn’t even fallen off the turnip truck yet. Impunity is US law, written into the Central Intelligence Agency Act and tucked away in the classified codex when it got too embarrassing. It overrides the constitution’s speech and debate clause, as when Leahy and Rockefeller “chose” to do nothing. It overrides peremptory norms, at least at home.
Then there’s Bromwich’s puzzlement about that “curious detail.”
Continuity-of-government exercises are not a yearly ritual. COG’s the constitution of this state, and Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Meyers are its founding fathers. COG reinforces de facto impunity for police lynching and torture with domestic national security authorities.
Health tip from the Neanderthals – weight training.
For individuals, it’s that; for nations, it’s manufacturing.
For the empire printing fiat global reserve currency, without restraint, something has to give to put it into worldwide circulation and in our case, it has been manufacturing outsourced.
Perhaps, we can blame it on the French, for having the gall to ask for gold in exchange for their dollars. But why blame others when we should and could look at ourselves? Domestically, it has been possible, if not the will by the elites, to satiate the populace, but abroad, an empire has been reborn consequently.
Apologies if this link to Bill Moyer’s presentation of Ursula Le Guin’s acceptance speech was already posted:
http://billmoyers.com/2014/12/27/ursula-le-guin-will-need-writers-can-remember-freedom/
http://www.nltimes.nl/2014/12/23/new-mh17-photos-suggest-surface-air-missile-launch-separatists/
Witness account of Ukraine MH17 takedown confirmed by lie detector – investigators ““According to his account, he personally saw the plane piloted by [Ukrainian military pilot] Voloshin armed with R-60 air-to-air missiles,” Markin said. “He added there was no need for such weapons during regular air missions of the Ukrainian Air Forces because the rebel forces had no military aircraft.””
W-e-e-e-e-l-l ….
Just pointing out the perils of using anonymous sources backed up by local, ummm, experts . I don’t buy either story at this point. I tried to emphasize that by linking to the German satire on You Tube, unfortunately it didn’t end up under my own comment as I intended.
http://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/binnenland/hoe-onderzocht-rtl-nieuws-de-nieuwe-mh17-fotos
In the interest of fairness, German media has been at the forefront of exposing the shameless Russkie propaganda. The picture of the pro-Russian terrorist gloating over the teddy bear from the downed airliner speaks volumes…
From the Guardian article on angry (British) voters; ” at the last election 76% of over-65s were still voting, while only 44% aged 18-24 were going to the ballot box.”
That’s nothing – turnout in the last American election was 36%, and doubtless even lower among the millennials Obama lured to the voting booth and then betrayed (was that a plan?) Refusing to vote is our version of “noneof the above” – without the effect. You’d think if they’re that pissed off, they’d make a protest vote. If enough people did that, they’d overturn our politics. Granted, that might bring on a coup or a cancelled election – but we need to know that.
Nobody knows when Americans will start voting in anger, but it can’t be too long now – if it is, it’ll be too late. It behooves us to field as many alternative candidates as we can, so they actually have the option. That’s something for the angry ones among our commentariat to think about.
I think it was a plan. The instant disbanding of OFA spoke volumes.