Topics

31

Aneristic Illusions / Effective martial law in Paragould, Arkansas

« on: January 31, 2013, 09:58:16 am »

What is this I don't even

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/29/arkansas_town_enacts_martial_law/

Following a rise in violent crime in Paragould, an Arkansas town of around 26,000 residents, the mayor and police chief announced that starting this month police in SWAT gear carrying AR-15s would patrol the streets.

“If you’re out walking, we’re going to stop you, ask why you’re out walking, and check for your ID,” police chief Todd Stovall told a December town hall meeting. As if to render the implementation of a visible police state more palatable, Stovall assured residents that police stops would not be based on any profiling: “We’re going to do it to everybody,” he said.

According to local news reports, the police department canceled two subsequent town hall meetings to discuss the heavy handed policing plan. Following outrage from Paragould residents, the police cited “public safety concerns” to cancel the meetings. Meanwhile, Paragould’s mayor has reportedly dialed back his rhetoric around the amped up policing proposal and, according to the Arkansas Times, the mayor said patrolling police would not “constantly” be carrying assault rifles. Although announced to begin in January, no SWAT patrols have begun in Paragould yet.

So, they won't be constantly carrying AR-15's.  They'll just be armed men in combat armour, asking for your papers, citizen.  Nothing to worry about.

32

Think for Yourself, Schmuck! / The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis

« on: January 27, 2013, 05:57:20 pm »

Charlie Stross asks "why are there so many stupid people"?

I have a speculative answer:

We are hominids. One of the things that makes us different from other primates is that we have language. Language enables us to communicate about our environment and to communicate our interior states. This is a very powerful tool; it means that if, for example, you have figured out a better way to peel a banana, you can tell me about it, and I can acquire that trait.

Our ability to exchange extended phenotypic traits without genetic exchange (thank you, language faculty!) makes us, as Dawkins pointed out in the 1990s, exceptional.

Because of this ability, we don’t have to invent everything for ourselves, individually; we can borrow one anothers’ good ideas. So we only need to be smart enough to understand and use the cognitive tools created by our most intelligent outliers.

Let me re-formulate that hypothesis: The evolutionary pressure selecting for general intelligence (to the extent that general intelligence exists) breaks once a species develops language.

And a logical corollary of this hypothesis is that we are only just smart enough, on average, to be capable of horizontal transfer of memes. Once language and culture arrived (note specialized usage of term ‘culture’), we didn’t need to get any smarter: we could “borrow” from one another. Therefore we’re only just smart enough to do this.

(I call this Charlie’s Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis.)

Steve Hynd suggests that this could explain the trajectory of the Republican Party at the moment:

My analogy is this: the Republican Party has lost the minimum intelligence to listen to its outliers because it has lost the minimum intelligence to realize that its outliers are now on its left-moderate wing.

[...]

To borrow from Charlie, the Republican Party – a memetic entity – has become too stupid for horizontal transfer of new memes which would fit it for survival in a cultural environment which is rapidly changing in demographics and in its attitudes to bigotry of various stripes. It can change that and evolve or it can stay the same and become extinct.

33

Think for Yourself, Schmuck! / Here's the paradox

« on: January 27, 2013, 05:51:52 pm »

never mind, thread ruined.

34

Apple Zone / Charles "Chinese" Gordon UNLIMITED discussion thread

« on: January 25, 2013, 04:23:57 pm »

You have to admit, the man had style.

35

Aneristic Illusions / UK to have referendum on leaving EU

« on: January 24, 2013, 02:44:10 pm »

This is pretty huge news:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21170265

David Cameron has rebuffed criticism at home and abroad of his commitment to hold a referendum on the UK's future in Europe if he wins the next election.

Labour and the Lib Dems have said plans to renegotiate the UK's membership and put it to a public vote was a gamble and against the national interest.

France and Germany warned the UK against pursuing an "a la carte" approach. The US said the UK and the EU were stronger together.

But the PM said he had public backing.

Peter Oborne explains fairly well why this is a huge deal:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/9821289/David-Cameron-may-have-finished-off-the-Tories-but-he-had-no-choice.html

All Conservative leaders since Margaret Thatcher have faced one central problem: how to prevent the party splitting wide apart over Europe. This was the difficulty that pulverised John Major, caused William Hague to go bald, propelled Iain Duncan Smith to the party leadership, and then got him sacked a short time later.

Until yesterday, David Cameron’s policy was both sensible and wise: to let sleeping dogs lie. He took heed of Mr Hague’s advice that shifting position on Europe was like moving an unexploded bomb, liable to go off at any moment, across a crowded room. Much better to leave alone. No wonder that the Prime Minister delayed any action for so long, and carried it out with such reluctance.

Yesterday, with immense trepidation, the unexploded bomb was moved. At first sight, Mr Cameron has got away with it. He received a hero’s welcome from Conservative MPs when he entered the chamber for Prime Minister’s Questions. Truculent customers such as the viscerally Eurosceptic Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell say they are delighted. Meanwhile, there was enough pro-European language in the Cameron speech to keep the Tory Left happy. Mr Cameron has pleased everybody, and that makes it less unlikely that the Conservative Party will win the next election.

So much for the short-term consequences. In the longer term, the situation is much more interesting, and more dangerous. The Prime Minister has moved the bomb, but he has not defused it. It remains in the room, ticking away. It is simply in a different place, and the circumstances have changed: Mr Cameron, by committing the Tories to an in-out referendum, has greatly increased the likelihood that Britain will eventually leave the European Union, while a formal split within the Conservative Party over Europe now looks almost certain.

There's also the international context:

Cameron has just put the world on notice that the UK is prepared to cause major disruption to the economic life of an immense trading bloc, with who knows how many cascading effects on the pattern of global trade and investment. We’re not a political risk in the way that say, Pakistan is, but Cameron has established political risk as a necessary factor in the ways that other countries will think about the UK from now on. As such, what the hell is going on here is going to be a matter of interest to the world’s intelligence agencies above and beyond the usual level of spying-between-friends. In addition, there’s the fact that pretty much every state with a dog in this fight would probably be pleased if the current government were to be replaced by a more co-operative entity. I have no idea whether or in what way these two things might connect, but I do wonder if the Conservatives will be on the receiving end of some of the same kind of attention that Labour used to get back in the Cold War days.

Prepare for "interesting times".

36

Aneristic Illusions / CIA to be given "free hand" in Pakistan

« on: January 23, 2013, 07:28:08 pm »

This can't be good.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/497799/remote-controlled-war-pakistan-seeks-us-explanation-on-drone-manual/

Pakistan has asked the United States to halt its highly controversial drone campaign following reports that US President Barack Obama’s administration was planning to give the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) a “free hand” to continue its remotely-controlled war in tribal regions.

The issue was raised by Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar in a meeting with Richard Olson, the US ambassador in Islamabad, on Tuesday, a foreign ministry official told The Express Tribune.

Foreign Minister Khar voiced her concern over reports that the CIA would step up its drone campaign in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan, said the official, who wished not to be named.

She also urged Ambassador Olson to explain his government’s position on the new “playbook” for targeted killings, which would not apply to Pakistan. This, according to The Washington Post, means the CIA will continue to hunt for al Qaeda and its Taliban cohorts in the tribal regions for a year or so before the new rules become applicable to it.

John Brennan, tipped to become next head of the CIA, is very, very (unhealthily) keen on drone attacks, you should recall.

37

Aneristic Illusions / How many Obama and MLK comparisons will we have...

« on: January 22, 2013, 11:53:21 am »

...before it becomes completely fucking tedious?  As if Obama isn't exactly the kind of "moderate" MLK despised:

"cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right."

and

"I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season."

Of course, Actual MLK will be ignored for Mythical Feel Good MLK, which will make that glaring problem go away.  For anyone unaware of history, which is, of course, most people.

38

Think for Yourself, Schmuck! / A sometimes useful reminder

« on: January 21, 2013, 08:52:51 pm »

Societies are not unitary.  They are not social systems (closed or open); they are not totalities.  We never find a single bounded society in geographical or social space.  Because there is no system, no totality, there cannot be "sub-systems", "dimensions" or "levels" of such a totality.  Because there is no whole, social relations cannot be reduced to "ultimately," "in the last instance," to some systemic property of it – like the "mode of material production," or the "cultural" or "normative system," or the "form of military organization."  Because there is no bounded totality, it is not helpful to divide social change or conflict into "endogenous" and "exogenous" varieties.  Because there is no social system, there is no "evolutionary" process within it.  Because humanity is not divided into a series of bounded totalities, "diffusion" of social organization does not occur between them.  Because there is no totality, individuals are not constrained in their behaviour by "social structure as a whole" and so it is not helpful to make a distinction between "social action" and "social structure".

Just in case you forgot.

39

Apple Zone / The terrorist threat has evolved

« on: January 21, 2013, 08:29:04 pm »

Once seen as a symbol of youth culture and Japanese soft power, Hello Kitty has now become an inspirational figure to terrorist masterminds all over the world, including this nefarious five year old from Pennsylvania:

Link

A 5-year-old Pennsylvania girl was suspended from kindergarten after she allegedly threatened to shoot herself and a friend with a pink plastic Hello Kitty bubble gun.

Officials at Mount Carmel Area Elementary School in Mount Carmel labeled the unnamed girl a "terrorist threat" over the January 10 incident, which occurred while she and a friend were waiting in line for a school bus, according to PennLive.

Robin Ficker, an attorney for the girl's parents, said the girl told her friend, "I'm going to shoot you and I will shoot myself" with her Hello Kitty bubble gun, which she didn't even have with her.

School officials then questioned both girls, grilling them for half an hour without their parents present. After the interrogation, the would-be 'shooter' was labeled a "terrorist threat" and suspended for 10 days. The school also ordered the kindergartner to be examined by a psychologist.

You'll notice how she cunningly threatened her helpless victims while the gun was not even present.  Truly a criminal genius.  Had it not been for the alertness and bravery of school officials, we could be mourning another tragic terrorist atrocity in America today.  God bless them, and their far-sighted actions.

40

Aneristic Illusions / The closest thing you're ever going to see to a 9/11 "smoking gun"

« on: January 20, 2013, 07:59:28 pm »

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/01/03/exclusive-al-awlaki-booked-pre-11-air-travel-for-hijackers-fbi-documents-show/

Yes, it's FOX, but elements of this ring true.

One FBI investigative report known as a 302 summarizes the bureau’s investigation of Al-Awlaki’s Visa transactions. While heavily redacted, the document indicates a credit transaction for “Atta, Mohammed -- American West Airlines, 08/13/2001, Washington, DC to Las Vegas to Miami," the document says.

The mid-August flight, according to the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, which first investigated the attacks, was one of Atta’s numerous and crucial surveillance flights.

"On August 13, Atta flew a second time across country from Washington to Las Vegas on a Boeing 757 (seated in first class) returning on August 14 to Fort Lauderdale," the 9/11 report reads.

The FBI documents also show a credit card record for a “Suqami, S. ----Southwest Airlines, 07/10/2001, Ft. Lauderdale to Orlando.” Satam al-Suqami was one of the muscle hijackers on American Airlines Flight 11, which slammed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.

The third individual, identified in the records is a “W. al-Sheri -- National Airlines, 08/01/2001, San Francisco to Las Vegas to Miami.”  This appears to be either Waleed al-Shehri or Wail al-Shehri. The two brothers were also muscle hijackers, according to the 9/11 Commission report. 

And this:

Fox News was also first to report that the cleric was a guest speaker on moderate Islam at a Pentagon executive dining room in February 2002. The newly released documents now suggest the FBI knew five months earlier of al-Awlaki’s probable link to the hijackers.   

Fox News was also first to report that al-Awlaki was held at New York City’s JFK airport on Oct. 10, 2002, under a warrant for passport fraud, a felony punishable by 10 years. However, as Fox News was first to document, an FBI agent, Wade Ammerman, from the bureau’s Washington field office ordered the cleric be released from custody, even though there was an active warrant for his arrest.

Fox News’ reporting, which has not been publicly disputed by the bureau, suggests that after the 9/11 attacks the FBI tried to work with al-Awlaki or track him for intelligence purposes.

I've suggested something along this line before.  Al-Walaki was in contact with suspected Saudi intelligence agent* Omar al-Bayoumi while under FBI surveillance in 2000.  The call was relating to (Nawaf)  Alhazmi and (Khalid) Almihdhar, two of the 9/11 hijackers.   Alhazmi and Almihdhar were known to have attended the 2000 Al-Qaeda "conference" in Malaysia by the CIA....but the CIA did not inform the FBI that said known terrorists were in the country.

Two months after al-Bayoumi began aiding Alhazmi and Almihdhar, according to a Newsweek investigation, al-Bayoumi's wife began receiving regular stipends, often monthly and usually around $2,000, totaling tens of thousands of dollars.

Payments arrived "in the form of cashier's checks, purchased from Washington's Riggs Bank by Princess Haifa bint Faisal, the daughter of the late King Faisal and wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi envoy who is a prominent Washington figure and personal friend of the Bush family."  Prince Bandar tutored Bush Jr on foreign policy during the 1999-2000 period, and currently is the head of Saudi intelligence.

Al-Walaki left the US shortly before 9/11 occured, and returned once before the October incident mentioned above.  That time, the FBI tried to hold him on a money-laundering charge.  Also worth noting that after that incident, he was placed on the terrorist watch list for the USA...then removed again, only days before he returned (the October incident mentioned above).

Despite large amounts of evidence tying al-Walaki to the 9/11 attacks, he was not considered a potential Al-Qaeda operative until 2008.  Something rather odd was going on between all of these actors, and while it may not add up to the Truther's wildest dreams of the encroaching NWO, it's still fishy enough to merit investigation.

*Suspected, that is, by the FBI, among others.

41

Aneristic Illusions / Rents, oil, copyright and the suicide of Aaron Swartz

« on: January 18, 2013, 12:42:47 pm »

Give this a read, please

http://symbalitics.blogspot.ca/2013/01/aaron-swartz-blood-for-oil.html

In the post-war era, one can define the "post-modern" problem as the point where production of information undermines information monopolies, this includes money, religion, and academia. This leads, in Marxist and Marxian thought to the continental movement now labelled "post-structuralism," the work of Derrida, Lacan, and others. On the right it leads to fundamentalist movements and traditionalism. Both left and right assert what I will label the "neo thesis." The neo-thesis states that the early 20th century was a disruption, that it is impossible to return to the time before it directly, but, largely agreeing with Hayek, that the disruption can be returned to by re-asserting a social control. What Derrida calls "the game itself," is the means to return to a Pre-World War II normalcy. Hence, a neo- world, where movements assert a three fold argument: the present is corrupt, the solution is to return to some imagined better moment, and the means is by having some particular ideology as the primary one which rules over others. Thus fights, even over small disagreements, become brutal, because the are a fight over the very most basic rules of social participation, the "other" is alien, not merely in disagreement.

However this ideological framework is not dominant for randomly or because of its intrinsic aesthetic appeal. It grew up because the reality is that control of a few key pieces of capital, knowledge, and resource, dominate over all the others. It was Derrida who quipped that two things would never be viritual: oil and Jerusalem, everyone wants the real thing. In this he encapsulated the problem: control over the keys to the mechanized economy and control over the brand equity of the "game itself" are the basis of all power, and since power is needed to maintain the benefits of the present, the basis of present society.

Enter Intellectual Property, and the role of academia. The West had two important rents: one is the path dependency of finance, which the very nature of the oilarchies could not easily duplicate, and the other was the path dependency of knowledge creation, which the oilarchies did not want to duplicate.

Thus part of the drive to create streams of income, was to propertize information, at the same time, cut the oil cost of its storage and transmission. These two goals are in fundamental contradiction: knowledge, the more it is digitized, and internetworked, acts less and less like property, and more and more like heat. It diffuses.

This is what bothered people who dealt with this system. Viewed in terms of the marginal, that is capital, cost, a copy costs almost nothing, and enough copies, and the value is enormous. At the same time that information became more important, the value of creation dropped to almost zero. The value of a song writer is less than zero: most musicians spend more on the tools to make music, than they earn. Rent has a value, thus a brand name musician, who is easy to find, is worth a million hits for nothing.

Academia is part of the path dependent rental advantage of the US, and as such, its price rose through the roof, going up by far more than inflation for the last 30 years.

It is this connection: the need to create rents to say ahead of the ability of low stake holder resource billionaires, that made IP and Academia behave like rents. The problem is that while academia does, indeed use rents all the time, for example, naming mathematical theorums after the creator, scientific laws after the discoverer, footnoting and textual apparatus, these rents are difficult to impossible to monetize directly. Academic rent created the drive to larger and larger administrative systems, and more and more power being given to people who controlled the money flow. With every passing year, there was the need to squeeze larger rents.

All in all it's quite brilliant, and links together two things I had never connected before (the role of oil in the global economy and the role of IP in academia)

42

Techmology and Scientism / Wrong! Jared Diamond you are WRONG!

« on: January 16, 2013, 02:38:32 pm »

 

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/archaeologists-uncover-clues-to-why-vikings-abandoned-greenland-a-876626.html#spRedirectedFrom=www&referrrer=http://t.co/1Xj9KbkB

For years, researchers have puzzled over why Viking descendents abandoned Greenland in the late 15th century. But archaeologists now believe that economic and identity issues, rather than starvation and disease, drove them back to their ancestral homes.

TL;DR they didn't like eating seals all day, every day.

43

Aneristic Illusions / PKK activists assassinated in Paris ahead of peace talks

« on: January 13, 2013, 10:50:56 pm »

http://world.time.com/2013/01/10/kurdish-assassinations-in-paris-turn-a-spotlight-on-turkey-pkk-talks/

Basically, Turkey was looking to open a dialogue with the PKK, the Kurdish Workers Party.  Talks were due to take place in Paris, with senior PKK members.  And then, someone killed them, execution style.

The internet is rife with rumours about who is reponsible already.  Some are laying the blame at the feet of dissident Kurdish nationalists, who feel the PKK is selling them out.  Possible.  Others suggest rogue units within the military and intelligence agencies of the Turkish state - Ergenekon, the "deep state" of far-right radicals - are the culprits.

But no-one seems to be looking at the Kurdish role in Syria's civil war...namely, that Syrian Kurds aligned with the PKK are becoming a serious and credible faction in the war, one which may be able to carve out their own territory from Syrian soil, giving a material base to a future "Kurdistan".

Their enemies in the civil war, such as the Syrian government, would be most delighted to see the PKK paralyzed, and to drive a wedge between them and Turkey, I am sure...

44

Aneristic Illusions / The French have gone to war

« on: January 13, 2013, 02:08:49 am »

Northern Mali is the target of operations:

President Francois Hollande says French troops are taking part in operations against Islamists in northern Mali.

French troops “have brought support to the Malian army to fight against the terrorists”, Mr Hollande said.

He said the intervention was in line with international law, and had been agreed with Malian President Dioncounda Traore.

Armed groups, some linked to al-Qaeda, took control of northern Mali in April after a coup in the capital, Bamako.

The militants said this week that they had advanced further into government-controlled territory.

Mr Hollande said French military action had begun on Friday afternoon and would last “as long as necessary.

The EU has also committed a force of 200 military trainers for the Malian Army.  I don't know what nationality, but this is almost certainly a NATO approved operation, so Italy, Spain etc are all good bets.

Not sure how ECOWAS will feel about this, though. 

45

Aneristic Illusions / Public choice theory = Marxism Leninism?

« on: January 12, 2013, 11:37:53 am »

So, let's consider...

According to the MLists,

(1) Politics is about struggle between economic classes. The state acts in the interest of the capitalist class as a whole, and arbitrates differences among ‘fractions’ of capital;

(2) Political ideas (except Marxism-Leninism) are ‘ideologies’ designed to rationalise class rule;

(3) The masses acquiesce because of ‘false consciousness’ associated with submission to a dominant or ‘hegemonic’ ideology.

And according to the PCTists...

(1) Politics is about the struggle between interest groups. The state responds to the pressure of organised interest groups, typically tight coalitions of producer groups. Logrolling between these groups produces an outcome which benefits them collectively at the expense of taxpayers and consumers;

(2) Political ideas (except free-market ideas) are ideologies designed to rationalise policies serving various interest groups;

(3) Voters acquiesce because of ‘rational ignorance’ which leads them to take little interest in politics and makes them easily subject to manipulation by political interests.

As a consequence:

If ideas do not matter, free speech is at best a luxury and at worst a distraction. Even if speech is not actually suppressed, it is debased. When political debate is seen as a charade by its participants, it naturally becomes one. Furthermore, since the system cannot be changed by reason, some form of ‘short sharp shock’ is required. The result is a cult of ruthlessness (the catchphrase here is ‘tough decisions’). Since opposition to one’s policies is interpreted as a sign that interest groups are being hurt, it may be taken as evidence of correctness. The correct response is not to persuade one’s opponents, but to override them.

And people say I'm strange for considering Neocons the last Leninists.  No, everyone else is for not.