Of Lies, Obfuscations and Trust
From Intrepid Blog:
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
~George Orwell, 1984
“And era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted.”
~Arthur Miller
Our modern civilization seems to be perpetually plagued by the dangers provoked due to the scarcity of precious natural resources. Since the early 2000s articles in the media have been warning us about ‘Peak Oil’, ‘Peak Energy’ & ‘Peak Water’. Heck, there’s even fears about ‘Peak Helium’! which I’m sure keeps clowns & carnival managers awake at nights.
But the crisis that worries me the most is the shortage of an even more precious commodity: Trust.
That we live in the Age of Peak Trust has become patently clear by the events that have shocked the world this year. When I first came across the news about the giant fireball on Russia last February, I was amazed to read a significant percentage of their population did not believe the ‘official’ meteor explanation! the favored alternative explanations ranged from an Amerikinsky weapons test, a UFO or a even a message from the Big-G himself –’cause you know how Jehovah liked to go all Roland Emmerich in the Ancient Testament.
I don’t think it’s too preposterous to explain this current Russian distrust on official channels by looking into the past, understanding it as the logical outcome of the way the Kremlin manipulated the news with propaganda during the Soviet era. Let’s just keep in mind that George Orwell based his landmark novel 1984 in the Stalinist regime of 1948.
On the other side of the pond, things are no better by any stretch of the imagination. The continuous streaks of domestic violence plaguing the United States –Aurora, Connecticut, Newtown, Boston– have triggered a reflex reaction of distrust in mainstream media. In the case of the Boston bombings, more people were consulting the live Tweet feeds than paying attention to the sponsored talking heads on the 24/7 news channels.
‘Conspiracy theory’ has become both a slandering label in America, as well as a commercial brand selling all sorts of products customized to any kind of taste or sensibility. “Tell me your favorite conspiracy theory, and I’ll tell YOU your political affiliation” is one of my mottos –and just so you know, it’s copyrighted, k?
Again looking into the past to try to find a clue about the present, many people would agree that JFK’s assassination constituted a traumatic ‘loss of innocence’ for the American people, when the Baby Boomer generation realized it was no longer possible to trust implicitly in everything the government said, the way their parents used to do when America was fighting the evil powers of the Axis. And not longer after that came Vietnam & Watergate, and the toothpaste was squeezed out of the tube.
On my side of the border we also find quite a lot of mistrust in government institutions. One of the most prominent political figures in the Mexican landscape is a man named Andres Manuel López Obrador, who has carved his career out of denouncing endless conspiracies against him. Every time he loses an election the man cries foul & demands a recount!
But like Russia & the USA, Mexicans have also suffered our own growing pains. There was the Tlatelolco massacre of ’68, a wound that refuses to heal because those responsible were never tried & prosecuted. And if rumors of election fraud are so easy to believe, it’s because such practices were standard procedure for many decades.
Peak Trust is a global problem. Make no mistake about it.
So we’re leaving in an age where the public perception in government officials is at an ultimate low, where common citizens view financial institutions as white-collared thieves, and the hierarchy of churches as a band of hypocritical accomplices of pederasts.
Ah, but we still have Science, right? that immaculate ivory tower of uncompromising quest for the Truth! Unfortunately that tower is not without a few skeletons buried beneath its foundations. Case in point: The Cigarette Controversy
“The tobacco companies knew and for most part accepted the evidence that cigarette smoking was a cause of cancer by the late 1950s.
The documents also reveal that the tobacco companies helped manufacture the smoking controversy by funding scientific research that was intended to obfuscate and prolong the debate about smoking and health”
As noble as its goals may be, Science is conducted by scientists, who are not above corruptibility. Global warming & the Antivaxxing movement are excellent examples of just how rampant the distrust in Science is now ingrained in a substantial part of the population.
But Nature hates a vacuum, and that’s equally true for Human nature; and the vacuum of trust in official institutions is easily filled by hawkers & peddlers of fear-mongering –I need not name them, everybody knows who they are.
And so it seems not a week goes by that a new scandal erupts, and this regularity causes a rather peculiar numbing effect in our minds. It’s like the abuse of profanity in someone’s vocabulary: repeating FUCK so many times deprives the word of its intended potency.
But here’s the thing: That numbness is a potential threat. Like the proverbial frog that instinctively jumps out of a boiling pot of water, but will stay in the pot if the temperature is slowly increased, I view our getting used to expect the worst out of those in power as a pathological behavior. How could a civilization be able to properly function & adapt to new threats without a modicum of confidence in the scaffolding of the social structure?
If you see politicians as nothing but crooks & liars, where’s the incentive to follow their orders? If you think of your physician as a pill-peddler at the service of Big Pharma, why would you trust his diagnosis & follow his recipe? So the distrust is translated into stagnation & the waste of precious time.
Either we snap out of it, or we’re destined to end up as frog soup.
Let’s illustrate this with a hypothetical scenario: Suppose next month president Obama called for a press conference, announcing the detection of a massive asteroid heading towards our planet. The impact, according to NASA scientists & confirmed by top astronomers around the world, was calculated for the year 2027. That would give us less than 14 years to coordinate an urgent international effort in order to launch an emergency program, so that we wouldn’t face the same fate of the dinosaurs.
I guarantee you that after 10 years of such an announcement, the emergency program would have made very little progress, because by then the public opinion would still be divided due to those denouncing the asteroid threat as a complete fabrication. And even the support of the United Nations would only help exacerbate the claims of those accusing the ‘defense asteroid program’ as a smokescreen campaign — I do believe the proper term is ‘false flag attack.’
Sounds familiar?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLsBwLhIVkk
Lying. A trait so common in men it’s even brought up in the Genesis tale, when Cain feigns not knowing where his brother is after he rearranged Abel’s skull with an ass jaw bone. But looking away of religious interpretation, believe it or not there are scientific theories suggesting it’s our bullshiting nature one of the crucial factors to our species’ vertiginous evolution. Studies with chimpanzees have proven our hairy cousins have a limited capacity to detect deception, because lying & cheating is an advantageous way to form coalitions, find food & mating. Other scientists suggest we’re constantly studying the facial features of those around us, trying to read their Po-po-poker face & call their bluff.
We pair sentience with deception. Don’t believe me? Think of the ultimate trial for Artificial Intelligence: the Turing test. The objective of the test is to see whether a computer program can successfully deceive you to believe you’re chatting with another person. Leave it to a scientist worried with masking his true sexual orientation to come up with such a trial…
Does that mean lying is common in ALL societies? Not necessarily. In hunter-gathering groups, lying carries a heavy penalty, since it may endanger the survival of the entire group. These groups tend to be more egalitarian than the hierarchical we live in, and perhaps this fosters an appreciation for Truth, and the avoidance of deception –at least among the members of the same clan/group.
But with increased numbers so to increase the chance to deceive your neighbor & getting away with it. I remember that scene in Spielberg’s film Amistad, when Baldwin (McCounaghey) is trying to explain to Cinque they need to retry the case again, even after they won. Cinque’s response is very telling:
Joseph Cinque: [in Mende] What kind of a place is this where you almost mean what you say? Where laws almost work? How can you live like that?
Indeed, how can we?
But the fact is that in our society we not only put up with deception, we recognize it as a tool to climb the social ladder –The better you are lying, the faster your career will advance. And it takes a very peculiar personality to make a successful liar: a natural charisma mixed with a high level of intelligence, coupled with a necessary lack of empathy for the person or persons you’re deceiving. People who show all these characteristics are easily recognizable by psychiatrists: they call them psychopaths.
The loonies are running the asylum, my friends. They always have been.
Because even though deception might have been an advantageous trait among our primate ancestors, like the rest of our violent proclivities so too we must find a way to rein to our lying impulses. We must realize that level of bullshit has raised so high we’re soon gonna drown on it, and that deception might pose a serious threat to our future.
Consider the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Most people think of that film as a Sci-Fi story in which a computer goes crazy, but almost everyone overlooks the reason why HAL goes bonkers: it’s heuristic programming couldn’t cope with its orders to withhold the information about the monolith discovered on the Moon from its human colleagues, which provokes a sort of cybernetic paranoia. When David Bowman & Frank Poole find out HAL lied about the antenna’s malfunction, how did they choose to respond? By LYING to Hal & go hiding on one of the pods with the sound off so they can scheme its disconnection! Lies upon lies upon lies.
I agree with Christopher Knowles: Dr. Heywood Floyd is the real villain of that flick.
Or if you find 2001 to dry & intellectual for you, what about one of the greatest Sci-Fi spoofs of all times: Galaxy Quest!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VGajDTNKFU
So how do we go about getting rid of the bullshit? Do we attempt the ‘evangelization’ approach favored by the so-called ‘Skeptic’ groups? IMO that has the exact opposite result, because the more you ridicule & mock a certain viewpoint, the more resistance you will engender among the same people you’re trying to convince –what we might call the ‘LA LA LA I can’t hear you!’ effect.
So ironically, all those pundits & pop scientists denouncing the insanity of the Mayan doomsday last year, probably helped promote it even more!
Speaking about 2012, I must confess that one of my favorite ‘doomsday scenarios’ –mind you, NOT because I was expecting it to happen, but because it was a fun idea to consider– was that on that fateful day of Dec. 21st we would all wake up, get out of bed, have breakfast & go to our works, and suddenly we’d realize that everybody became telepathic! A major solar flare would have excited the human pineal gland & activate a dormant capacity in our brains or whatever.
Think of it: if everybody could read each other’s minds, it would truly be the end of the world as we know it! Spouses would know their other half was cheating on them, employers would learn what their employees REALLY thought about them… Politicians would run to a cliff like a band of neurotic lemmings, closely followed by the Wall Street stock brokers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeoFv3dOeqo
Pure, absolute chaos. See why it’s such a fun scenario?
Alas, Dec 21st came & went, and our little peccadilloes remain secure in the safebox of our minds. Is telepathy even possible, one could ask? In his first book Jadoo, John Keel narrates his encounter with at least 2 ascetic masters–one in India, the other in Nepal– who seemed to have the capacity to read his thoughts. An accomplishment reached after a lifetime of mental training & spiritual discipline, they explained to the young adventurer.
Could we find a way to ‘mimic’ telepathy, using our modern technology? I believe we’re halfway there, whether we want it or not, thanks to the disruptive power of the Internet & social networks –which is perhaps the veiled drive behind our governments’ obsession with the regulation of online communications.
There’s also a great deal of research funded by Darpa, that mad-scientist wing of the US Defense Department, seeking to be able to scan & interpret the electrochemical activity in the human brain, and to wirelessly send direct command to the minds of soldiers.
With all this in the works, perhaps it’s not unlikely to predict that Deception has its days numbered. But a new question arises: are we ready to live in a world without lies, no matter how brutal it could be to be deprived of comfy delusions & false assumptions?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mub2JIwTtX8
Would the eradication of Deception be what frightens us the most about the so-called Singularity? With the veil of lies, might we be also casting away that which we identify as the Human condition?
Are we sure we can handle the Truth?
Fuck if I know, y’all! All I know is… I’m tired of the taste of bullshit.
Aren’t you?
Red Pill Junkie is one of my favorite bloggers and he appears on many blogs.
He tells heap big truth to power and as his moniker implies, partakes of the red pill.
And like him, I’m pretty sick of the taste of bullshit in my mouth.
Daniel Estulin’s 2012 Bilderberg Report
From Estulin’s Blog:
[…]U.S. economy and financial crisis in Europe
One of the key conclusions from the Bilderberg meeting: The U.S. will manipulate the fall of the U.S. dollar in value against the Chinese yuan. The thinking behind is that a devalued dollar will inflate away America’s debts and Obligations. Bilderberg is not particularly Concerned That the people are the guinea pig in all of this. What is being sacrificed is the purchasing power of the U.S. $.
It’s all part of Their Deal With Beijing to help inflate away its debts Washington, Beijing and give more say in the overall economy. That’s why Fu Ying, China’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs was invited to the Bilderberg Conference This Year. That’s why Huang Yiping, Professor of Economics, China Center for Economic Research, Peking University was invited to Bilderberg Also 2012. Collusion Between the U.S. government and the Chinese government is in progress. Others Who Have Actively participated in the discussion on the destruction of the U.S. dollar at the expense of the yuan are Chiense Cheng Li, Director of Research and Senior Fellow with John L. Thornton China Center, Brookings Institution and Robert Rubin, Co-Chair of the powerful Council on Foreign Relations and Former Secretary of the Treasury.
Bilderberg group is made up of former members alliance NATO, USA, Canada and Western Europe. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, former members of the Warsaw Pact minus Russia Have Been Incorporated into the organization. In the 1950s, Bilderberg Group was a very important element of the oligarchical structures of the cold war period Because It was a vehicle through private financier oligarchical Interests Which Were Able to Impose Their Policies on what are nominally sovereign Governments.
Today, Bilderberg is a medium of bringing together financial Institutions Which Are the World’s Most Powerful and Most predatory financial interests. And at this time, it is That Which combination is the worst enemy of humanity.
THUS, The Presence of Chinese Communist Party leaders is an extraordinary phenomenon Which Must Be Understood in terms of a US-China conspiracy meant to deflate away the value of the U.S. dollar. Now, it’s only a matter of time before the U.S. dollar loses its role as the world’s reserve currency. Bilderberg knows it is going to happen. The U.S. government knows it is going to happen. And the mainstream press knows it is going to happen. They WANT the dollar devalued so That the U.S. government can try and default on Washington’s domestic and International obligations through inflation.
Furthermore, Bilderberg is Concerned with yet another Lehman-type megashock – A Very Real Possibility of bank runs. As one Bilderberger said: “Europe and the U.S. are now on a collision course with a second Lehman-type megashock.”
As one European bankers present at the Bilderberg conference Stated, “If you think Europe’s Crisis and its deflated currency is going to help support the U.S. $, think again.” In fact, there was a general agreement at the Bilderberg meeting That the Fed will be called to the rescue to prop up Europe’s system failure by printing even more money, and THUS weakening the dollar in the long run.
It’s been a while since I posted anything about the Bilderbergers, but this past political season has reminded me that U.S. politicians are beholden to elite groups that are higher up on the food chain than they are.
No matter what political party they are members of.
And reminds me of reasons why I don’t like banksters very much.
Filmmaker Dan Mack’s Response to Lord Martin Rees
From Huffington Post:
Lord Martin Rees recently offered The Huffington Post his opinion about UFOs:
“No serious astronomer gives any credence to any of these stories … I think most astronomers would dismiss these. I dismiss them because if aliens had made the great effort to traverse interstellar distances to come here, they wouldn’t just meet a few well-known cranks, make a few circles in corn fields and go away again.”
Such sweeping statements from well regarded scientists are endlessly frustrating to the UFO researcher. Particularly given that interest in UFOs actually drives some people to study astronomy! Unfortunately the idea that only kooks see UFOs is prevalent.
But because Lord Rees is a scientist, the correct answer is to provide him with scientific data that is directly relevant to his claim. I am aware of only three attempts to scientifically gauge what percentage of astronomers see UFOs. Two show that not only do astronomers see UFOs in America, but many are afraid to report their sightings because they fear professional and public ridicule. The final source indicates that astronomers see UFOs at a dramatically greater rate than the general population.
On August 6, 1952, Astronomer J. Allen Hynek offered the USAF’s Project Blue Book a “Special Report on Conferences with Astronomers on Unidentified Aerial Objects.”
Hynek interviewed some 45 astronomers on their experiences and opinions about UFOs during and following the meeting of the American Astronomical Society that June. Hynek provides some notes on each individual astronomer and their opinions. Here’s what some astronomers thought in 1952:
Astronomer Y (no sightings) said, “If I saw one, I wouldn’t say anything about it.”
Astronomer II (two sightings) “is willing to cooperate but does not wish to have notoriety,” Hynek reports.
Astronomer OO: (one sighting) was a new observer at the Harvard Meteor Station in New Mexico. He saw two lights moving in parallel that were too fast for a plane and too slow for a meteor. He had not reported his observation.
Hynek concluded: “Over 40 astronomers were interviewed of which five had made sightings of one sort or another. This is a higher percentage than among the populace at large. Perhaps this is to be expected, since astronomers do, after all, watch the skies.”
The next data point comes from 1977. Dr. Peter Sturrock made a questionnaire about UFO attitudes and experiences. Again the target was the members of the American Astronomical Society. The paper was eventually printed in 1994 in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, a peer-reviewed but decidedly non-mainstream publication.
Sturrock received 1,356 responses from 2,611 questionnaires. Sixty-two astronomers responded that they had observed something they could not explain which could be relevant to the UFO phenomenon. Eighteen of those witnesses said they had previously reported their sightings, and Sturrock notes that a 30% reporting rate is greater than what is assumed for the average population. Section 3.2 of the paper titled “Comparison of Witnesses and Non-Witnesses” contains a table showing that UFO witnessees were actually more likely to be night sky observers (professional or amateur) while non-witnesses are more likely to not even be observing the skies at all!
Sturrock also includes commentary from the astronomers, and again a sample is illuminating:
C1. “I object to being quizzed about this obvious nonsense. Unidentified = unobserved or factually unrecorded: modern mythology. Too much respectability given to it.”
C1O. “l find it tough to make a living as an astronomer these days. It would be professionally suicidal to devote significant time to UFOs. However, I am quite interested in your survey.”
C16. “Menzel and Condon have made further investigation unnecessary unless some really new phenomena are reported … There is no pattern to UFO reports except that they predominantly come from unreliable observers.”
I could add more, but I want folks to read Mack’s article.
Rees’ comments are not unusual for the conservative scientific community at large and in turn benefit the military-industrial-complex which runs the U.S. and most world governments. The MIC doesn’t want any release of technology that is derived(?) from supposed alien technology because it would destroy the present world order. They prefer a slow “leak” of tech in dribs and dabs which doesn’t rock the boat much. Apples Ipod and other Smart Phone technologies are relatively innocuous in that they are primarily for games and other entertainment that distracts the younger population from more important concerns.
Astronomers and UFOs: A Response to the Lord Martin Rees
Hat tip to the Daily Grail.
Olympic UFO
When it comes to UFOs recently, the U.K. has had its fair share.
I don’t know whether it’s because of recently released MoD UFO documents or because Britain has the Rothschilds, when it comes to conspiracies nobody does it better than the Brits ( unless it’s the good ol’ US of A, lol! ).
Talk about an uninvited guest at the Olympics.
Friday night’s spectacular pyrotechnics display of the most watched opening ceremony in summer Olympics history attracted more than the eyes of over 40 million people. A clearly seen unidentified flying object was videotaped making its way over London’s Olympic stadium, reports Examiner.com.
The disc-shaped object is first seen entering the upper left portion of the video as the fireworks erupt over the stadium. The UFO — which appears to have a dome or bulge rising from its center — moves slowly across the sky as if deliberately observing the light-show spectacle below it.
While NBC Olympics — a division of NBC Sports — has chosen Goodyear blimps for all of its 2012 Olympics aerial coverage, the strange-looking object that appeared over the opening ceremonies doesn’t appear to be a blimp.
So what was it?
On an evening that included an apparent Queen Elizabeth and 007 agent James Bond parachuting out of a helicopter into the Olympics stadium, most people probably wouldn’t have been surprised if a staged UFO was also on the entertainment menu, just two weeks after the U.K. released its most recent batch of UFO documents.
Last month, former Ministry of Defense UFO desk officer Nick Pope suggested that a huge event like the London Olympic Games, could present itself as a prime target for otherworldly craft to show themselves to a gigantic viewing audience.
“With the summer of mass events, we are all on high alert for terrorism. But we must also cast our eyes further afield and be prepared for even the most seemingly unfathomable,” Pope said, according to PressTV.
Pope wrote earlier this year of a conspiracy theory rumor that suggested a fake alien attack would be staged at the London Olympics.
“A combination of special effects and holographic technology will be used to create the illusion of an alien invasion, the rumor claims,” Pope wrote on TruTV.com.
“If aliens have studied our psychology, they may choose to appear in our skies on a significant date — the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games is one date being widely circulated by conspiracy groups,” PressTV quoted Pope.
Maybe Friday night’s UFO appearance was a dress rehearsal.
Of course the old Project Blue Beam UFO attack from outer space was involked, this time by the Pope ( surprise, surprise, heh-heh! )
I wonder if he’s a fan of Star Trek?
UFO Over Olympics Opening Ceremony: A Classic Flying Saucer
Once again, hat tip to Daily Grail.
Dystopia vs. Dystopia
Two science-fiction classics of social dystopia, Brave New World and 1984 respectively by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell ( Eric Blair ) remain the yard-sticks by which future tyrannies are measured.
What is little known is that when Blair’s ( Orwell ) 1984 came out, Huxley wrote him a letter of ” congratulation.”
Kind of.
In October of 1949, a few months after the release of George Orwell‘s dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he received a fascinating letter from fellow author Aldous Huxley — a man who, 17 years previous, had seen his own nightmarish vision of society published, in the form of Brave New World. What begins as a letter of praise soon becomes a brief comparison of the two novels, and an explanation as to why Huxley believes his own, earlier work to be a more realistic prediction.
Fantastic.
Trivia: In 1917, long before he wrote this letter, Aldous Huxley briefly taught Orwell French at Eton.
(Source: Letters of Aldous Huxley; Image: George Orwell (via) & Aldous Huxley (via).)Wrightwood. Cal. 21 October, 1949
Dear Mr. Orwell,
It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much reading and consulting of references; and since poor sight makes it necessary for me to ration my reading, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ultimate revolution? The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf. The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.
Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government. Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations. Another lucky accident was Freud’s inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism. This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years. But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.
Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.
Thank you once again for the book.
Yours sincerely,
Aldous Huxley
If Huxley and Blair were alive today, the point would be moot because both types of tyrannies are employed in the world presently.
But I think these are just temparary developments.
Hat tip to Red Ice Creations
Leadership in world green energy another “Sputnik moment” for U.S.
Folks in government are calling China’s meteoric rise on the super-power stage a “sputnik moment” for the United States, especially since the introduction of their super-computer this year and the construction of their modern high speed rail service.
And although China’s currently the new leader in carbon emissions that aggravate the contested global warming effect, they are leading in finding new technologies that will eventually circumvent these problems.
Steven Chu, U.S. Energy Secretary, likened the milestones to a new U.S. “Sputnik moment”, which sparked the Space Race and the manned landing on the Moon in 1969:
…
A senior US official called China’s growing innovation a “Sputnik moment” that should spur the United States to ramp up investment in clean energy, despite a shift in Washington on climate change.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu likened a series of Chinese milestones — including the development of the world’s fastest supercomputer — to the Soviet Union’s landmark 1957 satellite that led the United States into the Space Race.
“America, I am optimistic, will wake up and see the opportunity. And when it does, it still has the greatest innovation machine in the world,” Chu said in a speech entitled “Our New Sputnik Moment.”
Chu said the United States still concentrated on research in areas such as computers, defense and pharmaceuticals but that its funding for energy innovation was paltry.
By contrast, China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon blamed for global warming, is working to build the world’s most expansive high-speed rail network and has developed technology for the highest-efficiency coal plants.
“America still has the opportunity to lead in a world that will need essentially a new industrial revolution to give us the energy we want inexpensively but carbon-free,” Chu said.
“But I think time is running out,” said Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.
Chu, however, will enjoy little political leeway when he heads to Cancun, Mexico, where representatives of more than 190 countries on Monday opened two weeks of talks on drafting a new global treaty to stem climate change.
President Barack Obama last year went to the climate summit in Copenhagen where he pledged US action to curb carbon emissions along with assistance for poor countries hardest hit by rising temperatures.
The rival Republican Party, which swept November 2 congressional elections, is strongly opposed to a so-called “cap-and-trade” plan to require industry to cut carbon. Many Republicans argue that it is too costly in uncertain economic times, while some contest the science behind climate change.
Chu countered that climate action would benefit the economy by opening up a new field in green technology.
But Chu also defended potential costs. He likened climate skeptics to homeowners who are repeatedly told to change wiring but keep looking for electricians to tell them they do not need to.
“Do you actually go and you say, well, okay, that’s a threat but I think it’s more cost-effective — I just make sure my fire insurance is up-to-date?” he said.
Two recent studies found that China’s investment in green technology has outpaced that of the United States. But China has held firm in rejecting a treaty that would legally require it to cut carbon emissions.
The United States, backed by other developed nations, has insisted on a binding treaty, believing it is crucial to ensure global action — and to win over support in Washington.
The Kyoto Protocol, which the United States rejected, asks only wealthy nations to cut carbon emissions. The requirements run out at the end of 2012.
The dispute has been tense at times. At UN-backed talks in October, China’s chief climate negotiator, Su Wei, said the United States was like a “pig looking in a mirror” and finding itself beautiful.
Vaughan Turekian, chief international officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said that the political dynamics have barely changed more than a decade after the Kyoto negotiations.
“The current climate summit process is unlikely to produce a global treaty that includes the United States as a signatory, let alone one that would stand any chance of being ratified by 67 senators,” he said.
…
With a $700,000,000,000 Pentagon budget, 1,000 military bases worldwide, budget deficits as far as the eye can see and an ultra-conservative Congress just elected, I don’t see any infrastructure investments at all within the next two years, if at all.
Actually, I see more townships combining, taxes going up and local paved roads returning to graded gravel, like in the 1920s and 1930s.
We are a 21st Century Roman Empire in decline, slowly being put down by the corporate global governance system after having served its purpose.
No Sputnik moment here. Its time has past.
Google and the NWO
By now most folks have heard about the Google and Verizon deal to create a multi-tiered Internet and eliminate Net Neutrality. That news alone is disheartening.
Now there’s proof that Google is going to end street privacy, under the guise of ‘street mapping’:
Citing a German news report, Techeye.net reports that Google has purchased small UAV “microdrone” aircraft manufactured by Germany’s microdrone GmbH, perhaps for use to augment the company’s Street View mapping data. Techeye says:
The UAVs being flogged are mini helicopters with cameras attached that can be flown about all over the place. They’re quiet and resemble sci-fi UFOs for the vertically challenged alien.
They can fly up to 80km per hour, so Microdrone CEO Sven Juerss suggests they’ll be brilliant for mapping entire neighbourhoods really quickly and relatively cheaply.
Even before Google started data mining on open web networks itsStreet View operations were controversial, with Google Maps picking up on people who didn’t exactly want their faces plastered all over the internet. With the kind of high-angle aerial shots this sort of kit can achieve, it boggles the mind as to the sort of images that may be accidentally captured.
Our take: Skepticism is warranted, and outrage is probably premature.
Our understanding is that FAA certification procedures for civilian UAVs operating in domestic airspace are not yet in place, so it is not clear that the regular operation of such UAVs would be legal — never mind prudent from a privacy or public-relations point of view.
Meanwhile, the Techeye report, while fascinating, is also single-sourced, with the news of the UAV sale to Google coming from the manufacturer of the UAV — which is to say, he’s hardly a disinterested conduit for information. There has been no confirmation of the sale from Google, so far as we know. (Indeed, Forbes reports a Google spokesperson says, “”This was a purchase by a Google executive with an interest in robotics for personal use.”)
So, while curious and exciting, Telstar Logistics suggests keeping cool pending further information about Google’s plans and the regulatory environment that may or may not make such plans viable.
UPDATE: Our friends at BoingBoing link to more information about Google’s UAV denial, as well as further detail about the air-certification challenges such UAVs would present.)
We’ll keep our eyes in the skies, but in the meantime, here’s some nifty footage of the Microdrone in action, during which we can see just how adept the tiny aircraft is at peeking into the windows of private homes.
Google once had a motto, “Don’t Be Evil.”
I think it might be safe to say that the definition of evil either changed, or Google doesn’t adhere to that particular motto any longer.
Does Google Plan to Fly UAV Spies in the Skies?
Pacific Rim NWO
Singapore is a city-state in the Pacific Rim near Malaysia. It is an economic power-house nearly on par with Hong Kong and is touted as the consummate 21st Century State.
Below is a video from an anniversary celebration last August. Notice all the Big Brother symbolism and the happy sheeple.
Is this our future?
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Singapore National Day Parade 2009
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For a more involved treatise on the symbolism used, go to Ignorance Is Futile! IIB is a student of esoteric NWO symbolism.
Internet Privacy, Corporatism and Tax Dollars
I had a discussion with certain family members over this past weekend about the subject of Internet privacy, anonymity, Facebook, corporations and governments.
I found that my kids (one late Gen Xer, two Millennials) have differing views about Internet privacy, which taken at face value, shouldn’t be too surprising.
While I found that my Late Gen-Xer son’s views most mirror my own (he’s 31 years old), I found that my Millennial daughters split into subgroups, even though they are only 22 and 19 years old respectively.
My daughters use Facebook quite a lot and post quite a bit of personal info, but my youngest daughter posts the most personal info and uses the message board to communicate with friends, her fiance and her fiance’s mother. Even though they text each other all day long on their cellphones!
These people don’t care who scans their personal info at all! They believe in the system’s ability to ‘protect’ them! Amazing!
Which leads me to today’s post about Big Brother, corporatism and raiding the taxpayer’s wallet:
Repression doesn’t come cheap, just ask the FBI.
As the securitization of daily life increase at near exponential rates (all to keep us “safe,” mind you) the dark contours of an American police state, like a pilot’s last glimpse of an icy peak before a plane crash, wobbles into view.
In the main, such programs include, but are by no means limited to the following: electronic surveillance (call records, internet usage, social media); covert hacking by state operatives; GPS tracking; CCTV cameras linked-in to state databases; “smart” cards; RFID chipped commodities and the spooky “internet of things;” biometrics, and yes, the Pentagon has just stood up a Biometrics Identity Management Agency (BIMA); data-mining; watch listing; on and on it goes.
Pity our poor political minders, snowed-under by a blizzard of data-sets crying out for proper “management”! Or, as sycophantic armchair warrior and New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, would have it, “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist–McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15.”
So true; yet neither can an aggregate of repressive police and intelligence agencies function without an army of corporate grifters who guide that “hidden hand” and not-so-hidden fist into highly profitable safe harbors. Call it Big Brother meets market fundamentalism.
And so, the heat is on as America’s premier political police agency struggles to “modernize” their case file management system.
The FBI’s Case Management “Problem”
When circumstances (a massive up-tick in illegal spying since 9/11 courtesy of the USA Patriot Act) forced the Bureau to store a treasure trove of tittle-tattle of “national security interest” on decidedly low-tech storage devices, FBI agents and their all-too-willing helpers from giant telecommunications firms such as AT&T took to scribbling “leads” on post-it notes.
Communications Analysis Unit (CAU) eager-beavers did so in order to speed-up the process of obtaining dodgy “exigent letters” that smoothed over the wrinkles (your rights!) as the Bureau issued tens of thousands of National Security Letters (NSLs).
The secretive lettres de cachet demanded everything: emails, internet searches, call records, bank statements, credit card purchases, travel itineraries, medical histories, educational résumés, even video rentals and books borrowed from public libraries. The contents of such shady administrative warrants cannot be disclosed by their recipients under penalty of stiff fines or even imprisonment.
While such extra-legal missives are supposedly issued only in cases of dire “emergency,” the banal, ubiquitous nature of surveillance in post-Constitutional, “new normal” regimes such as the United States, all but guarantee that extraordinary “states of exception” are standard rules of the game in our managed democracy.
As the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General revealed in a heavily-redacted report in January, with all semblance of a legal process out the window, the FBI were caught with their hands in the proverbial cookie jar, repeatedly violating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
Fear not, Obama administration legal eagles cobbled together a new theory justifying the practice and have created, yet another, accountability free zone for agents who violated the rules.
Neatly, seamlessly and silently Obama’s Office of Legal Counsel (John Yoo and Judge Bybee’s old stomping grounds) granted them, wait!, retroactive immunity for such lawbreaking. The trouble is, the OLC’s ruling is classified so we haven’t a clue what it entails or how far-reaching is its purview. So much for the new era of “openness” and “transparency.”
But I digress…
The New York Times reported March 18, that work on parts of the Bureau’s cracker-jack case management program known as Sentinel has been “temporarily” suspended.
While the “overhaul” was supposed “to be completed this fall,”Times journalist Eric Lichtblau disclosed that the system will not be ready for prime time until “next year at the earliest.”
Overall, American taxpayers have shelled-out some $451 million to an endless parade of contractors, Lockheed Martin being the latest. Delays are expected to cost “at least $30 million in cost overruns on a project considered vital to national security” Lichtblau wrote, citing Congressional “officials.”
But problems have plagued the project since its inception. Lockheed Martin, No. 1 on Washington Technology’s “2009 Top 100” list of Prime Federal Contractors, secured some $14,983,515,367 in defense-related contracts last year and was brought on-board to revamp the troubled case management project.
This is all the more ironic considering that the defense giant was hailed as Sentinel’s savior, after an earlier incarnation of the program known as Virtual Case File (VCF), overseen by the spooky Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), crashed and burned in 2006.
No slouches themselves when it comes to raking-in taxpayer boodle, SAIC is No. 7 on the Washington Technology list, pulling in some $4,811,194,880 in 2009, largely as a result of the firm’s close political connections to the Defense Department and the secret state.
SAIC’s work on VCF began in June 2001 and was expected to be completed in 36 months. However, after shelling out some $170 million over four years the Bureau concluded the system wouldn’t work. Published reports fail to mention whether or not SAIC was forced to hand the loot back to cash-strapped taxpayers. Probably not.
Open-Ended Contracts: Hitting the Corporatist “Sweet Spot”
As with all things having to do with protecting their national security constituency from lean quarterly reports to shareholders, congressional grifters and secret state agencies alike are adept at showering giant defense and security corporations with multiyear, multibillion dollar contracts.
After all, high-end CEO salaries and lucrative remunerations for top executives in the form of handsome bonuses are based, not on a firm’s actual performance but rather, on the critical up-tick in the share price; just ask Lehman Brothers or other outstanding corporate citizens such as Goldman Sachs. Or SAIC itself, for that matter!
Unfortunately, effective oversight is not the forte of a plethora of congressional committees; nor are crisp, objective evaluations, better known as due diligence, conducted by outside auditors before scarce federal resources, which could be used for quaint things such as health care, education or other reality-based programs, pour into any number of virtual black holes.
Take VCF as an example.
In a post-mortem of the SAIC program, The Washington Post revealed back in 2006, that after spending months writing 730,000 lines of computer code, corporate officers proclaimed VCF’s roll-out “only weeks away.”
The trouble was, software problem reports, or SPRs, “numbered in the hundreds.” Worse for SAIC, as engineers continued running tests, systemic problems were multiplying quicker than proverbial rabbits.
As Post journalists Dan Eggen and Griff Witte disclosed, citing an unreleased audit of the program hushed-up by the Bureau, because “of an open-ended contract with few safeguards, SAIC reaped more than $100 million as the project became bigger and more complicated, even though its software never worked properly.”
Despite evidence that the system was failing badly, SAIC “continued to meet the bureau’s requests, accepting payments despite clear signs that the FBI’s approach to the project was badly flawed.”
Auditors discovered that the “system delivered by SAIC was so incomplete and unusable that it left the FBI with little choice but to scuttle the effort altogether.”
David Kay, a former SAIC senior vice president and Bushist chief weapons inspector in Iraq tasked with finding nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction,” told the Post even though top executives at the firm were aware the project was going “awry,” they didn’t insist on changes “because the bureau continued to pay the bills as the work piled up.”
“From the documents that define the system at the highest level, down through the software design and into the source code itself,” Aerospace, the independent firm that conducted the secretive FBI audit, “discovered evidence of incompleteness, lack of follow-through, failure to optimize and missing documentation.”
Even more damning, a report by computer experts from the National Research Council and SAIC insider, Matthew Patton, removed from the program by top executives after posting critical remarks on VCF in an on-line forum, found that the firm “kept 200 programmers on staff doing ‘make work’,” when a “couple of dozen would have been enough.”
SAIC’s attitude, according to Patton, was that “it’s other people’s money, so they’ll burn it every which way they want to.”
As a cash cow, VCF was a superlative program; however, the IT security specialist told the Post: “Would the product actually work? Would it help agents do their jobs? I don’t think anyone on the SAIC side cared about that.”
Why would they? After all, $170 million buys much in the way of designer golf bags, pricey Hawaiian getaways or other necessities useful for navigating the dangerous shoals of America’s “war on terror”!
As investigative journalist Tim Shorrock detailed in his essential book, Spies For Hire and for CorpWatch, SAIC “stands like a private colossus across the whole intelligence industry.” Shorrock writes, “of SAIC’s 42,000 employees, more than 20,000 hold U.S. government security clearances, making it, with Lockheed Martin, one of the largest private intelligence services in the world.”
As the journalist revealed, while SAIC “is deeply involved in the operations of all the major collection agencies, particularly the NSA, NGA and CIA,” failure also seems to come with the corporate territory.
“For example” Shorrock wrote, the firm “managed one of the NSA’s largest efforts in recent years, the $3 billion Project Trailblazer, which attempted (and failed) to create actionable intelligence from the cacophony of telephone calls, fax messages, and emails that the NSA picks up every day. Launched in 2001, Trailblazer experienced hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns and NSA cancelled it in 2005.”
Is there a pattern here?
Is there a pattern indeed.
It doesn’t really matter whether these corporations have cost overruns that run into the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.
When one has no-bid cost-plus contracts that are paid for by the taxpayer, where is the need to do a job right the first time, or anytime at all?
The government contractor gravy-train just keeps rolling along, on the backs of the working poor and what’s left of the privately/self employed middle class.
And Internet privacy?
It’s just an archaic concept.
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The Politics of Fear
The 21st Century is one of William Gibson’s dystopic tales.
Or maybe Philip K. Dick, I can’t tell.
Anyway, one can’t deny the fear and anxiety that permeates the air like a thick cloud of smog.
Couple that with technology accelerating toward a Technological Singularity that seems to want to enslave all ordinary folk, well, one can see why people are slowly going insane.
At the center of this? Who knows? Theories go from the politicians, Bilderbergers, Freemasons, Trilateral Commission, to the Jesuits, Catholics, the CFR, all worshipping Lucifer!
The person studying the result of all this fear is Ignorance Isn’t Bliss and he’s made quite a few films on these subjects and my chicken scratchings hardly do him justice:
The Politics of Fear is going strong in 2010. The bruhaha over the mosque near the site of the old World Trade Center exemplify this by the inhabitants of New York City expressing their fear and anger with/of the Muslim community. Another example of the meme of fear and anger management by the political class/corporate media is the scheduled Koran burning in Florida on the September 11th anniversary.
Is this what Jefferson and Franklin had in mind when they formed the Republic 234 years ago?
Search within yourselves and answer that question.
The Global Meltdown of FEAR: Eliminated by 60+ visual aids.