IOT- light spots

A recent study by a Harvard group contended with the position of US intelligence agencies that tracking possible terrorists was becoming more difficult because there are too many “dark spots”—places where data can be encrypted to prevent tracking.  Harvard “reassured” the FBI, CIA, and others that new technologies embedded in common objects will provide (or already provide) plenty of additional tracking opportunities.  What are these?  How about toothbrushes, toys (yes, Barbie dolls), television, and light bulbs, just for starters?  These are the “Internet Of Things,” in the cute phrase of one law professor quoted in the article above.  But let’s just call them light spots.

light spots 

Plutocracy/Revolution

“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half”
—Jay Gould

http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/plutocracy/

SackerLiner!

"Black folks are the most left-leaning constituency in the United States, that's been shown generation after generation.....But we don't behave that way in national elections. And this year, much as in previous years, what we're seeing is that the black vote acts as the bulwark of the most reactionary wing of the Democratic party, the right wing of the Democratic party, and its standard-bearer this time around, Hillary Clinton."
   --Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report

According to Ford, if Sanders cannot break through the "brick wall" of black voters who have so far not come to him in sufficient numbers, his presidential campaign is "doomed."

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/02/23/wake-south-carolina-endorsing-sanders-spike-lee-slams-rigged-system

Lawrence of Libya

"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act upon their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible."   -- T. E. Lawrence

 American Matthew VanDyke, 34, describes himself as a revolutionary activist and combat veteran of the Libyan Revolution. He's also a documentary film-maker and media commentator who joined the rebels in Libya in March 2011 before moving to Syria a year later. In Syria he began to "help the revolution, filming, advising rebels, and some other projects that I haven't talked about publicly", he says. 

Lawrence of Libya 

Houston, we have a problem

Houston, we have a problem. Today, five jackasses with absolutely no plan to resolve any of the problems confronting America will take the stage in my hometown, at my alma mater. Five insufferable pieces of shit who sully humanity with their very presence will descend upon the H to spout nonsense and bullshit. If only that corrupt, corporate hack Hillary was with them, then I could hate all of ‘em at once. Damnit if I ain’t that lucky.

the devil's assholes

Open Carry

Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill into law that allows people with concealed-carry permits to bring their guns into most places on university campuses starting August 1, 2016. Now thousands of students have signed up to “strap gigantic swinging dildos to our backpacks” in protest of the new law on August 24 next year, the first day of classes after the law comes into force.

https://www.rt.com/usa/318438-dildo-protest-campus-carry/ 

the least of these is the greater evil

“I think apologizing’s a great thing, but you have to be wrong. I will absolutely apologize, sometime in the hopefully distant future, if I’m ever wrong.” 
   --Donald Trump, 2016

The American major party political and elections system, “as many Sanders supporters are about to discover, is immune to reform. The only effective resistance,” Chris Hedges argues, “will be achieved through acts of sustained, mass civil disobedience. The Democrats, like the Republicans, have no intention of halting the assault on our civil liberties, the expansion of imperial wars, the coddling of Wall Street, the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry and the impoverishment of workers. As long as the Democrats and the Republicans remain in power we are doomed.”

   --Paul Street 

history lessons

They Don’t Pay Me Enough to Not Hate You

Posted By Jennifer Matsui On February 22, 2016
 

As products and services are increasingly degraded by the ‘bottom line’ imperatives of ‘free-market’ capitalists and their diamond-encrusted cutting instruments, it is more than ever incumbent on wrung-out wage slaves to deliver “customer service”. And by “customer service”, I don’t mean knowledgeable, reasonably sane employees (unburdened by poverty, debt and stress-induced illnesses) assisting their fellow human beings to make an informed choice about purchasing a service or product, and not being a dick about it. By “customer service” I mean a groveling, dull-witted scapegoat thrust into a position of customer service provider, regardless of his/her job title, who will passively bear the brunt for the inept, greed-based decision-making that goes on in ‘corporate’ when more demanding consumers realize the knob-polishing they were subtly promised in a glossy brochure didn’t line up with their expectations of a ‘happy ending’.

Anyone in the service industry, whether a big-box store greeter or Professor of Advanced Quantum Physics will have an anecdote (or 30,000) to share about ‘The Customer from Hell’. These days you don’t even have to be a customer service rep to bear total responsibility for the CFH’s happiness. As most armchair internet experts will tell you, the CFH is a by-product of a narcissistic, increasingly entitlement-driven society being driven off the rails by ‘the bad apples’ who give free-market capitalism a bad name with their shrill complaints about their ice-cream being too cold to eat. And of course, who doesn’t feel abject pity for the Mumbai-based tech worker fielding calls at 3 am from irate, obscenity-hurling HP printer buyers – and by default, side with the firm that devised a system whereby expendable vassals in ‘developed’ nations have the chance to yell at a moonlighting PhD in a BRIC country? It should come as no surprise then, that millions worldwide have already succumbed to the cognitive dissonance that occurs when slick platitudes about “valued customers” rubs up against the reality of being a debt-ridden, penny-crunching consumer of priced-at-volume goods who can now add “too fucking stupid to plug in a printer” to a long list of indignities.

A steady stream of the sort of linguistic sewage that appears on advertising, brochures, inter-office memos, motivational memes, and telemarketing manuals has permeated public consciousness to the degree that it has become a ‘dog whistle’ command for consumers to rise up zombie style, and piss on their nearest cabin attendant. Or vote for Donald Trump. While most of us can resist the temptation to urinate on the people who serve our drinks, or drive us home in taxis, a growing chunk of the populace worldwide is unsurprisingly comprised of a permanently angry underclass; those now-disenfranchised individuals with little or no purchasing power who still ‘buy into’ the promises implicit in a digitized photo of a plastic crustacean on a ‘Red Lobster’ menu and interpret it correctly as permission to inflict lasting psychological trauma on anyone pushing a broom or performing surgery.

In these times of cost-cutting and increased demands from shareholders to protect their investments from ‘wasteful’ expenditures like human beings on their payroll, executives have devised sneakier means of maintaining their privileges within an organization that relies heavily on the promise of shiny, happy people willing to bend over: Take out everything and everyone below you with a wrecking ball and worry later about the laws of physics that decree a penthouse suite requires something solid at the base to support it. Remove all trace elements of accountability, responsibility and commitment to fulfilling promises to your customers and replace them with recordings of robot voices telling you to press numbers – or until you have your entirely non-human workforce in place, use poorly compensated, ill-equipped lackeys to mop up the spillage left in the wake of another head chopping spree.

These downward thrusting, scissor-wielding-maniacs will spew alphabet-based gibberish at you in office memos as “motivating” acronyms that stand for ‘Assurance Service Speed Wellness Intuitiveness Promptness Efficiency’. Because memorizing ASSWIPE is all it takes to perform the more soul-crushing aspects of a job that Ebola-infected lab raccoons have proven in costly clinical studies to be able to perform in 12 hour shifts where only six hours have been monetarily compensated for.

In this day and age it’s possible to reduce an organization to a smoldering shell of its former self, operated by a skeleton crew of nocturnal, stripe-tailed rodents bleeding from the eyeballs and still post profits based entirely on an ability to carry out an agenda as spelled out in ‘The Book of Revelations’ or a Hillary Clinton stump speech/lap dance to a private audience at Goldman Sachs.

The same principal holds true for would-be developers of the sort of nebulous, tech-driven ephemera coveted by the people who eat gluten-free cronuts in formerly rent-controlled apartments. A “cash-strapped” enterprise will always find enough its budget to implement a cost-heavy, short-sighted, glitch-ridden measure as long as it a) Takes food directly from the mouths of baristas and b) Can be heralded as ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ in upbeat, Silicone Valley lingo. Replace a handful of pink collar administrative paper-pushers with a top heavy IT department and watch how fast your share prices surge on the NASDAQ.

If you are concerned about your increasingly diminished role trapped within a hologram simulacrum of a livelihood where the only alternative is to not get paid for pushing a shopping cart filled with empty soup cans through a busy downtown shopping area, and want to get in on the scheme yourself to help rid the world of its workforce, there’s good news: You can brew dog poo in paper cups, call it a ‘start up’ and implement that idea globally – profitably even, despite global demand for dog poo being at an all time low. As long as you can guarantee it will be dispensed by people who live in their cars and won’t flinch in the face of irate customers upon discovering they are drinking *frapoochino*, ‘investor confidence’ will ensure that your literally shitty enterprise remains afloat.

If your goal in life is to add a meaningless new title on to your Linked-In profile, then you might want to heed the following advice: At your next PDS (Personal Development Session) try to refrain from confusing it with your own diagnosis of Pathologically Dead inside Syndrome. Try to blink at semi-regular intervals during the part where your armpit stain of a manager starts dropping inspirational quotes – meaning it’s probably not a good idea to respond to “We should always dress for the job we want, and not the job we have” with “Does that mean I can exchange my dunce cap and tin cup for a hood and axe?” And whatever you do, try to refrain from replacing the toilet paper in the executive bathroom with ASSWIPE.

Jennifer Matsui is a writer living in Tokyo.

Realism

"Believing that one day we will get a single-payer healthcare system, a living minimum wage, and free higher education even though people who like the idea of such programs are unwilling to vote for candidates who support them is not simply unrealistic – its fantastical! It’s a kind of supernaturalism, like the belief in Santa Claus. Clinton won’t support such things, no mainstream Democratic political candidate will support them, but we’ll get them one day anyway? How? Via the agency of the Good Healthcare Fairy? Santa Living Minimum Wage? The Free Higher Education Bunny?"

   --M. G. Piety

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/22/on-political-realism/print/

Gun

You have a gun, you can kill. Isn’t that pretty much it? Forget all those stupid remarks in the media: “the motive has not been determined, bla bla bla.” The motive is the gun, people. You have a gun, you can kill.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/19/make-love-to-your-gun/print/ 

“I'd underestimated him. I assumed anyone who started out gut-punching you in an elevator couldn't have all that much else in his arsenal. For instance, I had no idea he could smile, let alone at such an inappropriate time.” 

― Jonathan Lethem, Gun, With Occasional Music 

national bird

BERLIN (AP) — Among the eeriest scenes in "National Bird," a documentary which tracks the fallout of drone warfare from the point of view of American whistleblowers and Afghan victims, is the languid aerial footage of U.S. suburbs, sports fields and skyscrapers.

"Imagine if this was happening to us," Lisa, one of the film's protagonists, says in a voice-over. Would parents still allow kids out to play, she asks, "if they didn't know if today is the day that something is going to fall out of the sky and kill them?"

http://www.rocofilms.com/film.php?code=BIRD

iSpy

 this is going to be interesting.......

Apple’s decision to resist a court order to unlock a password-protected iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino killers has created a worldwide privacy shockwave, with campaigners around the world expecting the struggle to carry major implications for the future of mobile and internet security.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/17/apple-fbi-encryption-san-bernardino-russia-china 

Apple's response 

American psyche/psycho

"If my interpretation is correct, the American mass psyche is in what Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski, in referring to a friend, calls “fragile.” Our mass psyche is not only fragile because a Wild West capitalism is pitching itself off a cliff as a few market “players” compete in a game of risk taking. That psyche is fragile because Americans in that Wild West game only as victims and dupes are betting on Trump to make them winners, as he is."

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/16/the-reality-of-the-situation-is-not-clear-but-trump-is/print/

 

ESPN doesn't want you to have health care

At the conclusion of the NBA's Celebrity-All Star game that was played in Toronto, Win Butler, the American lead singer of the Montreal-based rock band Arcade Fire who won the MVP award, tried to use his time at the microphone to tell voters in the U.S. that they might learn a lot from their northern neighbors, specifically their publicly-run health system that affords every single resident equal access to quality care.

"I just want to say that it’s an election year in the US," Butler stated. "The US has a lot they can learn from Canada: healthcare, taking care of people, and I think..." But that's as far as he got when ESPN correspondent Sage Steele took the mic away.

"So we’re talking about celebrities and not politics," said Steele, turning away. "Congratulations on your MVP!"

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/02/13/espn-does-not-want-you-know-how-great-medicare-all-could-be 

Beyonce 'splained

"I confess, I am a culturally alienated, old, disconnected 1960s and ‘70s radical trying to live and struggle for revolutionary change in a world that might have passed me by, because I cannot for the life of me understand how Beyonce’s commodified caricature of black opposition was in any way progressive. Instead what I saw was the cultural power of neoliberal capitalism to co-opt opposition, monetize it and provide some mindless entertainment all at the same time. I didn’t see opposition; I saw the imagery and symbols of authentic black radicalism grotesquely transformed into a de-politicized spectacle by gyrating, light-skinned booty-short-clad sisters."
   --Ajamu Baraka

"You're fired!"

what Trump will tell all the folks who voted for him after he is elected President........

Techno-consciousness

Comparable to the way people feel that the wizardry of a Google search is guided by their own choices, the “you” of the near future accounts itself not subjected to an overpowering competitive techno-consciousness but as a ruling subject of all that. Techno-consciousness has a deep faith that Google results are empowering a personal and developing grasp of the world, a thoroughly self-designed knowledge. Caught within the bubble of our own identity, we cannot reach an external, observing point of reference, a second order of observation.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/09/politics-and-techno-consciousness/print/ 

kill capitalism

"So, you can laugh me off if you want but it’s a mistake. We either figure how to kill King Capital and follow through with a radically reconstructed and ecologically sustainable post-capitalist society or we can forget about a decent future. It’s not about incremental change and letter grades, moving forward at three or four yards per down. Capital is driving humanity and other living things off the cliff. We are approaching an existential chasm: we either take the revolutionary leap or its game over. The need for an eco-socialist revolution is humanity’s pass-fail moment."
   --Paul Street

 http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/09/kill-king-capital/print/ 

AH HA!

"The United States is the only nation within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that subjects its citizens to taxes irrespective of their place of residence."

 https://www.rt.com/usa/331643-us-renounce-citizenship-record/

Syria perspective

American media covers the world through American eyes. Let's look at Syria the way the rest of the world does

"Fifteen years after the September 11 attacks, the term “terrorist” is nothing more than an instrument anyone can wield for whatever reason. Hamas, elected to govern in Gaza, can be reduced to a “terrorist” organization. The Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt is “terrorist.” The Russian-speaking rebels in eastern Ukraine—my favorite example—are nothing more than terrorists.....Emptied of meaning, in the Syrian context the term is nearly 100 percent a tool in the service of strategic, political and ideological agendas."
   --Patrick L. Smith 

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/28/cruel_bastards_hang_together_all_you_need_to_know_the_world_according_to_the_new_york_times/

now the 60's really are dead

"It was sad enough that Jefferson Airplane founding member Paul Kantner, the keeper of the famed San Francisco band’s flame throughout its turbulent half-century, died last week, from heart failure. A deeper melancholy set in with news of the death the same day of the Airplane’s first female vocalist, Signe Toly Anderson, from cancer. Both were 74."

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/05/on-the-passing-of-the-jefferson-airplane/print/

Spencer Hall drives a 2016 McLaren 570S

"You will have conversations with people, and not always truthful ones. Coming out of the hotel, a Dutch tourist saw the car parked out front and asked what it was. Then he asked me what my job was. I told him, "cocaine." He nodded, and walked briskly off into the night before I could tell him I was joking. I hope this guy goes back to the Netherlands, and tells people solemnly about what great cars cocaine dealers in America drive."

http://www.sbnation.com/2016/2/5/10918760/mclaren-570s-super-bowl-2016

missile envy

The Indo-Russian joint venture BrahMos Aerospace has announced plans to start work on an advanced version of a supersonic air-launched cruise missile. The BrahMos-2 will be tested this year. BrahMos 2 is a supersonic cruise missile powered by an air-breathing engine. It will be capable of reaching speeds up to Mach 7 (or 5,238 mph).

http://www.brahmos.com/content.php?id=1&sid=4 



 

Hillary and the Urn of Ashes

"The danger of Clinton’s view of America’s role in the world is that it is old fashioned imperial behavior wrapped in the humanitarian rationale of 'responsibility to protect', or R2P and thus more acceptable than the “make the sands glow” atavism of most the Republicans. In the end, however, R2P is just death and destruction in a different packaging."

   --Conn Hallinan
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/02/hillary-and-the-urn-of-ashes/print/ 
 

Martyka: January 27, 2016

http://paulmartyka.com/