Politics in the Zeros

The Oxyana trailer opens with people saying, what’s happening here isn’t normal. Half my high school class is dead and I’m 23 years old. Dangerous Minds says what’s happening there is class war. I agree.

Who knows how long it will take to extract every last penny of energy out of Appalachia, but one thing is quite certain: Once this has occurred, as it inevitably will, there will be virtually nothing left. No jobs, no mountains, no communities, no clean water, fuck all. When the capitalists have finished raping West Virginia, there’s going to be a big gaping hole there, plenty of devastation, and not a lot more.

Well, y’know, they’re just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies and besides, lots of non-hillbillies are making large bucks off their misery.

Meanwhile, sisa, a cheap version of meth often made with seriously dangerous ingredients, is ravaging Greece. The sharp increase in sisa usage is directly related to banksters imposing austerity which has impoverished the country. Young people are just giving up and a hit of sisa is just one euro.

“There’s three ways you can take sisa,” said Stathis, who’s in his 40s. “With a pipe, with a syringe, or with a piece of aluminum, and I’ve seen people snorting it as well. But let me say that if you shoot it, you don’t have long to live. It destroys all vital organs from the inside.” I asked him if he knew of anyone who had died from taking it.

“Many,” Stathis said. “I know too many. For some, their innards rotted… It might give you other sorts of sicknesses, it might hit your liver, your heart, kidneys… anywhere.”

Yes, addiction is something the person needs to deal with. But there are also cultural and financial forces that help create addicts too.

Sheerwind says their innovative design for wind power is more efficient than traditional wind turbines at a cost equal to hydropower and natural gas.

Conventional wind turbines use massive turbine generator systems mounted on top of a tower. INVELOX, by contrast, funnels wind energy to ground-based generators. Instead of snatching bits of energy from the wind as it passes through the blades of a rotor, wind is captured with a funnel and directed through a tapering passageway that naturally accelerates its flow. This stream of kinetic energy then drives a generator that is installed safely and economically at ground level.

Was it just a few low-level rogue employees?

The IRS nonprofit division, over a period of years, became increasingly dysfunctional, isolated, and off on its own, oblivious to orders from DC. That’s the conclusion Propublica reaches in an excellent investigative report. But why was this division allowed to drift so badly and why was it so mismanaged that it disobeyed an order to stop the targeting and no one noticed? I find this quite curious.

Dan Backer, a lawyer in Washington who represented six of the groups held up because of the Tea Party criteria, said he doesn’t buy the notion that low-level employees in Cincinnati were alone responsible.

“It doesn’t just strain credulity,” Backer said. “It broke credulity and left it laying on the road about a mile back. Clearly these guys were all on the same marching orders.”

If higher-ups are doing a limited hangout, then blaming low-level employees is precisely what they’d attempt.

A limited hangout, or partial hangout, is a public relations or propaganda technique that involves the release of previously hidden information in order to prevent a greater exposure of more important details.

Incompetence is one thing, directing disobeying orders is quite a bit more serious.

Officials at IRS headquarters in Washington were unable to manage their subordinates in Cincinnati. When Lois Lerner, the Exempt Organizations division director in Washington, learned in June 2011 about the improper criteria for screening applications, she instructed that they be “immediately revised.”

But just six months later, Cincinnati employees changed the revised criteria to focus on “organizations involved in limiting/expanding government” or “educating on the Constitution.” They did so “without executive approval.”

Really? Where were their bosses? Why did supervisors not insure the orders were being followed?

Lifx allow you to dim, turn on or off any light in the house, change the color of the lights with a smartphone from anywhere. It’s also highly energy-efficient

LIFX is the smartest light bulb you’ve ever experienced. It’s a WIFI enabled, energy efficient, multi-colored bulb that you control with your iPhone or Android. LIFX gives you unprecedented control of your lights, reduces your energy costs, lasts up to 25 years and delivers an amazing range of experiences we think you’ll love.

Is this rock, is this country, is this cowpunk? Who cares! It’s an amped-up rendition of a great song, that’s what it is.

1/2 second of trading activity in Johnson & Johnson on May 2, 2013

For high frequency trading parasites, owning a stock for a second is a long-term hold. Instead they prefer to leech and game the market, poisoning the well for the rest of us.

The gang at Zero Hedge are in high snark over news that Venezuela has run out of toilet paper with the government blaming opponents for a media campaign that has created an excessive demand. The government will be importing 50 million rolls to make up the shortfall. The problem appears to be artificially low price controls which apparently makes it impossible for Venezuelan firms to manufacture toilet paper and sell it with it at a profit.

Alternatively, if the government is not merely paranoid, and if indeed this is just another CIA-inspired tactic to overthrow the government, then the Langley brain trust will have redeemed itself for the recent humiliation in Russia by showing the world it can truly think outside of the toilet box.

A new study highlights areas in the country with the greatest potential for water shortages. I have a problem with their methodology because they only include water from local precipitation in the results and exclude water from rivers or water pumped from distant locations. Plus we have bizarre results like Boston being included while Las Vegas is not and Phoenix is not a red dot. (Yet both get most their water from the imperiled Colorado River, so how is that local?)

Areas with the highest danger of shortages

• Washington DC metro area
• New York metro area
• California area, from San Diego to Santa Barbara and inland
• Agricultural belt: Dakotas
• Agricultural belt: Nebraska
• Illinois
• Lower Mississippi belt: Arkansas area
• Agricultural belt: North Texas
• Agricultural regions in Ohio
• Agricultural regions in Minnesota

The risk metric used here considers only locally renewable supply through rainfall or snow in the county. As a result, it exposes dependence on water from outside the county. This is the case for New York and Washington, which rely on water from the Delaware and Potomac, respectively.

Available free at The Rand Corporation

David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla of the Rand Corporation literally wrote the books on swarming as military, activist, and protest tactics. Ronfeldt just posted a comprehensive round-up of links on swarming as well as his thoughts. This is fascinating stuff with direct relevance to the Boston Bombing, terrorism, social protest, and our new ways of organizing.

“Swarming is a seemingly amorphous, but deliberately structured, co-ordinated, strategic way to strike from all directions at a particular point or points, by means of a sustainable pulsing of force and/or fire, close-in as well as from stand-off positions. This notion of “force and/or fire” may be literal in the case of military or police operations, but metaphorical in the case of NGO activists, who may, for example, be blocking city intersections or emitting volleys of emails and faxes. Swarming will work best — perhaps it will only work — if it is designed mainly around the deployment of myriad, small, dispersed, networked maneuver units. Swarming occurs when the dispersed units of a network of small (and perhaps some large) forces converge on a target from multiple directions. The overall aim is sustainable pulsing — swarm networks must be able to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on a target, then dissever and redisperse, immediately ready to re-combine for a new pulse.”

His thoughts on the Boston bombing, with a cautionary note. Emphasis added.

The two-man bombing attack in Boston, by itself, was not a case of swarming. It might be considered such only if it can be viewed as a step in a vast slow-motion global strategy by militant jihadists.

However, the quick response to the bombing embodied two kinds of swarming: One was the multi-agency police response — indeed, swarming has long been a standard response mode for police, particularly in their deployment patterns. The other is a new kind of cyber-swarming (others would call it smart-mobbing or crowd-sourcing, using “big data”) whereby photographic data was collected from myriad sources and then processed and distributed in ways the led to the identification of the perpetrators. All quite impressive and yet to be fully reported and assessed. I just hope that aspects of such a response do not end up meaning America is headed for a kind of future cyberocracy that will be far less democratic than I’d like to see.

John Arquilla writes about “Small Cells vs. Big Data. Can information dominance crush terrorism?”

The Tsarnaev brothers were very likely influenced by jihadist notions picked up either online, during Tamerlan’s trip to the North Caucasus, or both. In the coming weeks, no doubt more will be learned about specific motivations and catalysts. What can be said right now is that Chechens have shown themselves particularly adept at forming fighting networks.

Yet it seems that al-Suri may not have reckoned sufficiently with the power of big-data networking. Yes, a small cell — perhaps one motivated by his concept — did pull off an attack in Boston last week. But massive flows of shared information swiftly identified the malefactors and brought them down. This is clearly not the dynamic al-Suri wants to see unfold — one and done. If this is how matters will play out, his program will be in big trouble because of the power of big data. And when one adds in the losses to the small-cell network due to preemptions before some of these cells can mount a single attack, terrorist prospects look even worse.

Rand Paul says ambassador to Libya killed for gun-running in Benghazi. Right-wing hones Republican Benghazi meme pointed at White House.

Washington has a new meme in town, trying to give fresh impetus to the Benghazi Blowback Bandwagon still circling the White House in hopes of finding something worse than Watergate, or at least as bad as Iran-Contra.

Ever since the terrorist attack of September 11, 2012, that killed four Americans at the Benghazi consulate in Libya, Republicans have searched for any way to turn the Libyan event into an equivalent political calamity for the incumbent Democratic President.

“I’ve actually always suspected that, although I have no evidence, that maybe we were facilitating arms leaving Libya going through Turkey into Syria,” Kentucky’s Republican Senator Ron Paul told CNN on May 9, the same day he said he was “considering” a run for the Presidency in 2016.   Continuing without evidence, Paul said:

“I never have quite understood the cover-up — if it was intentional or incompetence — but something went on. I mean, they had talking points that they were trying to make it out to be a movie when everybody seemed to be on the ground telling them it had nothing to do with a movie. I don’t know if this was for political reasons….  Were they trying to obscure that there was an arms operation going on at the CIA annex?”

Lindsey Graham Hops on Another Bandwagon

South Carolina’s Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, according to Liberty Counsel’s Matthew Staver, again without evidence:

“has publically announced a significant part of what the Obama administration is trying to cover up in Benghazi-gate: The magnitude of gunrunning and fighter recruitment – even involving jihadist organizations – to oppose Syrian government forces through the U.S. facility in Benghazi, Libya.” 

The gun-running in Libya scenario was floated early in the fall of 2012, by Rand Paul, among others, but in more speculative form.   At The Patriot’s Trumpet, a 20-year CIA employee, Clare Lopez, posed a number of provocative questions in October.  Without offering supporting evidence, in a conversation with Glen Beck she asked whether the attack in Benghazi was part of:  

“…a much-larger gunrunning operation to al Qaida-linked and other Jihadist groups in Libya and, more ominously, Syria?

“Is the Obama Administration running guns into other Jihadist hot spots?

“…  Was Ambassador Stevens our operational officer in a gunrunning operation to al Qaida linked groups that had “gone wrong?  

“Did the Obama Administration set Stevens up and leave him (with former Navy Seals, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods and computer expert, Sean Smith) to die?” 

If Polite Questions Fail, Try Direct Accusation 

Perhaps the clearest, and most vitriolic, expression of the Benghazi gun-running plot comes from rising rightwing celebrity blogger Katie Kieffer of Minnesota.  In her April 29 post, Kieffer began:

“Liberals don’t want honest Americans like you to have guns. Liberals just want to arm foreign rebels in crapshoot attempts to “end global violence.” But liberals feign ignorance when the rebels they arm end up being criminals who kill innocent Americans like the late U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens.” 

Katy Kieffer’s thousand-word piece quotes both Senators Graham and Paul, but provides no more documented evidence.   Her piece was re-published verbatim on other websites such as Free Republic, Town Hall, and Bear Witness.

In contrast to Paul’s saying saying he had no evidence, Kieffer states:

“We now know that President Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-CIA Director David Petraeus were likely behind a mishandled gun-trafficking program that ended up arming the radical jihadist rebels who stormed the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya on that fateful day.” 

Rhetorically, If Obama’s Not a Murderer, Then Who Is? 

In other words, the new meme in Washington is that:  Obama gave weapons to jihadis – the jihadis killed Americans in Banghazi  — therefore Obama is a murderer.   Or as Kieffer put it:

“ Obama’s gun-running program failed to properly vet the rebels. Clinton most likely launched the gun program, expected Stevens to oversee it and then her weapons likely landed in the hands of al-Qaida affiliates who killed Stevens and three other Americans. Benghazi is a tragic failure of foreign policy and diplomacy under Obama’s watch.”

If this was a serious argument, at least some of its proponents would offer some evidence that any weapons went from American hands to Libyan jihadists in eastern Libya, which has been awash in weapons and jihadis for a decade or more.  This region provided more foreign fighters against the American invasion of Iraq than any other comparable part of the world.

And if this was a serious argument, it might explain how weapons for the Syrian rebels managed to remain in Libya, especially since they were on a boat in Benghazi bound for Turkey.

This is an argument that sounds much better if you can say “Fast And Furious II” in Arabic.