Police state already in NY

The very definition of a police state:

With CIA help, NYPD moves covertly in Muslim areas
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2011/08/24/us_sept_11_nypd_intelligence/index.html

Now, when it gets expanded beyond NY civil ‘liberties’ will exist only for people who have not (yet) popped up on the radar of the powers-that-be.

First we get a third-world economy dominated by a few mega corporations, then we get a third-world government almost entirely populated by cronies of the mega corporations, now we have a police system which is secret and works beyond the law, next (next week, perhaps the week after) we will have third-world infrastructure where bridges and utilities collapse and never get repaired.  I wonder what the immigration requirements are for New Zealand or Australia are.

Yet another glaring security hole…

E-mail typos result in 20GB of stolen data
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/09/09/email.typos.stolen.data.wired/

“The e-mails they collected included one that listed the full configuration details for the external Cisco routers of a large IT consulting firm, along with passwords for accessing the devices. Another e-mail going to a company outside the U.S. that manages motorway toll systems provided information for obtaining full VPN access into the system that supports the road tollways. The e-mail included information about the VPN software, usernames, and passwords.”

I did something analogous a few times by relying on the autocomplete function in Outlook: I sent a work email to a co-worker at his home address because for some reason that floated to the top of the list. I have got a bit more careful since then, but know I have done it at least a handful of times since then and if I, as someone who gives a damn and understands how things work, make such mistakes, how about the clueless masses?

Interesting emphasis on China.  I find it hard to believe that the Chinese intelligence community would be behind that as I am positive they would not be traceable back to China, so it must be Chinese hackers intending to sell the information internally.  Besides, if the Chinese IC is anything like our IC, I am not worried about them as a threat.

A very interesting take…

Are jobs obsolete?
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/07/rushkoff.jobs.obsolete/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1

I was sort of thinking along these lines when I was working on my trillion person population paper (which has sort of faded away, like so many of my writing projects, largely because no one seems interested).  If very little effort/energy is required to achieve self sufficiency (meaning a place to sleep and calories to eat), then what would people do?  I was sort of envisioning a society where people live in a sort of real-life virtual reality where they have no need to leave their home and can interact with anyone else, anywhere else, via virtual reality.  If we just call this virtual world video conferencing we have already achieved that state and I feel confident that in just a few decades (if that long) we will be able to plug in and get audio, touch and vision piped directly to our brain (Matrix anyone?).  As more and more manufacturing gets automated, there is less and less need for people to do physical stuff, which naturally leads a giant feedback loop that inevitably leads to people having nothing to do all day.  As suggested in the article, we can either penalize people for being part of a society that has evolved beyond physical labor or we can find a way to evolve our society to the level required by our brave new world.

It sucks to be a student!

School: It’s way more boring than when you were there
New studies show that the disappearance of art, music and even recess is having a devastating effect on kids
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2011/09/14/denvir_school/index.html

To me, this is a really scary statement:

“When reading and math count and nothing else does, then less time and resources are devoted to non-tested subjects like the arts, science, history, civics and so on,” education historian Diane Ravitch, a well-known high-stakes testing critic and one-time proponent, writes in an email to Salon.

When did science become a non-tested subject?  That alone would explain a huge amount why the creationist movement has gathered so much strength, kids are never exposed to an alternative!

The Latest Crime Wave

The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School School districts hire special investigators to follow kids home in order to verify their true residences.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903285704576557610352019804.html

“Only in a world where irony is dead could people not marvel at concerned parents being prosecuted for stealing a free public education for their children. ”

Given the number of poor parents that convincingly give the impression they don’t give a damn about their children’s education, it flabbergasts me that people are actually arrested, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced for this ‘crime’, surely the most victimless ‘crime’ that ever existed.  Where, exactly, is the cost to anyone, let alone society, when a child goes to the ‘wrong’ public school?

Truly our society is accelerating its slide into oblivion.  It seems to me that the (under reported, shock!) protests at Wall street (I am slightly heartened that the protests appear to be spreading (and getting more press, see “As Wall Street protest enters 3rd week, movement gains steam nationwide” http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/02/business/wall-street-protests/index.html?hpt=hp_bn3)) is possibly our only hope to stem the acceleration and give our nation a chance to avoid decades of privation (unless, of course, you are a member of the billionaire elite).  I read a rather horrifying article about Perry (the current GOP front runner, in case your head has been in the sand trying to block out the cacophony) that makes it perfectly clear the guy is totally corrupt and has only ever been in politics to enrich himself and his friends.  Since Romney (currently) appears to be the only other choice (Christie, it would seem, is too late in the game to have any real chance (except to dilute the GOP’s efforts and get Obama re-elected)) and his track record as a politician is only slightly better (or rather, slightly less worse), it would seem that we will be left with the typical choice come next Nov: death by hanging or death by firing squad.  I can’t see any of our apparent choices lifting a finger to even pause our head-long rush into a nation-wide police state (as opposed to the current state-by-state version we are building today) that stomps on the rights, health and financial welfare of the non-billionaires (when are the dumb-assed millionaires going to realize that eventually they will be targeted as we are?).

Please let me be totally wrong on this!  Please let me be a fatalistic pessimist who can’t see the dawn’s early light!  Please!

Manufacturing the police state

The Petraeus projection: The CIA director’s record since the surge
Hero worship hides the military failures of the CIA director’s “global killing machine”
http://politics.salon.com/2011/10/03/petraeus_projection/singleton/

This is a very interesting article that lays out pretty well what I personally feel is well established fact that we are destroying our society in a vain effort to achieve the impossible: prevention of the next terror attack.  So many innocent people have been killed in our effort to root out terrorism that we have probably increased the likelihood of another (first (or rather second (actually third or even later, history being so poorly understood here in America)) in a series) of terror attacks by several orders of magnitude.  Our military has a long history of failure to learn from its own mistakes (it appears that it is US culture to completely ignore anything that happened outside of your own personal life experience, no matter how detailed the evidence contrary to your held opinions is) which supports our political 30 second attention span and leads our unbelievably credulous populace (repeat anything with bombast and dramatic force enough times and it becomes true, no matter how idiotic and nonsensical it is) to champion a losing strategy of more war in more places to generate even more passionate sworn enemies so we can continue to drain our resources in even more pointless efforts.  Old Osama will be living a cheery afterlife looking down as the US bankrupts itself in a vain attempt to stamp out all the angry ants it makes even angrier by continued stamping (why not just move away from the ant nest?  I guess that it would make us look like ineffectual quitters).  Wasn’t that Reagan’s strategy against the USSR?  Bankrupt them by forcing them to try to keep up with our military output? Well, we have finally found a foe who can beat that strategy (they don’t have to come close to matching our spending to have equal effect), except we won’t realize that until way past the bitter end when we have exhausted every bit of our economy trying to stop the tide.  When erosion of civil liberties takes precedent over maintaining our roads, bridges and infrastructure it is easy to predict the path to destruction, all is left is to predict the irreversible point where no effort to mitigate the effects will have any beneficial effect (I try to make myself believe that point is still in the future, but often have trouble doing so).

Opps, it is already here…

The national police state isn’t on its way, it is already here…

So much evidence, there’s no need to show it
http://politics.salon.com/2011/10/03/awlaki_7/singleton/

So easy for everyone to ignore ‘just this one case’ until they start to add up the number of people the government can now target.  But wait! you say, I am a WASP, not some dirty Muslim terrorist eager to bring down our great government!  However, with very little effort on the government’s part, you could trivially be made into a terrorist sympathizer and rounded up and sent to some due-process free hell hole somewhere, never to be seen again.  All the government has to do is claim it has overwhelming evidence you are a bad guy.

Initially I was thinking Obama was the Antichrist, then I started to doubt him, but now I am changing my mind again.  If he gets reelected someone needs to shave his noggin and start looking for signs.

More not-bad news

Is Violence Finished?
In our era of wars, genocide, and terrorism, Steven Pinker says we’re more peaceful than ever.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/02/steven-pinker-s-better-angels-of-our-nature-review.html

I have read similar reports in the past.  I would imagine as violence becomes less common it attracts more attention so for some period it _appears_ as if violence is increasing when in fact it has been decreasing.

Finally, a good idea

A proposed demand for Occupy Wall Street
Let’s tackle the debt that actually matters
http://politics.salon.com/2011/10/05/a_proposed_demand_for_occupy_wall_street/singleton/

Yes, the ‘moral hazard’ is still there, but as the author points out, how is that one tiny bit different than Goldman Sachs reporting record profits when the entire globe is in a recession?  There is plenty of moral hazard in complaining banks are too big to fail then making them even bigger!  And don’t get me started on the corporate moral hazard of our government guaranteeing profit for companies that package mortgage backed securities (Freddie and Fannie) or student loans (Sallie).  Yes, it would really suck to be the one who responsibly paid down their debt, lived within their means and were lucky enough to remain gainfully employed during this Great Recession, but which is worse?  Another decade (or two!) of slow to no growth where you can’t find buyers for your house and your retirement grows at a pace that actually causes it to shrink once inflation is accounted for or growth such as we saw during the Clinton years?

This would give the top 1% an ‘opportunity’ to share with the rest of the country’s economic malaise.  Of course it has a near zero chance of becoming a reality, but it makes for a fabulous rallying cry and likely any politician smart enough to attach to it would see huge voter support.  And maybe, just maybe, that support would translate to action in Congress.