The National Insecurity State and the Twitterpation of America

Everyone's abuzz and atwitter about the WaPo's investigative report, Top Secret America. 

It certainly inspired Glenn Greenwald, and your really must read every single substantive word. It is an on-point piece about the National Security State and a howl of frustration toward the endless flood of trivial drek that we must all wade through to find anything, anything at all of actual importance.

Ironically, it's exactly the same problem that the "Intelligence" community has... a flood of information that overwhelms one's intelligence.

If you read and write about politics full-time and are thus forced to subject yourself to the political media -- as I am -- what's most striking aren't the outrages and corruptions, but the overwhelming, suffocating, numbing stream of stupidity and triviality that floods the brain.  One has to battle the temptation to just turn away and ignore it all.  Every day, day after day, is consumed by some totally irrelevant though distracting melodrama:  what Sarah Palin wrote on her Facebook page, some "outrageous" snippet of a comment made by John Boehner or Harry Reid, some "crazy," attention-attracting statement from some fringe idiot-figure or TV blowhard that is exploited for superficial partisan gain or distraction value (hey, look over there:  I think Michelle Bachmann just said something outrageous!!!!).

Now compare that to this excerpt:

NSA whistle blower Adrienne Kinne, when exposing NSA eavesdropping abuses, warned of what ABC News described as "the waste of time spent listening to innocent Americans, instead of looking for the terrorist needle in the haystack."  As Kinne put it:

By casting the net so wide and continuing to collect on Americans and aid organizations, it's almost like they're making the haystack bigger and it's harder to find that piece of information that might actually be useful to somebody.  You're actually hurting our ability to effectively protect our national security.

Glenn goes on and I'm certain I could find others saying much the same. Indeed, it would take very little effort to pick up instructive examples of waste and duplication of effort. I learned to pad the bibliography in grade school. But in fact, it would add very, very little to what I'm going to say next, which is, sadly, mostly based on things I've known for quite a long time, and you probably know too.


Now, this is actually what an intelligence and policy analyst does. Ideally, they do it a long, long time ahead of the curve, so that infrastructure, government and regulation - all slow moving entities - are able to respond and adapt. 


This entire, completely mad situation occurred because national panic created a situation that could be exploited by political and economic opportunists; people who put their own agendas far ahead of any rational view of National Security.  So the US is now far less secure than it was, with less reliable intelligence than it had before, with a bizarre degree of available force deployed in the wrong places, addressing the wrong threats, generally in the worst possible way. Consequently, it's ability to wield power usefully and effectively in order to secure it's own national and economic interests is much diminished, to the extent that it explains why there has been no serious attempt to follow up on 9/11.


"Never distract an enemy who's in the process of destroying themselves."


The whole point to "national security" is making the nation secure; that means every single citizen and indeed, even the unwelcome visitors and the rats in the walls must be secure; it must be a perceived and genuine reality. 


They must know they are secured against predictable threats and hazards, and that their governments are both willing, able and capable of responding to emergencies effectively, so when things like Katrina or the oil spill in the gulf happen the competent response to a visible emergency will reassure them that they are in good hands in regard to situations that must be kept under a cloak of secrecy.


One way to demonstrate competence is to deal with the obvious in an intelligent and proportional way. If you are serious about a policy, if it's not merely an exercise in diverting funds to cronies, then there are certain things that must be done, things that will displease some constituencies while pleasing others, but which proceed logically from the proposition. 


If you want a good football team, you don't dump a quarter of the budget into the glee squad. You don't spend time playing tennis to "develop a rounded athleticism."  Most of all, you do not choose the squad based on which player's parents whine the loudest. Once the process is corrupted, the only predictable outcome is that you won't have a football team that can put the ball in the end-zone. Putting it in the end-zone is the point to the exercise, and between corruption, distraction and pandering - that's the national security situation in a nutshell.


A team that doesn't know what game they are playing, how to work together, or where the other team is.


One of the first things that should have happened in the weeks following 9/11 would have been to secure the petroleum infrastructure, since large piles of things that can leak or go bang with effects that dwarf any pitiful little WMD that might be cobbled together in a garage are a problem. 


Security, regulation and oversight for critical infrastructure should have been an immediate and obvious priority. Hasn't been done. Hell, the routine maintenance of critical infrastructure has not been done. 


When procedures and inspections are so sloppy as to permit a well to just blow up all by itself, it would be amazingly trivial to sabotage a pipeline, pumping station or tank farm. Considering the industry track record on safety and cover-ups, I'd venture a guess that the sabotage, if ever detected, might never be reported. 


The same for securing the ports; ensuring that it's impossible to casually transit a few shipping containers filled with God Knows What routed to Who Knows Where. Hasn't been done.


And consider the substitution of National Security Theatre for anything that might actually promote National Security, such as the TSA and the "no fly list." Meanwhile, air cargo remains largely unscreened and the baggage handling system is easily penetrated. People concerned about the potential for cheap, high-impact terrorism have been screaming about this for decades. Decades. Since the time it was fashionable to hijack planes and fly them to Cuba.


Fixing infrastructure and communications mis-matches are not sexy. Precautionary regulations that cost Boeing and Exxon money are third-rail double-plus un-sexy. It's a quick ticket to being taken down in a primary by some useful idiot who will rant on about god, guns, gays and "American Exceptionalism."


Meanwhile, various levels of law enforcement are making it increasingly clear that if you have a bad situation, the quickest way to make it worse is to ask a cop for help. So, aside from all the inherent wrong that presents, you can fairly much forget getting any ground-level intelligence out of the very communities that any terrorist would first think to hide within. "The revolutionary swims within a sea of peasants" - Chairman Mao. 


He owed everything to the astonishingly corrupt "legitimate" government.  


So the way to avoid that outcome is to govern honestly and have as few ignorant, sullen resentful peasants as humanly possible. That's a lot easier and far less expensive than running a counter-insurgency.    


When it becomes clear to ordinary people that they will be treated as aliens, subversives and criminals by agents of the state, that the worst might happen to them regardless of their innocence, what incentive is there for them to not be smuggling blow, spying for foreign powers or trafficking in illegal weapons and people? 


There would have been no Robin Hood without the Sheriff of Nottingham. Now, here's the obvious thing. From the viewpoint of people who fondly believe that they are in charge, the Sheriff is "one of them." He's one of the good guys. But in actual fact, he's the guy who's escalating the situation. It's hard to find Robin, but you know where this guy lives. Dealing with him sends a message and just incidentally, makes a whole bunch of really bad situations never happen in the first place. 


That is the goal of national security. Making sure that most bad situations never happen. 


Looking at the concentration of effort going into "narcoterrorism" at the WaPo site, it's clear there is dramatic concern about the overlap between drug trafficking and it's ability to generate funds and camouflage for terrorism. Or at least, concern within each intelligence community that they aren't getting their share of drug dollars.


And yet the most obvious response would be to literally legislate the problem away. 


Legalize drugs, regulate them in a sane manner, tax them cautiously, so as to avoid significant grey and black market activity and an enormous amount of human capital and a giant pile of wasted money will be released for other uses.


It would take a relatively small amount of that money to deal intelligently and humanely with the actual consequences of individual drug use - which, I might add, are largely un-addressed due to there being no money and a lack of warm bodies. And suddenly, without the influx of "drug offenders" into private enterprise prisons, those prisons could retask themselves and their staffs towards something actually useful - say, perhaps rehab and treatment for drug use, chronic PTSD and vets affected or disabled by traumatic brain injuries. 


In other words, you want to get as close to the root of a problem as possible, and that leads me to refer once again to petroleum infrastructure. Clearly it's vulnerable. Hell, it's falling apart and blowing up at random! Phasing it out in favour of renewables, and distributing fuel and energy production as widely and evenly as possible would be a Very Good Thing. 


Consider how much havoc could be caused by simply triggering an overload of the power grid on a hot summer day at rush hour on the Eastern Seaboard. The best way to avoid this is to ensure that power is generated diffusely so that there are many fewer obvious, high-value targets.


But the most important thing to understand about National Security is this - you always, always, always want to get at least two bangs for your buck. Worse, any dollar that is directly spent on guns and spies is pretty much wasted, because those are fall-backs; ways to address the worst case. So you really do not want to invest more than you actually need, and you really want to spend even those dollars in ways that develop capabilities that can be used for more mundane things.


It's like building a city wall, in olden days. It is a HUGE investment. It's required, of course, and it must be maintained, and manned. If you don't have it, you will be exploited or attacked. But the point to the effort is to secure everything else, and if it becomes half of everything, and makes everything else that much harder... it's not actually doing it's job. Indeed, if it actually gets in the way of those it's intended to keep secure, they will subvert it as a matter of course.


Government should foster, encourage and regulate toward the end of seeing the nation secure itself, organically, in the ordinary course of affairs. That is to say, you regulate and legislate so that things that tend to make the nation more secure against external threats, and promote domestic tranquility and prosperity happen as a happy and natural side effect of what people are ordinarily doing. 


This generally means securing lines of communication, encouraging inter-dependencies between classes and regions, fostering trust, building relationships and generally being responsive and useful. In other words, when you call, they should come - and they should have better things to do than show up for no good reason.


When it starts to look to large portions of your population that they have a greater natural alliance and a greater reason to owe loyalty to foreign governments, drug lords, street gangs and of course, personal networks and families - that signifies national irrelevance - and at that point, you don't really have a "state" to "secure."


So, maybe you all should get to work on that. Me, I'd deal with the unemployment crisis. Can't really think of a bigger threat to national security than a large number of hungry, desperate, well-armed peoplewho can find out where you live by poking a few buttons on their smartphones. But that's just me. Carry on as you will.

In praise of SMART boondoggles.

From Griper Blade, a blog I wish I'd known of earlier.

Griper Blade: Shooting Down Missile Defense: "Since Obama's election, Bush loyalists have been quietly freaking out that he may not really be willing to waste money hand over fist on missile defense anymore. The military has never been very excited about missile defense (Pentagon officials refer to civilian MD advocates as 'missile defense moonies'), so it's not like they see any worth to the systems. But those Bush loyalists sure do. And they've made repeated attempts to get you to panic at the thought of abandoning it."

A commenter wryly observes that, while utterly unlikely to succeed in shooting down missiles that are unlikely to materialize in any case, is as worthy as any other make-work program in these troubled times.

However, the end result is a great deal of very expensive and useless stuff, when for far less, we could achieve far more. I'm speaking, by the way, to people in the Canadian Parliament and defense establishment. I recall reading earlier today - and my apologies, I forget where, - that in terms of defense technology, and specifically in terms of the F22 program - that due to the usual practice of selling air-superiority technology to allies, the US (and a rather significant number of Canadian subcontractors) are, in essence, competing with themselves.

My initial thought as I closed the article was "what a stupid boondoggle."

And then, in reading this, something clicked. You see, what we need is to concentrate on intelligent boondoggles. Useful and plausible boondoggles intended to generate useful side-benefits. It's nice to have something useful at the end, but if enough useful byproducts come along the way, it may not actually matter in the end.

One absolute priority is to keep very skilled people doing fairly much what they are doing. We really do not wish to see highly skilled weapons systems designers becoming available on the open market.

From several perspectives an ultimately pointless employment that, while unlikely to produce a useful weapons system nonetheless requires all kinds of amazing and useful technical spin offs is worth a certain level of support. And, of course, it doesn't end up producing some simple, easily deployed and cheap pain in the ass - as Gerald Bull (cite above) was casually able to achieve once he was forced to - erm - set his sights lower.

So, while it might seem obvious to cancel boondoggle missile defense programs - please. Think of the Children. We truly do not want to see that staff and technology wander off into unpredictable and horrifyingly effective "practical applications" in the "real world."

More to the point, think of all that lovely technology and all those systems that have come astonishingly close to actually achieving something. Indeed, what if the effort were intentionally expanded to explore practical applications using technology already developed? What if it were adapted to several fairly important long-term priorities - clearing space junk and producing some sort of asteroid defense?

Indeed, what about using the technology to create an anti-junk defense for the international space station - which could then be refined to be applied to communications and resource satellites?

Remember that these are inherently useful goals and which will absolutely have all kinds of high-tech industry spin-offs.

This, by the way, is the primary value of Big Science efforts, like a manned Mars mission - it's not the goal so much as what needs to be figured out in order to send a man to Mars that is the the compelling argument for doing it.

Weapons programs work much the same way. One of the beautiful things about any weapons system is that it's a fairly straightforward application of technology, the R&D is covered by military budgets, and there is a simple, defined development path. That's why cutting edge applications are first seen in military use. I'm quite certain that the initial development costs for the wheel were written off by some military or another. And it was retired soldiers who spread it into the civilian world, because even a former grunt won't grunt any harder than he has to.

So what we should be thinking, as part of the entire military procurement and supply planning process, is what technologies we'd like to advance and what sorts of systems and applications we would like to familiarize soldiers with, both in terms of application and in terms of a trained first generation pool of persons directly familiar with the basic technology. It's difficult to plan for spinoff applications that arise due to the solution of problems in unexpected ways, but you will have a rough idea of the general nature of those unexpected goodies.

It's not difficult to think of several technologies that absolutely must be developed - and soon. Robust and reliable high-density batteries and fuel cells, coupled with flexible, rugged electrical generation systems that can suck energy out of whatever is available - from sunlight to sugarcane. If you think that's a silly thing, ask any field commander how much any operation depends on maintaining a fuel train. Reducing that train by even a few percentage points is an extraordinary valuable thing, and it becomes worth doing LONG before it makes economic sense in civilian hands.

But we will need them as civilian ready units. Climate change is going to increasingly impact our ability to reliably keep energy running through wires and it's going to change what gets moved from where - even if no other unforeseen emergencies occur. Developing such capabilities must be seen as an urgent, national security priority throughout the Northern Hemisphere. We are going to have to solve all kinds of logistical problems and, as a matter of practical reality, the place logistics is most universally emphasized is within the military and various Coast Guards.

And then we must look at the certainty of some degree of rise in ocean level. We absolutely must develop amphibious technologies, because many of us are going to be living in amphibious communities.

And then there's an issue that Ottawa does not seem to be taking as seriously as it deserves - the emergence of the Northwest Passage as a practical reality. Realistically, this is not something Canada can offload on other powers. Aside from issues of sovereignty, take a look at the map.

The majority of potential North American deep water ports with shortest great-circle paths from Asia are Canadian. That means the shortest path between the two single largest economic powers - the United States and Japan - is right though Ontario.

We are about to become vital to international trade, as opposed to being perepheral. And we must, absolutely, as a matter of the most elemental self-preservation, control that crossroads. It must be secure, and if we do not secure it, I assure you, someone else will.

Current projections suggest that the Arctic Ocean may well be navigable, year round, by 2013. This absolutely mandates some sort of concentration of presence there, if only for the obvious necessity for an Air/Sea Rescue capability.

We need to learn how to feed, house and support large populations up there in ways that don't add fuel to the Climate Change fire, because those populations will develop as a matter of necessity. The shortening of trade-routes is so economically compelling that Canada's only real choice here is how to accommodate it. And, seriously, we must start now.

These are things that cannot become economically viable until you figure out how to make them work well enough to figure out how they should work. This is one of the great unspoken values of military applications. And in the case of Canada, we have more high arctic terrain than anyone else. I rather think it a good idea to be prepared to provide peace, order and good government.

Otherwise, we could be doing it unprepared, half underwater, while freezing in the dark.

Siegelman and Scrushy - Tip of the Iceburg?

Alternet: Going to Jail for Being a Democrat: How Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman Got Roved
By Paul Craig Roberts, CounterPunch.

The frame-up of Siegelman and businessman Richard Scrushy is so crystal clear and blatant that 52 former state attorney generals from across America, both Republicans and Democrats, have urged the US Congress to investigate the Bush administration's use of the US Department of Justice to rid themselves of a Democratic governor who "they could not beat fair and square," according to Grant Woods, former Republican Attorney General of Arizona and co-chair of the McCain for President leadership committee. Woods says that he has never seen a case with so "many red flags pointing to injustice."

The abuse of American justice by the Bush administration in order to ruin Siegelman is so crystal clear that even the corporate media organization CBS allowed "60 Minutes" to broadcast on February 24, 2008, a damning indictment of the railroading of Siegelman. Extremely coincidental "technical difficulties" caused WHNT, the CBS station covering the populous northern third of Alabama, to go black during the broadcast. The station initially offered a lame excuse of network difficulties that CBS in New York denied. The Republican-owned print media in Alabama seemed to have the inside track on every aspect of the prosecution's case against Siegelman. You just have to look at their editorials and articles following the 60 Minutes broadcast to get a taste of what counts for "objective journalism" in their mind.

The story itself bears so much similarity to so many other stories that it seems almost routine. It took a few of the comments to make me realize that suddenly "Dog bites Man" is genuine news.

The news is that "plausible deniablity" is off the table. We now know that when "Dog bites Man," it's almost always the same goddamn dog - just as we always suspected.

The Internet, the web and other emerging peer-to-peer connections are a staggering intelligence advantage to ordinary people, and a freakin' nightmare to those who would prefer to keep citizens "Mushroomed;" eg, "Kept in the dark and fed bullshit."

The Internet, the web, and now the various social media of "web 2.0" are a freaking godsend for people like me who justify their existence by making connections between apparently unrelated things. While the implications of it trouble civil libertarians when they contemplate how potentially troublesome data mining linkages could be, it's a fact that this particular phenomenon is at least as dangerous to those who would abuse their authority than to those they might find "dirt" on to abuse.

This case is fascinating evidence of that phenomenon. Not only do we have evidence of abuse, but clear and damning evidence pointing to a systematic cover-up.

It wasn't all that long ago that the assassinations of Robert and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and probably others were undertaken without any blow-back to those who set it up, or conclusive evidence pointing to who was responsible.

Back in the day, it only took a few judicious threats here and there, and the ominous, but truthful observation; "Who ya gonna tell?"

The answer today is "the whole goddamn world, and whatcha gonna do about it?" There are people alive today -Sibel Edmonds leaps to mind - who probably would have perished suddenly and quietly fifteen or twenty years ago.

The problem for those who start thinking in that way is this: There is no way to shut up a whistle-blower these days without significant and persuasive notice being taken. And if the implications of data-mining for connections between ordinary individuals may be troubling to ordinary individuals - imagine what the very idea does to the sphincters of people with connections to Karl Rove.

You see, this is one of those ideas that could have gotten me put in a quiet padded room somewhere very private, back in the day, just for pointing it out. But I hardly need to point it out, it's obvious, it's inevitable and it's already happening. The internet is a powerful and absolutely magnificent tool for individuals who need to evaluate the reliability of various information sources.

In "free and open societies" such as our own, a newspaper can be scrupulous about their journalistic standards and still be corrupt as all hell. There are probably three or four stories a year that are of critical importance - and if a paper sits on those stories, it's even better than publishing lies.

Well, that reality actually ended in the mid-eighties, when the Internet became a flood of information, and a way to reality-check information cheaply and reliably. What was first the tool of the hardwired geek intelligencia is now available to anyone with the cash to pick up a second-hand computer. If you are the slightest bit interested in data security, it's pretty darned easy to hide your tracks.

What this new reality amounts to is a means by which the average person can have access to the sort of information that William Casey would have sacrificed his left nut and his first-born to get his hands on - if he could have kept it to himself.

Indeed, that was J. Edgar Hoover's secret to power - files that contained dirt on everyone of significance in positions of power both public and private. Well, of course Rove has taken that tactic to heart - but the fact that he has done it is so clearly obvious to people in a position to "connect the dots" that it significantly erodes the effect.

For instance, ten years ago, even five years ago, Nancy Pelosi may well have gotten away with saying "impeachment is off the table." Anyone who disagreed and could object meaningfully would have no ability to do much of anything about it.

But by now there is some point to saying aloud that "taking impeachment off the table" made no goddamn sense politically or strategically when it's in the absolute best interest of honest Democrats to remove corrupt Republicans from power before they can fix the next election.

It makes sense to say that some combination of stupidity, incompetence and blackmail must account for the difference between implied promises in 2006 and delivered results in time for 2009 have significant and troubling implications.

The web hasn't eliminated smoke-filled back rooms where deals are made between politicians and "the people that matter." What it has done is put a live webcam in there, so we can see that the people in those smoke-filled rooms aren't any smarter, better informed or more high-minded than your average gas-station attendant or insurance agent.

We always had the right and the responsibility to oversee them. Now we have the practical capacity to do so; yes, that is bi-partisan urine trickling down their legs.

Oh - and by the by, what's true here in the US is true everywhere there is a robust Internet. So, pretty much, that means everywhere. The implications for the Taliban, for Norway, for China and Russia are all the same - there's no way of keeping "internal matters" internal, there's no way of ensuring that they don't end up on the front pages of their own media and blogs and there's no way of erasing every single trace of corrupt dealings.

Come to think of it, consider the implications of the internet in an honor society like Pakistan, where it becomes impossible to hide the private dealings of "men of the world."

It's a good way to get a private enterprise rocket grenade enema.

Nor is there any effective way of restricting access to that information without killing off their own economy. Now, some regimes don't give much of a crap about that - but that doesn't mean they can absolutely ensure that their citizenry will obey, when disobedience is so very profitable in so very many ways.

And it's also true of the United Nations, and stuffy old NGO's like the Red Cross. If it hadn't been for the web, I doubt they would have gotten so righteously hammered as they did in Canada, where the government took away their control over the blood supply after it turned out that they had willfully neglected to screen blood plasma for HIV - because it would have been "too expensive." That piece of data became widely known - along with another damning number - their overhead ate up 80 cents of every dollar donated. As I recall, - though it's only a vague recollections - it was a combination of hemophilia advocates who had been tracking this that brought it to national attention, but they did it by way of the internet, skipping the historical process of having to find someone to call who could do something and might be persuaded to do so.

Essentially, what has occurred is this: the web advantages people who deal honestly and who either have no skeletons in their closets, or who use them as festive decor while chuckling gleefully. It has made it clear that those who have invested a lot in appearing to have nothing to hide are less worrisome and more likely to screw you over than those who, say, like dressing up in rubber and don't much care about what "decent people" might think.

The average person is now capable of getting enough information to compete intellectually abd even strategically with "the people who matter," because we also have the ability to collaborate to mutual advantage at minimal cost.

Conservatives decry Wikipedia, for instance, because it's not "definitive," that it is "unreliable," and it's possible to insert innacurate information.

All of this is true - but what they don't comprehend is that the distinction between Wikipedia and, say, The World Book is that you can tell who's fingerprints are on which bit of information.

It's true that you can insert inaccuracies - but the act of doing so is information in it's own right; more compelling than the misinformation. Further, the process by which Wikipedia is self-policed tends to give extra validity to articles that have become stable and uncontested.

Compare that to the editorial policy of The Brittanica or Groliers.

Oh, wait. You can't.

So how do we know they have equal or higher standards, as is alleged by conservative sources?

They say so. Very authoritatively. And to the extent that you would have been able to check, that would be true, back in the day. The problem is, that makes you tend to rely on the accuracy of things you cannot check. And that is where the money is.

Go ahead, look up Armenian Genocide in three or four different encyclopedias.

Now go to Wikipedia. I don't actually know what it says - but I know that it will come from more perspectives than the "authoritative" sources, and the comments section will be more fun than "All My Children" and "Project Runway" put together.

History and culture is no longer defined by the victors, or by those who believe they are the "winners" in our society. Everybody gets their fifteen seconds - and it's archived by keyword on You-Tube forever.

Navy's Unspoken Reasons for ASAT Shot

clipped from news.yahoo.com The size of the debris is smaller than the Pentagon had forecast and most of the satellite's intelligence value was likely destroyed, Cartwright said. Though the Pentagon has played down that aspect of the shootdown, analysts had said one of the reasons for the operation was that officials worried that without it, larger chunks of the satellite could fall and be recovered, opening the possibility of secret technology falling into the hands of the Chinese or others.

Maintaining secrets is a good reason for shooting down a surveillance satellite, even if the only secret is that the intelligence it provides is no better than commercially-sourced data. (Let's hope that's not true, but given the fierce drive for privatization under Regan and both Bushes, it may be closer to the truth than many expect.)

But surely the other point to the shot was the shot itself. It seems to me that the odds that a tank of hydrazine could survive re-entry is a remote risk indeed. But even chunks of satellites can give very useful insights to people who should have to work harder for them.

Nonetheless, there is a great deal going on here that remains unsaid, possibly with the hope that the taxpayers of various nations don't quite realize what's really going on.

But the facts on the table are this: The chinese have demonstrated an anti-satellite capability, using tiny maneuverable explosive satellites that must already be in orbit to attack.

The obvious unspoken message is to the Chinese - "We can do it from the ground, and we don't need no damned explosives to send out clouds of shrapnel. We can just hit it with a goddam brick."

And all of this is very compelling, so compelling that it might well cause us to forget the fact that was used to contrive the excuse for shooting down the satellite.... that it might fall down and (gasp) HARM people!

That inconvenient kinetic truth is something that was first underlined by the Soviets, as they orbited first sputnik, and then demonstrated a capability to launch and parachute land a manned capsule that, unless I'm very mistaken, was the shape and roughly the size of the Trinity device.

Speaking of unspoken messages - inasmuch as the technology of the day required parachutes to ensure detonation at the correct altitude.

The mercury program responded using ICBM technology of the day to demonstrate first suborbital and later fully orbital capability with a manned space-capsule that bore an uncanny resemblance to the aeroshells we used for our own atomic weapons - but on a scale that would have held a weapon large enough to pave metropolitan Moscow in kimberlite.

If you want to know why we used disintegrating telephone poles instead of the far more elegant drop-launch technique with X-15 technology to put a man in orbit - that's why. We were waving our big sticks at each other.

So, the fact that things can fall out of orbital space with a loud bang has been pretty much the point to the entire enterprise for the last fifty years. The hard part is NOT making a smoking hole. And of course, not making a smoking hole within a relative degree of precision is also a desirable point to be made. If you can AVOID making a hole in the steppes or the Pacific ocean and recover the payload intact - well, you can put it into the same target zone and achieve a disturbing energy release.

Even without an atomic payload.

The term "smart crowbar" has been around since the early eighties, nutshelling the idea that a crowbar in space equaled at least one tank on the ground. And while delivering that crowbar with precision to take out a tank might have been iffy at the time - putting it within the "strike zone" required to turn an aircraft carrier into something that had formally been an aircraft carrier probably was a reasonable objective.

Given our current capabilities, I have little reason to doubt that we could deliver a smart slug from orbit through any particular compartment within a destroyer. It might even be possible with off-the shelf systems.

This capability, while unstated, is unavoidably available in a crude way with any satellite that has a sufficiently dense component and which can be de-orbited on command. As dense as, say, a thermionic plutonium battery. At least, were I designing a satellite that might have to be de-orbited, and which required such a power source, I would certainly try design it so that if it did de-orbit, I could ensure that component landed within as small a radius as possible and survived the impact without dispersing radioactivity.

And that is pretty much the design requirement of a dense slug penetrator.

Oddly enough, such batteries are designed in exactly such a way; whether they could be so exactly targeted is an open question, but the physics of the matter are pretty obvious to those who think about it.

And so the unspoken message by those interested in controlling the High Frontier - the Air Force - has been that of all the targets on the face of the globe for such a device, the highest value target has to belong to the Navy. For, while other nations do operate carriers, the US is the only one that maintains significant numbers.

One of the obvious implications of Star Wars tech was that anyone with the technology to launch and precisely control orbital payloads - the Air Force, for example - could take out any aircraft carrier in the world, any time it liked.

And the Navy just demonstrated (for the first time) that they could actually protect a carrier battle fleet with a deployed asset, rather than a theoretical capability.

Now while it's never wise to ignore the geopolitics of such capabilities, all politics are local, and there is no more dense locality than the Pentagon. This launch had many messages, and no doubt many intended recipients, but I'd be absolutely stunned if the primary intended recipient of this unspoken message on Navy stationary didn't have an office in the same building, on the same floor, with a parking spot within pissing distance.

SecNav just saw SecAir's smart crowbar and raised him an intelligent tomato can. I'm wondering now what the Air Force has in the hole.

"They" need us more than we need "them."

Over the last, oh, fifty to a hundred years, there has been a great effort toward shaping a general belief (and legislating to place stumbling blocks in front of those who have contrasting views), that for every problem of humanity there is a corporate solution that is better than any other means of dealing with that problem.

Even when some of those problems would not exist, had there been no corporate interest in solving them.

You may may suspect this is one of those "go back to the land" pieces that crop up like dock and dandelions in your yard. It IS an apt symbol - freely reproducing edible greens being considered the "enemy" of inedible, chemical-intensive grass.

But illustrative as it is of the principle, the principle is not going back to subsistence agriculture, or indeed, subsistence anything. Corporations exist as they because individual productivity has become very high indeed, and there is a great surplus to sustain their excesses.

And while many really do pay their own way, many are frankly parasitic, forcing choices upon us that are individually disadvantageous.

Consider, if you will, the twin evils of Asparatame and High-Fructose Corn Syrup.

If you live in the United States, and you want a soft drink, you get your choice of two substances that may well be worse for you than the sugar they replace. Neither one is possible to produce without the sort of huge, complex infrastructure that only a corporation could possibly afford, made possible not by honest market competition but by corrupt regulation and corn subsidies.

But you could choose to drink tea or coffee instead. Then you still get a choice of sweeteners, ranging from honey to sugar to saccharine to Aspartame and Sucralose.

Or you could simply do a bit of research on the web and find out how to carbonate your own water in bulk, or simply from a small appliance on demand. That's not a paid link. It just happened to show up on the first page of my Google search, lucky them, as I was thinking that the most difficult ingredient in pop is the bubbles. It used to be quite the difficult enterprise - back when soda was a novelty. Nowdays, though, the technology is actually quite simple, and probably accessible to anyone with a few wrenches and a Home Depot card. Soda Club obviously realized this ahead of me.



Jones Soda got started that way, realizing that the absence of honest soda in a wide variety of flavors was something they could build a business on. And now they have gone to pure cane sugar as a replacement for HFCS sweetener, again due to direct demand.

To sweeten sodas, and a multitude of other food and beverages, companies typically use the sweetener high fructose corn syrup (or HFCS for short). But here at Jones we’ve decided to do things a little different. Thanks to phone calls from our fans, consumer research, and one passionately loud Jones Soda Receptionist, we are tossing out the HFCS. You may have seen that our 12-ounce cans of soda are now made with pure cane sugar, and by mid-2007 all of your favorite Jones products will be available with real sugar.

Soda club goes a step further, saying "what would you add to seltzer water if you had fresh seltzer to start with?" This is a P2P idea, and they expand on it - as does Jones - by maintaining direct relationships with their customers.

Here's what they have to say about sweeteners:

6. How do you sweeten your regular flavors?

Soda-Club regular sodamix flavors contain sugar (sucrose), not high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). While many of our labels do say “sugar and/or high fructose corn syrup”, we have chosen to formulate without high fructose corn syrup and have not yet updated our labels to reflect this fact. The exception to this is Energy Drink, which indeed does contain fructose and dextrose, in addition to sucrose. In addition to sugar (sucrose), regular sodamix flavors contain sucralose (Splenda® brand) and some also contain acesulfame potassium. If you have dietary concerns, please read the label of every Soda-Club product before purchasing, available by clicking the sodamix images on the Flavors Galore page of this website. When in doubt, consult with your physician.

Consumer preference rules - when companies don't have any involvement with other companies that would prefer consumers didn't have preferences. It's getting a lot easier for consumers to find out which sort of company they are dealing with and making a silent choice based on that information.

But ven the worst corporation has to produce something of arguable value, or sooner or later it will be revealed as a vast ponzi scheme. Consider Enron.

Alas, this is not true of governments; governments have no commonly agreed objective measure of success, other than "not being replaced." Generally, they maintain a monopoly or near-monopoly on organized force, so they are damn difficult to dislodge, even if they act in ways that would have scandalized the board of governors of the Astoria Corporation.

But even governments can be and will be erased by this sort of philosophical, economic and infrastructural sea-change. When they cease to matter to "the people who matter" - they will no longer matter much at all. And who will be "the people that matter?" Well, that's hard to say precisely, but it's certain that there will be a lot more of those of us that matter, at the expense of the influence of "them."

You see, in life, you get a choice. You can choose to be "one of us," or one of "them." The "usses" are those that share your interests, needs and desires. "Thems" are the folks that "would rather be a hammer than a nail." For a particular sort of aspirant "them", government is the natural choice. While it does not offer the potential financial reward that climbing a corporate ladder does, it offers something better - individual access to power.

That, or one is blessed (or cursed) with a greater than usual need for rules and structure, so one is drawn to becoming a tiny cog among a great number of other cogs, without the need to make any choices at all.

This brave new world brings to light the possiblity of a political and economic universe for each of us that contains no "thems." You deal only with those who you need to and want to, from a wide range of possible choices. You almost never encounter a "them," much less have to submit to them, unless your own personal needs cause you to seek "them" out.

These admittedly simplistic observations do illustrate the unavoidable choice we are all facing - assent or dissent regarding the overriding model for the next age of human civilization - given that some aspects of it are simply inevitable outgrowths of our communications, logistics and transport infrastructure. Whatever we think of the result, a flattening of the pyramids of authority and capital seems both overdue and inevitable, and the righting of the balance will likely be more violent the more government and capital conspire to put off the inevitable with "globalization" strategies that are simply a means to keep power and wealth in the same few hands.

Of course, that's way too complicated for most folks. But that doesn't matter, because that choice will be made, for the most part, by people who don't understand it at all, justified by the words of those who barely comprehend it. (Had they really comprehended what they were saying, they would have written it comprehensibly.)

In the current historical configuration, our technological infrastructures are often taken the form of a distributed network, such as the point to point internet, or the generalized self-publishing features of the web which allow any internet user to produce and diffuse different type of content. Humanity has therefore a technology which has the fundamental effect of allowing the global coordination of small teams, which can now work on global projects based on affinity. Well-known expressions of this is the production of the alternative computer operating system Linux, and the universal Wikipedia encyclopedia. But the over a billion already connected people are literally engaged in tens of thousands of such collective projects, which are producing all kinds of social value. The alterglobalization movement is one expression of a movement born out of such networks, which can globally organize and mobilize without access to the decentralized mass media, using a wide variety of micro media resources.

In the business environment, we see the increasing importance of diffuse social innovation (innovation as an emerging byproduct of networked communities, rather than internally funded entrepreneurial R & D), and we see the emergence of asymmetric competition between for-benefit institutions based on communities of peer producers), which are successfully competing with traditional for profit companies. In addition, for profit companies are now themselves adapting and therefore using practices pioneered by such communities. This is not the right context to explain in detail such trends, so interested readers are referred to the Wiki Encyclopedia at P2PFoundation.Net . We are witnessing a similar process as when imperial slaveholders were freeing their slaves into serfs, or smart feudal lords where sponsoring merchants and entrepreneurs.

Perhaps they were writing for a particular audience. I can write like that too, when I wanna sound all smart and inarguable, but that usually means I'm a wee teense weak on the ground. But never mind the presentation, there is a solid core to this article - and the site.

This is about Peer-to-Peer relationships, which is a strange and bloodless way of saying that the future will be made from relationships of choice between persons, using mechanisms that essentially network around choice limiting hierarchies and authoritarian decision-making processes, and whatever structures that persist from our time into that future will have done so because they have adapted to that new reality.

In other words, I will drink Coke if the only alternate is Pepsi - unless I'm eating mild foods, in which case, I'll have Pepsi - if the coffee is typically bad. But if RC Cola is in the fountain, neither competing soft drink nor coffee stand a chance.

Now, why is RC not in the fountain? It's not because of equipment issues, distribution issues or even cost. It's due to exclusive marketing agreements. Most places get to choose Coke or Pepsi, and whatever other beverages the bottler chooses to hand them. They get a small choice and their customers none at all.

P2P enterprises are about giving your peers - friends, customers, suppliers - what THEY want in exchange for what YOU want. Most often that will be money, but there are other valuable considerations, such as prestige, such as market share, such as "being the best."

For myself, were I opening a food joint today, I'd be tempted to choose "none of the above" and go with making my own designer pop, even though I suspect I'd have to invest more for less return. It would significantly difference myself in a marketplace filled with franchises and "might as well be franchises;" it could well allow me to prosper without a liquor license!

The fact that proper "soda fountain" culture has not reappeared is because it's more expensive and supplies are probably hard to come by, and the old-fashioned technology requred a good deal of skill.

Still, with more modern controls, it could well be the next "Starbucks" phenomenon, when various local and then national and international entrepreneurs realized that people like choices - and LIKE the option of a better than average product.

Incidentally, the very existence of a Starbucks on every corner has raised the quality of American coffee at least two ticks on the "Joe Scale."

Five basic grades: Coffee, java, jamoke, joe and carbon remover. (Author Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road)

Joe usta be what you got, jamoke in a fancy place. Brewed 80 cups to the pound in a drip machine that hadn't been cleaned in a week, then left on the hob until it was empty, the best one could say for it was that it had caffeine, it was hot and it wasn't actually poisonous. Nowadays, you often find Java, if not actual coffee. The marketplace DOES work, you see, when nobody futzes with it. But that's what both governments and huge multinational corporations do, almost by design - futz with otherwise free markets. But, short of actual force, that is accomplished mainly by restriction on the distribution of and access to both education and information - and both of those are structural issues that the existing order depends on, but did not create and really cannot enforce.

So we can see this as being essentially an emerging, gradual phenomenon, the de-institutionalization of US culture.

Republicans tend to see that as a bad thing, Democrats tend to see that (guardedly) as a mostly good thing, and neither party has any more choice in the matter. Being varieties of authoritarian, both will have to cope with a general decrease in the social value of authoritarian personalties - "decision makers," "movers and shakers" who make wholesale choices on behalf of entire demographics.

They will have to learn to be content with offering choices, instead.

This, of course, brings me to the current political situation, where our only choices seem to be cosmetic and meaningless.

Again, if the choice is between Coke and Pepsi - perhaps it's tea-time!

In other words, concentrate on the aspects of government that affect you and yours and work to change those things so that they either go away or become more benign. This may seem selfish, but if everyone does it, it will all come out in the wash.

And then of course, whenever government is completely foolish or criminal, ignore it when possible, evade it if necessary and resist it if unavoidable. This approach makes a great deal of difference over time; consider, for instance, how greatly the war on drugs has degraded general respect for drug laws and lawmakers - to the extent that entire state governments are at loggerheads with the federal government on this issue. The outcome is quite inevitable in law because it's fait accompli in practice. The social use of marijuana is widely accepted and it's medical use - at least in principle - has reached near universal acceptance, or at least tolerance.

Certainly it's become evident that the risks of growing a little weed for personal use are trivial, even though the potential penalties are draconian; outside of the DEA, few law-enforcement officials can be bothered with that "vice" when there are crimes that really matter.

(Nor does it likely escape the average cop on a night beat during a full moon that more widespread usage of pot might make their job a LOT easier.)

So, take a good solid look at to what degree government affects you, and to what extent the investment of your energy into a national presidential election keeps you from using it in more directly profitable ways.

For most Nevadans, that might be ridding ourselves of Jim Gibbons and his cronies, or working to diversify our energy and economic infrastructures. It may probably boil down further to your county or your town. It used to be that we needed central knowledge bases and centralized decision makers. Now we have the world wide web, FedEx and all kinds of "appropriate technology" options that can be implemented in a cost-effective way on an individual or neighborhood basis - given the proper and appropriately respectful climate of regulation.

So let's see to that.

It's been many years since our elected representatives had to do much personal interaction to get our votes - or lose them. It's time we paid closer attention, and consider how many of them we need at all. Both political and appointive structures are hierarchical, and governments as well as profit-making entities will HAVE to adapt to a new reality of Peer to Peer approaches - or wither away.

Not in the happy fun Marxist wet-dream sense. As in being entirely replaced, made irrelevant, bypassed; becoming a vestigial, ceremonial residue not unlike various European monarchies or the Canadian Senate.

What WILL the "top ten," the cheerleaders and the homecoming queens (of all genders) do with themselves?

Well, as people persons, they should do rather well for themselves in a Peer to Peer world. They will just have to do it differently. Along with the rest of us, who may well have to employ them as our surrogate peers.

In the intermediate term, consider what your candidate actually says about the issues that matter to you. And by "Says," I mean what they say in practical terms, not the airy generalities and High Concept specification. That's all very fine and good, of course - if it has a practical implementation.

You see, our new and bravely webbed world means that there will be a change in how business and government is done, for good, for ill, and likely both. The only question NOT at issue is whether change will occur; it will occur just as surely as the growth of a good road network made the Roman Empire possible. Possible - but not inevitable, other than there was a need for some entity to maintain roads and trade nexi. It could just as well been a federation of trade guilds as a consolidation of power in the hands of traditional authorities.

Ask not what you can do for your country; ask what your country can do for you. Because in a Peer to Peer world, your peers are just as likely to be in Afghanistan as next door, so a government that presumes to pick and choose your peers - and your friends - is not acting in your interest at all.

Considering the expense of the damn things - national governments - they are overdue for an audit both in concept and practice. That is to say, if they wish to continue being of service past the first decade or so of this new millennium.

UPDATE: I investigated Soda Club, since I stumbled across it, and found out that I COULD become an affiliate. So I applied, and it will appear in my sidebar as a permanent sponsor. Why?

Not because I expect to make a ton of money. It's because I believe you are known by your friends, and what they stand for. This firm seems to me to be representative of the thrust of this whole article, and what Graphictruth is all about. I mean, I'd LOVE to make a dime or two off this, don't get me wrong. But it's more about investing in the idea, even if it's just vicariously.

Here's their link. And here's the link to their Affiliate page, just in case you might like to spread the word yourself.

Love soda? Get a Soda-Club soda maker! About the size of a coffeemaker and even easier to use, you’ll make fresh seltzer and soda at the touch of a button, with no clean-up. No more lugging, storing and recycling. Over 25 great-tasting flavors.

And their diet varieties come with "Splenda" instead of the other. In case that matters to you. Me, the idea of being able to make fresh juice-based drinks is even more attractive. Alternately, you could carbonate your Kool-Aide - or even your gelatin desserts.

The point is, you get to choose, and the marketing is not about making you want something in particular, but wanting to become empowered to choose what YOU really want.

Even if it's Jones Soda's "turkey and gravy" flavor.

The price of expediency is again greater than the price of honor

A Reporter at Large: The Black Sites: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker Annotated

Sadly, absolutely nothing in this article reveals anything revolutionary or even surprising about the black art of torture. There is nothing here that could not have been presumed, based on what is known about human nature and our psychological limits. That is most especially true of the inevitable mental devastation of those charged with using this evil art upon others.

Oh, and one other thing, also long known by anyone who's made even the briefest study of it. Torture may produce information you need to know - but it will be buried in confessions of everything the subject thinks you want to hear.
The estimate - by one PRO-torture source cited elsewhere in the essay - is that 90 percent of the information obtained by torture is useless, meaning that it's not even seriously competitive with conventional techniques of investigation. This result comes at the price of human sanity, souls, and ultimately precludes the possibility of justice. Perhaps, in the final judgment, it will be found that was the object all along.

“Waterboarding works,” the former officer said. “Drowning is a baseline fear. So is falling. People dream about it. It’s human nature. Suffocation is a very scary thing. When you’re waterboarded, you’re inverted, so it exacerbates the fear. It’s not painful, but it scares the shit out of you.” (The former officer was waterboarded himself in a training course.) Mohammed, he claimed, “didn’t resist. He sang right away. He cracked real quick.” He said, “A lot of them want to talk. Their egos are unimaginable. K.S.M. was just a little doughboy. He couldn’t stand toe to toe and fight it out.”

The former officer said that the C.I.A. kept a doctor standing by during interrogations. He insisted that the method was safe and effective, but said that it could cause lasting psychic damage to the interrogators. During interrogations, the former agency official said, officers worked in teams, watching each other behind two-way mirrors. Even with this group support, the friend said, Mohammed’s interrogator “has horrible nightmares.” He went on, “When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but it’s well outside the norm. You can’t go to that dark a place without it changing you.” He said of his friend, “He’s a good guy. It really haunts him. You are inflicting something really evil and horrible on somebody.”

Among the few C.I.A. officials who knew the details of the detention and interrogation program, there was a tense debate about where to draw the line in terms of treatment. John Brennan, Tenet’s former chief of staff, said, “It all comes down to individual moral barometers.”

Indeed it does. Mine is pegged on "Evil"

Nyet to missile defense shield, Putin says.

Yet another Foreign Policy Triumph!

Russia withdraws from arms treaty - CNN.com: "President Vladimir Putin signed a decree suspending Russia's participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty due to 'extraordinary circumstances ... which affect the security of the Russian Federation and require immediate measures,' the Kremlin said in a statement.

Putin has in the past threatened to freeze his country's compliance with the treaty, accusing the United States and its NATO partners of undermining regional stability with U.S. plans for a missile defense system in former Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe."

Yep, with all the potential fallout of the Cuban Missile Crisis. If you won't impeach Bush because he has committed illegal acts, how about impeaching him for deliberately, stupidly and willfully endangering our national security?

Resign, Sir!

A belated Fourth of July post from me, courtesy of Crooks and Liars, via digg. Keith Olbermann delivers arguably his most pointed and most powerful Special Comment yet on the ramifications of Bush’s commutation of Libby’s sentence. The video is also on YouTube and is embedded above, but C&L has a transcript.

We enveloped “our” President in 2001.

And those who did not believe he should have been elected — indeed, those who did not believe he had been elected — willingly lowered their voices and assented to the sacred oath of non-partisanship.

And George W. Bush took our assent, and re-configured it, and honed it, and sharpened it to a razor-sharp point, and stabbed this nation in the back with it.

Were there any remaining lingering doubt otherwise, or any remaining lingering hope, it ended yesterday when Mr. Bush commuted the prison sentence of one of his own staffers.

Did so even before the appeals process was complete…

Did so without as much as a courtesy consultation with the Department of Justice…

Did so despite what James Madison –at the Constitutional Convention — said about impeaching any president who pardoned or sheltered those who had committed crimes “advised by” that president…

Did so without the slightest concern that even the most detached of citizens must look at the chain of events and wonder:

To what degree was Mr. Libby told: break the law however you wish — the President will keep you out of prison?

In that moment, Mr. Bush, you broke that fundamental compact between yourself and the majority of this nation’s citizens — the ones who did not cast votes for you.

In that moment, Mr. Bush, you ceased to be the President of the United States.

The Comments on Digg, C&L and YouTube are worth reading. Even the Usual Idiots seem to have lost heart for their mindless apologeas, with a few "dead ender" exceptions. There is a literal flood of video responses on YouTube, too. The following is from a Ron Paul fan - a truly devastating bit of Bush-Bashing.

I took the time to include a response to one such dead ender, by the name of asknotaxe , who's comment was so astonishing that it demanded a reply beyond the limits imposed by YouTube.

Keith Olberman seemingly has forgotten the 211 presidential pardons Clinton granted in the last 9 weeks in office, and thew 121 on his final day of office? Olberman is a windbag. Listening to him wax philosophic about democracy and war makes me puke. I am a US soldier, and don't need some liberal toad eulogizing my service....we are volunteers. So just shut the fuck up and sleep quietly under the blanket of freedom and security provided by better men than yourselves, non serving liberals.

What makes you think "people here" approve of those pardons? I don't recall the details of all of them, but a few - even several - stuck in my craw.

But as I recall, none were pardons of people that had been convicted of crimes committed directly on Clinton's behalf.

Meanwhile, Sir, your unwillingness to consider the evidence; your mockery and contempt for those who do, your self-definition as being "better than" those who do not blindly follow the Leader does not ring freedom's bells in MY ear.

No, Sir, what I hear is the tramp of jackboots and knocks on the door at midnight.

You, Sir, have managed to capture the sheer arrogance of the Redcoat, the unthinking tone of superiority of - not then Nazis, but of an Italian fascist soldier.

Worse yet for you, you sound something like a cross between an Italian Fascist and a Vietnam-Era Helicopter General.

Where, sir, is my Habius Corpus? Where, Sir, is my guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure, or a fair and speedy trial by a jury of my peers? Where, Sir, does the Constitution define "Free Speech Zones?" What happened to the Posse Comatatus act - and for what reason?

And for what reason did Haliburton get a no-bid contract to build internment camps? Should I believe they are really intended just for uppity brown people, or as "relocation camps" in case of emergency?

The guard towers and razor wire argue against that "explanation," Sir.

So, you see, us "liberals" - that is to say, those of us with various political views who have not been seduced by the warming tickle of smoke being blown up our asses - do not find the "blanket" you refer to as being either warm, comfortable, or having anything whatsoever to do with "freedom."

When an armed and enthusiastic thug tells me to "shut the fuck up" and be quiet in the NAME of freedom, something is terribly wrong.

But I rather think that when you get your marching orders to try and impose martial law upon us "spineless liberals" who "never had the guts to serve," you may find yourself in for a bit of a surprise.

First, I think you may be astonished at how many of us are armed and who take defending the Constitution very seriously indeed, despite a very realistic view of the outcome for us in a personal sense. Second, I believe you will be stunned at how many of us ARE veterans, unlike myself and Third, the embarrassing holes in your own ranks as many take the higher path of honor blazed by Gen. Robert E. Lee.

An interesting further question - one of some professional concern for those such as yourself, I should imagine - is what cause will appeal to all the competent military leaders who's careers foundered upon the rocks of unwelcome candor? Come the day you are led into battle against the American People - as you may well be, given the history and nature of this viciously stupid administration - are you entirely sanguine about the competence of your chain of command and it's ability to anticipate emerging threats and respond effectively? Given it's track record in the "Cakewalk," I mean.

Nah, I suspect you to be just another Redcoat who doesn't believe that a bunch of rag-tag ruffians can achieve anything against the might of the Empire, a fetishist drone of the National Security State, and until the last moment, I suspect you will be unable to comprehend the fact that the individual Citizen - not the CINC - is the intended sovereign agency in this nation. Those of us who understand that - well, you've probably bunked with a lot of them.

So, if you do not respect MY potential ability to fuck you up at range - respect theirs.

Redcoats learned to fear "The Widowmaker," the deadly accurate Pennsylvania rifle. capable of reliably putting a 50 caliber slug into a man's head at 200 yards.

Well, sir, it's descendants are here, and rather a lot of them are in the hands of Citizens. And for those of us who cannot scrape up the ten grand needed for weapon and optics - well, there's always Home Depot, sporting goods stores, and various things dismissed as "wacky" by those who've not considered the immutable laws of physics, such as spud guns. Anything that can shoot a potato 1000 yards and crack the sound barrier in the process has some potential for elemental mischief.

The bottom line is this: George Bush will not be able to steal this nation from it's Citizens. He may be able to screw it up, fragment it, balkanize it, kill thousands upon thousands of us, but ultimately, you cannot enslave free citizens. Killing us is your only option - and we have you outnumbered.

I certainly do not advocate civil war. I'm horrified at the prospect. But the ultimate outcome, given the forces at the command of Bush,, even assuming only "scattered resistance" and complete willingness to bear arms against the citizens of this nation, the outcome will come down to the numbers. And that's a damn graphic truth.

When Push Comes To Shove

Without Impeachment................George Bush Skates

by buhdydharma

George Bush leaves the White House for the last time. The ranch in Crawford is sold and Texas is nearly instantaneously overgrown with brush. George moves back to Kennebunkport (why bother going to Paraguay?) and the payoffs he couldn't hide as President begin to roll in. Knowing the arrogance of the man, his ghostwritten book intended to seal his legacy as a Great War President follows shortly.

In the meantime, Iraq is still raging, Afghanistan is still an unholy mess and Darfur is still ignored...and Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind behind 9/11 is still free. These are now no longer Bush's problem. It is now Hillary's problem, or Barack's problem, or Edward's problem. As is the destroyed economy, the destroyed environment......and the destroyed [American Government rendered ineffective] and littered with Neo-con and Fundy moles.

The post goes on to explain what will happen "inside the beltway," but even now, what goes on in Washington is becoming conditionally irrelevant.

There are so very many frustrating issues that are of significant importance to the various States and local governments that have gone un-addressed for so long that state legislatures are starting to seriously wonder about their addictions to federal dollars.

One extremely interesting case in point; New Jersey rejects Sex-Ed dollars from the federal government on frankly state's rights and individual rights grounds.

new guidelines would require the state to follow all sections, "including one that teaches that monogamous marriage is the only expected standard and that sex outside of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects." A state official had this to say:

Monogamy is not a bad idea, but having the government of New Jersey dictate these things for families is not something we wish to do. It isn't the function of state government to create standards (for sexual activity).

There's growing rebellion regarding the Department of Education and No Child Left Behind - led by that reddest of all red states, Utah.

On Monday, Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, Jr. fired the first shot in what may become a national rebellion against the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Resisting intense veto pressure from President Bush and federal regulators, Huntsman signed into law a bill that will prioritize Utah's own educational goals over the mandates of the federal act. To preserve its freedom to chart the future of its schools, the Beehive State, Huntsman signaled, is willing to say no to Washington's money.

Increasingly, the various states see that adminstration policies conflict with State polices, and that federal regulatory maneuvering is being used to delay or override laws and policies States find to be reasonable and prudent. From Emissions Standards to Sex Education to Medicaid to NCLB, the states have increasingly decided to go to the mattresses.

"Our message to federal officials: Give up your unfunded mandates or give us the money. Live up to the law's promise. Show us flexibility or show us the money. We begin this federal court battle today – before spending one cent on illegal unfunded mandates this fiscal year. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. Again and again, in letters and meetings, the federal government has rejected our repeated waiver requests unreasonably and arbitrarily. This mindless rigidity harms our taxpayers, but most of all, our children, who are robbed of resources in their classrooms. We will not dumb down our tests – as the federal education officials suggested – or divert money from critical existing educational programs."

"As Education Commissioner, if I believed that the $8 million cost of adding additional tests in grades three, five and seven was educationally beneficial to Connecticut's students, I'd be the first one in line advocating for the expense," Sternberg said. "The cost, however, is not worth the questionable educational benefit. After multiple failed attempts to obtain a mutually agreeable resolution to our reasonable, research-based requests, it is time to seek resolution in another forum – the courts."

And then there's the crisis with the National Guard:

Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire watched the events unfold in Kansas, remembering her own worries from 2006.

At the beginning of last summer's wildfire season, she was attending a meeting with other governors from the Northwest. She had a big problem, Gregoire told them. Parts of her state were a tinderbox because of drought. Key segments of Washington's National Guard had deployed to Iraq. And the units that were left—the ones that would be called up to respond in the event of fast-spreading fires—were facing such severe equipment shortages that they sometimes struggled even to adequately train for disasters, let alone respond to them. "I soon discovered that virtually all of the other governors were in the same position," Gregoire recalled.

Not long after that meeting, all 50 U.S. governors—the commanders in chief of their states' National Guards—signed a letter to President Bush imploring him to immediately begin reoutfitting their depleted National Guards. But little changed, and the Guard now has only 56 percent of its required equipment, the lowest level in nearly six years, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The tug of war between the president and the governors over the National Guard seems to heat up every time there is a national emergency. But how much of the rhetoric is simply the finger-pointing and power-jockeying of politics and how much is a frank assessment of how prepared the Guard would be in the event of a catastrophic domestic emergency, be it a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina or a terrorist assault on the scale of the Sept. 11 attacks?

"The problem with the National Guard is not being exaggerated or overstated," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based national security think tank. "It is very real, and it is a very big deal."

It seems obvious to me that responsible State governments must already be in the planning stages to create state emergency response teams that cannot be federalized. State militias, in other words.

New York City - responding to the obvious massive intelligence failures from Federal Authorities who apparently see it as an entirely dispensable target filled with Godless Liberals, have gone even further, creating their own offices of counter-terrorism which do not depend on the political winds of fortune.

Terrorism experts applaud the city's approach in part because of this comprehensive nature. That reflects a growing consensus among security analysts that five years after 9/11, the United States must readjust its thinking and behavior in the fight against terror: It should not only continue to implement on-the-ground security measures, they say, but it should also reaffirm and cultivate bedrock American values that could counterbalance terrorist efforts.

"In the final analysis, our security is not going to be a matter of barriers and bollards and electronic surveillance or keeping shampoo from carry-on luggage," says terrorism expert Brian Jenkins, who created the terrorism unit at RAND Corp. more than 30 years ago. "It is really going to be found in our own courage and our continuing commitment to our own values and the rule of law - our sense of community, our tolerance, our historic traditions of self-reliance and resilience."

That spirit of self-reliance is what motivated New York to create its unique counter terrorism and intelligence units within the police department, as well as to post detectives in 10 different countries.

A suspicious-minded person might wonder if the misuse of the National Guard might in fact be deliberate policy, to make it impossible for states to resist Federal Government takeovers "in case of national emergency," such as a declaration of martial law. (In such a case, martial law would properly be administered by the State's Guard Units - but they do have to be capable of insisting on that point, and it's apparent that Bush would prefer them to be unable to do so.

The other hot-button issue between the governors and the president regarding the National Guard involves the Insurrection Act, the law that governs when the National Guard can be "federalized" for domestic law enforcement without the consent of a governor. A 2006 revision to the act expanded the president's power to assume control of the Guard during domestic events, something that governors say threatens to derail state disaster planning and response. Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Kit Bond (R-Mo.), co-chairmen of the Senate National Guard Caucus, have introduced a bill to repeal the changes.

Combine that with revisions of the Posse Comatatus Act of 1878 and the Insurrection Act permitting the federal government to use federal troops or to essentially conscript National Guard units and Ready Reserve units from other states to "suppress domestic unrest" and you have the foundation for the possibility for the federal government to simply take over any state (such as, say, California) by fiat, at least on paper. As Iraq demonstrates, in practice, millage may vary.

And a very significant question remains untested; what happens if there actually comes a time when the President - Bush, or an administration or two down the line - decides to test the resolve of the Governors. What happens when and if the State Guard refuses to comply with the president's orders?

For that matter, there's a more dangerous "what if;" what if the governer caves but a significant minority or even a passive plurality of a state or region's citizens decide to resist a federal occupation?

The root of the problem is that the federal government's bi-partisan disdain for the Constitution, the rule of law and the will of the people, no better symbolized than by Nancy Pelosi's refusal to consider several and various Bills of Impeachment that are the manifestation of huge popular distrust and discontent.

Dave Lindorff: Co-Sponsors for Cheney Impeachment Bill: They Think ...

It remains to be seen whether more members of the House will sign on to Kucinich's bill, or whether other representatives will add new bills of impeachment ... www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/985 - 27k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Daily Kos: New Mexico Legislature to get impeachment bill

Pass the impeachment bill in New Mexico, but do not make an effort to get it before the U.S. House -- yet. Pass it in a substantial number of states (my ... www.dailykos.com/story/2007/1/12/14726/1248 - 237k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Kucinich to Sponsor Impeach Cheney Bill - CommonDreams.org Politics

Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) filed a bill of impeachment against President Bush in December of last year, just as the 109th Congress was about to end, ... www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/20/652/ - 81k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Hillary Clinton Proclaims Bill's Impeachment Off Limits ...

33 Responses to “Hillary Clinton Proclaims Bill’s Impeachment Off Limits”. wardmama4 February 26th, 2007 at 1:34 pm. What an insane logic - make this topic ... sweetness-light.com/archive/hillary-clinton-proclaims-bills-impeachment-off-limits - 56k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Rep. McKinney's floor statement on the impeachment of George W ...

MCKINNEY'S FULL REMARKS ON BUSH IMPEACHMENT BILL. By Matthew Cardinale, News Editor and National Correspondent (December 08, 2006) ... www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/16230 - 84k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

This Can't Be Happening!

They could be submitted as bills of impeachment and voted on by the House Judiciary Committee and by the full Congress tomorrow, if there was the will to do ... www.thiscantbehappening.net/2007.05.01_arch.html - 172k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

One Citizen's Bill of Impeachment Activism

One Citizen's Bill of Impeachment. by STUART MARKOFF. A DECLARATION OF DIVORCE FROM, AND IMPEACHMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THESE UNITED STATES CURRENTLY IN ... baltimorechronicle.com/2006/101906MARKOFF.html - 5k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Two States Bills of Impeachment Possible. « Last Bastion of Reason

Two States Bills of Impeachment Possible. Finally, some states with balls are doing the work that we expect from our Congressmen and Senators. ... www.lastbastionofreason.com/2006/03/29/two-states-bills-of-impeachment-possible/ - 19k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

2007-2008 Bill 3194: Impeachment procedures - www.scstatehouse.net ...

(Text matches printed bills. Document has been reformatted to meet World ... 1895, RELATING TO IMPEACHMENT OF CERTAIN EXECUTIVE AND JUDICIAL OFFICERS OF ... www.scstatehouse.net/sess117_2007-2008/bills/3194.htm - 20k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

I think it's pretty clear that this is a litmus test issue for the American People in general; that there is widespread discontent with "government and politics as usual" and that our representatives had damn well better take that discontent as seriously as it merits, returning us to the rule of law, or face an American People who hold all federal officials, elected or otherwise, in utter contempt.

We may recall where that led us in 1776 - with lower levels of public discontent and less direct threat to the practical liberties of ordinary citizens. Google "Causes of the Revolutionary War" if you are a little shaky on the history of that completely avoidable conflict.