The Intercept

For those of you who share my interest in the secret and often nefarious doings of our security and defense apparatus, I would commend to your attention the establishment of a new online publication called "The Intercept." I've long been a reader of Glenn Greenwald, most lately (in)famous for being instrumental in breaking the Edward Snowden story that informed the world the extent to which the U.S. national security agency (NSA) is spying on just about everybody in the world including us millions of once-unsuspecting (but now fully aware) Americans. Who thought the laws protected them from domestic spying and also prevented the NSA and other arms of the government from snooping into their affairs. The amazing thing is that even after the revelations of widespread NSA misconduct, a great many Americans aren't upset by it. It's yet another measure of our ignorance.

Here's an edited discussion of The Intercept's goals and purpose from its website. The emphasis in the paragraphs is mine.

This looks like something all friends of civil liberties ought to be jumping on.

About The Intercept

The Intercept, a publication of First Look Media, was created by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill. It has a two-fold mission: one short-term, the other long-term.

Our short-term mission is to provide a platform to report on the documents previously provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. . . . Our NSA coverage will be comprehensive, innovative and multi-faceted. We have a team of experienced editors and journalists devoted to the story. We will use all forms of digital media for our reporting. In addition, we will publish primary source documents on which our reporting is based. We will also invite outside experts with area knowledge to contribute to our reporting, and provide a platform for commentary and reader engagement.

Our long-term mission is to produce fearless, adversarial journalism across a wide range of issues. The editorial independence of our journalists will be guaranteed. They will be encouraged to pursue their passions, cultivate a unique voice, and publish stories without regard to whom they might anger or alienate. We believe the prime value of journalism is its power to impose transparency, and thus accountability, on the most powerful governmental and corporate bodies, and our journalists will be provided the full resources and support required to do this.

While our initial focus will be the critical work surrounding the NSA story, we are excited by the opportunity to grow with our readers into the broader and more comprehensive news outlet that the The Intercept will become.

Carnivals of Folly

Here we are, four days before the United States of America defaults on its debts. Here we are entering into the third week of a partial governmental shut down because a tiny minority of idiots in the Republican party have brought us to this pass. We are facing self-imposed disasters of unknown magnitude and duration if sanity doesn't prevail soon.You have to wonder about a system and set of rules that could allow something like this to happen, but that's a question for another time. Right now we are all staring down the barrel of a shotgun, with a madman on the other end of it, finger on trigger.

As usual Chris Hedges has cogent observations. And as usual he looks at the system. Once you understand the system, you can understand this present mess. Here he is today in Truthdig:

The last days of empire are carnivals of folly. We are in the midst of our own, plunging forward as our leaders court willful economic and environmental self-destruction. Sumer[ia] and Rome went down like this. So did the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Men and women of stunning mediocrity and depravity led the monarchies of Europe and Russia on the eve of World War I. And America has, in its own decline, offered up its share of weaklings, dolts and morons to steer it to destruction. A nation that was still rooted in reality would never glorify charlatans such as Sen. Ted Cruz, House Speaker John Boehner and former Speaker Newt Gingrich as they pollute the airwaves. If we had any idea what was really happening to us we would have turned in fury against Barack Obama, whose signature legacy will be utter capitulation to the demands of Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry, the military-industrial complex and the security and surveillance state. We would have rallied behind those few, such as Ralph Nader, who denounced a monetary system based on gambling and the endless printing of money and condemned the willful wrecking of the ecosystem. We would have mutinied. We would have turned the ship back.

The populations of dying empires are passive because they are lotus-eaters. There is a narcotic-like reverie among those barreling toward oblivion. They retreat into the sexual, the tawdry and the inane, retreats that are momentarily pleasurable but ensure self-destruction. They naively trust it will all work out. As a species, Margaret Atwood observes in her dystopian novel “Oryx and Crake,” “we’re doomed by hope.” And absurd promises of hope and glory are endlessly served up by the entertainment industry, the political and economic elite, the class of courtiers who pose as journalists, self-help gurus like Oprah and religious belief systems that assure followers that God will always protect them. It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical thinking.

Well, magic didn't get us to this pass, and magic will not get us out of it. Alas, what it will take to get us back on even keel--a collective acceptance of the concept of the common good--is, it seems to me, dead as a dodo, beyond resuscitation. We seemed determined to commit suicide.

Our Defunct Fourth Amendment, Part 2

Have you noticed where all the lamestream media attention is going on this NSA snooping story? The inevitable villain, Edward Snowden, the spook contractor with a conscience, has become half the story. Boehner called him a "traitor." Mitch McConnell is calling for his blood. The Justice Department is after him, and the majority of the country thinks he's a criminal. The other half is a large discussion about the merits of the policy. Is it really in our best interest as a nation to have the National Security Agency recording and keeping terabytes of metadata on every American using one of the major telephone companies to make calls? I submit that both of these issues are bogus. Completely. The real issue is secrecy. All the things that the security apparatus of this country is doing in the dark, out of sight and purview of the American people.

What's really the problem the NSA and the rest of the federal government has with Snowden? You don't think it's that these two NSA programs--the phone listening and PRISM--that are the issue, do you? As if the terrorists aren't aware of what the U.S. is doing to combat them? You think anybody with half a brain can't figure out that the U.S. is engaged in electronic snooping to some degree? You think Snowden let some kind of really gigantic cat out of the bag when he went public? Are you kidding me? No, brothers and sisters, the real sin is that Snowden told the whole population of America what was going on. He told the people who are being snooped on, who are paying for all of it, and who were not consulted about this program that wasn't even debated in their hearing. That's the problem. NSA got caught treating every American citizen as a potential enemy. If these programs are so good for the country, if they're protecting everybody, then why the hell are they secret? Why are they locked away under layers of classification.

So don't let all this smoke screen jabber about Snowden and all the other peripheral issues distract you. The issue is SECRECY and how it makes a mockery of Obama's promises of transparency. Things are more Orwellian under him than George W. Bush. The issue is the creeping massive power accruing to the police and security agencies of the government.

I heard today on NPR that George Orwell's 1984 is and has been the best selling book on Amazon since this spying on Americans story broke. Don't doubt it. 

This CNet story explains all about PRISM. Wikipedia already has a pretty expansive article on Snowden here.

Related articles

• Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America (commondreams.org)
• Protesters Worldwide Rally to Support Whistleblower Edward Snowden (commondreams.org)
• Our Defunct Fourth Amendment, Part 1 (whatpowderfingersaid.blogspot.com)

Encouraging News of a Sort

Results of some recent polls (source)

A Fox News poll : “Would you be willing to give up some of your personal freedom in order to reduce the threat of terrorism?”

45 percent said NO, which is good. But 43 percent said yeah, OK. Be glad. This is a great improvement on a month after the 9/11 attacks when 71 percent of Americans were willing to sacrifice their liberties for the promise--not the actuality--of safety from terrorists. This is also the first time since 1996 that more people are saying NO than are saying OK.
 
A separate Washington Post poll: Almost half (48%) of Americans are worried that the government has gone too far in investigating terrorism. 41% don't think it's gone far enough! Who in the hell are these people? Logically enough, 57 percent of people don't have a great deal of faith in the government's ability to halt terrorism. But 15 out of a hundred have a high degree of confidence. Again: who in the hell are these people?

Related articles

• Americans troubled more by governmental abuse than terrorism (rt.com)

Droning On

I read this morning that by 2020 there are going to be 30,000 civilian drones. (That's the kind that don't kill people, the non-military ones.) And the FAA thinks that over the next ten years drones will be a $90 billion+ industry and--get ready for it--100,000 new jobs! Well, we can stop all questions about this right now. All those jobs! All that money! What can be wrong with something like this?

Well, I'm here to tell you that you can kiss any rights you thought you had to privacy goodbye. Snooping technology is beyond anything you can possibly imagine right now, not to mention 10 years hence. And I have no confidence whatever that we're going to be smart enough not to deploy these damn things everywhere, putting them in the hands of police and local/state governments in the name of safety, efficiency, protection, security or some other nice-sounding goal.

Our Constitution's 4th Amendment says that we're supposed to have the right not to be snooped on by government and not to have them poking around in our property and privacy without strict limits. But people don't care about this anymore. Money, money, money. Jobs, jobs, jobs! That's all that matters. In fact, I'm beginning to think that if it's abstract (save of course good ole "freedom") it doesn't matter. That of course would include "privacy."

Related articles

• Uncertainties remain as FAA integrates drones into American skies (mcclatchydc.com)
• Industry looks to use drones for commercial purposes (mcclatchydc.com)
• Drones Are Inevitable, But... (bobcesca.thedailybanter.com)
• Drones: Coming to City Near You (article-3.com)

No Bad Dogs, Just Bad Sniffs

Several years ago there was this Englishwoman – I forget her name – who wrote a book, it was probably one of many, about dogs. It was called No Bad Dogs. She was really quite an amazing person: she would approach any dog even dogs with a reputation for being vicious, and these dogs would accept her like one of the family. None of them ever attacked her or was anything but nice to her. It was really quite an amazing thing to see. And as a dog lover, I've often had that phrase "no bad dogs" reverberate in my head whenever I'm around a dog who's skittish or nervous or even threatening. I often had this thought about dogs when I see the K-9 corps dogs, cop dogs, dogs who've been trained to either attack people on command or sniff out drugs, explosives, etc. Not that these jobs are necessary sometimes, although I do question attack dogs almost on principle, because somehow it seems unfair to the canines to put them to such uses. Because basically it goes against the nature of the dog, its basic nature, to do things harmful to human beings. Dogs are at their core devoted to people. Of all the animals on earth, their lives are the most closely integrated with ours.

Anyway, all this just leads up to a satisfying report on the Supreme Court's decision in Florida v. Jardines, an opinion was handed down recently. "In an opinion written by Justice Scalia, the Court affirmed the Florida Supreme Court. The Court held a dog sniff at the front door of the house where the police suspected drugs were being grown constitutes a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment." And it was therefore illegal without a warrant.  In essence, they found that the police would be trespassing in this case.

You got to get a picture here. The cops, or the DEA guys, with their dogs just come up on your porch– without a warrant – and let them have a sniff around. If the dogs alert, they bust in your door and collar you for those pot plants or your stash. (Or they say "whoops" because I can't find anything. either way, they bust into your house and search it without the authority to do so.) The Supreme Court said that's a no-no. You can read more about the Court's reasoning here. But it should be noted that it was a 5-4 decision, in the most unlikeliest of justices was the swing vote here. So the American people came within an ace of seeing their civil liberties erode even more.

But never fear: that will happen again soon enough.

Related articles

• Diabetics' best friends sniff-out low blood sugar (cbc.ca)
• Dog Training: The Power of Sniffing (smartdog.typepad.com)
• Every drug dog has his day - in court; even Supreme Court (mcclatchydc.com)

Good News

We're Watching You Because We Can

For anybody concerned with civil liberties in this country, this is terrific news. The Supreme Court has blocked enforcement of an Illinois law that prohibited people from recording police officers actions, agreeing with the ACLU that the law "restricts far more speech than necessary to protect legitimate privacy interests.”

CopWatch, in New York and elsewhere, explains why it matters. (This video has some horrific footage of a NYC guy who was just minding his business in a subway station getting really manhandled by a cop. And other stuff. The most depressing thing in the video: the information that even documented police brutality and malfeasance rarely has consequences for the guilty cop. Next step is to see that these criminal, sick cops get what's coming to them.

Baring the TSA

Score one for emphatic free speech. A judge in Oregon has upheld the right of an (obviously) outraged patron of airline services at the Portland International Airport to remove all of his clothes before going through the TSA checkpoint. This has been done before, but I don't remember a court ruling on the matter till now. "Judge David Rees said nudity laws don’t apply when it comes to protest. 'It is the speech itself that the state is seeking to punish, and that it cannot do.'"

The TSA, damn them, cannot be happy about this. Just think if they had to deal with naked people all the time . . . I do dearly wish that some mass way of protesting the indignity of TSA procedures getting on airplanes could be devised. But, then again, the vast majority of the people in this country are such sheep, it would never work even on the unlikely chance it did happen. In this particular incident, the TSA clowns harassed a passenger, John Brennan, at a scanner beyond the bounds of his patience. He had refused the scanner and the pat-down resulted in some nitrate residue on his clothes. So he stripped off all his clothes to go through the checkpoint. At which point he was arrested, naturally. What else would you expect? (Source)

Related articles

• Decent Exposure: Guy Who Stripped Naked to Protest TSA Is Found Not Guilty (loweringthebar.net)

We Deluded Americans

What are some of the most interesting or shocking things Americans believe about themselves or their country? An intriguing question, don't you think? It was to me too when I ran across it at this site. How would you answer it? Well, I discovered that I would respond pretty much the way thoughtful people who answered the question did. I've just pasted responses from various people in verbatim and commented where I felt moved to. As you will see, the quality of the observations vary, but they all have this in common. They are true.

1. American exceptionalism: that some magical combination of Anglo-Saxon liberties, Protestantism and capitalism made the US new, unique, better, and outside the normal rules. [Number one. As well it should be.]
2. That now or ever, there was a mass public in foreign countries praying for United States Armed Forces intervention.
3. That the quality of life in the US is better than in Europe.
4. That Detroit cars are as good or better than Japanese cars like Toyota and Honda.
5. That women from the US need to worry more about their safety in Europe.
6. A large fraction of Americans believe that humans have only been on Earth for about 6000 years, and that evolutionary biology is false.
7. That a public healthcare program would be socialistic [well, actually it is socialistic, but that doesn't make it bad.]
8. That President Obama is a socialist, a Muslim, and was foreign-born.
9. That all Americans have an equal chance to become wealthy. [how people actually believe this has been a mystery to me for decades]
10. That the UN is a dangerous concept.
11. That American society is truly "classless."
12. That there is no need for labor unions.
13. That corporations are people [according to the law. A bizarre 19th century construction that has wreaked untold havoc on our political system]
14. That there is nothing of significance that the US could possibly ever  learn from other countries
15. That no matter where Americans are in the world, they will never be more than a few feet away from someone who speaks English [Something I observed over and over when I lived abroad.]
16. That the corporate-owned mainstream media is liberal. [Another completely counter-intuitive belief]
17. That our national government is less corrupt than most other nations. [Everything floats of a sea of falsehood in government, not to mention business, and just about any other field of endeavor you care to mention.]
18. That everyone carrying arms somehow makes our society safer and deters crime. 
19. That the military is the most honorable, truthful, and virtuous constituency in American life, and the corollary that U.S. military intervention anywhere is be definition necessary, well-intentioned, and desired by the people of other countries. 

This last one is mine. There were were many more, and you can probably come up with a list of your own. The bottom line is as a people we probably rank at the top in self-delusion.

Related articles

• Obama, a European Socialist? I Wish! (tnr.com)

Allah Akbar

A few days ago, a federal appeals court--not always the voice of sanity, but in this case definitely so--to the surprise of no one who knows anything about the US Constitution, declared unconstitutional Oklahoma's recently approved proposed constitutional amendment that barred judges in the state from considering Sharia or international law in formulating their decisions. (See here.) The Bubba electorate of this state thought that was such a fine idea they voted for it en masse, by a 7 to 3 majority, when it was offered as a state question in 2010. A couple of Republican dingbat representatives, naturally, had proposed the measure. It was nothing but hysteria-driven nonsense, but that the electorate of this state was heartily in favor of blatant discrimination against a religion other than Christianity just shows to what pass we've come in this country. Since 9/11, it seems the whole country has taken leave of its senses.

The federal judges pointed this very fact out: the proposed amendment openly discriminates by name against a specific religion, it said. Moreover, the supporters of the law could not point to any specific problem the proposed amendment addressed. "Indeed," they wrote, "they admitted at the preliminary injunction hearing that they did not know of even a single instance where an Oklahoma court had applied Sharia law or used the legal precepts of other nations or cultures, let alone that such applications or uses had resulted in concrete problems in Oklahoma."

Related articles

• Court dismisses fears of 'creeping Sharia law' that led to Oklahoma ban (+video) (csmonitor.com)
• Court Rules That Oklahoma's Anti-Islamic Amendment Is Probably Unconstitutional (patheos.com)

Musings

I recently ran across a Roman proverb that goes thus: "The world wants to be deceived." It got me to thinking just how true it is. Just think about the masses of people in this country who believe that a "recovery" of the economy will restore things to the way they used to be. Or the similar masses who equate repression with security and believe that nations fight wars for peace.

Let's Play Pepper

Pepper is a game played by baseball players in close proximity to one another. It's also a game, a brutal game played by the police against students at the University of California campus at Davis recently. They were in close proximity too. Close enough for cops to pepper spray people as nonchalantly as if they were watering a garden. If you have not seen videos of these public servants at work on students sitting cross-legged in the quad, you need to see it right now. It's chilling and frightening. Pepper spray in the face of perfectly peaceful protesters! Elsewhere on the same campus students were being jabbed with overhand baton thrusts, female professors were being pulled to the ground by their hair and arrested. Go to YouTube. You will find video of all these outrages. Notice the Nazi storm trooper gear. It's de riguer now for the cops everywhere.

I have been lamenting for several years now what we as a country are becoming. The aftermath of 9-11 has loosed the hounds of hell upon us. It makes me both fearful and furious to see what has become of our once precious civil liberties. Now it's dangerous to confront authorities, period. But we all have allowed this to happen. By our fears, by our paranoia, by our ignorance, and by our complacency. The buzzards have come home and are roosting, brothers and sisters. And their breath stinks of rot.

Here's Matt Taibbi on this incident:

What happened at UC Davis was the inevitable result of our failure to make sure our government stayed in the business of defending our principles. When we stopped insisting on that relationship with our government, they became something separate from us.
And we are stuck now with this fundamental conflict, whereby most of us are insisting that the law should apply equally to everyone, while the people running this country for years now have been operating according to the completely opposite principle that different people have different rights, and who deserves what protections is a completely subjective matter, determined by those in power, on a case-by-case basis.

 He quotes Glenn Greenwald on the reason things have come to this unfortunate pass:

Despite all the rights of free speech and assembly flamboyantly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the reality is that punishing the exercise of those rights with police force and state violence has been the reflexive response in America for quite some time. As Franke-Ruta put it, “America has a very long history of protests that meet with excessive or violent response, most vividly recorded in the second half of the 20th century.” Digby yesterday recounted a similar though even worse incident aimed at environmental protesters.

 ======

Although excessive police force has long been a reflexive response to American political protests, two developments in the post-9/11 world have exacerbated this. The first is that the U.S. Government — in the name of Terrorism — has aggressively para-militarized the nation’s domestic police forces by lavishing them with countless military-style weapons and other war-like technologies, training them in war-zone military tactics, and generally imposing a war mentality on them. Arming domestic police forces with para-military weaponry will ensure their systematic use even in the absence of a Terrorist attack on U.S. soil; they will simply find other, increasingly permissive uses for those weapons. Responding to peaceful protests and other expressions of growing citizenry unrest with brute force is a direct by-product of what we’ve allowed to be done to America’s domestic police forces in the name of the War on Terror (and, before that, in the name of the War on Drugs).

The second exacerbating development is more subtle but more important: the authoritarian mentality that has been nourished in the name of Terrorism. It’s a very small step to go from supporting the abuse of defenseless detainees (including one’s fellow citizens) to supporting the pepper-spraying and tasering of non-violent political protesters. It’s an even smaller step to go from supporting the power of the President to imprison or kill anyone he wants (including one’s fellow citizens and even their teenaged children) with no transparency, checks or due process to supporting the power of the police and the authorities who command them to punish with force anyone who commits the “crime” of non-compliance. At the root of all of those views is the classic authoritarian mindset: reflexive support for authority, contempt for those who challenge them, and a blind faith in their unilateral, unchecked decisions regarding who is Bad and deserves state-issued punishment.

Both these guys are far more elegant and at this moment more in control of themselves than I am when I contemplate what we've allowed our country to become.

Related articles

• Reality Check: How Painful Is Pepper Spray? (healthland.time.com)
• The Militarization of the Police (wcward57.wordpress.com)
• Violent Police Crack-Downs on the Occupy Movement Represent a Real Threat (alternet.org)

We ARE in Kansas, Todo

Got contraband, old lady?

So I'm about 12 miles west of Salina, Kansas, in a rented car with my almost 91-year-old Mom and my 64-year-old wife. I'm driving the former to Baton Rouge where she's moving in with my brother. It's been a long trip from Denver already. This Kansas State copper pulls alongside of me, gives me the eyeball, drops back and hits the lights. I pull over and the dude walks over to my mom's side of the car and tells me after I fumble with getting the window lowered--didn't know the car and fumbled with controls the whole day. Anyway, he tells me he's stopped me for--are you ready for this??--not using my turn indicator to signal lane changes.

He asks me for my license. Asks me if the car's rented (How did he know? We figured out later it has to be some code in the license plate number.) Checks out the rental papers. Wants to know where I'm going and why. Says he's going to run my license and if it checks out, he'll write me a warning ticket. While he's back there in his cruiser, another cop drives up beside him and sits there for awhile. (I wondered if I'd been reported as a possibly dangerous character with two lady cohorts, one near-ancient, the other obviously beyond poster-child status for the over-50 set. Not to mention fairly greying me, age 68.) The other cop leaves after a while, and the first guy comes back and gives me the warning ticket, and oh, by the way, do you mind if I look in your truck because there has been a lot of "contraband" crossing the country. (Why, hell yes, I frigging mind, think I, but I'm not going screw around with this yahoo; that's a no win game.) So we go to the trunk, and he finds it crammed with luggage (naturally!). I was sweating it like hell because I had two cases of wine in the trunk--is it not illegal to carry alcohol across state lines?-- and I would have been royally pissed if he said anything about that. But the wine was at the bottom of this spacious trunk, under all kinds of other other stuff, so he either doesn't see it, or less likely, decided not to say anything. But he does want to know what's inside a big roasting pan Susan is bringing home. I have to show him it's empty. He wants to know how my mom's stuff is getting to Baton Rouge. When were we going to get there, and some more questions I can't remember. Can you believe this?

Fact of the matter is, I was just being rousted. With my driving cap and pony tail and patterned tee shirt, I fit his and every other cop's profile of suspicious, and probably dangerous, character. Thus the hassle. Don't start me on the surpassing idiocy of it all, or on the fact that this is a clear example of police profiling--no way in hell I get stopped if I've got a high-and-tight Marine haircut--that one has no choice in such a situation but to allow this violation of his 4th Amendment rights (what would have happened if I said no to the trunk search?), that this situation happens all the time to the disadvantaged in our society. Don't start me.

Need I tell you that incidents like this don't particularly beef up my trust in cops?

It's a Great Embarrassment

I don't know if other bloggers do this, but I suspect they do. I often back-date entries, i.e., writing Wednesday's blog entry on Thursday, Sunday's on Monday, etc. That's what I'm doing now. Typing at 1:35 a.m. on Sunday morning and posting to yesterday. (Of course, I would not have this problem at all if I weren't so anal about trying to maintain one daily blogging entry. I'm not like my friend Montag over at "A Father Talks to His Daughter about God." I mean that guy is prolific, sometimes half a dozen entries a day, always at least two or three. And sometimes he so erudite and deep I cannot really follow what he means. But it's all good. I like the way his mind works.) Anyway as I was saying, I read in the Writer's Almanac that tomorrow is the 54th anniversary of the day that President Eisenhower sent over a thousand federal troops to Central High School in  Little Rock, Arkansas, to ensure the safety of nine black students who were the first to integrate the school. Like all the southern states, Arkansas had dragged its feet about implementing the order of the Supreme Court in 1954's epochal Brown decision. And in the case of Arkansas, the governor had used the state national guard to essentially prevent the blacks from attending the school. You can read all about the story here.

The point of the story is to tell how embarrassed I am now at what I was then, just another southern white guy who uncritically accepted the racism of everything and everybody around me, including my family and relatives, friends, the whole white culture in the South, as normal. It's a great embarrassment to me that won't, I fear, ever be subsiding. I was part of that whole culture of hate. My conversion, my sanity, came too late to eradicate what had gone before.

This is what it took in 1957 to get into your school . . . if you were a  black person.

Hate--an iconic image of the time.

Related articles

• Little Rock Arkansas Is Still Backwards, Apparently (ken_ashford.typepad.com)
• Federal court reviewing Arkansas desegregation funding case (huffingtonpost.com)

10 Years Gone

Everybody in America--well, not literally everybody, but millions--are getting wrapped up in memorials today for the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon that occurred on this date 10 years ago. Thousands of innocent people died. Some of them were Muslims who were not the terrorists in the planes. The victims were all colors, all ages, all religions. The pain of their passing still grips the hearts of us all. Prayers for all of their lives.

But that horrible event ten years ago also marked the beginning of this country's descent into a strange kind of madness. In the ensuing ten years, we Americans have willingly allowed a total transformation of our country. What used to be a place of liberty has become a place of fear, a place . Americans have given over fistfuls of their precious civil liberties; we have allowed creation of a massive, secret bureaucracy that not only gathers information on all of us, all the time, but operates out of oversight by anyone. (The Frontline program "Top Secret America" reports on this development. If it doesn't scare the crap out of you, it's simply a measure of how far you've bought into the government's rationale for depriving us of our liberties and establishing a fearsome, gargantuan police power that didn't exist ten years ago.) All in the name of protecting us from terrorists, which is ultimately a futile task. What powers are we going to hand over to the government when we're subjected to another attack? And guess what, brothers and sisters? This octopus isn't going to go away. It will never go away. Liberties once surrendered are gone forever.

We have willingly allowed our government to engage in torturing people, we have allowed American citizens to be held without charge for days, weeks, on end. We have, in the name fighting terrorism, launched two wars that still continue. They have ignited a conflagration in the Mid-East, they have snuffed out the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghani and Iraqi lives, wreaked untold destruction of property, cost us a trillion dollars, and thousands of American lives dead and wrecked from wounds of body and spirit.

This anniversary will be commemorated all over the country with flags, mournful music and speeches, black crepe . . . but there won't be any mourning for the country that we once were that has been buried under a mountain of fear. We may have killed bin Laden, but he is triumphant from his grave. We are in the grip of terror, we've lost our senses because of it. This is exactly what he wanted to accomplish. And he's succeeded beyond his wildest imagination.

No Doubt in My Mind

I am always wary of the institutions of power in the U.S. It matters not whether these institutions are corporate, military, or governmental, including and maybe especially, law enforcement, agencies. Power has but one aim, self-perpetuation, and part of that impulse is its imperative to grow. There never was an agency of power that was satisfied with its allotment of power. It always wants more. This is why the massive enlargement of domestic surveillance and monitoring capabilities bestowed upon agencies such as the FBI and CIA in the wake of the attacks of 9/11 is so dangerous. These were not benign agencies to begin with, and especially in the case of the CIA, which was an out-of-control agency from its inception. The CIA has always been involved in sinister activities.

Do you think the adjective "sinister" a bit to strong? Well, consider this narrative which appeared today in the Writer's Almanac. It will give you the creeps.

On this day in 1977, the Central Intelligence Agency released 20,000 documents revealing that they had engaged in mind-control experiments. They released the documents after a request under the Freedom of Information Act, and the revelation triggered a Congressional hearing in August. The program was named MK-ULTRA; it began in the early 1950s and ran at least through the late 1960s. 

MK-ULTRA had its roots in Operation Paperclip, a program to recruit former Nazi scientists who had conducted studies on torture and brainwashing. Operation Paperclip spawned several secret government programs involving mind control, behavior modification, hypnosis, and the like. It's not clear whether the CIA's real aim was to produce a "Manchurian candidate" who could be brainwashed to carry out various tasks, or whether these off-the-wall "operations" were a smoke screen to keep attention away from their real mission: to come up with better torture and interrogation techniques. The program received 6 percent of the CIA's operating budget without oversight or accounting. 

Since then-director Richard Helms ordered all the MK-ULTRA documents destroyed in 1973, the investigation had to rely on sworn testimony and the 20,000 remaining documents, which had escaped destruction because they were stored in a different warehouse. The limited information that was available at the Congressional hearings revealed that "chemical, biological, and radiological" methods to achieve mind control were studied. This involved, among other things, administering drugs like LSD, heroin, amphetamines, and mescaline to people without their knowledge or consent; they also used, according to the Congressional report, "aspects of magicians' art." In one project, called Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up brothels in San Francisco, gave patrons LSD, and filmed their responses through hidden cameras. They figured that even if subjects got suspicious, they would be too embarrassed to report anything to the authorities. In other experiments conducted at McGill University in Montreal, subjects — who had come to the institute thinking they were to be treated for anxiety or post-partum depression — were put into drug-induced comas and exposed to tape loops for weeks at a time; others were given electroconvulsive therapy at 30 to 40 times the normal dose. Many subjects suffered lasting damage. 

The CIA had the assistance of nearly a hundred colleges and universities, pharmaceutical companies, research foundations, hospitals, and prisons in conducting the MK-ULTRA project. Some evidence suggests that Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was one of the subjects; Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, volunteered for the LSD tests at a Veterans Administration hospital when he was a student at Stanford. The official CIA position is that they no longer conduct mind-control experiments, although at least one veteran of the agency has said that the tests continue.

The whole story is appalling. But certain aspect of it are positively chilling. First, there's the fact that the agency effectively has no oversight. The citizenry of this country, which pays who knows how many billions every year for the operations of this agency don't know what it's doing. The fact that it can destroy records of its activities at whim should give us pause immediately. Second, the cooperation of "nearly a hundred colleges and universities, pharmaceutical companies, research foundations, hospitals, and prisons" in conducting the experiments is disheartening, to say the least. It's appalling actually.

Proving once again that there is no limit to what people will do under the impetus of fear. From the late 1940s to the fall of the Soviet Union, our government kept us terrified of the godless communist conspiracy that threatened our existence. Now of course, it's the Muslim terrorist conspiracy. Note that in either case, opposing the conspiracy demands extraordinary governmental powers. And the threat is constant, never-ending. (Who knew the Soviet Union was going to collapse? The CIA, NSA, and all the other intelligence apparatus of the U.S. didn't have a clue.)

Keeping us afraid is the primary tool that the government employs in also keeping us docile. Why else would we put up with the TSA and cameras everywhere and the powers we have handed over to the government under the so-called Patriot Act? There's no doubt in my mind that these same agencies are carrying out any number of illegal activities even as I type this. We will never know.

(The Wikipedia article on MKULTRA has many more details about this horrible program.)

Related articles

• Calls for arrest of former CIA legal chief over drone attacks in Pakistan (guardian.co.uk)
• Is the CIA Helping Run a Secret Prison in Somalia? (globalspin.blogs.time.com)
• Project Paperclip ??? (2012patriot.wordpress.com)
• "Bugsplat" in Waziristan (dissenter.firedoglake.com)

Actually, Some Good News

I got this notice in email today from Change.org. It caught my eye because of mention of a MLB team:

And the Minnesota Twins make 5. To cap it all off, CBS reported on Tuesday that the Minnesota Twins will be the 5th pro baseball team to make an "It Gets Better" video to help prevent suicide by teens who are bullied for being gay. Every team that's made a video (Twins, Red Sox, Cubs, Mariners, and Giants) has done so after a local Change.org member started a petition asking them to. As these victories add up, the cumulative effect is eroding the culture of homophobia in men's pro sports.

Well, I didn't know that. In fact, I barely knew there was a campaign "It Gets Better" going on, much less that the likes of the Chicago Cubs were involved in it.

No Privacy

Back in the late '70s or early '80s, the Rolling Stones had a tune called "Fingerprint File"--at least I think it was in this tune--where Jagger moaned about "all secrecy, no privacy." It's a lament that fits our times even better than then, and it fit well enough 30 years ago, that's for sure.

Just thinking about the implications of my discovery that Google, a company whose products I use continually and habitually, is tailoring results of my searches to my own individual profile it has built up based on no less than 57 variables about me that it knows and applies. I've become a Heinz 57 Variety without even knowing it. In fact, I think that all of us are transparent to hundreds of commercial enterprises. We're being sliced and diced by data mining software daily. All this data in the service of selling us more merchandise we don't need. And this is hardly the whole of it. I think this Google thing is just the tip of the iceberg. How much does the U.S. government know about me? What lists am I on?

The very notion of privacy has become almost quaint. And you know what I think? I think that even if the American people had any idea about the tons of information numerous corporate entities as well as the U.S. government has on them, and believe me, they don't--well, there would be nothing they could do about it. Let's face it: the idea of democracy itself has become quaint. This thing we go through the motions of in the U.S. Well, it's a charade. The people have control over nothing. We belong to the corporations, the government belongs to the corporations, and both know everything about us. We live in George Orwell's world, and we may as well get used to it.

Related articles

• Datamining and privacy: don't shoot the pianist (zyxo.wordpress.com)

Google Is . . .

Here's a little quiz for you. This is a multiple choice question. It goes like this. Complete this sentence:

Google is:

a. Cool

b. Ubiquitous

c. Scary

d. Indispensable

e. All of the above.

You want to say e., don't you? Sorry. The correct answer is c. Scary. Okay. It was a trick question, just by way of introducing you to some information you may not know. I consider myself a pretty well informed person, and I did not know this.

The information I'm about to share can be found here, in a pretty stout article in The New York Review of Books--thanks to my friend Cecil for turning me on to it--about three new books out about computing. More specifically, the effects and future of the revolution computers have wrought in the world. The names of the books aren't important. You can read about them in the piece. But what I want to tell you about is some stuff I discovered that, I have to confess, I find bothersome indeed.

I pretty much knew that somewhere at some mega database in the sky that every place I've ever been to on the Internet is recorded and who knows how it's being sliced and diced. This thought is disturbing enough, but there's a lot worse. We all think that Google is pretty much working on a much improved and sophisticated version of the original algorithm. Which, as you recall, figured out what to throw up there first when one searched by figuring out what sites people most visited for that information. So-called "page ranking". There's probably a better way to explain it, but I trust you know what I mean.

So if you and I search for, say, the word "art," we're going to get the same thing back, right? Well, of course, you say. In fact, you could not be more wrong. Without our knowing it Google has been amassing a whole slew of data about us as individuals. And on every search we do, it applies this data to construct a search result just for us. There are 57 separate variables considered. Read this bit from the article:

The search process, in other words, has become “personalized,” which is to say that instead of being universal, it is idiosyncratic and oddly peremptory. “Most of us assume that when we google a term, we all see the same results—the ones that the company’s famous Page Rank algorithm suggests are the most authoritative based on other page’s links,” Pariser observes. With personalized search, “now you get the result that Google’s algorithm suggests is best for you in particular—and someone else may see something entirely different. In other words, there is no standard Google anymore.” It’s as if we looked up the same topic in an encyclopedia and each found different entries—but of course we would not assume they were different since we’d be consulting what we thought to be a standard reference.

If this ain't scary, I don't know what is. More on this tomorrow.

Related articles

• Google's collateral damage after algorithm changes, illustrated (thenextweb.com)
• Reverse Google Pagerank Algorithm (hobo-web.co.uk)
• Bursting the Bubble: Are We Isolated in a World Wide Web of One? (time.com)

A Decent Idea Out of Texas

Stop the presses! This is an unusual story, indeed. I'm about to say something good about Texas that doesn't involve my Texas Rangers baseball team. To wit: in a rare action that actually meets my approval the Texas House of Representatives recently passed a bill banning searches by TSA agents without probable cause. (Read about it here. See also here.) The law says that searches by these ubiquitous airport agents unless they have good reason to suspect that a person has committed a crime are illegal in Texas. The Boing Boing writeup has a wonderful description of the TSA's reaction: "The TSA has responded with headless chicken hysteria, making up gradeschool misinterpretations of the nature of US federalism." The TSA claims that the supremacy clause of the US Constitution (Art. IV, Clause 2*) "prevents the states from regulating the federal government." A bald-faced lie, according to knowledgeable commentators. Good writeup why is here.

So we have the long arm of federal intrusion into our lives claiming basically that there is nothing to restrain their intrusive power. I'm not interested in the constitutional niceties here. The huge public outcry against the latest outrages on Americans perpetrated by the TSA had no effect whatever. The intrusive pat-downs and scans have simply continued. So it's time for a state legislature, or many of them, to step in and protect the basic constitutional liberties of the citizenry.

Too bad it had to be Texas, though, a fruitcake state if ever one there was.

*This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.

Related articles

• TSA Responds To Texas: Resistance is Futile (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
• In Ruthless Act of Economic Warfare, Tsa Threatens to Make Texas a No-fly Zone (worldtruthtoday.com)
• An Example of the TSA's Sexual Assaults and Texas Pat Down Ban Back? (thepursuitofliberty.wordpress.com)