Skilluminati Research

Posted Dec 31, 2007 4 comments

4 comments

Filed in: News

Posted Dec 29, 2007 2 comments

Quite a statement, I know. This is not an anti-Bush diatribe. I do not hate America, and I am not even remotely liberal. I am simply referring to this fact: the United States of America has the higest percentage of its citizens in prison of any nation in the world. The precise statistic is 737 per 100,000 US citizens behind bars, a rate that is higher than Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, Libya or even Canada. No other nation in the world locks up its own citizens at the level the United States do.

From Daniel Lazare's outstanding recent article in The Nation:

With 2.2 million people behind bars and another 5 million on probation or parole, it has approximately 3.2 percent of the adult population under some form of criminal-justice supervision, which is to say one person in thirty-two. For African-Americans, the numbers are even more astonishing. By the mid-1990s, 7 percent of black males were behind bars, while the rate of imprisonment for black males between the ages of 25 and 29 now stands at one in eight.

That's pretty remarkable when you compare those numbers to the fact that, according to US Census Data, white voters have a 1 in 63 chance of casting a ballot that will never be counted. For black voters, the odds are 1 in 7. Most Americans live their lives under two huge myths: first, that nuclear holocaust is no longer a threat simply because the cold war is over, and second, that after the courageous efforts of Martin Luther King Jr, America has changed its racist ways. Martin Luther King Jr was shot in the head and not a damn thing has changed since.

The worst part, of course, is that violent crime has actually been dropping for years here in the US. Quoting Lazare once more:

In 2002 just 19 percent of the felony sentences handed down at the state level were for violent offenses, and of those only about 5 percent were for murder. Nonviolent drug offenses involving trafficking or possession (the modern equivalent of rum-running or getting caught with a bottle of bathtub gin) accounted for 31 percent of the total, while purely economic crimes such as burglary and fraud made up an additional 32 percent.

Actually, wait, the worst part is that nobody is doing anything to change this and it keeps getting worse. We have only just begun to see the real consqueneces of this. Sexual violence in prison is rising dramatically over the past decade. Prisoners are being used as sweatshop labor. Most of the "single parent households" in the US are due fathers and mothers being in jail.

Further Brainfood

First of all, if you haven't already clicked the link, please read Daniel Lazare's article.

I also strongly recommend The Atlantic's groundbreaking article "The Prison Industrial Complex"

Begin your own research with the Department of Justice's publicly available prison statistics.

Prison Moratorium Project -- this is a great site and a great organization.

If you're interesting in getting your Brainfood in the form of flashing light, check out the excellent documentary The War on Drugs: Prison Industrial Complex. It's disturbing as f***, but beautifully done.

2 comments

Filed in: Social Control

Posted Dec 26, 2007 4 comments

Karl Popper Explains History

Of all political ideals, that of making the people happy is perhaps the most dangerous one. It leads invariably to the attempt to impose our scale of ‘higher’ values upon others, in order to make them realize what seems to us of greatest importance for their happiness; in order, as it were, to save their souls. It leads to Utopianism and Romanticism. We all feel certain that everybody would be happy in the beautiful, the perfect community of our dreams. But, as I have said before, the attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell.

Nelson Mandela Could Possibly Not Repeat This Enough

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Jeff Wells Talks Conspiracy Cybernetics

I've been guilty of it, too. I've been suckered by channeled "insiders" who predicted the other shoe was about to drop. I don't want to be again. Conspiracy research is not a prophetic art. We can see clearly enough to make out the broad strokes on the big canvas, and we can tell it's not going to be a pretty picture, but we're kidding ourselves - actually, entertaining ourselves - if we believe we know how it's all going to turn out. Or that some Unnamed Other is going to come along and tell us, rather than trick us.

It's a perverse fact of the conspiracy industry that it incubates credulity within those who claim to "Question Everything." But that's the nature of industry, to nurture its market, and the nature of conspiracy, to place every honest and dangerous inquiry into disrepute.

Jeff Wells is the author of the truly outstanding site Rigorous Intuition.

An Important Clarification.

In a recent discussion on the RI board about the control and subversion of social movements, I posted the following statement:

Doesn't this whole thesis extend from the notion that humans are controllable and our behavior is deterministic?

Personally, I tend to suspect that the elite can "control" and "subvert" whatever movements they want, but their power is limited to a monopoly on violence. Movements are still composed of individual humans, fundamentally irrational, full of their own dreams, fears and lunacy.

I got a reply I found extremely insightful and valuable and I want to pass it along here. It's done wonders to clarify my own thinking, and perhaps you'll dig it, too:

That's an important insight, because in my opinion it is 100% wrong.

I'd say the thesis extends from the notion that humans are manageable and our behavior is stochastic.

They never know which particular rat is going to do whatever. But they have a pretty good idea as to what proportion of the total rat population will do whatever or something very close.

4 comments

Filed in: Emergent Order

Posted Nov 26, 2007 7 comments

Found a very frank and fascinating article this morning: "How to Profit from a Police State." It's a blunt market analysis, and provides a continuation of Skilluminati's recent theme about "paranoia" being a self-abusive form of "pragmatism." If possible, cancel out the Fear and stay focused on the Facts.

The article is by Jon Markman, a regular columnist for MSN Money. (I also recommend his equally honest and educational article on who benefits from recessions and bad credit.) Markman offers a very concise summation of the Police State landscape:

In the midst of a six-year war on terrorism, widening income inequality and a growing fear of immigrants, America has become something of a police state, according to a new study, with as much as 25% of our entire labor force focused on protection rather than production.

The evidence is all around us, from the 47% increase in U.S. workers classified as security guards since 2002 to the sharp advance in the number of men and women under arms in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Similar calculations of guard labor for 18 other countries suggest that the United States is pretty much the leader in this category, slightly trailing Greece, a former military dictatorship, but well ahead of Western democracies such as Switzerland, which has just a 10th of its labor force devoted to guard labor.

It hardly needs to be stated that this is a recipe for disaster, right? Any profit model based on creating jobs by locking human beings up will confront an inescapable cieling envisioned decades ago by William S. Burroughs, when everyone in your labor pool is either locked up or guarding the prison. You will eventually run out of either criminals, or employees, most likely both at once. This is nothing less than a social version of cancer.

Markman plainly states facts that few "political science" experts will even admit to being aware of:

The increasing focus on protecting the existing economic pie rather than making more pie has important implications going forward, especially as we head into a year in which something like $1 trillion in adjustable-rate-mortgage adjustments will hit low-income and middle-class homeowners like a pie in the face.

You don't need a Ph.D. in behavioral science to realize that a material number of household heads, faced with the loss of their homes and cars to foreclosure and repo men, will turn to theft, drugs and violence amid a sense of frustration with their deteriorating status, just as they have in past periods of economic dislocation.

Indeed, a Ph.D. is probably the biggest handicap you could have, in this day and age. Markman's social cybernetics are remarkably similar to the famous "conspiracy" document, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. These sorts of calculations are ugly, determinist, but inescapably correct. His logic is evil, without question, but it's instructional to see how a money man looks at the Death of America:

Key names in the industry that we need to focus on are prison titan Corrections Corp. of America, which sports a $3.3 billion stock-market capitalization; Geo Group, which has a $1.1 billion market cap; Cornel, which has a $340 million cap; and Brink's at $3 billion. You could probably throw in the major drug companies that make antidepressants Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft, too, but we don't really need to go there. Let's look at the three in detail.

Of the bunch, Geo looks in many ways the most attractive. The second-largest operator of private correctional facilities in the United States and provider of rehab, educational and mental-health services to boot, Geo operates numerous maximum- and minimum-security prisons domestically and in Scotland, South Africa and Canada.

What a great line, eh? "...but we don't really need to go there." Can't be laying things out too plainly, after all. People might start looking at it as One Big Prison System, and that might just jolt them enough to start making changes.

Here's hoping we do.

7 comments

Filed in: Social Control

Posted Nov 24, 2007 7 comments

From the "Don't Ever Call Me Paranoid Again" files:

The Washington Post reported something remarkable: "Cellphone Tracking Powers on Request," an article that plainly states that law enforcement and intelligence agencies routinely track US citizens through their cell phone's GPS capability. Please remember that I'm not being alarmist. I personally accepted the fact I live in a total surveillance police state awhile back. Rather than view that as a prison, I've decided to treat it like a stage. This is not a crisis, this is not a nightmare, this is just the world that you and I happen to live in.

With that said: the United States government military-intelligence complex has data on the daily routines of all US cell phone users. As you're no doubt aware, any and all cellular phones are also GPS tracking devices. They happen to be somewhere between convenient and nescessary, so many of us are carrying around these tracking devices voluntarily.

The issue is taking on greater relevance as wireless carriers are racing to offer sleek services that allow cellphone users to know with the touch of a button where their friends or families are. The companies are hoping to recoup investments they have made to meet a federal mandate to provide enhanced 911 (E911) location tracking. Sprint Nextel, for instance, boasts that its "loopt" service even sends an alert when a friend is near, "putting an end to missed connections in the mall, at the movies or around town."

With Verizon's Chaperone service, parents can set up a "geofence" around, say, a few city blocks and receive an automatic text message if their child, holding the cellphone, travels outside that area.

"Most people don't realize it, but they're carrying a tracking device in their pocket," said Kevin Bankston of the privacy advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Cellphones can reveal very precise information about your location, and yet legal protections are very much up in the air."

Further:

"Law enforcement routinely now requests carriers to continuously 'ping' wireless devices of suspects to locate them when a call is not being made . . . so law enforcement can triangulate the precise location of a device and [seek] the location of all associates communicating with a target," wrote Christopher Guttman-McCabe, vice president of regulatory affairs for CTIA -- the Wireless Association, in a July comment to the Federal Communications Commission. He said the "lack of a consistent legal standard for tracking a user's location has made it difficult for carriers to comply" with law enforcement agencies' demands.

Don't Fall For The Shell Game

I'm going to state something with no evidence, because it's transparently true and the evidence will be emerging this year: all of the debates about phone companies sharing this information is a charade. The NSA has total access to any and all servers anywhere in the world, around the clock. The NSA has total access to all of this information and seldom, if ever, ask for "permission" to go in and invisibly take it. They do that all day every day, and that's why the NSA headquarters in Maryland consumes more electricity than most US cities do.

Further Reading for Curious Primates

I frequently recommend Cryptogon and sure enough, that's the single best resource on this issue.

AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance. You know, just like IBM did for Germany. Thanks, guys.

SEAS: Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation. In case you missed it, DARPA is running real-time, full-planet Earth wargame simulations using the flood of data they're harvesting from...well, from you and me.

Interview with NSA Whistleblower Russell Tice. An essential excerpt:

[Tice] said he plans to tell the committee staffers the NSA conducted illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of U.S. citizens while he was there with the knowledge of Hayden. “I think the people I talk to next week are going to be shocked when I tell them what I have to tell them. It’s pretty hard to believe,” Tice said. “I hope that they’ll clean up the abuses and have some oversight into these programs, which doesn’t exist right now.”

Tice said his information is different from the Terrorist Surveillance Program that Bush acknowledged in December and from news accounts this week that the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of millions of Americans. “It’s an angle that you haven’t heard about yet,” he said. He would not discuss with a reporter the details of his allegations, saying doing so would compromise classified information and put him at risk of going to jail. He said he “will not confirm or deny” if his allegations involve the illegal use of space systems and satellites.

7 comments

Filed in: Social Control