Skilluminati Research

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.

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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.

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Filed in: Social Control

Posted Nov 14, 2007 9 comments

Researchers have found that low self-esteem and materialism are not just a correlation, but also a causal relationship where low self esteem increases materialism, and materialism can also create low self-esteem. The also found that as self esteem increases, materialism decreases. The study primarily focused on how this relationship affects children and adolescents. Lan Nguyen Chaplin (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and Deborah Roedder John (University of Minnesota) found that even a simple gesture to raise self-esteem dramatically decreased materialism, which provides a way to cope with insecurity.

"By the time children reach early adolescence, and experience a decline in self-esteem, the stage is set for the use of material possessions as a coping strategy for feelings of low self-worth," they write in the study, which will appear in the Journal of Consumer Research.

The article goes on to call this a "paradox" -- stating that "consumerism is good for the economy but bad for the individual." At the risk of sounding rude or something, that's motherfucking retarded. I would only refer you to the good people at the Mises Institute, if you're interested in learning actual scientific Economics. Most of what passes for Economics is merely a justification for existing policies, much like "Political Science" is devoted to inventing excuses for the actions of organized crime. A little bit of honesty would go a long way towards clarifying Where We Stand in 2007.

Although these findings might appear trite and obvious to the Skilluminati Reader -- you're an unusually astute and informed audience and frankly most of you are far smarter than me -- I still urge you to consider this at face value. Much like the finding that men make less rational decisions when exposed to images of half-naked, hot women, the content is "duh" but the implications are vast and disturbing.

Also, if any readers are familiar with earlier studies about the psychology of material desire, please toss me a few hints and pointers. This is exceptionally interesting and quite new to me. Thanks in advance.

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Filed in: Social Control

Posted Nov 09, 2007 16 comments

If you're familiar with the work of Ben Mack, this will be a revelation. Ben sits down with his friend Dave Lakhani and offers an amazingly open, honest and naked summation of his life and his beliefs. I have to admit, I really admire the balls behind sitting down and having a no-holds-barred discussion and not holding anything back. Even if you're not up on Think Two Products Ahead and never touched Poker Without Cards, students of persuasion, social control, marketing, salesmanship, and financial freedom will find an overdose of brainfood here.

Big thanks to both Ben and Dave for providing this.

I know what you're thinking..."two old guys in a room with a mic?"...but don't sleep. This is valuable, useful, and applicable material and you need to beef up your attention span.

16 comments

Filed in: News

Posted Oct 18, 2007 4 comments

Two highly synchronous articles wound up in my inbox this morning. I will not argue with the Universe -- I will simply pass them along to you. As I have mentioned before, I am of the opinion that the only real "war" happening, here on Earth in 2007, is obscenely wealthy elites engaged in population control. The only way to maintain their lifestyle is by violently repressing literally everyone else on the planet.

I know that's dark. I know that's pessimistic. Have you ever been caught in the middle of a bar fight? Personally, this has happened several times and now I have a very attuned sense of impending violence. I don't think it's "pessimism" to state facts, especially when it's not a prophecy I'm making. This is already underway, and here are two excellent articles for the sake of perspective and brainfood:

The Billionaire Criminal Class

Via Counterpunch.

What do Brazil, Mexico, Russia and the USA have in common?

A rapidly expanding billionaire class.

Rampant poverty.

And a distressed middle class.

That's the take of Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston in a soon to be released book--Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You with the Bill) (Portfolio, December 2007).

In it, Johnston seeks to afflict the comfortable top one tenth of one percent of Americans--the 300,000 men, women and children who last year made more money than the bottom 150 million Americans.

The Urban Future of War

Via Asian Times Online.

"We think urban is the future," says James Lasswell, a retired colonel who now heads the Office of Science and Technology at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. "Everything worth fighting for is in the urban environment." And Wayne Michael Hall, a retired army brigadier general and the senior intelligence advisor in Schattle's operation, has a similar assessment, "We will be fighting in urban terrain for the next hundred years."

Last month, in a hotel nestled behind a medical complex in Washington, DC, Schattle, Lasswell, and Hall, along with Pentagon power-brokers, active-duty and retired US military personnel, foreign coalition partners, representatives of big and small defense contractors, and academics who support their work gathered for a "Joint Urban Operations, 2007" conference. Some had served in Iraq or Afghanistan; others were involved in designing strategy, tactics, and concepts, or in creating new weaponry and equipment, for the urban wars in those countries.

Over the course of the conference, this representative of one of the world's best known weapons manufacturers will suggest that members of the media be shot to avoid bad press and he'll call a local tour guide he met in Vietnam a "bastard" for explaining just how his people thwarted US efforts to kill them. But he's an exception. Almost everyone else seems to be a master of serene anodyne-speak. Even the camo-clad guys seem somehow more academic than warlike.

In his tour de force book Planet of Slums, Davis observes, "The Pentagon's best minds have dared to venture where most United Nations, World Bank or Department of State types fear to go. They now assert that the "feral, failed cities" of the Third World - especially their slum outskirts - will be the distinctive battlespace of the 21st century."Pentagon war-fighting doctrine, he notes, "is being reshaped accordingly to support a low-intensity world war of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor".

But the mostly male conference-goers planning for a multi-generational struggle against the global South's slums aren't a gang of urban warfare cowboys talking non-stop death and destruction; and they don't look particularly bellicose either, as they munch on chocolate-chip cookies during our afternoon snack breaks in a room where cold cuts and brochures for the Rapid Wall Breaching Kit - which allows users to blast a man-sized hole in the side of any building - are carefully laid out on the tables. Instead, these mild-mannered men speak about combat restraint, "less-than-lethal weaponry", precision targeting, and (harking back to the Vietnam War) "winning hearts and minds".

I definitely recommend reading the entire article.

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Filed in: Social Control