The Language of Power
Posted Apr 26, 2009
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QUESTION: Some are raising that the privacy aspects of this thing, you know, sharing of that kind of data, very personal data, among four countries is quite a scary thing.
CHERTOFF: Well, first of all, a fingerprint is hardly personal data because you leave it on glasses and silverware and articles all over the world, they're like footprints. They're not particularly private.
His stance has remarkable implications for the future of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) in a post-Bell's Theorem world. It's also a very naked statement that the only "privacy" you can expect to have ends at the surface of your skin -- everything else is exposed to the panopticon. Clothing hides nothing anymore.
Spooky action at a distance is a great single-sentence summary of 5GW. For brainfood I submit Henry Okah, David Myatt and Ronald Stark. In terms of clinical psychology, 5GW operatives are NOT SANE -- they are sociopaths, they are monomaniacs, etc. Effective 5GW is all-consuming and requires greater discipline than most humans are willing to subject themselves to.
Henry Okah ran a multinational fuel-piracy ring, which funded the purchase of huge stockpiles of weapons, which were used to arm constantly-shifting groups of mercenaries who were organized and mobilized via SMS text messaging. He's repeatedly crippled the infrastructure of Nigeria, and done over $29 billion in damage to Shell. He pulled all this off while living a respectable life in South Africa: he's since been arrested in Angola and deported to face charges in Nigeria. Read more.
David Myatt wears many masks: he's a leading neo-nazi philosopher, he's a Satanic occultist, and he's also a radical Islamic cleric. Sounds crazy and gets far stranger than that -- get to know David Myatt aka Ashton Long aka Abdul Aziz. Jeff Wells at Rigorous Intuition has the best summary and meditation on Myatt's twisted legacy: read Nine Angles of Separation.
Ronald Stark was the subject of the most entertaining article I ever did research for: The Man Behind the LSD Curtain. It was mostly guesswork, quotations and my own blend of horseshit, but characters like Stark -- or Barry Seal, or Finis Shelnutt -- are worth studying for the patchwork of connections they reveal.
Along those lines, check out the excellent Zenpundit thinkpiece, Who Would Declare War on the World?
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Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Lecture
Posted Apr 01, 2009
...the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.
But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.
Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.
But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.
Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten to death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.
The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America's view of its role in the world, both then and now.
I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.
The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.'
Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. 'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.
Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.
But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.
The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'
It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.
...the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.
The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don't quite know how they got there but they are there all right.
The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity - the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons - is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.
Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.
The Last Word
When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.
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Superstruct Review: Unplayable, Unwinnable, Still Awesome
Posted Dec 02, 2008
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Although I was disappointed with Superstruct, that's mostly because of my own expectations. My first impression made me think the game was a much Fuller system -- more grounded in simulations based on actual data, more complex and testable. This is partially my cognitive biases at work, filling in details based on my own ideas. It's also because of the blog echo chamber that amplified the project in stature, from a cool narrative online experiment to a serious attempt at fixing world problems.
I'm writing a Brainsturbator article about the game that Superstruct should have been -- a game that still needs to be designed. I also think it would be unfair to focus on Superstruct too much during that article, so I'm publishing my short review here instead. Superstruct is not an Earth simulator, and in no way resembles an updated version of R. Buckminster Fuller's "World Game." On it's own rights, and by it's own modest goals, Superstruct was a valuable success.
As Sean Ness clarified for me, though, Superstruct was never promoted as a MMOG -- a Massively Multiplayer Online Game, which involves a continuous environment that's "inhabited" by thousands of players who all occupy the same space.
Unplayable and Unwinnable
First problem: the Superstruct website is a usability nightmare. Don't think I'm a grumpy critic, though: the background and layout was truly badass, very cool looking. It just didn't work. For instance, if you'd like to browse people's submissions, which include detailed plans for solving specific global problems, you'll need to navigate this:
Frame nightmares are easily avoidable -- and if you're paying someone money to make a website, this should not be happening at all. To scroll through all the contributions, you need to scroll down the frame to the left, then click on the "Struct" you'd like to read. Now, unfortunately, you're going to read it while it's crammed into the frame at the right.
Considering user-generated content is main attraction and asset for this website, I'm amazed that the designers went through such pains to make it inaccessible and unappealing. I know there's ways for competent Internets Users to get around that, but it shouldn't be necessary to out-smart bad web design in the first place.
The scoring system is downright cynical. Basically: get a bunch of people to sign up on our site and we'll declare victory. If that sounds like an unfair summary, here's how they describe it:
A three step process? Sounds complicated, which usually means it's not. "SEHI" is just their term for a user profile page, and "survivability points" are just based on SEHIs. So basically, they rename "number of users" three times and call that a process. Perhaps I should be writing this review at Pizza SEO, because there is surely some good business advice to be found here. In terms of the seed content, there was actually very little on the table beyond a few videos and enthusiastic word-of-mouth promotion. Fortunately, that's all they needed to launch a remarkable crowdsourcing project, which brings me to the subject of What Actually Worked.
Still Awesome
The reason I opened this with the Nick Douglas joke -- aside from the fact I thought it was funny -- is the fact that all of the best content from the Superstruct project grew outside the original petri dish. Most of the best brainfood wound up growing on the Tumblr platform, which makes sense...I would especially recommend The Gupta Option.
In fact, the Superstruct information works so much better on other platforms, I'm kind of confused why they'd take the time to code up a clunky site in the first place. Check out the Reconstruct Ning page -- it handles every aspect of usability and information design better than the actual site. Much like the Obama campaign, the best thing to come out of Superstruct is the community that it created. To me, that's awesome enough to still give Jane McGonigal, Jamais Cascio and the rest of the folks at IFTF credit for a job well done.
Please hire better web designers next time, though....or just use Ning. It works.
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The Hidden Flaw in AI Research
Posted Jul 27, 2008
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My media diet lately has consisted of Nick Cook's The Hunt for Zero Point
and a re-reading of all Jacques Vallee's books. I also picked up his published journals, with the rather cheeseball title "Forbidden Science." It was an excellent read and gave me a new appreciation for Brother Jacques. I especially dig this short, tangential passage...so much that I'm posting it here. Enjoy.
"On Wednesday I went to Princeton. I was kindly received and the seminar I gave on information retrieval met with polite applause. Then a man with intense eyes and silver hair took me aside. We sat on the benches in the lab next to the lecture hall.
He said, "There is a fundamental fallacy in artificial intelligence, and you're falling into it like everybody else."
"In what respect?" I asked with the feeling that this discussion was not going to conform to the usual exchange of generalities heard at most professional meetings.
"Artificial intelligence is trying to emulate nature, it wants to approximate what man does."
"What other inspiration is there?"
"Imitation of nature is bad engineering," he answered patiently. "For centuries inventors tried to fly by emulating birds, and they killed themselves uselessly. If you want to make something that flies, flapping your wings is not the way to do it. You bolt a 400-horsepower engine to a barn door, that's how you fly. You can look at birds forever and never discover this secret. You see, Mother Nature has never developed the Boeing 707. Why not? Because Nature didn't need anything that would fly that fast and that high. How would such an animal feed itself?"
"What does that have to do with artificial intelligence?"
"Simply that it tries to approximate man. If you take man's brain as a model and test of intelligence, you're making the same mistake as the old inventors flapping their wings. You don't realize that Mother Nature has never needed an intelligent animal and accordingly, she has never bothered to develop one!"
I could only greet this stunning thought with silence. He went on:
"When an intelligent entity is finally built, it will have evolved on principles very different from those of man's mind, and its level of intelligence will certainly not be measured by the fact that it can beat a chess champion or appear to carry out a conversation in English."
With his piercing eyes on me, I had a brief vision of what an intelligent machine might be. If Nature has never needed an intelligent animal and hasn't evolved one, I kept wondering, then what are we? In our feeble attempts to handle the information we call our life, can we trust the creations of our dreams? Are we perhaps nothing more than the process through which another form of intelligence is evolving?"
Further Brainfood
I randomly came across a free copy of the IEEE Spectrum's special issue on The Singularity. It was very entertaining and interesting stuff, and even though I'm deeply skeptical of techno-worship, I highly recommend checking it out. I found Rodney Brook's essay "I Am A Robot" to be the real standout from the collection. Also excellent: The Consciousness Conundrum looks at the circular nature of trying to build something we can't even define, and The Economics of the Singularity was a good visionary workout.
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Outstanding Report on the Echelon Global Surveillance System
Omni Interview with Stanley Milgram
Information is a Communicable Disease
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