Category Archives: Politics & Government

Letter to an Unknown Whistleblower

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Tom Engelhardt’s Letter to an Unknown Whistleblower is the most encouraging thing I’ve read in a couple of years. An excerpt:

“I have no way of knowing what will first strike you as wrong. I just know that something will. It might be very specific and close at hand — something amiss you see in the program you’re working on, some outrageous expenditure of money or set of lies about what an agency or outfit is doing, or some act or set of acts that you, in growing up, had been taught were un-American. The possibilities are legion. After all, the national security system that they’ve built and engorged with taxpayer dollars, using fear and the excuse of American “safety,” has dispatched armies, and special ops outfits, and drones all over the world to commit mayhem and increase global instability, to kill civilians, wipe out wedding parties, kidnap and torture the innocent, assassinate by robot, and so on.”

The Blast Shack: Part 2

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Bruce Sterling has written a follow-up to his 2010 essay on Wikileaks. Here are a few of my favorite snippets:

The War on Terror has failed as conclusively as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations failed.

Even US Senators are decorative objects for the NSA. An American Senator knows as much about PRISM and XKeyScore as a troll-doll on the dashboard knows about internal combustion.

The authorities finally got around to convicting Bradley this week, of some randomized set of largely irrelevant charges. But the damage there is already done; some to Bradley himself, but mostly grave, lasting damage to the authorities. By maltreating Bradley as their Guantanamo voodoo creature, their mystic hacker terror beast from AlQaedaville, Oklahoma, they made Bradley Manning fifty feet high.

It’s incredible to me that, among the eight zillion civil society groups on the planet that hate and fear spooks and police spies, not one of them could offer Snowden one shred of practical help, except for Wikileaks.

Personal computers can have users, but social media has livestock.

Who wants to die for a supermarket

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“The greatest weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that. What is the West but a gigantic supermarket? And who really wants to die for a supermarket?”

— Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett

“I do not expect to see home again”

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snowden

“We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians. […] We hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries.”

“A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama’s promises. I was going to disclose it [but waited because of his election]. He continued with the policies of his predecessor.”

More of Edward Snowden interview here.

And Then There Was One

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Form Tom Engelhardt’s thought-provoking essay on “Imperial Giantism and the Decline of Planet Earth.”
“And here was the curious thing after centuries of arms races: when there was no one left to race, the U.S. continued an arms race of one. […] What could possibly go wrong?  What could stand in the way of the greatest power history had ever seen?”
“Under the circumstances, nothing could have been stranger than this: in its moment of total ascendancy, the Earth’s sole superpower with a military of staggering destructive potential and technological sophistication couldn’t win a war against minimally armed guerillas.  Even more strikingly, despite having no serious opponents anywhere, it seemed not on the rise but on the decline, its infrastructure rotting out, its populace economically depressed, its wealth ever more unequally divided, its Congress seemingly beyond repair, while the great sucking sound that could be heard was money and power heading toward the national security state.  Sooner or later, all empires fall, but this moment was proving curious indeed.”

Scott Adams: The personality of the United States

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“The personality of the United States changes periodically. Sometimes we’re generous and inspiring. Other times we’re total dicks. It’s a complicated country. But no one thing defines the personality of the United States more than our willingness to spend ten trillion dollars – and kill anyone who gets in the way – just to put a bullet in one asshole’s skull (Bin Laden). That gives me neither pride nor embarrassment; it’s just a statement of fact.”

“The best part of our new personality is that Kim Jong-un understands that if someday he lobs a missile at the mainland United States, we’ll spend ten years and another ten trillion dollars to put a bullet in his head. We’ll even shoot his kids on the way up the stairs.”

Tradition

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Been thinking about tradition. Probably because of all the buzz and chatter on the topic of marriage equality. The phrase “traditional marriage” keeps coming up and I realized I wasn’t sure of the definition of “tradition,” so I looked it up.

A tradition is “a belief or behavior passed down within a group or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past.”

A belief or behavior. Belief/believe are words we use all the time. Again, my mini-amnesia: what is a “belief?” Well, it’s “the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true.”

See, here’s the thing for me. I just don’t think “belief” is a real thing. Real in the sense the chair I’m sitting in is real (let’s skip the quantum particles thing for now). My belief change all the time. I get new information, what I believe changes. I have an experience, what I believe is affected.

I believed — with all my heart and soul — the world was flat… well, fuck me! Turns out it isn’t and never was. What I believed was wrong. Was always wrong. You get the idea. A belief is just a state of mind. Yikes! I believe that’s a snake at my feet. Uh, no, it’s a piece of rope. Let’s move on.

“…passed down within a group or society.” Because my grandpa believes in Big Foot, my pa believes in Big Foot, and now I believe in Big Foot.” I can’t think of a worse reason to believe something. If something is important, shouldn’t I be able to see and experience it first-hand and decide for myself what I think about it (at that moment in time)?

I’m way off topic. Anybody remember what I was talking about? Oh yeah, tradition.

 

We have had a tradition in the United States that marriage was between a man and a woman. Except for that time and those places where it could be one man and lots of women. It was once traditional for a man to beat his wife if she disobeyed him. And on and on and on.

The question that got me thinking about this is: Why is it acceptable for a man to propose marriage but not okay for a woman to ask a man (yes, I know that sometimes happens)? Well, it’s “traditional.”

I’ve been trying to come up with some traditions that are important to me. Some practice I couldn’t or wouldn’t change. And I’m drawing a blank.

“They were playing chess while we were playing checkers”

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Robert Draper asks the question in a longish piece (Can the Republicans Be Saved From Obsolescence?) in the NY Times. The pieces that grabbed my attention had to do with technology. A few examples (from many):

“1.25 million more young people supported Obama in 2012 over 2008.”

“Obama was the very first candidate to appear on Reddit. We ask our clients, ‘Do you know what Reddit is?’ And only one of them did. Then we show them this photo of Obama hugging his wife with the caption ‘Four more years’ — an image no conservative likes. And we tell them, ‘Because of the way the Obama campaign used things like Reddit, that photo is the single-most popular image ever seen on Twitter or Facebook.’ ”

“Romney’s senior strategist, Stuart Stevens, may well be remembered by historians, as one House Republican senior staff member put it to me, “as the last guy to run a presidential campaign who never tweeted.”

“They were playing chess while we were playing checkers,” a senior member of the campaign’s digital team somberly told another top Romney aide shortly after the election.

Southern Discomfort

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From article by George Packer in The New Yorker:

The region was an American underbelly in the semi-tropical heat; the manners were softer, the violence swifter, the commerce slower, the thinking narrower, the past closer.

Following the upheavals of the civil-rights years, the New South was born: the South of air-conditioned subdivisions, suburban office parks, and Walmart. Modernization was paved with federal dollars, in the form of highways, military bases, space centers, and tax breaks for oil drilling.

the Southern way of life began to be embraced around the country until, in a sense, it came to stand for the “real America”: country music and Lynyrd Skynyrd, barbecue and nascar, political conservatism, God and guns, the code of masculinity, militarization, hostility to unions, and suspicion of government authority, especially in Washington, D.C.

As its political power declines, the South might occupy a place like Scotland’s in the United Kingdom, as a cultural draw for the rest of the country, with a hint of the theme park.