Thursday, January 14, 2010

Infiltrate the Blogs!

Along with my posts on MANUFACTURING CONSENT recently I see today an Obama advisor is recommending the govt get busy undermining credibility of and among bloggers.

"Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled "Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures," in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine" those groups.

As head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Sunstein is in charge of "overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs," according to the White House Web site."

This is nothing new, it is just surprising to hear people say we have a free press in USA. Freedom means "free to" say what you like and "free from" govt generated misinformation.


Spontaneous Order Out of Chaos in Haiti

Who's running Haiti? No one, say the people

(My comments are between the *** ***)

14 Jan 2010 21:14:09 GMT Reuters
Source: Reuters


By Andrew Cawthorne and Tom Brown

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 14 (Reuters) - Desperate Haitians turned rubble-strewn streets and parks into makeshift hospitals and refugee camps on Thursday in the absence of any noticeable response from authorities in Haiti after Tuesday's earthquake.

***Order out of chaos, proof the Haitians do not need governors in palaces, especially in time of crisis.***

With the 7.0 magnitude earthquake collapsing the presidential palace, a string of ministries and the headquarters of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in the country, Haiti faces a dangerous vacuum in security and government.

***Those who report for govt controlled organizations are only concerned with government. ***

Many in the capital Port-au-Prince picked away at shattered buildings with bare hands, sticks and hammers hoping to find loved-ones alive. Thousands of homeless people began to set up their own camps anywhere they could, the biggest right opposite the collapsed presidential palace.

***Order out of chaos, people helping themselves.***

"Look at us. Who is helping us? Right now, nobody," said Jean Malesta, a 19-year-old student who was the only survivor when her apartment building collapsed from the powerful quake that has killed thousands, possibly tens of thousands.

"So far, they have brought us nothing. We need water, food, shelter, everything, but we are on our own," Malesta added, to cries of agreement from women sitting and lying around her.

***Welcome to Katrina... if you wait for help, you will suffer. Elsewhere people are helping themselves. go get what you need, help where you can, thank God you are alive.***

A major international aid effort has not yet kicked in, although plenty of small groups, many from the United States, have scrambled quickly, moving personnel into Haiti by plane and overland from neighboring Dominican Republic.

*** Of course, small is faster and better than big.***

Even President Rene Preval lost his home. "My palace collapsed. ... I can't live in the palace, I can't live in my own house," he told CNN on Wednesday.

***Poor baby, lost his palace! So get a shovel and get to work.***

At one crushed supermarket, young men calmly carried off bags of food and electronics without a policemen in sight.

***Of course, as we see repeatedly all over the world, govt workers run away in a disaster. If I was there I would direct the looters to the frozen foods section first, and then set up cooking facilites with whatever stoves and gas and wood that could be found, and cook up the frozen foods, to feed the latrine diggers and medical personnel. Then work through the rest of the stores to keep people fed until other aid shows up.. No doubt this is happening in some places.***

Pickup trucks stacked high with bodies could be seen making their way through traffic-clogged streets on Thursday morning, on their way to drop off the dead at the morgue attached to Hospital General, the city's main health facility.

***The dead carriers should be fed early too. The morgues should just take pictures of the deceased, time and date, then bury them quickly. ***

But Guy LaRoche, the hospital's director, said it was already filled to overflowing with more than 1,500 rapidly decomposing bodies. Many had been left lying out in the sun. LaRoche said he had had no contact with any government officials to see what to do with them.

***As a govt worker he needs direction. The dead need burying.***


Google and China

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the suicide (suicided? he took two bullets to the head) of Mark Webb, a San Jose Mercury News reporter who did yeoman work exposing the CIA involvement in the crack epidemic in the USA in the 1980s, events associated with our dirty wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua during the Reagan administration. As the linked article lays out, it can be very dangerous to report the news in USA.

We learn Google has taken a stand and threatens to withdraw its search engine business from China. The Wall Street Journal has three articles on the topic today, front page, op-ed page, and its always-read Heard on the Street column. This is big news, highlighting corporate responsibility and Chinese Communist Party oppression.

Friends of mine, escapees from the former Soviet Republics have told me a difference between USSR and USA is in USSR if you wrote anything critical of the government, you would be punished. In USA if you write anything critical of the government, it just will not get published and distributed.

Now some may object that in USA we are able to criticize our politicians as much as we like, in any way that we like, but as Herman and Chomsky lay out in the book noted below MANUFACTURING CONSENT, criticisms are only within a false dilemma framework, that is "govt health care" versus "big biz health care" when in fact they are one in the same. No one can get a hearing on free market, small business health care. Talk about deregulating medicine, and the ears glaze over.

An excellent observation of Herman and Chomsky is that the USA news bureaucracy formed to match the USA govt bureaucracy. The very act of gathering news has settled into news stars who hang out with the newsmakers, and duly slap a by line on the newsmakers press releases. Talking point are emailed out to the talk-show hosts, who flavor the content with whatever their particular schtick, such as Limbaugh and bombast. Think about it: the major news orgs all have their White House Correspondent, Pentagon Correspondent, State Department Correspondent, Pentagon Correspondent. These people are fed their stories at 3pm, add flavor and turn them in to be read on the six oclock news. The newsmakers and the news reporters live very structured easy life.

I listened to a panel of Politico.com "reporters" talking about how the web would shake out. Up until I saw this show (I think it was Charlie Rose) I imagined the powers that be would have to shut down the internet at some point, and go to an AOL (based in the same town as the CIA) closed system model. But as these fellows spoke, they pointed out how a website with the best production values and best news would rise to the top, and leave everyone else behind like crank newsletter writers of yore, with no influence.

Well, as we learn the Gloria Steinem, Ed Schultz, Cooper Anderson, Bob Woodward and countless others are all ex-intelligence agency actors. It is no secret many media publications were founded and controlled by the CIA. Just as govt took control of newspapers and TV, why would they not do just the same with the internet? Do they somehow now lack the will, or smarts?

Before when people watched TV or read a newspaper, the powers that be had no idea what you personally thought about what you saw or what you read. Now they can know what you read, time your exposure to what you read, and then know what you think by how you blog or email or twitter your views to others. With computers, command and control can get down to granular level.

How China rules itself is of no matter to the USA govt. USA traders in China are free to complain to the Chinese if their internet access is not what it should be. As a guest in China, it would be rude for me to criticize what my hosts have on offer.

But China, in particular the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China, have on offer Hong Kong, one of the freest places on earth. USA has nothing even close, where free markets allow cheap and plentiful everything, including news.

Perhaps before criticizing China, USA should allow a special administrative region as free as Hong Kong, and should allow free trade in news, and enforce a separation of business and state.

Back to Google: According to the Wall Street Journal, Google would get just one percent of it 2010 profits from China, although it has a 36% search engine market share in China. (Baidu, the Chinese Google, was founded by a fellow with the same ideas at the same time as google founders). Well, folks, Google has a whole lotta infrastructure to support a whole lotta searchin going on, for very little money. From a business point of view, Google moves seem a lot more about sound business practices than any ethical standards.


Wednesday, January 13, 2010

A Building With Lungs?

Since China is relatively freer than USA, they are moving ahead in innovation. China is half way through building a structure in Guangzhou, to be the tallest, and designed to be "green."

Althoough plenty of people have reported on this building, nobody has noted that the building in fact has two lungs, for breathing. To wit: "Skidmore Owings embedded the tower with triple-glazed facades and solar panels, and chilled radiant ceilings. Its showpiece: four power-generating vertical-axis wind turbines."

These are placed in two sections, forming lungs allowing the building to breathe and regulate. Now another weird aspect, is the first building with lungs was built for a tobacco company.

Chinese think it is bad Feng Shui to have structures that block the flow of dragons, so they will often leave gaping holes in skyscrapers, for the dragons to move through. Check out this apartment building.


Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Free Frequent Flier Miles

Ok, this is weird. If you have a credit card with frequent flier miles earning feature, then you can get free miles. What you do is go to http://catalog.usmint.gov/ and order up on your credit card dollar coins, $5000 worth, the household limit currently. You pay $5000 and Uncle Sam ships the dollar coins to you, no shipping charge. So, for a $5000 charge on your credit card, you get $5000 in one dollar coins delivered to your home. Then, you walk the coins down to your bank, and pay off your credit card with one dollar coins. Result: 5000 free frequent flier miles on your credit card.

Now we are a little late in the game, not long ago there was not limit, and people were doing $100,000 at a pop and depositing the coins in the bank. Problem there was, the bank shipped them straight back to the mint, defeating the purpose of selling (trading?) the coins directly to consumers, thus forcing dollar coins into circulation. (Coins last longer so cost less to circulate than dollar bills.)

O well, better late than never.


Catholic Health Care Exemption

As a Catholic and follower of Jesus, I am obliged to be nonviolent and refuse military service. I think a plain reading of Catholic theology Jesus' teaching forbids violence. Therefore I sought and gained and exemption during the American War in Vietnam from military service. I still have my draft card, with its 1-A-O classification, meaning I was exempt.

If this health care bill goes through with mandatory coverage, I will seek an exemption as well, like the Amish, who will get it automatically. The Amish are exempt from social security and medicare taxes.

Of course since I will get an exemption, it is more likely the bill will pass, since people like me will not object to the bill. What do I care, the law will not apply to me. Being moral can have such bad effects.

Since medicine will be in lockdown and rationed at too low a price, my cash will go much farther in healthcare that other peoples' "health care" insurance, here or overseas.


Sunday, January 10, 2010

Manufacturing Consent

We all want a vigilant press, and I stirred up a little dust a while back asserting in USA the press is government controlled. Probably more accurate would be to say "the powers that be" control the press, and they control the government too. I am not too interested in conspiracy theories, nor are Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, who wrote Manufacturing Consent, a book that lays out the political economy of the mass media.

The book was published in 1988 and lays out a propaganda paradigm and shows how the powers that be have he media stick to the agenda, and how distorted our news is when finally delivered. The good news is we truly have no idea (although if we care we can find out) just what is going on in the world. If we have no idea, then we can hardly pay our taxes. It is a tribute to ourselves that the powers that be go to such lengths to keep us uninformed.

Herman and Chomsky take the reader through VietNam in the 50s, 60s and 70s, then into Cambodia into the 80s, and the Central American wars in the 80s. The authors were demonstrating how the recent history of falsification (as of the mid-80s) of the news, so fresh and clear at the time was being done presently regarding the central America wars. It is sad to note how the book can be read today, knowing now how the central American conflicts were so mischaracterized, just as readers knew then about the falsification of the news regarding the Vietnam war (which Vietnamese call the American War.)

The patterns work so well, even if widely known, that the powers that be can continuously apply them, and so it is astonishing to see the exact sam lies being touted now, as before, with the same results.

The upshot is the media is wide open for entrepreneurial activity. Matt Drudge was the first with the most, but there is limitless need for accurate reporting on any and all topics. A blog is s sort of news room, if only reporting on your business.


Food Security - Africa

This article hits the nail on the head, the problem with food shortage in Africa is property rights. It looks like one Congolese government is risking its independence. By the way, this article is better informed and more balanced than anything I read in USA news. An active and independent press is important in a free economy.