Political Science 101 . . .

Yup, that pretty much sums 'er up.

Two years ago . . .

AS THE PERSECUTION of Julian Assange was getting organized, things were in their early stages, and on 23 of June, 2011 a secret five hour meeting took place between Julian and Eric Schmidt, who is the CEO of Google. Wikileaks has the complete transcript. It gets a bit technical, but you can get through that, and ponder.

This meeting discusses the current state-of-things, and gives an interesting look at the facets of the Wikileaks effort around the world. It discusses the power and the vulnerability of the surveillance state, and what concerned citizens might do about it. Mobile phone network freedom may be the key to freedom in the future:

During these revolutionary periods the people involved in the revolution need to be able to communicate. They need to be able to communicate in order to plan quickly and also to communicate information about what is happening in their environment quickly so that they can dynamically adapt to it and produce the next strategy. Where you only have the security services being able to do this, and you turn the mobile phone system off, the security services have such an tremendous advantage compared to people that are trying to oppose them. If you have a system where individuals are able to communicate securely and robustly despite what security services are doing, then security services have to give more ground. It's not that the government is necessarily going to be overthrown, but rather they have to make more concessions.

Well, Julian wound up in the London embassy of Ecuador, as US pressure built up. A key component has been to deny Wikileaks access to the banking system, especially credit cards. This means that you can't support Wikileaks, because you can't donate any money. Well, according to NPR, that's changed:

Iceland's most recent move that lent support to WikiLeaks was an April Supreme Court decision that "ordered Valitor hf, the Icelandic partner of MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc., to process card payments for [the] anti-secrecy website ... within 15 days or face daily penalties," Bloomberg News says. So, as other nations have tried to put roadblocks in WikiLeaks' way by cutting off its access to funds, Iceland has gone the opposite direction.

Maybe getting one of those mobile phone base stations might be a worthy consideration, but even passing them a few bucks might be crucial; these guys have some heavy lifting to do.

The spark . . .

FABIUS MAXIMUS has a thoughtful site, worthy of your perusal. "Attention Americans: the Revolution has begun. You must choose a side." is a post that discusses how important WikiLeaks has been to the resistance to America's fascists.

The first sparks of Revolution are invisible to the Proles and considered insignificant by the Outer Party. Only the fierce reaction by the government reveals their importance. The combination of power and ambition gives senior government officials a clarity of vision we lack. Watch these sparks. The opportunity to take sides might not last long, before they get snuffed out. 

• • •

You might sneer and laugh at Wikileaks and Anonymous as quixotic — foolish and vain efforts. But the government knows better, and devotes great effort to stamp out these sparks. Without wider support our ruling elites will successfully suppress these movements. With our support these can mature into powerful engines of reform.

Fabius also has another post you should check out: "On Counterinsurgency: How We Got to Where We Are", which looks at the history of repression and suppression.

The greatness of a nation depends as much on its ability to learn as much as its power. Failure to learn can prove fatal. As with German’s refusal to learn from its defeat in WWI, substituting resentment for wisdom. As with America’s refusal to learn from its defeat in Vietnam, and belief that the doctrines of counterinsurgency could win if tried again. This required ignoring clear analysis showing the folly of this, explaining the inherent flaws of foreign armies fighting entrenched local insurgencies.

Hanging Insurgents at Cavite,
from the Philippines War circa 1900

As the first phase (Iraq, Af-Pak) winds down of our 21st century mad foreign wars — and the second phase expands — we can still learn and turn from this path. So today we look at one such analysis, by Martin van Creveld — one of the West’s greatest living military historians.

The most astonishing aspect of this paper is that after 60 years of failed counterinsurgencies by foreign armies, ten years into our second wave of failed counterinsurgency, it lists simple facts that remain unknown to so many Americans — including a large fraction of our geopolitical gurus.

Freedom fighters . . .

MAYBE STUPID INSECTS aren't so stupid. According to George Dvorsky's article in io9, "Enslaved worker ants fight back through acts of sabotage", there are species that have developed effective resistance to slavery. 

The ant has been a creature respected by various cultures, and appears in the Bible in Proverbs 6:6 —

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise

Which John Wyndham used as the title for a rather fine novella, now forgotten, "Consider Her Ways", which is worthy of your perusal (Alfred Hitchcock thought so, adapted it for his TV show). 

The story is mostly a first-person narrative. It begins with a woman who has no memory of her past waking up and discovering that she is a mother of some description, in a bloated body that is not her own. After some confusing experiences her memory gradually returns and she recalls that she was part of an experiment using a drug to see if it enabled people to have out-of-body experiences. It seems that the drug has worked far better than anyone could have anticipated: she has been cast into the future. She also realizes that she is in a society consisting entirely of women, organized into a strict system of castes. Her initial contacts have never even heard of men.

Testing the future . . .

WE USED TO HAVE 23 skidoo; now, we have 23andMe. According to Susan Young at MIT's Technology Review, "Personal Genetics Company Seeks Regulatory Approval", 

23andMe, in which Google has invested $6.5 million, offers a genome analysis test directly to consumers, who can use the product to explore their genetic risk for everything from curly hair to Alzheimer's disease. Although the company isn't disclosing which particular tests it is seeking regulatory approval for, Ashley Gould, vice president for corporate development and chief legal officer, says the tests are medically relevant and examine genetic variants with disease connections that are well supported by scientific research. The company is already working on a second submission, and plans to eventually seek approval for some 100 of its 240 tests.

240 tests. One of 'em's for Neanderthal percentage, even. And genetic science is still in its infancy. We could have this be of  incredible benefit, or we could wind up with Gattaca — or much, much worse, like the "Genetic Slavery" that exists in David Weber's "Honorverse", some 3,000 years from now.  The future sure looks like interesting times, don't it?

Historical perspective . . .

80 YEARS AGO, HANS THILO-SCHMIDT needed money to keep his love-nest going. Seeing as Hans was working at the German Armed Forces' cryptographic headquarters, the Cipher Office, he had some secrets to sell. The German army and navy had adopted an improved Enigma cipher machine after the revelation that the US and the British had broken German codes in WW1.

So in 1932, Hans approached the French, and Captain Gustave Bertrand of French Intelligence seized the opportunity — to no avail, initially. The French looked at the Enigma manual and daily code key, and pronounced it unsolvable, as did the English. Things might have died right there, but Capt. Bertrand approached the Polish secret service's cipher office, who eagerly accepted the gift.

He furnished Gustave Bertrand of the French Intelligence service a booklet detailing the Enigma machine setup procedures. There was no mention of the rotor wiring or information on the keys. In fact, it was more than a booklet but seven documents with two important ones: User Manual for Enigma and Enciphering Procedure for Enigma with drawings and pictures . The French puzzled over this information, then consulted with the British, who agreed that it was insufficient to be of any practical use. No one knows why the this valuable information was rejected. Bertrand then offered it to Lt Col Langer, head of the cipher office in Poland who was overjoyed upon receiving even this small crumb. Rejewski (one of the three mathematics experts) asked Bertrand if he could obtain some outdated Enigma keys. The Frenchman relayed this request to Schmidt who readily obliged, and the keys were passed back to Poland.

With keys given them by the French, and using replica machines they had built, the Polish team of Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rózycki and Henryk Zygalski were able to decode most German messages.

And then the Germans introduced an expanded Enigma rotor set, just before the outbreak of WW2. Adding 2 more rotors to the 3 already used, plus the addition of the plugboard meant that the solution of these new Enigma ciphers got vastly bigger, too big for the Poles to tackle. The Poles could see war approaching, so they passed their latest findings over to the British as Warsaw got pounded.

This time, the British got with the program, Bletchley Park came to be, and the Americans got up to speed with the new electro-mechanical tabulating machines, with National Cash Register supplying the machines that broke the most stubborn of all Enigma traffic, the German Kriegsmarine.  This left Bletchley to tackle other Nazi ciphers, including the Offizier cipher and the Lorenz cipher in which Hitler corresponded with his generals.

Out of this effort, Alan Turing invented the first programmable electronic computer, Colossus. From these beginnings, a new digital world appeared.

Colossus Mk 2

So, from the wellspring of venality and greed, the source of change. Historians have said that the Ultra effort shortened the war by two years, maybe more. Certainly the Enigma decrypts resulted in the defeat of the U-boat campaign, with the withdrawal of the wolfpacks by mid 1943.

But Ultra actually accomplished more than the mainstream historians would suggest. IMHO, without Ultra, the chances are very good that Russia would have collapsed in 1942-1943. Why? Because Stalin had purged the Red Army officer corps and the NKVD, and the survivors were easy pickings for the German veterans.

But the British did not share any details about Ultra with the Russians, except to give general warnings. It was the efforts of the Cambridge Five that got the decrypts to Moscow Center.  Kim Philby (cryptonym: Stanley), Donald Duart Maclean (cryptonym: Homer), Guy Burgess (cryptonym: Hicks) and Anthony Blunt (cryptonym: Johnson) and John Cairncross (cryptonym: Liszt) were ideological spies, who believed that Socialism was the future, in spite of Stalin. Their efforts, as recounted by one of their major "handlers", Yuri Modin, in his book, "My Five Cambridge Friends" were tireless in their efforts to pass along the Bletchley decrypts.

From their efforts, the Russians had the Wehrmacht "order of battle", the disposition and organization of Wehrmacht units, as well as Luftwaffe disposition. This last was extremely critical, as the Soviet air power was able to destroy a lot of Luftwaffe aircraft before the battle of Kursk, and the Luftwaffe was never able to catch up.

Without the chain of events unfolding as they did, the chances were very good that Russia could have collapsed, the US and the UK would have had to agree to an armistice with Nazi Germany that might have survived in some fashion until the US could have started irradiating German cities with A-bombs in 1946.

From chaos, venality and patriotism, we get to today. Everything has changed, and nothing has changed: we have Wikileaks, Bradley Manning and OWS, Occupy Wall Street.

It may be delusional, but I like to believe that more and more people are taking their freedom more seriously. Today's fascists have eschewed the funky Nazi uniforms for Armani suits, Rolexes and Porsche Designer Sunglasses, but like the fascists of old, the ruthlessness remains — only this time the ruthlessness is hidden in the smoke and mirrors of "patriotism". Meanwhile, the true patriots, the Bradley Mannings of this world keep appearing, to try to make things right and the eternal battle against fascism continues.

Critical communication . . .

MIT'S TECHNOLOGY REVIEW is a wonderful site for looking at what's coming down the pike at ya. John Pollock has a great article, worthy of your perusal, "People Power 2.0  How civilians helped win the Libyan information war."

Information is power: How ad-hoc nets helped off Daffy Duck.

After weeks of skirmishes in the Nafusa Mountains southwest of Tripoli, Sifaw Twawa and his brigade of freedom fighters are at a standstill. It's a mid-April night in 2011, and Twawa's men are frightened. Lightly armed and hidden only by trees, they are a stone's throw from one of four Grad 122-millimeter multiple-rocket launchers laying down a barrage on Yefren, their besieged hometown. These weapons can fire up to 40 unguided rockets in 20 seconds. Each round carries a high-explosive fragmentation warhead weighing 40 pounds. They urgently need to know how to deal with this, or they will have to pull back. Twawa's cell phone rings.

The force of laughter: Graffiti on a wall in Tripoli
represents the Libyan leader, Colonel Qadaffi,
as a fleeing rat. Credit: John Pollock

Two friends are on the line, via a Skype conference call. Nureddin Ashammakhi is in Finland, where he heads a research team developing biomaterials technology, and Khalid Hatashe, a medical doctor, is in the United Kingdom. The Qaddafi regime trained Hatashe on Grads during his compulsory military service. He explains that Twawa's katiba—brigade—is well short of the Grad's minimum range: at this distance, any rockets fired would shoot past them. Hatashe adds that the launcher can be triggered from several hundred feet away using an electric cable, so the enemy may not be in or near the launch vehicle. Twawa's men successfully attack the Grad—all because two civilians briefed their leader, over Skype, in a battlefield a continent away.

Indeed, civilians have "rushed the field," says David Kilcullen, author of The Accidental Guerrilla, a renowned expert on counterinsurgency and a former special advisor to General David Petraeus during the Iraq War. Their communications can now directly affect a military operation's dynamics. "Information networks," he says, "will define the future of conflicts." That future started unfurling when Libyan networks—and a long list of global activists—began an information war against Qaddafi. Thousands of civilians took part, but one of the most important was a man who, to paraphrase Woodrow Wilson, used not only all the brains he had but all the brains he could borrow.

So, why should YOU care? Simply, offing Stevie is going to take concerted creative effort. They may be neo-fascists, but Stevie's CONS aren't stupid, they can see that middle-of-the-road Canadians are starting to get nervous and upset. So, they are going to fight, and it will be nasty. I don't see how the next election could be postponed — but these are psychopathically ruthless people, and when they see the end of their folly, desperation could make Stevie very dangerous. Remember, Stevie's the Pro Rogue.

How things work . . .

TED TALKS cover the whole panoply of human endeavours. Kevin Slavin argues that we're living in a world designed for -- and increasingly controlled by -- algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can't understand, with implications we can't control. H/T to Harold.

Up, up and away . . .

KEN COUCH has a great hobby: lawn chair flying. According to GIZMODO, last week,

he hitched 105 helium balloons to a lawn chair and set out on a nine-hour adventure that took him to a height of 13,000 feet, traveling 193 miles from his home in Bend, Oregon, all the way to the other side of the state.

The thought occurs, maybe a lawn chair with 210 balloons might be a great way to get rid of some of our politicians . . . just duct tape 'em into the chair, and let 'em fly away — far, far away. (H/T to Cubby.)

A word, if you please . . .

THE REGISTER is a great geek site, with an irreverent attitude, as one can surmise from their slogan, "Biting the hand that feeds IT"— ya gotta love these guys. Anyway, Cade Metz has a fine article, "Wikipedia awash in 'frothy by-product' of US sexual politics".

The world's Wikifiddlers are obsessed with santorum. Though they can't agree on what that is.

For some, it's a word. For others, it's not: it's the result of a campaign to create a word. The distinction – however subtle – has sparked weeks of controversy among the core contributors to Wikipedia, the "free encyclopedia anyone can edit". If you find this hard to believe, you've never been to Wikiland – and you've never Googled "Rick Santorum".

Famously, Rick Santorum – the former Pennsylvania Senator and a Republican candidate for president of the United States – has a Google problem. But he also has a Wikipedia problem. And the two go hand-in-hand.

Ricky S.

santorum

1. That frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex.

2. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA)

Fred sums it up . . .

FRED REED has a bad feeling about the future of the U.S., in a rant, "Awaiting the Storm". He's really worried:

Flags. These are always a bad sign. Hardly a politician appears on television who doesn’t stand in front of an American flag, sometimes three American flags. A venomous nationalism now poisons the air, and grows. We are off and rolling.

The trappings of fascism spread. General David Petraeus, commander of the Eastern Front, poses with the President in the White House in combat fatigues. The country is now the Homeland, reminiscent of the Nazi Fatherland and the Soviet Motherland. We hear of American Exceptionalism, the ritual self-idolizaton beloved of pathological nationalism. Blood and Soil. The American Dream. Ubermenschen. All we need is a short Austrian.

We may get one. The times ripen for a man on a horse. (Or perhaps a woman: Twitler of Alaska looms.) An ignorant populaton, unread, unfamiliar with the outside world, focuses its anxieties on troubling dark things lurking abroad, the brown hordes from the south, the rising Chinese, inexplicable Moslems who want to kill all Christians. Sooner rather than later such a mob finds solace in an angry unity. From an unhappy lower middle-class spring Brown Shirts. Wait.

Check out the whole article.

Pandora's?

Sven Ortmann has an interesting site, Defence and Freedom, which he proclaims is "about the defence against external threats and about the defence of civil liberties. Most topics are about the art of war, military history or military technology." Anyway, Sven posted the bon-bon above.

Lest we forget . . .

ACCORDING TO A POST IN CANNABIS CULTURE written by Jodie Emery, "Send Marc Emery Mail or Money in US Federal Prison", you can mail him a letter. And that would be a good thing to do for a victim of US legal imperialism in solitary confinement.  Click on the link above to get the address and rules.

Marc has NOTHING to do while locked in solitary confinement. Please, if you have the time, write long letters instead of just short notes. Again, he has absolutely nothing to do while locked into a cell 24/7 except read mail that he gets, so the longer the letters, the better. Thank you!

Extramarital sex 'causes more earthquakes'

ACCORDING TO THE TELEGRAPH, in an article by Andrew Hough, some Iranian shell-back is claiming that "Women who dress “inappropriately” incite extramarital sex that in turn cause more earthquakes".

Attractive women who snub traditional Islamic clothing to instead wear fashionable clothes and apply heavy make-up, caused youths in the country to “go astray” and have affairs, Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi said.

"Many women who dress inappropriately ... cause youths to go astray, taint their chastity and incite extramarital sex in society, which increases earthquakes," he told worshippers at a Tehran prayer service late last week.

"Calamities are the result of people's deeds.

“We have no way but conform to Islam to ward off dangers."

Which raises the question: which Islam is to be conformed to? Somehow, you just know that old goatface has never read  “The Taqwacores” or listened to the Kominas pound away at "Suicide bomb the GAP".

A tale of two campaigns

A little something for Halloween?





Then there's the campaign of "That One"




Seen earlier somewhere in the blogosphere: "Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Barack could run. Barack is running so all our kids can soar"

Excuse me, I think I have something in my eye.