The UK ID card scheme is heading our way. Now, the next phase, discussed separately but a part of the same design for organs of the State to evolve into Big Brother, is being discussed in Parliament

Let’s talk about these two apparently loosely related components for what they really are. The databases of identity and communications are deeply interrelated from a Government perspective.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are now capable of fishing in this data pool and cross-referencing the most innocuous of details and then pulling you into a Police cell because your behaviour is suspect Winston Smith.

The film Minority Report is now barely science fiction due to the increasingly predictive capabilities of artificial intelligence and the ongoing development of computers on which it runs.

AI is fuzzy and error prone like the human brain, but nevertheless powerful in predicting behaviours in complex systems (society) in the same way that you get a hunch, an intuitive feeling that a person you are talking with is lying.

The State loves this kind of tool, it tells them which individuals to trust and which individuals to intern. Hitler’s IBM supplied card indexing system of the German population was such a tool but stone age in comparison with our information age technology.

Do you visit an ‘alternative’ bookstore or support Greenpeace, and go to demos? Watch your back. I predict this.

And I feel… more than a little peeky.

Watch the End of Suburbia and see how you feel

Gordon Brown, the UK’s ‘leader’ is currently floundering as we enter the years of the Perfect Storm. He has no answers, he is not proacting, he is showing clearly that he has no clue how to discuss with his nation the problems that face us all:

Military crisis
Environmental crisis
Financial crisis
Food crisis
Oil crisis

And the biggest crisis of all: These five layered and forward-feeding factors that will end the world as we know it. Watch Naomi Klein (author of No Logo; Shock Doctrine) on the choice that is currently facing Americans.

This same choice will face Europeans as the situation here quickly follows that in the US. We may not be such a suburban culture as North America, but our way of life is nevertheless still predicated on what the philosopher Derrick Jensen terms a Culture of Make Believe.

We will be faced with an End of Suburbia and social and economic change on the same scale as North America, culturally different on the surface but no less massive. The five horses of the combined emergent property known as the apocalypse, the five factors of the Perfect Storm, are now upon us. Rome is burning and we are down at the forum watching Big Brother. Just at the moment when UK Parliament is considering building Big Brother’s brain. How beautifully ironic.

See more…

Err, not so fast this time. Could we please see the evidence before the generals start massing. By evidence I do not mean a photograph of an explosive device, bomb, pieces of wire, superimposed on a picture of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Just to remind you Mr Bolton, that in many western countries we have realised that when our leaders invite us to go to war people can get injured, or worse.

Therefore, appropriate evidence might look something like a 1000 page report validated by the United Nations. Something with a bit of gravitas. People could get killed, let’s show some decorum and put it all in writing so their families will understand the full reasons for which they are about to die.

The Telegraph, Wednesday, 21 May 2008

Mr Bolton said that striking Iran would represent a major step towards victory in Iraq. While he acknowledged that the risk of a hostile Iranian response harming American’s overseas interests existed, he said the damage inflicted by Tehran would be “far higher” if Washington took no action.

“This is a case where the use of military force against a training camp to show the Iranians we’re not going to tolerate this is really the most prudent thing to do,” he said. “Then the ball would be in Iran’s court to draw the appropriate lesson to stop harming our troops.”

Mr Bolton, an influential former member of President George W Bush’s inner circle, dismissed as “dead wrong” reported British intelligence conclusions that the US military had overstated the support that Iran was providing to Iraqi fighters.

A US military spokesman revealed last week that the elite Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards had drafted in personnel from Lebanon’s Hizbollah to train fighters from Iraq’s Shia militias.

Colonel Donald Bacon, a spokesman for the coalition in Baghdad, said captured fighters had told interrogators that thousands of Iraqi fighters were undergoing training in the Islamic Republic.

The main camp is located near the town of Jalil Azad, near Tehran, according to coalition officials.

The capture of Qais Khazali, a major figure in the Shia insurgency alongside Ali Mussa Daqduq, a senior Lebanese Hizbollah guerilla, last year yielded a treasure trove of information on Hizbollah’s activities in Iraq.

“Ali Mussa Daqduq confirmed Lebanese Hizbollah were providing training to Iraqi Special Group members in Iran and that his role was to assess the quality of training and make recommendations on how the training could be improved,” said Col Bacon. “In this role, he travelled to Iraq on four occasions and was captured on his fourth trip.”

Five Britons kidnapped in Iraq are believed to have been put under the control of Quds Force agents after failed attempts to barter the men for Khazali and Daqduq’s freedom.

The importance of the Quds Force to stability in Iraq was demonstrated last week when a five-member Iraqi delegation was sent to Tehran to meet with its commander, General Ghassem Soleimani. The delegation was despatched by the Iraqi government to plead for an end to Iranian meddling in its enfeebled neighbour.

Who needs sixties counter-culture heroes when a contemporary statesman can produce poetry with this depth and enlightenment.

The poetry of Donald Rumsfeld

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Glass Box
You know, it’s the old glass box at the—
At the gas station,
Where you’re using those little things
Trying to pick up the prize,
And you can’t find it.
It’s—
And it’s all these arms are going down in there,
And so you keep dropping it
And picking it up again and moving it,
But—
Some of you are probably too young to remember those—
Those glass boxes,
But—
But they used to have them
At all the gas stations
When I was a kid.
—Dec. 6, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing

A Confession
Once in a while,
I’m standing here, doing something.
And I think,
“What in the world am I doing here?”
It’s a big surprise.
—May 16, 2001, interview with the New York Times

Happenings
You’re going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don’t happen.
It doesn’t seem to bother people, they don’t—
It’s printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.
Everyone’s so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story’s there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven’t happened.
All I can tell you is,
It hasn’t happened.
It’s going to happen.
—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing

The Digital Revolution
Oh my goodness gracious,
What you can buy off the Internet
In terms of overhead photography!
A trained ape can know an awful lot
Of what is going on in this world,
Just by punching on his mouse
For a relatively modest cost!
—June 9, 2001, following European trip

The Situation
Things will not be necessarily continuous.
The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous
Ought not to be characterized as a pause.
There will be some things that people will see.
There will be some things that people won’t see.
And life goes on.
—Oct. 12, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing

Clarity
I think what you’ll find,
I think what you’ll find is,
Whatever it is we do substantively,
There will be near-perfect clarity
As to what it is.
And it will be known,
And it will be known to the Congress,
And it will be known to you,
Probably before we decide it,
But it will be known.
—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing

The above was copied from the following site where there is an appraisal of the qualities of Rumsfeld’s poetry:
http://www.igreens.org.uk/poetry_of_donald_rumsfeld.htm 

IFWHITEAMERICATOLDTHETRUTHFORONEDAYIT’SWORLDWOULDFALLAPPART

(Manic Street Preachers, 1994)

And of course, it will.

Good to see so many people now saying the same thing.

The war-on-Iran has now passed through the deceit stage. The propaganda which led to the invasion of Iraq has been replicated over the past couple of years with Iran the target this time. The next step is to capitalise on the propaganda now that the US people have been softened up by the psyops communications specialists.

The special forces teams have been in Iran for years preparing the ground. We’ll soon see small provocative strikes against ‘terrorist training camps’ in Iran, the inevitable Iranian response to attacks on their sovereignty. Arab people in the region will become even more radicalised against the US, and Israel will sigh relief that the Americans are still behind them. Tactical nuclear strike is the subtext, the implicit violence that even the psychopaths in Washington or London would think very carefully about using - never use your biggest stick, just keep it handy as a threat otherwise you may provoke a retaliation you cannot handle.

Is this any way to run our public life? I am British but I feel no less a part of this Madness of Crowds than anyone in the US or Israel. Powerful western countries (i.e. US and Europe) are rogue states, and since our international laws are powerless to stop them it is time for the people of Europe and the US to stop these governments - by the ballot box, or else. Because the stakes are so high, because governments have already proceeded beyond the pale,. They have gone beyond national sovereignty, beyond the social contract, and so we’ll do the same. We’ll take to the streets, we’ll disempower them, unilaterally if necessary. Pre-emptive strikes are the rule they have written.

Read more…

No ifs or buts, is waterboarding torture or not? If you think it’s a valid means to some end, read Derrick Jensen’s A Culture of Make Believe and then see if you still feel the same way.

Torture, stress positions, and other ‘interrogation’ techniques are not primarily attempts to gain intelligence but attempts to break the will and morale of an enemy. These are aspects of what Gen. Rupert Smith calls War Among the People, where an ideology is the real enemy of the dominant power. The power of an ideology can be broken by weakening the minds of its overt actors. Remember Winston Smith’s experiences in 1984? The torture we have seen in Iraq and the hidden torture programmes of the CIA are aimed at this end: you will stop resisting and ‘…love Big Brother with all your heart’.

This aspect of warfare has been happening since the wars against communism in the latter half of the 20th century, and it will only increase as multiple forms of resistance to hierarchical powers continue to increase. The forthcoming Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act in the US is a different manifestation of this mind control technique, where a witch-hunt will act to chill free speech and free thought in order to make activists and their ideologies less threatening to the dominant power. Thought crime has come of age.

Believe it or not one aim of this latter tactic is to help reduce the impact of the awakening (known as radicalization) that can occur when people read the same kinds of internet content that you are reading right now. You may be interested to know that the correct definition of radicalization is: to go to the root of an issue.

Very interesting state of affairs in Ohio. The subprime fiasco now has another angle to it.

The banking practice of subdividing mortgages into derivatives may have caused records of the ownership of the credit (mortgage notes) to be disconnected from the credit. The bank claiming rights to repossess a defaulter’s home in a foreclosure can be challenged to show that they have a legal right to the property. If they cannot connect their ownership right to the property then ‘case dismissed’.

It does seem odd that a defaulter would be able to claim that technically they do not owe anything. But it would be an appropriate lesson for bankers who play complex technical legal games themselves in pursuit of profit. Bleating “Judge, you just don’t understand how things work…” is a wholly inadequate legal argument and indicates a certain level of arrogance. Live by the sword…

New York Times article…