Peace on Drugs

The War on Drugs is a mess. Preventing harm cannot be achieved while some drugs are legal and others are not - it is a conceptual muddle and hypocritical. Many smart people have been saying for decades that drugs have positive aspects as well as negative. Educate people and let them choose what substances they want to use and the world will be a safer, healthier, and potentially better place.

Peace
“The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world. “- Carl Sagan

Ecological
“The fact that Richard Nixon saw Timothy Leary [proponent of LSD] as ‘the most dangerous man in America’ is an indication of just how threatening the values of the ‘counter-culture’ were deemed to be. However, few people in ’straight’ society had even glimpsed the extraordinary power of the revolutionary tool which Leary and others were propagating. As Jay Stevens observes in his seminal study of the drug, even the activists of the New Left had overlooked ‘the role LSD was playing in redefining the Counter-culture’s thrust’. For the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, ‘technology had produced a chemical which catalyzes a consciousness which finds the entire civilisation leading up to that pill absurd’” - Rory Spowers, A History of the Environmental Revolution and Visions for an Ecological Age.

We no longer live in a world of straight versus counter culture and yet we continue to fail to calculate the social good (in the Spowers’ example above the context is ecological awareness) against the potential social harm from the drug. In terms of ecological awareness there has never been a more pressing need for an awakening pill.

A tiny percentage of all those trillions so far spent on the War on Drugs would have been better spent on education (including educating the medical profession) and treating side effects. All drugs have benefits, not least social benefits and yet ’social harm’ always seems to come up as an argument for prohibition. Let’s try an intelligent approach instead.

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Them and Us

I completely missed this until it was pointed out to me. Tony Blair revealed his true colours and the media didn’t notice either:

“There is a tendency even now, even in some of our [US] own circles, to believe that they [THEM] are as they are [THEM] because we [US] have provoked them [!] and if we left them [!] alone they would leave us [!] alone. I fear this is mistaken. They [THEM] have no intention of leaving us [!] alone.” Tony Blair on ‘extremist Islamic ideology’

Separate the ingroup (US) from the outgroup (THEM) in order to set the scene for a fight. Someone in such a position of power and influence should not be using such language in these dangerous times. Satan’s spawn these politicians.

Masters of All

Seems to be no better way of putting it so I’ll present it all as it is:

In the counsels of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. -Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961.

The first stage of fascism should more appropriately be called corporation because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -Benito Mussolini

Then

Come you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know I can see through your masks

And I hope that you die and your death will come soon
I’ll follow your casket through the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered into your death bed
Then I’ll stand over your grave till I’m sure that you’re dead
- Bob Dylan

and now

The End of Terror and the Collapse of Globalisation

Terrorism is the label for a twentieth century phenomenon. The end of real terrorism could be just around the corner. That is, terrorist organisations have begun to realise that ‘terror’ as a weapon is obsolete when fighting a globalised technological civilisation. That civilisation holds the keys to its own destruction, keys which ex-terrorists are beginning to explore:

The globalised infrastructure is vulnerable without having to engage in violence against the person, as John Robb describes. The standard theory of terrorism is that political power can be gained through targeting the population, and this has been the focus of security activity for the past century. However, political power can also be gained by directly targeting the infrastructure and materials of the globalised economy rather than the people.

The ways in which the non-terror actors could attack the nodes in the system are as numerous as the components within the system. Attacks are likely to be highly imaginative and will not come under current conceptualisations of terrorism. By focusing on terrorism states may be sleep walking into a defeat by other means. Currently, security is aimed at protecting the population from direct violent attacks, with anti-terror legislation designed for this purpose. We do not have legislation or security in place (other than standard criminal damage and arson laws) that would prevent groups from targeting the non-human aspects of the civilisation they are in opposition to. That is, the legal and social sanctions that work against the growth of terrorism will no longer work. This is critical since just a few well-coordinated attacks on our infrastructure could do more damage than terror ever has - if at all (1) - to the integrity of Western countries.

Furthermore, given the expample of the green movement in the US this new ‘non-terror threat’ could become more closely aligned with non-violent legal activism in ways that will be difficult to separate into the current terrorist and activist concepts. In the future, an organisation may make its aims of collapsing civilisation clear (see Derrick Jensen’s Endgame) and face no penalty since no threat is being made against people only against abstract systems and processes. In other words terrorism will evolve into subversion, but subversion of what hierarchies do rather than direct subversion of state power.

For example, alone and in combination any of the factors below could be involved in non-violent ‘attacks’ that attempt to cause a cascade of systems failure:

• Transport nodes
• Logistics nodes
• Energy supplies - critical nodes of national grid/pipelines etc
• Financial market disruption from within
• Spreading bird flue and other diseases
• Computer (and psychological) virus attacks
• Social contagion and hysteria, media manipulation

The way that this may be effected is set out in Robb’s description of how cascading failures occur in violent attacks, drawn from Lai and Motter (2002):

Dynamic networks and cascading failures

Static maps of a network’s connectivity (like a scale free network topology) don’t provide a true picture of an infrastructure network’s operation. Infrastructures are dynamic. There are flows of information, power, and substances constantly coursing through them. This dynamism creates a new set of vulnerabilities that can be exploited by global guerrillas. Here’s how cascading network failures occur in dynamic networks when they lose high-load nodes (the loss of even a single high-load node can result in system-wide cascading failure):

• Load redistribution. In most infrastructure networks, the loads carried by each node on the network are dynamically redistributed. If a network node is lost, due to accident or attack, the load that node carries is rapidly distributed to the other nodes on the network.
• Hi-load nodes and failure. If a high-load node is removed from the network, the loads it carries are redistributed to other nodes on the network. This increased flow causes less capable nodes to exceed their capacity. To protect these nodes from damage, many networks will automatically force the overloaded node to fail-over (shut down). In other networks, the increased congestion will cause the overloaded node to become inefficient (bog down). Regardless, the result is a series of shut-downs or slow-downs that “cascade” through the network as the excess load is pushed to the next available node. The end result is total network failure.
• Heterogeneous networks. Cascading failures only occur in heterogeneous networks where there are a few nodes that have the capacity for high-loads and many with the capacity only for low-loads. Homogeneous networks, where all the nodes handle an equal load do not suffer cascading failure. Unfortunately, all infrastructure networks are heterogeneous by design.

NOTE: Cascading failures do not cleanly apply to terrorist “social” networks. In social networks, the network nodes are people and the flow is information/knowledge/etc. When a high-load node is removed, the remaining nodes will not fail due to an increase in load. People can adapt dynamically. For example: they can prioritize the new loads they inherit which mitigates the impact of a high-load node loss to the network.

The vulnerability of dynamic networks to attacks on hi-load nodes is straight forward. However, planning attacks on these dynamic networks isn’t. Here’s how global guerrillas will plan attacks to create cascading failures within dynamic networks:

Global Guerilla Attack Planning

• High-load node identification. There is a high level of correlation between the number of connections a node has and the amount of load it carries. Additionally, many infrastructure networks (oil, gas, electricity, etc.)concentrate production of the flow that travels through the network. In these networks, high-load nodes can be identified as those nodes that are immediately downstream from production facilities. In other networks high-load nodes are the most central (communication networks).
• Connections instead of nodes. A non obvious approach to node failure is to attack the connections radiating from high-load nodes. The result of an attack on the connections between nodes will be the redistribution of the load carried by the damaged connection to the remaining connections. This will result in the failure of a high-load node when the remaining connections fail due to overloading (see diagram).
• Network suppliers. Some networks are vulnerable to undersupply (gas, electricity, and water). In these networks, an attack on a supply facility or connections from a supply facility will produce network failure as undersupplied nodes pull resources from the rest of the network (see diagram).

(1) Terrorism has never been shown to have an adverse effect on society in Western countries, apart from the direct human impact. It is a little known fact that bomb attacks tend to be associated with more people coming out onto the streets and engaging in consumerism!

Declining Fossil Fuel: All Aspects of Daily Life

If you think $/£5 a gallon is expensive for fossil-oil based fuels then wait until it hits $20 during the next 5-10 years.

Peak oil already arrived in 2006. Warnings that the capacity for global oil production is soon to drop off were wrong: it’s not soon, it’s happened and prices will now begin to rise exponentially.

Energy Watch Group is a Germany-based group of independent scientists and energy experts who this month released a report that includes nearly 100 pages of exhaustive technical analysis of every oil producing field in the world and every known and proven reserve. The report concludes that global oil production has already peaked at about 83 million barrels per day some time in 2006. They predict that global production will now fall every year, including this year, even with a quintupling of production in Canadian tar sands and new discoveries and developments elsewhere in the world. By 2020, they predict only 58 million barrels will be produced per day, and 39 million barrels per day by 2030. These predictions are made without regard for how high the price of oil goes in the meantime because their analysis is based solely on the technical limitations of oil production and its availability.

“This [the decline in oil production] will create a supply gap which can hardly be closed by growing contributions from other fossil, nuclear or alternative energy sources in this time frame. The world is at the beginning of a structural change of its economic system. This change will be triggered by declining fossil fuel supplies and will influence almost all aspects of our daily life.

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On what possible grounds would we believe you again?

Tony Blair on ‘extremist Islamic ideology’.
“This ideology now has a state - Iran - [not Afghanistan this time, not Iraq either? I thought the late S.Hussein was your axis of evil] that is prepared to back and finance terror in the pursuit of destabilising countries [how do you know? what have you done to verify this?] whose people live to wish in peace.”

“There is a tendency even now, even in some of our own circles, to believe that they are as they are because we have provoked them and if we left them alone they would leave us alone.
“I fear this is mistaken. They have no intention of leaving us alone.”

The ‘extremist’ islamic ideology is just that, extremist. The main stream majority in Iran will not tolerate extreme conservative policy in the same way that the American people will not tolerate a lurch towards fascism. The real agenda however, is that Iran is a powerful and proud country that has its own oil. A country of true democracy and equality with all that oil would be extremely powerful at a time when other previously oil-rich states like the US are facing an uncertain future with declining oil supplies.

UK ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair has accused Iran of backing terrorism and warned the world faces a situation akin to “rising fascism in the 1920s”.
[Yes, kind of. Except that the rising fascism is being caused by Western governments.]

Mr Blair told a charity event in New York that Iran was prepared to destabilise peaceful countries. [Well, since the West has been trying to destabilise Iran for the best part of a century...]

This man is helping to set up the chess pieces for a war with Iran. These are the same moves he and George Bush made at each previous step in their ‘war on terror’. These political madmen are being allowed to conduct their own private experiments at controlling the oil necessary to power our states and keep them powerful. And yet this is occurring while the citizens of the world are trying to move to a more egalitarian, sustainable and ecologically balanced society of man.

The US calls their plan the Long War, or the Project for a New American Century. Its aim is:

“Our aim is to remind Americans of these lessons and to draw their consequences for today. Here are four consequences:
• we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
• we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
• we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;
• we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.”

Some European countries (e.g. Britain) seem to have their eyes on similar foreign policies far into the future, with no prospect of a more egalitarian and ecologically balanced world. In fact these policies point to a harsh world of permanent warfare ahead. The alternative of switching to a powerdown is not on the horizon. Fascism is.

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Tipping Point to Fascism

Naomi Wolfe documents the similarities between the behaviour of the US state in recent years and the history of states that have succumbed to fascism. The evidence is worrying and the potential is certainly there for the unthinkable to happen again.

Wolfe’s analysis (The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot) hardly touches on issues like the corporate kleptocracy and yet it is a powerful indictment of the shift towards to a tipping point from the far right into full-on fascism. We in Europe and other countries where the plebs are getting too smart and beginning to question and challenge state authority and power should be aware that we are following a similar techno-military route towards suppression of human values and conscience.

The War on Terror was never just an excuse for war and suppression of rights - the war on terror is a real war in which the state is preemptively targeting individuals and groups who challenge it in whatever way. The ecoterrorist and anyone else who challenges the state is a serious threat to the state - whether or not s/he uses violence.

Anyone who marshalls dissent and civil disobedience is an enemy of the state. In our increasingly fragile (see John Robb’s Brave New War) industrial-military-capitalist driven societies a group which uses words alone in order to trip-up a logistics system is as much a threat to the state as a group that uses violence or physical sabotage. Grass roots organisation is what the state wants to crush: the corporate-political globalised world will collapse if the people gain any more power, and the state will do everything it can, legal or illegal, in order to stop it.

The people of Europe need to be aware that the same is happening in our societies but due to our complacency about it never happening here again, and there being less overt organs of state power and oppression, the preparations for totalitarianism and fascism are not as obvious as in the US.

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Surveillance Society - Final Warning

“The false security of a surveillance society threatens to turn our country into a place where individuals are constantly susceptible to being trapped by data errors or misinterpretations, illegal use of information by rogue government workers, abuses by political leaders – or perhaps most insidiously, expanded legal uses of information for all kinds of new purposes. It threatens to worsen the imbalance of power between the weak and the strong, and the government and the people, and have an enormous chilling effect on our open society where citizens have always lived secure in the knowledge that the government will leave them alone if they’re not involved in wrongdoing.” - ACLU: Even Bigger, Even Weaker report 2007.

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Don’t Taze Me Bro… TTZZZ

Whenever I see cases of police belligerance and brutality it shocks me. When such officers are brought to justice they seem to get away with murder – in many cases literally, the senior officers never condemn their behaviour and in many cases they go back on duty after ‘disciplinary’ rather than legal charges. Police violence is becoming increasingly acceptable to a generally naïve public who can’t see where it’s leading.

Tasers are now being considered for use in the UK – and they won’t be brought out only when a person is suspected of being armed. They will become a normal part of police powers to be used with the officers’ ‘discretion’. In our country there is a strong resistance to police powers – e.g., ‘I am going to continue to go about my business unless you arrest me’ and that is going to conflict strongly with police officers’ instincts towards controlling a situation by ordering people about at the end of a taser gun and which they are doing far more often now that many of them have firearms. A person has a right to ask why they are being ordered about before complying - questionning orders is an essential control against a police state. However, police officers tend not to see it that way.

I certainly wouldn’t argue with a police officer who has a gun, whereas I used to know my rights and would face down an officers attempts to control me confident that I am a law-abiding person: ‘Arrest me or I’m going to continue about my business’. Police should maintain order by initially upholding the law, as they are trained to do, rather than by attempting to directly control situations which they are trained to do as a last resort. That has been turned on its head and we are now on the road towards a police state where officers rush into situations with the sense that they are there to control rather than uphold the law - the law itself should be used in order to provide the necessary degree of public order.

With a taser on the belt the sense of police confidence and control will have the upper hand so that it becomes possible to make the challenge ‘stand still or I will shock you, don’t walk away or I will shock you’ rather than ‘I am arresting you for xxx, if you resist with violence then I may shock you’. This is increasingly the case in the US where control has become the norm for police rather than maintaining the rule of law, e.g. Fouad Kaady, and only the other day the incident at the John Kerry talk which I guess is now sub-judice, and this: Man tasered while handcuffed to hospital bed in order to insert a catheter. Tasers and other violent ‘non-lethal’ but nevertheless often lethal weaponry are taking us all down a one-way slope towards submitting to the police instincts of controlling the public’s every move rather than upholding the rule of law. It may only be a small number of officers who engage in unnecessary violence in order to directly control a situation where no crime has been committed but acceptance of ’shoot first then ask questions later’ leads to a powerful change of culture. Government officials in the US and UK seem to be doing nothing to stop it. The rule of law must prevail, not state control.

False Flag: Unthinkable, Hypocritical, Fascist, but true?

“This isn’t about party, it isn’t about Bush Bashing. It’s about our country, our constitution, and our future. … Your countrymen have been murdered and the more you delve into it the more it looks as though they were murdered by our government, who used it as an excuse to murder other people thousands of miles away.” -Lt. Col. Shelton F. Lankford, U.S. Marine Corps (ret).

The more I read about the 9/11 truth movement the more convinced I am that the US government has to answer some serious questions or be put on trial. If there turns out to be truth in the idea that 9/11 was an inside job then all the world’s citizens need to be asking themselves what to do about it.

The internet is the biggest tool we have against state power and control. How long before some ‘terrorist act’ or ’state of emergency’ either wipes out the internet or provides and excuse to close it down. We are coming close to a time when the machiavellian in this world are about to be outed - and they are going to find extreme machiavellian ways to prevent this and to maintain the hierarchical order that they benefit from. In fact governments are already working on ways to keep us all in our place: Total Information Awareness is aimed at this role (see my post Social Network Analysis and Thought Crime)

I will not be surprised if by 2015 there is a state of emergency in the US - under which a fascist state eventually takes over (if that’s not already happening). I will eat my words if this doesn’t happen but all the evidence I see indicates to me that the US government is going to take more and more extreme actions in the face of: global energy depletion, global resource and ecological depletion, a need for global depopulation, growing citizen empowerment and peer to peer communication which governments find hard to control and threatening to power, the fragility of urbanisation, etc, etc.