New ‘Monsanto Protection Act’ Gives Monsanto Power Over US Government - #GMO #NWO

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It is imperative that we peacefully kick Monsanto out of the Senate and back into the alleyways of Washington D.C., and let it be known that any politician who sides with Big Biotech will not be staying in the Senate for much longer.
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There truly is no rest for the wicked and Monsanto is at war once again against health conscious consumers with the latest ‘Monsanto Protection Act,‘ managing to sneak wording into the latest Senate legislation that would give them blanket immunity from any USDA action regarding the potential dangers of their genetically modified creations while under review. The USDA would be unable to act against any and all new GMO crops that were suspected to be wreaking havoc on either human health or the environment.

It’s a legislative weapon that could be passed as early as next week if we don’t gather enough support to force our senators to eliminate the section.

It all started in the late hours of Monday night, when lobbyists working for the Monsanto-fronted biotechnology industry managed to slide a ‘rider’ (through the deceptively worded Farmer Assurance Provision, Sec. 735) into the Senate Continuing Resolution spending bill that is currently on the table of the Senate.

A massive petition to stop what has been labeled as the ‘Monsanto Protection Act’ has been launched by Food Democracy Now, detailing what could come if the legislation is signed into law within the coming days or weeks:

If approved, the Monsanto Protection Act would force the USDA to allow continued planting of any GMO crop under court review, essentially giving backdoor approval for any new genetically engineered crops that could be potentially harmful to human health or the environment.

Monsanto Protection Act Trumps U.S. Government

Federal courts would be powerless to regulate the sale and even cultivation of illegal and dangerous GMO crops, succumbing instead to the power of the biotech industry and Monsanto. The same threat we faced last summer during the initial emergence of this act. During that time, we saw major groups assemble against the act, from national farm institutions to food safety titans. The Center for Food Safety, the National Family Farm Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Sierra Club, and the Union of Concerned Scientists all came together to speak out against the incognito bombshell slipped into the 2012 Farm Bill and the 2013 Agriculture Appropriations Bill.

And now Monsanto is back at it.

Thus, it is imperative that we peacefully kick Monsanto out of the Senate and back into the alleyways of Washington D.C., and let it be known that any politician who sides with Big Biotech will not be staying in the Senate for much longer.

View the Petition Now

#Thank Manning (HD) - #FreeBrad #FreeManning

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Flood the Mail Rooms #ThankManning

PFC Manning 239 Sheridan Ave, Bldg 417 JBM-HH, VA 22211

Source: youtube.com

Bahrian Bans Guy Fawkes Masks To Repress Uprising - #Anonymous #AnonOps #AnonFamily #WTF Bahrain has banned Guy Fawkes masks, in an apparent bid to further stifle opposition protests in the Gulf state. A document issued by the Bahraini Ministry of Industry and Commerce on Thursday cited “public safety” as a factor behind the decision to ban the import of “revolution masks.” The Guy Fawkes mask, which became iconic thanks to its use in the 2006 movie “V for Vendetta,” has become an international symbol of anarchism and revolution. It is also an emblem of the hacktivist group Anonymous. The mask has become particularly widespread in the Middle East to maintain anonymity during anti-government protests. The United Arab Emirates also banned the mask in November, saying that anyone wearing the mask could be subjected to police questioning, Gulf News reported at the time. Bahrain has witnessed two years of political upheaval linked to opposition demands for a real constitutional monarchy, with the unrest claiming at least 80 lives, according to international rights groups. Protests continue despite the resumption on February 10 of a national dialogue between opposition groups and the government. A Saudi-led Gulf force entered the island in March 2011 to help crush the rebellion, but the country still witnesses almost daily protests. The small but strategic kingdom is home to US Fifth Fleet. Related: Obama Arms Bahrain Monarchy Against Pro-Democracy Protesters
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Bahrian Bans Guy Fawkes Masks To Repress Uprising - #Anonymous #AnonOps #AnonFamily #WTF

Bahrain has banned Guy Fawkes masks, in an apparent bid to further stifle opposition protests in the Gulf state.

A document issued by the Bahraini Ministry of Industry and Commerce on Thursday cited “public safety” as a factor behind the decision to ban the import of “revolution masks.”

The Guy Fawkes mask, which became iconic thanks to its use in the 2006 movie “V for Vendetta,” has become an international symbol of anarchism and revolution. It is also an emblem of the hacktivist group Anonymous.

The mask has become particularly widespread in the Middle East to maintain anonymity during anti-government protests. The United Arab Emirates also banned the mask in November, saying that anyone wearing the mask could be subjected to police questioning, Gulf News reported at the time.

Bahrain has witnessed two years of political upheaval linked to opposition demands for a real constitutional monarchy, with the unrest claiming at least 80 lives, according to international rights groups.

Protests continue despite the resumption on February 10 of a national dialogue between opposition groups and the government. A Saudi-led Gulf force entered the island in March 2011 to help crush the rebellion, but the country still witnesses almost daily protests.

The small but strategic kingdom is home to US Fifth Fleet.

Related: Obama Arms Bahrain Monarchy Against Pro-Democracy Protesters

#MSM -> #FED | Federal Reserve Confirms Security Breach, Calls #Anonymous Hack Claim 'Overstated' - #OpLastResort

A Federal Reserve spokesperson confirmed a temporary security breach of its computers to The Huffington Post on Tuesday morning.

“Information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product,” the spokesperson told HuffPost in a phone interview, adding that the problem was “fixed after discovery and is no longer an issue.”

According to the spokesperson, who asked not to be identified by name, the breach “did not affect critical operations.”

The confirmation comes in the wake of a claim by hacker group Anonymous on Sunday that it had stolen sensitive information on 4,000 American bank executives from Federal Reserve computers.

Although the security breach has now been confirmed, the spokesperson called Anonymous’ claim “overstated,” and would not comment on the nature of the data obtained other than to confirm that contact information was taken.

Earlier this week, ZDNet reported that “login information … credentials, IP addresses, and contact information of American bank executives” were listed in a spreadsheet posted to a government site that Anonymous had hacked.

Even if the breach might not have been as serious as publicized by Anonymous, it is the first actual leak of information achieved by the group’s Operation Last Resort. Launched in January, OpLastResort is the Anonymous response to the suicide of Internet activist Aaron Swartz. The group demands “reform of computer crime laws” and investigation of “overzealous prosecutors.”

Federal Reserve computers have been hacked before. In 2010, a Malaysian man was arrested in a credit card scheme after managing to hack into and damage 10 computers associated with a Federal Reserve training system, Bloomberg News reported at the time. However, no data or information was accessed or compromised in that attack, a spokeswoman told Bloomberg.

In 2011, Federal Reserve developers discovered a cross-scripting bug in Adobe ColdFusion software, which is used by some Federal Reserve Bank websites. Such cross-site scripting allows an attacker to gain high-level access privileges to sensitive information by way of injecting malicious client-side scripts.

“Web developers working for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta discovered the cross-site scripting vulnerability as part of an internal development project,” ThreatPost, an Internet security blog, reported at the time.

In December 2011, Adobe released a patch for ColdFusion that fixed weaknesses it said could be exploited in “a cross-site scripting attack.”

In an e-mail to HuffPost, Adobe senior communications manager Wiebke Lips wrote that the company could not comment on the specific breach confirmed Tuesday by the Federal Reserve. According to Lips, a patch released Jan. 15 by Adobe “addressed four vulnerabilities” that had been observed in active attacks against ColdFusion customers.

“These types of attacks are often referred to as ‘zero-days’ because a fix is not available at the time of the attack,” Lips wrote. “As soon as these vulnerabilities were reported to Adobe, we immediately addressed them in the software and provided the fix.”

According to an Adobe security bulletin, the recent patch for ColdFusion fixed loopholes that could have enabled a hacker to “circumvent authentication controls, potentially allowing the attacker to take control of the affected server … could result in information disclosure from a compromised server.”

Although it is unclear whether hackers used the recently patched vulnerabilities as a vector for attack, if a third party gained access to sensitive information through ColdFusion, it would follow that computers belonging to the Federal Reserve may have been compromised because their software was not up-to-date.

The Federal Reserve spokesperson would not elaborate on its security systems other than to say that measures against attacks were “absolutely” in place.

More

HERE (“Fed Confirms It Was Hacked By Anonymous”)

Dear Hacker Community - We Need To Talk. : by @AsherWolf <3

Foreword: I Know Your Feel!

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LogoRoughIdea-1

Some parts of this article deal with misogyny, sexism, and harassment, while other aspects of it respond to experiences of down-right douche-baggery.

It doesn’t apply to all of you, but a number of you engage in it and many of you are bystanders.

I know a lot the community doesn’t want to talk about this stuff. I know I didn’t personally try to build a bridge between wannabe-crypto-users and hackers so I could deal with shitful sexism, misogyny and down-right crappy behavior.

I know most people would rather just delete a sexist webpage or image, apologize for the offensive comment, or shitty behavior and move on. Again.

But things aren’t changing for the better. And pasting anti-harassment rules on conference wikis doesn’t seem to be making a dent in obviously unacceptable behavior of some arseholes.

Yes, of course, there are arseholes in all communities. But some communities make sexists, misogynists, harassers and general arseholes truly unwelcome.

Unfortunately, the hacker community seems to flounder at making progress in the area of human relations.

“We’re trying!”

Yeah, I hear you, but it’s not good enough. Not good enough by far. 

Inequality doesn’t just spring up without a context. And women don’t just opt out of hacking and hacker communities because of the tired rhetoric “maths and hacking is boys’ business.”

No, women stay the hell away from hacker-spaces, conferences and tech initiatives because of on-going experiences of misogyny, abuse, threats, put downs, belittlement, harassment, rape.

Last infosec conference I went to – there was six females and over 1000 males in attendance. My female friend roped me into pretending I was her lesbian lover, simply to get a guy to let-the-fuck-go of her hand.

“Oh, I’ve never experienced misogyny at a hacker conference”, says someone.

Well great for you. Many of us have. Including myself.

So much, that last night, I quit as an organizer of Cryptoparty.

It was an initiative I cared about and was deeply involved with setting up.

And yes, after I quit I said “fuck” a whole lot, and cried an ocean, then packed my son the toddler off to my mother’s house for the night and got profoundly drunk.

And now I’m ready to talk about the arse-hattery that basically broke me over the last few months.

I’m not some wall-flower or “pearl-clutching” provoker of needless moral outrage.

As a teenager I lived in youth refuges and on the streets. I’m unwilling to put up with bullshit

I have no problem fighting back. I’m not scared of speaking up either.

So what went wrong?

Cryptoparty was created one very boring evening, in a very open and inclusive conversation on Twitter, a little over four months ago.

I thought if the gap between cryptographers, hackers and users could be bridged, perhaps some activists would have a chance at scaling back aspects of surveillance. If we could teach people how to use crypto – we could maybe begin to organize without surveillance.

I paid a friend to set up a wiki and Cryptoparty was born. Decentralised, DIY, psuedo-leadership. All the catchy keywords. It felt exciting. It took off. People were drawn to the concept. Beer, chips, party.

And it seemed so easy to set up a Cryptoparty. The only requirement was a venue, and people willing to learn.

My rule was “counter negative criticism with unbearably nice optimism.” Anyone who whinged about something was asked to fix it themselves. A “do-ocracy” supposedly.

As soon as the Cryptoparty wiki went online I asked that an anti-harassment statement be included, much to the expressed chagrin of some men. They said it wasn’t necessary. They said they’d help deal with harassment personally, if it happened (by the way – they didn’t.)

Later on, it was one of those same men who’d been so resistant to the idea of an anti-harassment declaration on the wiki – who participated in bullying and talking down to me.

Meanwhile, Cryptoparties were springing up around the world faster than I could keep track.

Anyway, at some point I broke – something in me broke or something broke me.

There were lots of little things, piling on me day by day. But let me try to explain the events of the last four months a little for the readers at home.

Here goes…

A number of Cyptoparty organizers regularly talked down to me when I questioned their choices, suggested I wasn’t qualified to comment on their actions.

And then they left me to face public scrutiny when the shit hit the fan over their stupid decisions:

Some examples:

“We’re writing a Cryptoparty manual, it’ll be crowd-sourced by a limited group over four days…” (What? When were they planning to run the peer review before publication? Never?)

“Ohai, I’m running a Cryptoparty at Google and Mozilla.” (Cryptoparty is supposedly commercially non-affiliated and non-profit. Allowing it to be hosted at Google and Mozilla raised a number of issues that were never addressed.)

“Our Cryptoparty has a “no-laptop” rule, to keep users safe.” (Great, fabulous, and how were you planning to help new-comers learn to install crypto-tools?)

“We ran a Cryptoparty with @OpenISP in Tunisia with a real-name policy, funded by USAID.” (What the holy fuck!? @*#*@$&*!!!!!!!!)

You get the picture…

When I communicated about concerns and issues – as well as complaints from Cryptoparty participants peeved with out-of-touch crypto-lecturers who wanted to teach command lines to crypto-newcomers – I got put downs, got brushed off, ignored, told “oh don’t worry, we’ll look after it, it won’t be a problem”, “don’t worry your head about it”, or aggravatingly – told that I wasn’t qualified to judge their choices as I wasn’t a crypto-expert or a hacker.

And I got told to quit. Quite a bit, actually.

And then I got emails telling me to stick to motherhood and tweeting.

When I criticised @RT_Com for airing a segment on Cryptoparty that promoted CryptoCat (an insecure host-based security tool, not a core tool taught at Cryptoparties) – Cryptocat’s founder, Nadim Kobeissi responded:

Screen Shot 2012-12-29 at 9.18.40 AM

I think I may have told him to go bite me.

Eventually we both apologized for niceties sake, but damage done.

I also copped flack for the technically inaccurate aspects of the Cryptoparty manual, despite not having worked on the technical aspects of the book and having suggested to the book’s organizers that the project’s time-frame was too short.

When the issue of technical flaws in the Cryptoparty Manual took off on the LiberationTech email-list I responded: “I didn’t work on the technical aspects of the book. I can’t. I don’t have the right skill set.”

Jacob Appelbaum responded:

“I believe that you are totally able to learn and I think that it is very demoralizing when people say they are *unable* or *unwilling* to learn.”

Jacob continued: “That isn’t to say that you will become a developer of cryptographic protocols.”

Appelbaum’s charming treatise finished with a flourish: “It is to say that many people will need to make choices about security and trusting a vanguard is dangerous. We’re always trusting someone and I realize that reality. I didn’t write my own compiler to compile my email client before sending this email with hand crafted electrons… However the high level view of most of this stuff is well within the grasp of each person – it just requires an interest and *educational resources* that empowers *all people* to learn.”

My response:

“Wait, I’m just trying to remember when I last slept more than 4 hours in a night while trying to educate myself.

I’ve gone from being a Facebook user to running OTR, PGP and Tor all in under a month. Note: I’m a sole parent, without access to child support, no childcare and trying to support myself, my son, put myself through postgraduate studies and contribute to social movements.”

I should point out, Jacob was invited to speak at the first Cryptoparty. He asked me to use PrivateGSM, which I found impossible to install on my phone. 48 hours without sleep, and finally I managed to get it working on a friend’s phone. Hours before the Cryptoparty, Jacob let me know he had yet to install it himself. And then a couple hours later, he messaged to pullout entirely.

Yes, I’m sure he was very busy.

The idea behind Cryptoparty had always been about building a bridge between the crypto-community and new-comers, but increasingly I felt locked-out.

Multiple Cryptoparty IRC channels were created and the people creating them didn’t inform the general public about them, and didn’t add them to the wiki. Some of the servers they placed the IRC channels for Cryptoparties on were almost impossible to access.

One day I made it into one of the Cryptoparty IRC rooms – under a different handle than usual – and watched.

I watched a bunch of male Cryptoparty organisers talking about me – about how I knew nothing about crypto (well, that much was true, but the point had always been to build an educational bridge) and that “real hackers” should be the face of Cryptoparty, not a “mommy-type.”

Mommy-type. As if having a uterus made me ineligible. But I said nothing. I let it slide, for the sake of keeping the peace. I was trying to be “nice.” But I should have said something at the time.

Instead, I decided to drop back a bit from organising Cryptoparties, focus on getting a personal website set up instead.

@SamTheTechie, an organizer from a Cryptoparty in London offered to make me a website, said it’d cost $700. Said it’d only take weeks. I was foolish, I handed the money over, emailed him the links I wanted uploaded and waited. And waited…

When my “web-developer” got in contact next it was to tell me he’d gone on holidays and had presented Cryptoparty at the European Commission’s “No Disconnect” meeting. He hadn’t discussed it with me before-hand. I still have no idea what representations he made to the E.C. about Cryptoparty. He never reported his talk with the E.C. to the Cryptoparty wiki.

When I tried to discuss the issue, he /rage-quit the conversation.

Oh, and he *still* hadn’t done any work on the website either…

(Thanks to @selfagency for creating this website voluntarily and free of charge – it’s appreciated.)

Eventually, a number of friends encouraged me to apply to speak at 29c3 about Cryptoparty. My family offered childcare, on the sole condition I gained a speaker spot at 29c3.

At AUS$3k for a return flight to Europe, affording an airfare would have required me to do some serious crowd-funding – an idea I hated – but was willing to do for the sake of the chance to visit 29c3. It would have been my first holiday since 2008.

In the background of my application to speak at 29c3 was the fact a Sydney-based male Cryptoparty organiser had already posted in an application to speak at 29c3…

In an attempt to bridge the issue, I invited the 29c3 application to be crowd-sourced and agreed to make the talk into a panel – including the individual who had originally put in an application. He sat in on the crowd-sourced process of writing of the application, contributing nothing except criticism to anything I wrote for hours.

He didn’t actually contribute any text himself.

Later, he texted to say he thought he may have a “bit of an ego issue.”

29c3 got in contact, asked if I was willing to take some people off the application for the panel. I felt unable to, under pressure to yield to everyone. The application for a Cryptoparty panel at 29c3 was rejected.

Rejection always sucks, but what really rubbed my nose in it was knowing a group of guys who had treated me like crap, who put me down, talked down to me, criticized and belittled me for months… were heading off to 29c3 and running a Cryptoparty workshop – as opposed to the panel I’d applied for – without me.

And so finally, the last few days…

Watching Jacob Appelbaum on stage talking about the fight against the surveillance state via a glitchy live-stream.

Watching the guy who spent hours criticizing a compromised, crowd-sourced application to 29c3 tweet about how he was on his way to the conference – oh boy!

And watching the person I paid $700 to create a website *months* ago tweet he’d be at 29c3… and how he was looking forward to hanging out with the guy who criticised the Cryptoparty 29c3 application non-stop too (wheeee!)

And no, the “web-developer” still hasn’t built me a website or paid me back.

So by the time 29c3 properly got underway, my nose was more than a little out of joint.

And I stopped sleeping properly.

I reached peak rage as the ‘Creeper Card’ issue unfolded at 29c3. You might have read about the cards, if you were watching the 29c3 twitter stream.

The ‘Creeper Cards’ originated at DefCon in 2011.

Red cards supposedly represented unacceptable behavior.

At 29C3, someone took a bunch of the ‘Creeper Cards’ and made them into a statement all of their own. An image of a headless female body.

Screen Shot 2012-12-29 at 7.47.44 AM

The ‘Creeper Cards’ were ripe for send-up. Let’s face it: the hacker community has begun to rely upon ouiji board-style methods often utilized by individuals with profound communication impairment.

The headless ‘Creeper Card’ female body image is one hell of a statement. It’s implied message: creeps will exist, where-ever and when-ever and despite the initiatives you take, your efforts will be subverted, and all your efforts will be subjugated to place the focus back on your body, your gender…

And I’m sure, if it wasn’t for the fact I was incredibly pissed off about how I’ve been treated by some elements of the hacker community, then maybe I would have found some aspect of the ‘Creeper Card’ image funny. Maybe.

I didn’t.

Instead, when I saw the Headless Female ‘Creeper Card’ image I blacked out with pure rage for more than a few seconds.

And then I publicly railed, in unholy unrestrained outrage for all the ways I had lost my faith in members of the hacker community over the last few months.

I quit Cryptoparty publicly, live on twitter, raging against the slimedom I’d encountered over the last four months.

And then I watched as twitter-users pounded me for the “drama” I’d “caused”, for being a potential “lolcow” for having an emotion, rather than just sweetly tweeting the news like a respectable automation.

Journalist Quinn Norton, responding to my decision to quit Cryptoparty wrote: “You know who is worse than hacker culture and really really doesn’t give a shit? The people we need to use crypto against.”

If the hacker community truly has no respect for the values flushed away by regimes who seek to crack crypto – and no will to fight harassment, discrimination and douchebaggery – then frankly we might as well give up and join the storm-troopers.

I didn’t create Cryptoparty just so a bunch of privileged white boys could exclusively hang out together, slurping down ClubMate while trying to figure out how to anonymously use BitCoin to buy Aderall off SilkRoad.

You shouldn’t need a red card wagged in your face to let you know your behavior is shitful.

Yes, it’s all so very well-meaning, but ultimately “Creeper Cards” are like all other responses so far in most parts of geek community – bullshit tokenism.

For the most part, the study of human relations within hacker culture is marginalised (except of course, the realm of social engineering and scholarly endeavours.)

Human relations issues such as discrimination and harassment are relegated to informal talks, given no space on the main stage – and anti-harassment statements are tacked-on, ignored on most conference websites.

After I quit Cryptoparty people responded I had to stay, had to take responsibility for changing the culture of the community.

I was beyond tact. I howled “fuck you” back at them repeatedly. I was sick to death of being constantly requested to fix other people’s shitty behavior.

I tried to build bridges and at the end of the day was left with the mockery of an option to flap little pieces of red fucking card in the air – and my public howl in despair at the absolute wankery I’d experienced over the last few months.

So you still want a solution to the issue of douchebaggery in hacker-spaces? Really?

Ok. Start by talking about it physically, formally in public spaces. Not just online, on wikis and in small working-groups or in informal talks run by feminists.

In workplaces around the world, human relations departments trot their workforces off to anti-discrimination workshops on a regular basis.

Human Relations departments do it because they know the cost of not formally addressing harassment and discrimination impacts upon the workplace, both in terms of productivity and culture.

I’m not suggesting we send the global hacker community off to a H.R. anti-discrimination/anti-harassment training session (though it probably wouldn’t hurt.)

But if you’re serious about dealing with discrimination and harassment – put it as a topic on the main-stage. I really mean it.

Put the anti-harassment policy as an opening statement at your hacker or infosec conference. Chose a “thought leader” to open the conference each year who will be willing to engage the topic of community standards, even for a few minutes.

Would 10 minutes at the start of a conference explaining anti-discrimination policy and acceptable conduct really infringe on anyone’s “fun”?

It won’t change the culture of asshattery over-night, but it will begin a conversation that’s needed – far more necessary than another article or blog post like this, or more red-card waving in the wind.

Is it selfish for me to quit Cryptoparty? Probably. But I believe Cryptoparty will survive without me.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find another way to get my message across that the culture has to change without walking away, at least for now.

And it is also self-preservation. I couldn’t stand another second of the crap I went through over the last 4 months.

So many of you are fucking bystanders, and my respect for you has gone down the toilet over the last few months. You knew what I went through. And you said nothing. Go to hell.

You’ll drink Club-Mate in your hackerspaces and tinker with stuff.

I’ll go back to child-rearing and tweeting in the lull while the toddler is occupied and amused…for now.

We’ll see what the future brings.

When a Robot Signs a Bill: A Brief History of the Autopen - #WTF

Bob Olding, president of Damilic Corp., the leading manufacture of automatic signing machines for replicating authentic signatures,produces a signature at their Rockville, Md., office. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

While serving as the 3rd president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson discovered a piece of technology that he could simply not live without. And no, it wasn’t this thoroughly gonzo precursor to the home gym.

It was the polygraph (shown on the right): a machine that made direct copies of handwritten letters. The user would write a version on one side of the machine, and by mechanical action, the words would be instantly facsimiled on the other. Being the technophile that he was, Thomas Jefferson purchased two: one for the White House, one for Monticello.

In 1809, he wrote to the portrait artist Charles Wilson Peale raving that “the use of the polygraph has spoiled me for the old copying press the copies of which are hardly ever legible… . I could not, now therefore, live without the Polygraph.”

As it turns out, neither can modern-day presidents.

Yesterday, the president was in Hawaii, rejoining his family on vacation. The recently passed fiscal-cliff deal was in Washington. How could the all important-presidential signature be affixed to the bill to make it law? The solution: Obama signed it via a robot, the autopen, a technological great, great grandchild of the machine Jefferson so loved.

Although the White House won’t tell you how it works, the device essentially makes a copy of the president’s pen strokes and saves them in the system’s memory for future facsimile. Typically, any pen or pencil can be loaded into the machine. It has been reported that George W. Bush prefered Sharpies.

Citing ambiguity in the Constitution (the exact line is “if he approve he shall sign it”), George W. Bush’s Justice Department made the legal case that an autopen is as good as the president’s hand when it comes to signing bills.

“Neither the constitutional text nor the drafting and ratification debates provide further guidance regarding what it means for the President to ‘sign’ a bill he approves,” the opinion begins, and then dives into a lengthy legal discussion of what “signing” meant during the early days of the republic (it’s a thrilling read with many footnotes).

Although Bush set up the legal argument for autopen bill signing, he never used the device to enact legislation. Obama was the first to do so, signing an extension of the PATRIOT Act via autopen while in Europe. (Kind of fitting that a robot re-signed into law an act that represents the tenuous nature of technology, privacy, and the role of government.) Some lawmakers objected to the move, but no serious legal challenge to auto-signing bills has ever surfaced.

While Jefferson’s polygraph could only make copies if he was writing an orignial, fully robotized auto pens didn’t arrive until the 1930s. A 1936 article in Popular Mechanics described how the machine recorded a signature on “a master record, comparable to a phonograph,”and was transcribed by a “secret process” to make it difficult to steal one’s signature. There was even a function to scramble the recording, rendering the machine useless for a would-be signature thief. (Modern machines store signatures on SD cards.) Harry Truman is said to be the first U.S. president to use such a robotized machine.

The White House treats the presidential autopen’s security with the secrecy you might expect for the most powerful signature in the world. “I always heard the autopen was the second-most guarded thing in the White House after the president,” Jack Shock, Bill Clinton’s director of presidential letters and messages told the Associated Press in 2011. When the AP pressed the matter to the executive branch, the White House “declined to provide any further details about how many autopens the administration uses, what they look like, where they’re kept, or who makes the machine.”

While there was no signing ceremony for the fiscal cliff legislation, here’s how it probably happened.

#SpreadThis -> The Massive Oil and Gas Disaster You've Never Heard Of - #FRACKING #WhatTheFrack

Sink Hole.The picturesque bayous in Assumption Parish are now contaminated with natural gas. (Photo: Jeff Dubinsky / Louisiana Environmental Action Network)For residents in Assumption Parish, the boiling, gas-belching bayou, with its expanding toxic sinkhole and quaking earth is no longer a mystery; but there is little comfort in knowing the source of the little-known event that has forced them out of their homes.

Located about 45 miles south of Baton Rouge, Assumption Parish carries all the charms and curses of southern Louisiana. Networks of bayous, dotted with trees heavy with Spanish moss, connect with the Mississippi River as it slowly ambles toward the Gulf of Mexico. Fishermen and farmers make their homes there, and so does the oil and gas industry, which has woven its own network of wells, pipelines and processing facilities across the lowland landscape.

The first sign of the oncoming disaster was the mysterious appearance of bubbles in the bayous in the spring of 2012. For months the residents of a rural community in Assumption Parish wondered why the waters seemed to be boiling in certain spots as they navigated the bayous in their fishing boats.

Then came the earthquakes. The quakes were relatively small, but some residents reported that their houses shifted in position, and the tremors shook a community already desperate for answers. State officials launched an investigation into the earthquakes and bubbling bayous in response to public outcry, but the officials figured the bubbles were caused by a single source of natural gas, such as a pipeline leak. They were wrong.

On a summer night in early August, the earth below the Bayou Corne, located near a small residential community in Assumption, simply opened up and gave way. Several acres of swamp forest were swallowed up and replaced with a gaping sinkhole that filled itself with water, underground brines, oil and natural gas from deep below the surface. Since then, the massive sinkhole at Bayou Corne has grown to 8 acres in size.

On August 3, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a statewide emergency, and local officials in Assumption ordered the mandatory evacuation of about 300 residents of more than 150 homes located about a half-mile from the sinkhole. Four months later, officials continue to tell residents that they do not know when they will be able to return home. A few have chosen to ignore the order and have stayed in their homes, but the neighborhood is now quiet and nearly vacant. Across the road from the residential community, a parking lot near a small boat launch ramp has been converted to a command post for state police and emergency responders.

120612-4c(Photo: Jeffrey Dubinsky / Louisiana Environmental Action Network)

“This place is no longer fit for human habitation, and will forever be,” shouted one frustrated evacuee at a recent community meeting in Assumption.

The Bayou Corne sinkhole is an unprecedented environmental disaster. Geologists say they have never dealt with anything quite like it before, but the sinkhole has made few headlines beyond the local media. No news may be good news for Texas Brine, a Houston-based drilling and storage firm that for years milked an underground salt cavern on the edge of large salt formation deep below the sinkhole area. From oil and gas drilling, to making chloride and other chemicals needed for plastics and chemical processing, the salty brine produced by such wells is the lifeblood of the petrochemical industry.

Geologists and state officials now believe that Texas Brine’s production cavern below Bayou Corne collapsed from the side and filled with rock, oil and gas from deposits around the salt formation. The pressure in the cavern was too great and caused a “frack out.” Like Mother Nature’s own version of the controversial oil and gas drilling technique known as “fracking,” brine and other liquids were forced vertically out of the salt cavern, fracturing rock toward the surface and causing the ground to give way.

“In the oil field, you’ve heard of hydraulic fracturing; that’s what they’re using to develop gas and oil wells around the country …”What is a frack-out is, is when you get the pressure too high and instead fracturing where you want, it fractures all the way to the surface,” said Gary Hecox, a geologist with the Shaw Environmental Group, at a recent community meeting in Assumption Parish. Texas Brine brought in the Shaw group to help mitigate the sinkhole.

As the weeks went by, officials determined the unstable salt cavern was to blame for the mysterious tremors and bubbling bayous. Texas Brine publically claimed the failure of the cavern was caused by seismic activity and refused to take responsibility for the sinkhole, but the United States Geological Survey (USGS) has since determined that the collapsing cavern caused the tremors felt in the neighborhood, not the other way around.

120612-4a(Photo: Jeffrey Dubinsky / Louisiana Environmental Action Network)

According to Hecox and the USGS, the collapsing cavern shifted and weakened underground rock formations, causing the earthquakes and allowing natural gas and oil to migrate upward and contaminate the local groundwater aquifer. Gas continues to force its way up, and now a layer of gas sits on top of the aquifer and leaches through the ground into the bayous, causing the water to bubble up in several spots. Gas moves much faster through water than oil, which explains why the bubbles have not been accompanied by a familiar sheen.

Documents obtained by the Baton Rouge newspaper, The Advocate, revealed that in 2011, Texas Brine sent a letter to the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to alert its director, Joseph Ball, that the cavern had failed a “mechanical integrity test” and would be capped and shut down. The DNR received the letter but did not require any additional monitoring of the well’s integrity.

Despite this letter, regulators apparently did not suspect the brine cavern to be the source of the bubbles until a few days before the sinkhole appeared, The Advocate reported. The letter raised ire among local officials, who did not hear about the failed integrity test until after Bayou Corne became a slurry pit.

Texas Brine spokesmen Sonny Cranch told Truthout the company has not officially taken responsibility for the sinkhole disaster, but has “acknowledged that there is a relationship” between the collapsed cavern and the sinkhole.

120612-4b(Photo: Jeffrey Dubinsky / Louisiana Environmental Action Network)

A Historic Disaster

“It’s a tough problem. Nobody in the world has ever faced a situation like this that we’re grappling with,” Hecox told evacuees at a community meeting on November 13.

At an earlier public meeting on October 23, Hecox said there is no “cookbook” for dealing with the sinkhole and, because the disaster is unprecedented, there is no clear path for a cleanup. After all, he said, you can’t “fix” a collapsed underground cavern.

At the most recent meeting, Hecox told residents that installing methane monitors in houses near the sinkhole was one step that must to be taken if they ever wish to return home. At one point, an evacuee interrupted Hecox.

“You expect us to go back to our houses again?” the evacuee shouted from the audience. “Have y’all lost your damn minds?”

No Place Like Home

Nick Romero is a former postal worker from Baton Rouge who moved to the Belle Rose community in Assumption parish to retire next to the bayous.

“Until May 30, or whenever they reported the bubbles and stuff, everything was great around here, just great,” Romero told Truthout during an interview at his home near the sinkhole in early November.

Romero has a small boathouse on the bayou behind his home, where he and his wife have lived for more than 15 years. Romero can simply push a button to drop his boat in the water and follow the bayou to his favorite fishing holes.

“The fishing was great, ah man,” Romero said. “I just go over there, turn a nob, and if they don’t bite, I go back to doing what I’m doing.”

But Romero has not gone fishing anywhere in the neighborhood since the sinkhole opened up nearby.

“You just don’t know what could happen next,” he said.

Every night before going to sleep, Romero surfs the web for updates on the sinkhole from various local and state agencies. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night, worried about the sinkhole, and spends hours thinking about questions to ask authorities, or looking up information online.

Romero said he sometimes smells the sinkhole, which sits behind a tree line on the other side of a nearby state road. The morning before the interview, he said, was the first time the fumes came into his house. The air outside was heavy and thick, and soon the smell was inside, hanging low about the house. Luckily, he said, as the day heated up, the fumes evaporated.

Romero probably smelled the stench of the crude oil floating on the top of the sinkhole. Texas Brine has been skimming it from the surface and pumping what they can out of the ground.

Romero and his wife among the last people still living in their homes on their block in early November.The rest had evacuated. Romero said they had finally decided to move out just a few days earlier, but they did not know where to go. Should they sign a lease on a new home? What if returning home became possible in a few months? Hecox and local authorities have made it clear that they have no idea when the evacuation order will be lifted. For the Romeros, there are too many questions and not enough answers.

Romero’s decision to finally evacuate was partially based on serious health concerns: His wife is battling breast cancer for the second time in a decade. He gestured with his hand, naming nearby homes where residents had also developed breast cancer. From 2005 to 2009, Assumption Parish had the seventh highest breast cancer rate among Louisiana’s 64 counties, according to the National Cancer Institute. Romero is concerned about radioactive material that was produced by Texas Brine’s mining operation more than a decade ago.

In 1995, Texas Brine asked state authorities for permission to dump “low amounts” of soils containing underground radioactive material into the cavern that is now collapsed. The “naturally occurring radioactive material,” also known as NORM, had accumulated in soils near the well pad as part of the brine production process.

Texas Brine’s Cranch said there was a “serious discussion” about storing the NORM in the cavern, but that never happened. Instead, he said, the company left the material near the wellhead and above ground, as allowed by state law. Cranch said NORM has a “low level” of radiation and a “low half-life.”

“This stuff is everyday stuff,” Cranch said.

State officials found NORM in the sinkhole in August, but only at concentrations well below even acceptable levels. They determined it did not pose a risk to human health, and there’s no hard evidence linking the radioactive material to the cases of breast cancer noted by Romero. The NORM is simply another unknown on Romero’s list of worries.

“It was a nice, laidback, easygoing place,” Romero said of his community. “You feel safe. But you just don’t have that anymore.”

No End in Sight

On November 27, the sinkhole had a “burp,” according to observers. Crude oil and woody debris rose to the surface, as water from a nearby swamp was seen flowing into the sinkhole. The “burp” roughly coincided with seismic activity recorded by the US Geological Survey.

The sinkhole continues to shift and settle, as do the fractured rocks below it, regularly causing tremors and micro-earthquakes observed by seismic monitors. Shaw Geologist Gary Hecox believes the sinkhole may increase in diameter, and observers have found that the depth of the sinkhole has decreased from 490 feet to 140 feet.

At a public meeting in mid-October, Hecox told evacuees that there is a considerable amount of subterranean material that has yet to be accounted for and may continue the frack out. At the time, the sinkhole measured 550 feet across, but Hecox calculated that it could grow to 1,500 feet across. When asked how many trees and living things could be killed by brine and oil leaking from the sinkhole, Hecox said he did not know.

The hole won’t grow big enough to swallow the nearby neighborhood or state highway, Hecox said, but he continued to insist that the mandatory evacuation order is appropriate. When asked about the risks faced by those who ignored the order, which is “mandatory” but not enforced, Hecox repeatedly said that he would “not let his grandkids” live near the sinkhole.

Cleanup work continues while residents wait for the undetermined end of the evacuation order. Some evacuees are staying with friends and family; others are renting places to stay while they wait.

Texas Brine has recovered a considerable amount of oil from the sinkhole and formations below, but the company has failed to keep oil and other pollutants from contaminating nearby waterways, according to state officials. On December 1, Louisiana Commissioner of Conservation James Welsh fined Texas Brine $100,000 for failing to meet several deadlines for the cleanup effort. The company failed to install a containment system at the sinkhole to prevent contamination of nearby waterways by a November 16 deadline, Welsh said. Texas Brine also failed to meet deadlines for installing methane monitors in nearby homes and establishing a number of vent wells to burn off natural gas in the aquifer and other underground formations.

“We cannot, and will not, tolerate delays or excuses in the effort to protect public safety and the environment, especially when the people of Bayou Corne still cannot feel comfortable returning to their own homes,” Welsh said.

The company is also under state to orders to pay a weekly $875 stipend to each evacuated household.

Vent wells set up by Texas Brine are now burning off the natural gas that contaminated local aquifer. Like flaming torches, pipes connected to the aquifer let flames fly into the open air as the gas makes its way out of the groundwater. One vent well removing gas from the aquifer can burn about 46,900 cubic feet of gas per day.

Wilma Subra, a chemist and technical advisor for the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, has been monitoring the sinkhole and evacuated neighborhood. Subra, who has documented environmental justice issues across the country, told Truthout that the evacuees and others living nearby are “a very well-informed and engaged community.”

Public meetings and web postings provided by local officials, Texas Brine and state regulators provide the community with updated information on a near-daily basis. A spokesperson for Texas Brine told Truthout the company is trying to make its operations as transparent as possible.

Transparency alone, however, will not bring the evacuees back to their homes.

“We are doing all we can do…. Mother Nature has to take its course,” said spokesperson Cranch, who added that Texas Brine did not issue the evacuation order and some people have ignored it and returned home.

Romero and other residents remain frustrated with Texas Brine. They say that simply complying with state orders to clean up the sinkhole is not enough, and the company should go above and beyond the call of duty to return them to their homes.

“They are frustrated and they are scared, and the level of frustration and the level of depression are building,” Subra said. “They have been out of their homes since the beginning of August, and there is basically no end in sight.”

The Bayou Corne sinkhole is not going away anytime soon. Texas Brine, state authorities and experts like Hecox have made it clear there is no magic fix for a massive slurry pit, a collapsed underground cavern and untold amounts of oil and gas escaping through the disturbed earth.

These are difficult facts to face for residents like Romero. Even if they can return to their homes one day, he said, the neighborhood will never be the same.

UAE bans Guy Fawkes masks… reallyNovember 21, 2012 In the UAE it is now illegal to wear a Guy Fawkes mask, the iconic symbol of the international hacktivist collective known as Anonymous. The clear implication of the new law is that the UAE government fears the power of the mask, and the Anonymous collective the mask represents. On November 17, Gulf News reported that government authorities made the Guy Fawkes mask illegal in anticipation of December 2, which is National Day in the UAE. Any person found wearing a Guy Fawkes masks risks being taken into custody for police questioning. The report cites a Dubai Police official who stressed the negative connotations of the mask, saying: “Using any symbol that insults the country or instigates unrest against its system is not allowed. We urge citizens to celebrate using other symbols such as national flags, slogans or photos that are more appropriate to the happy occasion of National Day.” Anonymous, and the Guy Fawkes mask, became a prominent feature of the Arab Spring uprisings. As a result, the mask is now a symbol of rebellion against tyrannical governments and regimes across the region, and across the world. Source It’s not the mask they should be afraid of; it’s the idea behind the mask!
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UAE bans Guy Fawkes masks… really
November 21, 2012

In the UAE it is now illegal to wear a Guy Fawkes mask, the iconic symbol of the international hacktivist collective known as Anonymous. The clear implication of the new law is that the UAE government fears the power of the mask, and the Anonymous collective the mask represents.

On November 17, Gulf News reported that government authorities made the Guy Fawkes mask illegal in anticipation of December 2, which is National Day in the UAE. Any person found wearing a Guy Fawkes masks risks being taken into custody for police questioning.

The report cites a Dubai Police official who stressed the negative connotations of the mask, saying:

“Using any symbol that insults the country or instigates unrest against its system is not allowed. We urge citizens to celebrate using other symbols such as national flags, slogans or photos that are more appropriate to the happy occasion of National Day.”

Anonymous, and the Guy Fawkes mask, became a prominent feature of the Arab Spring uprisings. As a result, the mask is now a symbol of rebellion against tyrannical governments and regimes across the region, and across the world.

Source

It’s not the mask they should be afraid of; it’s the idea behind the mask!

A Norwegian Perspective on the EU Nobel Prize: “Insult to the Peoples of Europe and the Whole World” | Global Research

nobel

The European Union (EU) is not a peace project. The EU is not a “People’s Europe”.  The EU is and has always been the Europe of the monopolies.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee continues unabated to scandalize the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel testament to a degree that evokes head-shaking and embarrassment abroad as well as at home. Under the leadership of former Norwegian Labour party leader and current Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Thorbjørn Jagland, the committee is already guilty of handing the award to the belligerent U.S.  President Obama. And now to the EU!

Supposedly, the reason for awarding the prize to the EU is that “the Union and its predecessors have spent more than six decades helping to promote peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.”

This is like spitting the peoples of Europe right in the face. What “human rights?” More than 25 million people across the European Union are struck by mass unemployment.

Half of the young people are without work and countries such as Greece and Spain are being battered with welfare cuts and misery to an extreme extent, with the prospect of even worse attacks to come.

The “national” governments in the most crisis-ridden member states have become administrative bodies. They are threatened and instructed by the troika – the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF – to cut funding for schools, pensions, hospitals and wages down to the bone.
A war project

The EU is supposed to have created “peace” in the Balkans. Here we are speaking of the same EU, with Germany as a particularly active player, that encouraged and provoked civil war in Yugoslavia in the 90′s! Since then we have witnessed how especially France and Britain, but also other European powers, have been the main aggressors in relation to the bombardment of Libya in 2011. At this moment they are using a similar threatening rhetoric against Syria.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee mocks the European workers and peoples. But it also mocks the people and workers of Norway, who by no means regard the Union as a peace project. That is one of the reasons that seventy percent of Norwegians say no to Norwegian EU membership.

We ask the peoples of Europe and the whole world for forgiveness and beg they understand that the political elite and the ruling class of Norway does not represent or respect the people of Norway; they only respect and obey big capital, the U.S. and the European Union bosses.

The Europe of monopolies is an imperialist structure with two possible outcomes. Either it could become a “successful” imperialist union under German leadership that exploits workers at home and abroad and wages war against other states and peoples. Alternatively, the contradictions between the Union’s member states and capital groupings will lead to fractures, trade wars and perhaps open war between the great powers themselves.

Whatever the final outcome, the EU is anything but a project for peace.

#MSM - @CNBC EXECS CHILDREN MURDERED 1 DAY AFTER #CNBC REPORT $43 TRILLION BANKER LAWSUIT? - #WTF

~

Watch video here:
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2012/10/cnbc-execs-children-murdered-1-d…

other sources:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/49555671
http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/26/us/new-york-nanny-deaths/index.html#cnn-disqus-…

Source: youtube.com

#MSM - 100-Year Starship Project Forges Ahead With First Round of Funding

USS Enterprise Wikimedia Commons

An ambitious effort for an interstellar travel planning organization officially kicked off this week, after DARPA awarded $500,000 to form the 100-Year Starship initiative. Former astronaut Mae Jemison, whose proposal was selected earlier this year, will lead the new independent organization. The goal is to ensure that the capability for human interstellar travel exists within the next 100 years.

It may not look like the starship Enterprise, but a real interstellar vessel is possible within that timeframe, Jemison said. “Yes, it can be done. Our current technology arc is sufficient,” she said in a statement.

In its first year, the organization will seek new investors and develop new ideas for interstellar exploration, the new 100YSS website says. A public symposium is planned for September in Houston, where anyone from engineers to philosophers will be able to present papers and host talks about the challenges of such a project. The 100-Year Starship is not necessarily a ship per se, but an organization that can last 100 years and potentially carry out the vision of a real starship. It will look for input from scientists, engineers, doctors, sociologists, writers (!), ethicists and public policy experts.

The 100-Year Starship project also has a new scientific research partner called The Way, an awesomely named spinoff that will focus on “speculative, long-term science and technology,” according to the project. We can’t wait to see what they come up with.

[via EE Times]

Army Issues Anti-Suicide Nasal Spray As Military Suicides Double The military suicide rate doubled in July. That’s one of our troops, almost every day. To come up with an answer, the Army recently gave 3 million dollars to a university of Indiana research center, and those researchers came back with this: Anti-Suicide Nasal Spray. Katie Drummond of The Daily reports researchers found a naturally occuring neurochemical called thyrotropin-releasing hormone, or TRH, that has euphoric, calming, anti-depressant effects. News of the nasal spray comes as a relief to some, who had to endure spinal taps for injections of the medicine. The Pentagon, which tracks military suicides, reported that troops have committed the act at an 18 percent increase over the same period last year. Now, more troops die by their own hands that by the hands of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The spray is only possible because of advances in “nanotechnology delivery systems.” Researchers plan to run a full battery of trials over the next few years, and hopefully put the spray not only in the hands of soldiers, but civilians as well.
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Army Issues Anti-Suicide Nasal Spray As Military Suicides Double

The military suicide rate doubled in July. That’s one of our troops, almost every day.

To come up with an answer, the Army recently gave 3 million dollars to a university of Indiana research center, and those researchers came back with this: Anti-Suicide Nasal Spray.

Katie Drummond of The Daily reports researchers found a naturally occuring neurochemical called thyrotropin-releasing hormone, or TRH, that has euphoric, calming, anti-depressant effects. News of the nasal spray comes as a relief to some, who had to endure spinal taps for injections of the medicine.

The Pentagon, which tracks military suicides, reported that troops have committed the act at an 18 percent increase over the same period last year. Now, more troops die by their own hands that by the hands of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The spray is only possible because of advances in “nanotechnology delivery systems.” Researchers plan to run a full battery of trials over the next few years, and hopefully put the spray not only in the hands of soldiers, but civilians as well.

(via anti-propaganda)

Source: anarcho-queer

#MSM - Imperial Affront: Ecuador Will Face U.S. Wrath for Asylum Decision

It is apparent that the nation of Ecuador will now be in the frame for what American foreign policy elites like to call, in their dainty and delicate language, “the path of action.” Ecuador granted political asylum to Julian Assange on Thursday for one reason only: the very real possibility that he would be “rendered” to the United States for punishment, including the possibility of execution.

None of the freedom-loving democracies involved in the negotiations over his fate — Britain, Sweden, and the United States — could guarantee that this would not happen … even though Assange has not been charged with any crime under U.S. law. [And even though the sexual misconduct allegations he faces in Sweden would not be crimes under U.S. or UK law.] Under these circumstances — and after a sudden, blustering threat from Britain to violate the Ecuadorean embassy and seize Assange anyway — the government of Ecuador felt it had no choice but to grant his asylum request.

As we all know, some of America’s top political figures have openly called for Assange to be put to death for the crime of — well, what was his crime, exactly, in American eyes? His crime is this: he published information leaked to him by a whistle-blower — exactly as the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, NBC, Fox News, etc., etc., do on a regular basis. Some American leaders and media blowhards have demanded he be executed for “treason,” although, as an Australian citizen, he cannot commit treason against the United States. Others say his leaking of classified documents (none of them remotely as sensitive as, say, the much-celebrated Pentagon Papers from the Vietnam Era) has put “American soldiers in danger” — even though America’s own military and intelligence officials have repeatedly stated that no one has been harmed from the publication of documents on Wikileaks.

No one has been physically harmed, that is. Of course, great harm has been done to the pride of the puffed–up poltroons who strut and preen atop the imperial battlements, thinking themselves the lords of all the earth and the apple of every little peon’s eye. Their crimes and lies and third-rate minds were exposed — in their own words — by Wikileaks: and it is for this that Assange must pay. (And be made an example of to all those who might do likewise). Our imperial elites (and their innumerable little yapping media sycophants on both sides of the political fence) simply cannot bear to have American power and domination resisted in any way, at any time, for any reason, anywhere, by anyone. It offends their imperial dignity. It undermines their extremely fragile, frightened, frantic egos, which can only be held together by melding themselves to an image of monstrous, implacable, unstoppable power.

It also — and by no means incidentally — threatens to put a slight crimp in their bottom line, for the American system is now thoroughly militarized; the elite depend, absolutely, on war, death, terror and fear to sustain their economic dominance. As the empire’s chief sycophant, Thomas Friedman, once put it: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” You really can’t put it any plainer than that. The only path to prosperity is through domination by armed force. Others must die, must suffer, must quake in fear, to preserve our comfort. This is Modern American Militarism in a nutshell: the ruling ideology and national religion of American society today.

Anything or anyone who threatens this dominance — or just disagrees with it, or simply wants to be left alone by it — is automatically judged an enemy of the imperial state. You must accept the system. You must get with the program. You cannot question it. The beliefs or religion or ideology of the resister (or perceived resister) do not matter in the slightest. Even the impact (or lack of impact) of the resistance doesn’t matter. It is resistance that it is the crime. It is the refusal to acknowledge the greatness and goodness of the strutters on the battlements, and the legitimacy of their armed domination over the earth, and over you.

It is not enough that you obey; you must be seen to obey. You must obey cheerfully, without complaint — just ask any of thousands and thousands of your fellow citizens who have been tasered or beaten or arrested for failing to show due deference to a police officer or security guard or any of the many other heavily armed figures out there who can stop us, hold us, put us away — or put us down — on the merest whim.

Although Britain is acting as the beard in this case, the government of the Nobel Peace Laureate is clearly driving the action. It is simply inconceivable that Washington will not find ways to punish Ecuador for this act of lèse–majesté. What form it will take remains to be seen (although it could begin with covert backing for Britain’s violation of the Ecuadorean embassy in London). But the fragile, frantic strutters will not let this pass.

Source: mostlywater.org

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