A Networked World

The real Wikileaks secrets

Most of what we have seen from the Wikileaks cables is mere confirmation of what we suspected all along, mostly that our politicians and other leaders routinely lie to us about what they are doing and, especially, why they are doing it.

In some cases that leads to dead people as have illegal or unwinnable wars such as in Iraq and Afghanistan and it is seriously rich to have people with buckets of blood on their hands lecturing Wikileaks about the possibility that people may be compromised.

There is a difference between those who cause harm inadvertently while trying to out a criminal and those who commit the crimes in the first place. Ask any cop who has accidentally killed someone who walked into the line of fire at the wrong moment, for example.

But the real secret that is causing so much panic is not the diplomatic chitchat and scandal, schadenfreude-inducing though that may be; what is causing all the sturm und drang is the meta message that is coming down the line and will get much liuder and much clearer as the commercial and banking data comes out.

That message is this, the game is rigged. Like this, for instance

TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – A WikiLeaks cable indicates that BHP Billiton tried to sabotage a proposed investment by China's Chinalco in rival Rio Tinto, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“The cables sent from Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan's chief of staff to US officials describe how BHP "played its cards with consummate skill" in lobbying the government to delay a decision on a deal between Rio Tinto and Chinalco,” the ABC report said.

In February 2009, Chinalco agreed to invest $19,5-billion in Rio Tinto and its operations to obtain an 18% stake in the world's third-biggest mining company, which at the time was battling to shift debt.

But Rio broke off the deal in June, opting instead for a big rights issue and a since-scrapped iron-ore joint venture in Australia with BHP.

The Chinalco agreement had followed an earlier failed hostile takeover bid by BHP Billiton for Rio Tinto.    

All of the players involved knew what was going on, not one of them lacks the resources to know what the others are actually doing behind the scenes, the only people who must not find out that the pollies and the captains of industry are rigging the game is us.

As long as we can be convinced that we have to play the capitalist (or communist or theocratic) game and that there are rules which, if followed, can lead to "success" we will keep doing our best and blaming ourselves for any failures.

But once we see clearly that the whole game is rigged by those who have been playing longest, we will first withdraw our participation and, when they try to enforce play, out will come the torches and pitchforks.

THAT is what is getting so many panties in a bunch in the capitals of the world.

Understanding America

As a vassal state of the Empire, NZ has to understand what is happening in the US because what happens there has implications everywhere. So their current madness about Obama's birth certificate and the violence around getting a better health care system is important. It just makes no sense until you read Dana Blankenhorn: The 1969 Game: Days of Rage

When a political thesis is overthrown, when a generation's assumptions about political right or wrong cease to be the majority view, the inevitable result is rage.

That's what is happening at the "town hall" meetings over health care. It's not just that activists are feeding their people lies. It's that people are acting on those lies, with a virulence and potential for violence that threatens our democracy.

The shoe was on the other foot, in my lifetime.

The year was 1969. The subject was Vietnam.The 1968 election had settled this question. The war was a "Cold War activity," as Robert McNamara said, and surrender was not an option. But those who opposed the war (and it was a stupid war) could not accept the peoples' verdict, resulting in a series of protests climaxing in the notorious "days of rage" protests organized by the Weathermen.

The Weathermen failed, the question is whether the birthers and the anti health reform people will succeed, they have behind them the full power of corporate America.

God help us all if they do.

Sceurity STILL Doesn't scale

In a deterministic universe, at least in some theoretical paradise, it would be possible to predict everything provided only that you could get enough information to start with. And those who sell us all manner of technological solutions to our fear appear to live in that kind of universe; all we need is to collect more data.

Some get nervous that our freedoms will be undermined by all this data collection but I have always embraced it. Let them collect more data, much more data, so much data that they choke on it.

Oh, wait. U.K. police swamped by surveillance TV data.

The police cannot deal with the amount of information generated by surveillance cameras, according to the U.K.'s Association of Chief Police Officers.

Ian Readhead, director of information for the ACPO Criminal Records Office, said this week that police are overwhelmed by the volume of such data and that one of his major concerns is that police don't have the capability to track a car in real time using the Automatic Number Plate Recognition System, which is part of the surveillance cameras' functions.

"The problem is the amount of data," said Readhead, speaking at a data protection in event in London on Wednesday.

Yep, looks like we are getting there, as people like Bruce Schneier and YT have been confidently predicting for years.

We can't have the kind or the level of security we would like, its always been like that, nothing has changed. Get over it.

There's No Ammo on the Shelves

I've thought for years that with China and India practising female infanticide at serious rates, the two neighbouring countries are going to have to find a way to keep their millions of never-to-be=-married young men from turning on their own people. The traditional way to do that has been war with a neighbour.

When the neighbour has the same problem, its a win-win for mother nature, if not for anyone else. But the cause and the data have been there for a long time. Same thing on the other side of the world where, right across the US, There's No Ammo on the Shelves.

Ever since it became clear that Barack Obama would be our next president, there's been an unprecedented run on guns 'n ammo in America. Partly this is fueled by fears, some justified some not, that Obama will outlaw a broad range of assault weapons; partly it's fueled by socioeconomic factors, racism and right-wing hate.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in Victorville, a desert exurb of Los Angeles that boomed faster with the subprime craze than just about any city in the country and fell harder when it all collapsed. Today, guns and ammo are in short supply here in Victorville. But there is an abundance of despair and paranoia.

Its a horrific story, not just because of the ignorance, stupidity and blind hatred that are fuelling the arms race, but because in spending all these millions on weapons adn ammo, ($25 for a box of 25 x 9mm shells) the community is pushing ever molre of its scarce resources into non-productive use; helping to guarantee the worst of the possible outcomes.

Dang it, people who don't own weapons are bying ammo, "just in case".

Theatre - its only pretend you know

We have been treated by various panicked bureaucracies for the last 9 years to a panoply iof "security" actions that we are supposed to believe are keeping us safe from the terrorists.

so what do we make of this? Teens smuggle weapons on Australian Qantas, Jetstar flights.

Two boys have smuggled an arsenal of weapons and ammunition through two states in one of Australia's most serious breaches of airport security. The boys, aged 14 and 11, packed stolen pistols, knives and 3000 rounds of ammunition in their check-in luggage on a Qantas flight from Karratha to Perth on Monday night, the West Australian reports. They then boarded a Jetstar flight to Cairns where they were arrested on Tuesday morning, the paper said.

A 14 year old and an 11 year old, with an arsenal of stolen weapons flies clear axcross the country, pasisng through not one, but 4 security checks (personal and baggae, before they are caught.

Lessons

• This is security theatre meant to keep the ignorant among us happy and to PO the rest of us because, like theatre, it isn't REAL.
• The systems don't work. When they are tested by adults or ignored by kids, they fail
• If anyone really wanted to circumvent these "controls" it would be child's play - literally.
• Therefore, nobody is trying to attack us, they achieved ALL their goals on 911, they pushed over a couple of dominoes (three if you count WT7) and left the rest to the ignroance and fevered imaginations of the pollies and the bureacrats.

We have seen the enemy alright, and he is US.

Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'

With a hat tip to Bidabunch, The Onion shows how utterly predictable Bush was.

"My fellow Americans," Bush said, "at long last, we have reached the end of the dark period in American history that will come to be known as the Clinton Era, eight long years characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas. The time has come to put all of that behind us."

Bush swore to do "everything in [his] power" to undo the damage wrought by Clinton's two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.

During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.

"You better believe we're going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration," said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. "Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?"

Utterly, utterly predictable, but carefully ignored by 99% of the media and the vast majority of Americans, which makes Bush himself Black Swan number one.

In a mostly pointless piece at Marketwatch Paul Farrel talks about a test to see whether we'll profit from the next Black Swan event and in the comments a racist, fascist republican (I know, mostly redundant) calls Obama the Black Swan and predicts awful things for the US.

He is taken to task but actually he may be right. Go back two years and none of those in power would have predicted that the black junior senator from Illinois would start with nothing, bankroll his campaign via the Internet, roll the Clinton Machine inside the Democratic Party and them blow the Republican permanent majority into the weeds.

That he took the oath of office today is unprecedented in so many ways and we have to hope that he is Black Swan II because only a force with that kind of power will be able to prevent the US from crashing and burning and taking the rest of us with it.

Unlike many, I didn't get up early to watch the inauguration live, much as I love Obama's rhetoric; there is little to celebrate in it. He has inherited the whirlwind and he has almost no time to unwind it.

But if anyone in the US can inspire and energise people and canalise that energy through grass-roots level organisation, it is Barack Hussein Obama. We must all wish him well, our lives and the lives of our children actually depend on him delivering.

PS, I think the real black swan in the Dems was probably Howard Dean. He is Obama's prophet at least and paved the way for his candidacy in a party that was functionally depressed and totally clueless.

Terrorists in our midst

Bin laden and his boys have the occasional success, but for sustained assaults on the population, start with the state: Police deliver TradeMe names to prisoners.

The private details of up to 10,000 Trade Me users - described as a "shopping list for criminals" - have been released by police to prison inmates.

Police investigating the so-called terror raids last year obtained the information of the innocent traders as evidence. They then passed the disclosure material to defence lawyers and, in one case, to the prison cell of Jamie Lockett.

One of the "Urewera 16" arrested on firearms charges, Lockett received 16 boxes containing 24,000 pages of information relating to the police case against him, according to this week's Listener.

One of the boxes contained the personal details of up to 10,000 Trade Me customers, including their name, user name, personal email address, phone numbers, home address and trading history over the past five years.

One trader, whose details were passed on to Lockett, recently bought an AK-47 military assault rifle and 100 rounds of ammunition and other firearms, including target rifles.

The security services are pretty famous for just "losing" stuff, laptops, discs, websites loaded with personal data, but at least we have the protection of the herd; those things are mislaid in random places at unpredictable times and as such no more a risk than crossing the road.

But these data have a clear chain of custody, they were deliberately handed over to people who

1. had been charged with a crime and that the police thought they had enough evidence to convict
2. it was a firearms charge
3. it was also a terrorism charge. You know, terrorism, that deliberately seeks to harm the innocent, that terrorism.

If TradeMe (the NZ equivalent of eBay that many of us use) were to, evben accidentally, release this stuff the state and its minions wiould be hopping up and down and screaming about the breach of our rights.

So how did the cops GET this information?

Trade Me security manager Dean Winter said the company had no choice in what information it gave to police. The popular Kiwi auction site was merely a witness in the investigation and had no control over the information once it had been passed on, Winter said.

"We were served with a search warrant, and we complied with the search warrant. We didn't have a choice whether we thought the information was relevant or not."

TradeMe did their job and complied with the law, now the law has put thousands of homes at risk. Can i find out if my name was one of them? I'd bet not, it would be a breach of my privacy, or something.

The vital point is that practically none of this would be happening if our pollies, like the rest of the world, had not been driven by fear of not being seen to do something about the things they had spent so much time and effort making us afraid of and passed terorism legislation that led to a pointless action on the part of the police.

Terrorism is a pain in the bum and we have about as much chance of being caught up in it as we have of being hit by lightning.

But its a great lever for the political mind to use in gaining more power and people who SEEK power (even those wanting to do good with it) are still power seekers and cannot be trusted.

This is where all their attempts to PROTECT us lead, and this is exactly what Ben Franklin warned against when he said, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Hi Ben, looks like we got there.

Wrong on QANTAS

Damn, looks like I was wrong on QANTAS after all, the bang looks increasingly like a detonated oxygen bottle. Which goes to maintenance or design and is a nasty one.

Will I keep flying then? Certainly, even on QANTAS. Modern aircraft need a very liong string of failures to cause a crash, strings that are longer than any that wiould result in me getting totalled in the street on any ordinary day.

The marketing people, on the other hand, will be having a hernia.

The real question is WHY?

Anybody with a  passing interest in US politics has been able to see for months that John McCain is a broken horse on which a broken party is trying to ride. So this comes as zero surprise: No cliffhanger, more like an Obama landslide.

Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University, Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, and Larry Sabato, professor of politics at University of Virginia, accused the media of flogging a dead horse in trying to portray the presidential race as a cliffhanger.

It was a particularly bold call for Professor Sabato, who has previously cautioned about Senator Obama's claims that he can redraw the political map in America. "While no election outcome is guaranteed and McCain's prospects could improve over the next 3½ months, virtually all of the evidence that we have reviewed - historical patterns, structural features of this election cycle, and national and state polls conducted over the last several months - point to a comfortable Obama/Democratic Party victory in November," the three men wrote in Sabato's Crystal Ball newsletter.

Yes, yes, fine, so tell us something new. But no, they too are failing to do their job.

"Trumpeting this race as a toss-up, almost certain to produce another nail-biter finish, distorts the evidence and does a disservice to readers and viewers who rely upon such punditry. Again, maybe conditions will change in McCain's favour, and if they do, they should also be accurately described by the media. But current data do not justify calling this election a toss-up."

Good, we get it this far. So the real question, the one that these guys too have failed to ask, remains 'why would an overwhelmingly corporate-owned media with demonstrable active support of the Republican party since the latter days of the Carter administration continue to insist, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, that this race is close?'

What possible motive could they have for a level of cognitive stupidity bordering on delusional?

We can posit some kind of mass hallucination on the part of people in corporate media offices but you have a long stretch to come up with a mechanism, so lets go to Occam's razor.

1. If only one channel or business were doing this, you would suggest that it had something to do with a partisan at a very high level in the organisation. If all, or most, of them are doing it, how much of a stretch is it to suggest that there are partisans in every one of the media ownership ranks?
2. After all, the people who own and run these organisations are among the American elite and as Bush has remarked, "some call you the elite, I call you my base"
3. Since Bush has the sense of humour of a small rock, is it possible that he was speaking the truth?
4. If the media ownership is in fact in the hands of Bush's "base", why would they nevertheless, daily, parade a string of lies and incompetence beyond belief?
5. What possible circumstance could justify such egregious behaviour?

One.

When the Republicans steal the next election, as they have probably done the last two, the groundwork will have been done. If they continue to peddle the lie that this is close, that it is a toss-up, then when McCain wins they can point to a long history of "evidence" that shows it was close and that the finger of fate only needed to nudge a few people one way or the other to completely change the result.

Tell me I'm wrong, but first, explain the facts in some other way.

More QANTAS stuff

Back, fill dodge, weave: Gaping hole in Qantas plane after mid-air bang.

Experts say the probable cause of the bang was an explosion of some sort, although not necessarily caused by a bomb.

Yoohoo, guys, since the Chinese invented gunpowder we have known that "BANG!!" equals explosion, they are, you know, closely tied together. So why do you bother saying it? Well, talking about the cause of the bang, instead of the cause of the explosion helps to keep the proles quiet. And, of course, many things can cause an explosion, aircraft are full of shizzle that detonates, especially in the wing root fairing next to the baggage hold.  Now, lets see, the list would include.

Umm

err

hmm

Failing that, some sort of corrosive material could have been gnawing away at the plane's hull, eventually tearing it and creating a hole that gradually grew in size before succumbing to pressure.

Great. I would much rather it WAS a bomb because the incidence of actual terrorism is trivial compared with the number of flights in 747s every day. When American Airlines flight 587 crashed just two months after the attacks of September 11, a mate hoped that it was not another terrorist attack, to which my reply was that we should hope it WAS because the entire tail fin had shorn off at the base which was potentially MUCH more serious.

In the end it turned out that bad pilot practise in using the rudder for course corrections in turbulence was the problem.

If this little number turns out to be a design, corrosion or maintenance problem, it is orders of magnitude more serious that someone with a grievance and some explosives knowledge. It calls every single jumbo into question, you know, like this.

Either way, the 346 passengers and 19 crew on board, none of whom were hurt, would later share tales of their brush with death.

Meanwhile, isn't this fascinating.

Dramatic mobile phone footage, which showed cabin crew exuding a calm authority to suppress the initial panic that engulfed the aircraft, captured the saga for posterity.

Once we have the tools, it turns out that, even if this is the last thing we do, we want to record the event so others will know what has happened.

Tools change brains.

My increasing kit of handyman tools is changing the way I think and what I think and also changing my practise around the place; information tools do the same, we just don't see how much they have changed until an event like this.

Update: media not listening as usual. This paragraph appears in the story.

The aircraft, which was about 200 miles from Manila when it underwent "rapid decompression", plunged nearly 20,000ft before being levelled out by the pilot.

Please note, the rules for sudden decompression of an aircraft at 11,000 metres is to get down fast. The reason is simple, there isn't enough oxygen up there to breathe and it is seriously cold, around minus 40 celsius, if you don't die of asphyxia, the cold will kill you in short order.

Ah, but it sounds SO much scarier if we imply that the plane "lost altitude" of its own accord before the pilot "regained control" doesn't it?