Yearly Archives: 2015

Life in the Algorithm

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By Douglas Haddow

Source: Adbusters

The searches we make, the news we read, the dates we go on, the advertisements we see, the products we buy and the music we listen to. The stock market. The surveillance society. The police state, and the drones. All guided by a force we never see and few understand.

A series of calculation procedures that come together to constitute capitalism’s secret ingredient — the all holy algorithm, that which binds and optimizes. Those strange numerical gods who decide whether or not you’re a terrorist and what kids’ toy is going to set the market on fire this Christmas. But what are they, where did they come from and how did they get so powerful?

Algorithms are not new. You can trace their origin all the way back to a 9th century Persian mathematician by the name of Muhammad ibn Musa al–Khwarizmi (Algoritmi in Latin) from whom the word derives its name. Then there was Abu Yusaf Ya’qub ibn Ishaq al–Kindi, a contemporary of al–Khwarizmi’s at Baghdad’s House of Wisdom. He discovered and developed the science of frequency analysis, or code–breaking, providing a basis for code breaker Alan Turing to develop his Turing Machine, the theoretical prototype for the 9 billion devices currently sending and receiving signals through the Internet.

When we talk about algorithms, when they come up in conversation, often tied to latent and emerging fears, we’re not talking about the mathematical models behind them, we’re talking about the models that the models were modeled on. Most people have never heard of a polytope, Boolean Logic or the Hirsch Conjecture. But everyone has a credit score, whether they like it or not.

If we want to interrogate the true nature of these numbers, the wizard behind the ghost in the machine, we need to look no further than Adam Smith, that dour Scot who lived with his mum and accidentally created the modern world.

Smith was neither a modernist nor a cosmopolitan. He was an absent’minded hermit who never married, had few friends, suffered from alternating fits of depression and hypochondria, travelled outside Britain on just one occasion and demanded that all his personal writing be burned upon his death. He was the supreme king of unintended consequences, a humble and misunderstood moral philosopher who became the patron saint of greed.

Most famously, and most tragically, Smith was an ambitious writer who got a bit flowery with his language on occasion, and, as a result, his entire legacy was reduced to two words: invisible and hand. As in, the Invisible Hand — that mysterious market force that secretly and surreptitiously guides all our actions and decisions. Or so we’ve been told.

In The Wealth of Nations, the blueprint for what became known as capitalism, Smith drops the phrase but once. It’s situated in a rather dry discussion on trade policy and is used as a metaphor in a straightforward critique of mercantilism’s excessive restrictions.

And that’s it. Just a cursory metaphor used for poetic flourish in an otherwise obscure and forgettable passage. And for the 150 years that followed the book’s publication, that’s exactly what it was — obscure and forgotten. Smith didn’t mention it, his contemporaries didn’t mention it, nor did his critics. Nary a soul on Earth repeated those two words or paid them any heed.

That is, until 1948, when everything changes.

If you look at a Google NGRAM chart of “invisible hand,” you’ll see that there was little to no interest in the phrase up until the 1930s and ’40s, at which point it begins to bubble up a bit, gaining traction in a few peripheral spheres here and there. Then in ’48, Chicago School economist Paul Samuelson writes a book called Economics: An Introductory Analysis, which would go on to become the best–selling economics book of all time.

In his book, Samuelson grabs hold of Smith’s wordplay and freebases meaning from it until a mere metaphor mutates into the economic doctrine that would define the shape and form of global finance for the remainder of the century, and beyond.

“Every individual, in pursuing only his own selfish good, was led, as if by an invisible hand, to achieve the best good for all, so that any interference with free competition by government was almost certain to be injurious,” writes Samuelson. And with that, not only is it justifiable to be callous in the pursuit of wealth, your callousness will somehow, vis–à–vis the invisible hand, uplift those you trample on your way to the top.

Picture Gordon Gekko, hair trickling with high–end product, walking with the gait of limitless sprezzatura, saying, “Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.”

Samuelson would later go on to regret the liberties he took with Smith’s words, but the meme had already been injected into the passive hive mind of economics. What followed was a long and tangled game of economic telephone wherein Smith’s fatalistic conceit gradually took on mythical qualities. From turn of phrase to doctrine, from doctrine to dogma, from dogma to metaphysical law. The invisible hand became the celestial justification of the free market and the economic rationalist’s negation of anything that stood in its way.

Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek even went so far as to develop an entire theory of human interaction based on the myth. It was called Catallactics, and proposed that we did not live within an economy, but rather, a Catallaxy — a complex and self–organizing system in which every individual sent out a constant stream of complex signals that mixed to create overall market behavior.

Knowledge, Hayek argued, was distributed on an individual level, each person containing their own fraction of the whole.

The vast repository of human knowledge was inherently decentralized. Because of this, no central body or government agency could ever hope to contain enough of it to know what was really going on. But if allowed to move freely without meddling, these messages would come together to create order and equilibrium in the market.

This, he argued, is why the government should never meddle in the market. And why order could never be “planned,” and was instead “brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market.” As long as the signals, our private info–snowflakes, could float freely, the market would reach equilibrium.

Through Hayek, dogma became revelation — the invisible hand was not merely a magical presence promising equilibrium, it was also pointing us toward a not–too–distant utopia. And if we didn’t follow the hand? Oppression and despair would follow mankind into a dark hole of tyranny.

Hayek’s ideas spread swiftly through a series of think tanks connected to his economic clique, The Mont Pelerin Society, which counted Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises and, of course, who else but Milton Friedman among its members. Together they successfully launched what we now call “neoliberalism” into the political consciousness.

Neoliberalism found its champions in Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Thatcher regularly corresponded with Hayek and used the slogan There Is No Alternative (TINA) to explain her affection for its concepts. Reagan hired Friedman to be his economic advisor. And together they carried out an economic revolution that smashed trade unions and deregulated and privatized anything and everything that could be guillotined. From this axis of Anglos, it spread to other parts of the Commonwealth, then to Europe, Asia, South America and beyond.

But no matter how much they stripped away government meddling, somehow the “abstract signals” still weren’t getting through. The hand remained clenched and crises endemic. Asia, Argentina, the Eurozone, the 2008 meltdown, the flash crash. The market continually failing to magically self–correct and achieve equilibrium.

The faithful kept their faith and stuck to the program. The crisis, both economic and existential, were met with a recommitment to the faith in the form of austerity and technology and the dream persisted.

The problem was obvious to anyone outside the neoliberal thought–bubble: the invisible hand wasn’t real and it didn’t exist. It never had existed. It wasn’t just invisible, but immaterial, made from the twisted fantasies of economists obsessed with achieving an impossible “equilibrium.” You couldn’t touch it, and it couldn’t touch you.
Until now.

In 2010, when the Dow Jones Industrial dropped 1000 points in under a minute, the biggest one–day point decline in history, it received far less attention then it deserved, because everything returned to normal a few seconds later. Now, miniature flash crashes occur constantly throughout the day. But this crash was a turning point, demonstrating that something had changed. That something was that the neoliberals had achieved what communists, socialists and Christians never could: they made their god real, and in doing so, achieved their utopia. They just didn’t let the rest of us in on it.

The critical flaw in Hayek’s vision of the hand was that a “central body” could never gather enough information. We know this to be untrue, and with big data and the analysis and manipulation of that data through algorithmic equation, the missing link between money and the machine was discovered.

The searches we make, the news we read, the dates we go on, the advertisements we see, the products we buy and the music we listen to. The stock market … All informed by this marriage between mathematics and capital, all working together in perfect harmony to achieve a singular goal — equilibrium. But it’s a curious sort of equilibrium. Less to do with the relationship between supply and demand, and more about the man and the market.

All these algorithms we encounter throughout the day, they’re working toward a greater goal: solving problems and learning how to think. Like the advent and rise of high–frequency trading, they’re part of an optimization trend that leads to a strange brand of perfection: automated profit.

And their current day use, no matter how impressive the specs, is still rooted in 7th century code–breaking. Only now it’s about breaking our individual codes. Throughout the day we send out thousands of our own individual abstract signals and the algorithms figure out how best to streamline our existence into the market’s needs. We’re all just cyphers waiting to get cracked.

This is not the stuff of Orwell and Huxley, but Amazon and the NSA.

There is an overwhelming feeling of inevitability surrounding all of this. With computational capacity still threatening to double every two years, the algorithmic estate will continue to expand and become more sophisticated. All of this development, testing and research is leading to a predictable outcome. Given that they are leading investment and research in the sector, Wall Street financiers will develop the world’s first fully functioning Artificial Intelligence.

If any of this feels inevitable, it’s because it was designed to make us feel that way. If the algorithms that organize the world of money were turned on their head and used to analyze the defects in their guiding philosophy, they would shred it all on one razor sharp fact: the world beyond the market is still a real one. And no matter how sophisticated the math, how brilliant the AI, we will always be living in it.

Outside of The Wealth of Nations, Smith employed the Invisible Hand concept on only two other occasions. Once in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he slags off the rich, and the other in the History of Astronomy, where he says:

For it may be observed, that in all Polytheistic religions, among savages, as well as in the early ages of Heathen antiquity, it is the irregular events of nature only that are ascribed to the agency and power of their gods. Fire burns, and water refreshes; heavy bodies descend, and lighter substances fly upwards, by the necessity of their own nature; the invisible hand of Jupiter was never apprehended to be employed in those matters.

These days, the “savages” kick back, polish their yachts and let the machines do their thinking for them. Their god is a primitive and cruel one. Worse yet, it lacks imagination. The future it sees is just an optimized version of the present. Everything that falls within its gaze is predictable, because mathematical sequences are predictable. What remains to be seen is whether or not human beings are as predictable as the machines think we are.

The Global De-dollarization and the US Policies

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By Vladimir Odintsov

Source: New Eastern Outlook

In its quest for world domination, which the White House has been pursuing for more than a century, it relied on two primary tools: the US dollar and military might. In order to prevent Washington from establishing complete global hegemony, certain countries have recently been revising their positions towards these two elements by developing alternative military alliances and by breaking with their dependence on the US dollar.

Until the mid-twentieth century, the gold standard was the dominant monetary system, based on a fixed quantity of gold reserves stocked in national banks, which limited lending. At that time, the United States managed to become the owner of 70% of world’s gold reserves (excluding the USSR), therefore it pushed its weakened competitor, the UK, aside resulting to the creation of the Bretton Woods financial system in 1944. That’s how the US dollar became the predominant currency for international payments.

But a quarter century later this system had proven ineffective due to its inability to contain the economic growth of Germany and Japan, along with the reluctance of the US to adjust its economic policies to maintain the dollar-gold balance. At that time, the dollar experienced a dramatic decline but it was saved by the support of rich oil exporters, especially once Saudi Arabia began to exchange its black gold for US weapons and support in talks with Richard Nixon. As a result, President Richard Nixon in 1971 unilaterally ordered the cancellation of the direct convertibility of the United States dollar to gold, and instead he established the Jamaican currency system in which oil has become the foundation of the US dollar system. Therefore, it’s no coincidence that from that moment on the control over oil trade has become the number one priority of Washington’s foreign policy. In the aftermath of the so-called Nixon Shock the number of US military engagements in the Middle East and other oil producing regions saw a sharp increase. Once this system was supported by OPEC members, the global demand for US petrodollars hit an all time high. Petrodollars became the basis for America domination over the global financial system which resulted in countries being forced to buy dollars in order to get oil on the international market.

Analysts believe that the share of the United States in today’s world gross domestic product shouldn’t exceed 22%. However, 80% of international payments are made with US dollars. As a result, the value of the US dollar is exceedingly high in comparison with other currencies, that’s why consumers in the United States receive imported goods at extremely low prices. It provides the United States with significant financial profit, while high demand for dollars in the world allows the US government to refinance its debt at very low interest rates.

Under these circumstances, those hedging against the dollar are considered a direct threat to US economic hegemony and the high living standards of its citizens, and therefore political and business circles in Washington attempt by all means to resist this process. This resistance manifested itself in the overthrow and the brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who decided to switch to Euros for oil payments, before introducing a gold dinar to replace the European currency.

However, in recent years, despite Washington’s desire to use whatever means to sustain its position within the international arena, US policies are increasingly faced with opposition. As a result, a growing number of countries are trying to move from the US dollar along with its dependence on the United States, by pursuing a policy of de-dollarization. Three states that are particularly active in this domain are China, Russia and Iran. These countries are trying to achieve de-dollarization at a record pace, along with some European banks and energy companies that are operating within their borders.

The Russian government held a meeting on de-dollarization in spring of 2014, where the Ministry of Finance announced the plan to increase the share of ruble-denominated contracts and the consequent abandonment of dollar exchange. Last May at the Shanghai summit, the Russian delegation manged to sign the so-called “deal of the century” which implies that over the next 30 years China will buy $ 400 billion worth of Russia’s natural gas, while paying in rubles and yuans. In addition, in August 2014 a subsidiary company of Gazprom announced its readiness to accept payment for 80,000 tons of oil from Arctic deposits in rubles that were to be shipped to Europe, while the payment for the supply of oil through the “Eastern Siberia – Pacific Ocean” pipeline can be transferred in yuans. Last August while visiting the Crimea, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin announced that “the petrodollar system should become history” while “Russia is discussing the use of national currencies in mutual settlements with a number of countries.” These steps recently taken by Russia are the real reasons behind the West’s sanction policy.

In recent months, China has also become an active member of this “anti-dollar” campaign, since it has signed agreements with Canada and Qatar on national currencies exchange, which resulted in Canada becoming the first offshore hub for the yuan in North America. This fact alone can potentially double or even triple the volume of trade between the two countries since the volume of the swap agreement signed between China and Canada is estimated to be a total of 200 billion yuans.

China’s agreement with Qatar on direct currency swaps between the two countries are the equivalent of $ 5.7 billion and has cast a heavy blow to the petrodollar becoming the basis for the usage of the yuan in Middle East markets. It is no secret that the oil-producing countries of the Middle Eastern region have little trust in the US dollar due to the export of inflation, so one should expect other OPEC countries to sign agreements with China.

As for the Southeast Asia region, the establishment of a clearing center in Kuala Lumpur, which will promote greater use of the yuan locally, has become yet another major step that was made by China in the region. This event occurred in less than a month after the leading financial center of Asia – Singapore – became a center of the yuan exchange in Southeast Asia after establishing direct dialogue regarding the Singapore dollar and the yuan.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has recently announced its reluctance to use US dollars in its foreign trade. Additionally, the President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev has recently tasked the National Bank with the de-dollarization of the national economy.

All across the world, the calls for the creation of a new international monetary system are getting louder with each passing day. In this context it should be noted that the UK government plans to release debts denominated in yuans while the European Central Bank is discussing the possibility of including the yuan in its official reserves.

Those trends are to be seen everywhere, but in the midst of anti-Russian propaganda, Western newsmakers prefer to keep quiet about these facts, in particular, when inflation is skyrocketing in the United States. In recent months, the proportion of US Treasury bonds in the Russian foreign exchange reserves has been shrinking rapidly, being sold at a record pace, while this same tactic has been used by a number of different states.

To make matters worse for the US, many countries seek to export their gold reserves from the United States, which are deposited in vaults at the Federal Reserve Bank. After a scandal of 2013, when the US Federal Reserve refused to return German gold reserves to its respective owner, the Netherlands have joined the list of countries that are trying to retrieve their gold from the US. Should it be successful the list of countries seeking the return of gold reserves will double which may result in a major crisis for Washington.

The above stated facts indicate that the world does not want to rely on US dollars anymore. In these circumstances, Washington relies on the policy of deepening regional destabilization, which, according to the White House strategy, must lead to a considerable weakening of any potential US rivals. But there’s little to no hope for the United States to survive its own wave of chaos it has unleashed across the world.

Vladimir Odintsov, political commentator, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

The Cowardly and Despicable American Presstitutes

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy

There is a brouhaha underway about an American journalist who told a story about being in a helicopter in a war zone. The helicopter was hit and had to land. Which war zone and when I don’t know. The US has created so many war zones that it is difficult to keep up with them all, and as you will see, I am not interested in the story for its own sake.

It turns out that the journalist has remembered incorrectly. He was in a helicopter in a war zone, but it wasn’t hit and didn’t have to land. The journalist has been accused of lying in order to make himself seem to be “a more seasoned war correspondent than he is.”

The journalist’s presstitute colleagues are all over him with accusations. He has even had to apologize to the troops. Which troops and why is unclear. The American requirement that everyone apologize for every word reminds me of the old Soviet practice, real or alleged by anti-communists, that required Soviet citizens to self-criticize.

National Public Radio (2-5-15) thought this story of the American journalist was so important that the program played a recording of the journalist telling his story. It sounded like a good story to me. The audience enjoyed it and was laughing. The journalist telling the story did not claim any heroism on his part or any failure on the part of the helicopter crew. It is normal for helicopters to take hits in war zones.

Having established that the journalist had actually stated that the helicopter was hit when in fact it wasn’t, NPR brought on the program a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, an expert on “false memory.” The psychologist explained various reasons a person might have false memories, making the point that it is far from uncommon and that the journalist is most likely just another example. But the NPR presstitute still wanted to know if the journalist had intentionally lied in order to make himself look good. It was never explained why it made a journalist look good to be in a helicopter forced to land. But few presstitutes get to this depth of questioning.

Now to get to the real point. I was listening to this while driving as it was less depressing to listen to NPR’s propaganda than to listen to the Christian-Zionist preachers. In the previous hour NPR had presented listeners with three reports about civilian deaths in the break-away provinces in eastern and southern Ukraine. The first time I heard the report, the NPR presstitute recounted how explosives had hit a hospital killing 5 people in the break-away Donetsk Republic. The presstitute did not report that this was done by Ukrainian forces, instead suggesting that it could have been done by the “Russian-supported rebels.” He didn’t offer any explanation why the rebels would attack their own hospital. The impression left for that small percentage of informed Americans capable of thought is that presstitutes are not allowed to say that the Washington-backed Ukrainians attacked a hospital.

In all three reports, Secretary of State John Kerry was broadcast saying that the US wanted a diplomatic, peaceful solution, but that the Russians were blocking a peaceful solution by sending tank columns and troops into Ukraine. On my return trip, I heard over NPR Kerry twice more repeating the unsupported claim that Russian tanks and troops are pouring into Ukraine. Obviously, NPR was serving as a propaganda voice that Russia was invading Ukraine.

Think about this for a minute. We have been hearing from high US government officials, including the president himself, for months and months about Russian tank columns and troops entering Ukraine. The Russian government denies this steadfastly, but, of course, we cannot trust the now-demonized Russians. We are not allowed to believe them, because they are positioned as the Enemy, and good patriotic Americans never believe the Enemy.

But how can we help but believe the Russians? If all these Russian tank columns and troops that have allegedly been pouring into Ukraine were real, Washington’s puppet government in Kiev would have fallen sometime last year, and the conflict would be over. Anyone with a brain knows this.

So, we arrive at my point. A journalist told a harmless story and has been roasted alive and forced to apologize to the troops for lying. In the middle of this brouhaha, the US Secretary of State, the President of the United States, innumerable senators, executive branch officials, and presstitutes have repeatedly reported month after month Russian tank columns and troops entering Ukraine. Yet, despite all these Russian forces, the civilians in the break-away provinces of eastern and southern Ukraine are still being slaughtered by Washington’s puppet state in Kiev.

If Russian tanks and troops are this ineffective, why are NATO commanders and neoconservative warmongers warning of the dire danger that Russia poses to the Baltics, Poland, and Eastern Europe?

It doesn’t make any sense, does it?

So the question is: Why are the presstitutes all over some hapless journalist rather than holding accountable the Great Liars, John Kerry and Barak Obama?

The answer is: It is costless to the presstitutes to try to destroy, for totally insignificant reasons–perhaps just for the pleasure of it, like “American Sniper” killing people for fun–one of their own, but they would be fired if they hold Kerry and Obama accountable, and they know it. But they have to get someone, so they eat their own.

A democracy without an honest media cannot exist. In America democracy is a facade behind which operates every evil inclination of mankind. During the past 14 years the American people have supported governments that have invaded, bombed, or droned seven countries, killing, maiming, and displacing millions of people for no reason other than profit and hegemonic power. There is scant sign that this has caused very many Americans sleepless nights or a bad conscience.

When Washington is not bombing and killing, it is plotting to overthrow reformist governments, such as the Honduran government Obama overthrew, and the Venezuelan, Bolivian, Ecuadoran, and Argentine governments that the Obama regime is current trying to overthrow. And, also, of course the democratically elected government in Ukraine that has been supplanted by Washington’s coup.

The new Greek government is in the crosshairs, and so is Putin himself.

Washington and its fawning presstitutes branded the elected Ukrainian government that was a victim of Washington’s coup, “a corrupt dictatorship.” The replacement government consists of a combination of Washington puppets and neo-nazis with their own military forces sporting Nazi insignias. The American presstitutes have been careful not to notice the Nazi insignias.

Ask yourself why a journalist’s false memory episode of an insignificant event is so important to the American presstitutes, while John Kerry’s and Barak Obama’s extraordinary, blatant, blockbuster, and dangerous lies are ignored.

In the event you have forgotten the efficiency of the Russian military, remember the fate of the American and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian Army that Washington sicced on South Ossetia. The Georgian invasion of South Ossetia resulted in the deaths of Russian peace-keeping soldiers and Russian citizens. The Russian military intervened, and the American and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian Army collapsed in five hours. All of Georgia was back in Russian hands, but the Russians withdrew and left the former province of Russia independent, despite the lies from Washington that Putin intends to restore the Soviet Empire.

The only correct conclusion that any American can make is that every statement of the US government and its presstitute media is a blatant lie designed to serve a secret agenda that the American people would not support if they knew of its existence.

Whenever Washington and its whore media speak, they lie.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

The Man in the High Castle: When a Nazi-Run World Isn’t So Dystopian

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(Editor’s note: I recently viewed the pilot for the new “The Man in the High Castle” series and was disappointed for the same reasons mentioned in the article. For a PKD adaptation more faithful to the source material see Radio Free Albemuth.)

By Noah Berlatsky

Source: The Atlantic

Amazon’s new television adaptation The Man In the High Castle—part of the streaming service’s 2015 pilot season—opens in a conquered New York. The Nazis won World War II, and the American flag now bears a swastika. A few freedom fighters struggle on—we see one in particular brutally tortured and beaten to death—and the police are everywhere. Life in this alternate dystopia is a thing of fear and hardship, as in 1984, or The Handmaid’s Tale, or The Hunger Games. The familiar forces of freedom struggle against the familiar totalitarian forces of dystopia, epitomized, in the usual way, by a cruel, sadistic supervillain (here portrayed by Rufus Sewell as SS officer John Smith). If the Nazis had won the war, the TV series warns us, the world would have been much, much worse.

This message, as it happens, is a complete inversion of Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel of the same name, on which the series is based. As such, it betrays the source material’s difficult and conflicted message in the interest of the banal genre default of plucky Americans fighting for freedom against the evil invaders; as Adi Robertson of The Verge suggests, it might as well be Red Dawn.

Superficially, perhaps, the novel isn’t all that different. Dick also imagines that the Nazis have won World War II, and the world under the Nazis is certainly horrible enough: The novel mentions several times that after their victory in the war, the Germans set about murdering everyone in Africa. Slavery has been reinstituted in the southern United States (an uncomfortable detail that isn’t mentioned in the pilot episode), and American Jews in Nazi-controlled areas have been systematically gassed. One of the Jewish main characters, Frank Frink (née Fink) is arrested on the Japanese-controlled west coast and scheduled for deportation to Germany. Meanwhile, in the TV series, Frink (Rupert Evans) only has a Jewish grandparent, which seems a bizarre alteration.

But while life in the novel’s alternate reality is certainly awful in many ways, it’s not exactly a dystopia, which is precisely why it’s so chilling. Dick’s book has little of the pulp melodrama of the TV pilot; there are no torture scenes, no supervillains, and not even a single scene set in the repressive Nazi-controlled region of the former U.S. Instead, the action occurs in the independent Mountain States or on the Japanese-controlled Pacific areas, and most of the characters go about their daily lives just as most of us do now. They have small problems and worries and cares, they adapt to quotidian injustices. But they do so without great urgency about the genocidal violence being inflicted on people on the other side of the world, continent, or neighborhood. The frightening thing isn’t the dystopia. It’s that the dystopia is so familiar it doesn’t really feel dystopian at all.

This is nowhere more clear than in the novel’s treatment of race. In the TV pilot, the bad guys are racists, and the good guys are not. Frank’s wife, Juliana Frink (Alexa Davalos), makes it clear that she opposes the racial laws that threaten her husband and that she harbors no racist feelings toward the Japanese conquerors. But in the book, things are a lot murkier. Juliana and Frank are estranged, and in her internal monologue she sneers at him for liking “Japs” and for being “ugly” with “large pores” and a “big nose.” Another character who doesn’t appear in the pilot, the salesman R. Childan, vacillates between obsequious paeans to Japanese racial superiority and resentful, vicious Orientalist stereotyping. Even Mr. Tagomi, the Japanese official who is the moral center of the book in most respects, lapses occasionally into racist invective—”white barbarian. Neanderthalyank. That subhuman …”— although he regrets it almost immediately.

It makes sense that a world in which the Axis won the war would be, in just about every way, more racist. But the uncomfortable question is, just how much more racist is it? Again, the Nazis seem to have created a protectorate of sorts in the southern U.S., the implication being that whites who supported Jim Crow there would find the Nazi racial doctrines quite congenial. And when Mr. Tagomi, in a quintessential Dickian moment, stumbles out of his alternate reality into the “real” 1962, his own racist preconceptions (as he orders whites around) are met in turn with the simmering racist antipathy of the world in which America won the war. (“Watch it, Tojo,” one man says to him.) The racism in Dick’s alternate universe isn’t alien. It’s homey.

The imagined and the real fit together in a number of other ways as well. One of Dick’s characters muses, for example, that the basic insanity of the Nazis is that “They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God’s power and believe they are godlike … Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.” That’s a reasonable analysis of Nazi obsessions. But it’s also a reasonable analysis of American obsessions, as Carl Freedman points out in his book Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Dick, Freedman says, is linking “the quintessential Western will to domination with the horrors of genocidal Nazism.” And that Western will to domination is shown most clearly in the book through the Nazi plan to drop a bomb on the Japanese home islands. But in the real world the Nazis didn’t drop a bomb on the home islands. America did.

In the TV pilot, Juliana finds a banned newsreel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which portrays a world in which the Allies won the war. The idea that this might be true fills her with an almost religious, tearful enthusiasm. In Dick’s version, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a book. Juliana discovers that that book is true—but her reaction is not exactly fervor. Instead, it’s a mixture of hope, bafflement, and a kind of displaced, distant fear. “Truth, she thought. As terrible as death.” That truth, or at least one possible truth suggested by Dick, is that there is no radical disjunction between his alternate history and our own. The TV show encourages us to congratulate ourselves on our horror at the Nazis, and our distance from them. But Dick’s novel suggests, disturbingly, that the defeat of the Nazis did not, in fact, truly transform the world. Their evil was not banished; it’s still here with us, a dystopia we can choose, and that many of us do choose, every day.

Saturday Matinee: Lost in Thailand

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lost-in-Thailand“Lost in Thailand” (2012) is arguably not a “cult film” since it’s one of the highest grossing films in China, though it might be considered one in the U.S. where it’s relatively obscure. The film was written, produced, and directed by Xu Zheng, who also starred in the film as Xu Lang, the inventor of a miraculous new energy source. In order to get added funding to develop his innovation he needs to get a signature from his company’s largest shareholder who happens to be in Thailand. Xu’s quest is made more difficult than expected due to the antics of Wang, a comically annoying character he meets on the flight to Thailand, and Gao, a rival scientist secretly tailing them.

French comedian convicted of ‘supporting terror’

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By Ramin Mazaheri

Source: PressTV

Popular French humorist Dieudonné Mbala Mbala has been convicted and fined 30,000 euros for “supporting terrorism speech” in a decision which many say exemplifies the often discriminatory and two-tiered nature of France’s legal system. 

Following the recent terrorist attacks in France, Dieudonné, as he is widely known, posted on Facebook that “Je me sens Charlie Coulibaly” (I feel like Charlie Coulibaly), an apparent reworking of the global “Je suis Charlie” campaign. Coulibaly refers to Amedy Coulibaly, the terrorist responsible for four deaths at a Kosher supermarket in Paris.

The court rejected Dieudonné’s claim that he is a satirist in the same vein as Charlie Hebdo, the French weekly which has sparked worldwide protests on multiple occasions by publishing sacrilegious pictures of Prophet Mohammed.

Both Dieudonné and Charlie Hebdo defend their actions by saying they insult any and all religions, ethnicities and politicians, with plenty of evidence available on the Internet to support their claims.

While Charlie Hebdo has been exonerated for its previous cartoons of Prophet Mohammed, as well as for insulting  former French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the neo-fascist National Front Party, Dieudonné has been repeatedly fined for remarks deemed to incite racial hatred and anti-Semitism, both of which are explicitly banned by French law. Dieudonné and his entourage have been taken to court some 80 times in recent years, and just this week Dieudonné was convicted and forced to pay a fine of 4,000 euros for calling current Prime Minster Manuel Valls a “Mussolini with half Down’s Syndrome”.

Many claim that the lack of a law to ban Islamophobic speeches or the insulting of Islam reflects a state-sanctioned double-standard, and there is little political support apparent to create such laws. That has led to widespread complaints from France’s Muslim community, estimated at 5 to 10 percent of the overall population.

Where Dieudonné and Charlie Hebdo differ greatly is in their favored target: For more than a decade Charlie Hebdo has been openly anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic, while Dieudonné is openly anti-Zionist. Many also believe that Dieudonné satirizes France’s politicians much more forcefully, as Charlie Hebdo’s editors have increased their ties to the conservative UMP party in recent years.

This helps explain Dieudonné’s vast popularity among the youth, Muslim and immigrant communities, as reflected by the hundreds of Dieudonné supporters present at the Palais de Justice in Paris.

“Dieudonné is the same as Charlie Hebdo, except that Dieudonné attacks our society’s ‘untouchables’,” said Enzo Columba, 23, outside Dieudonné’s trial. “In France, you can attack the Blacks, the Arabs, the Muslims, but not the ‘untouchables’, and that’s why Dieudonné is treated differently by the media and the law,’” said Columba.

“He is so popular because he is like us: He is the son of immigrants, he grew up around Paris, and, like so many French youth, he is anti-Zionist,” added Columba.

France has not released updated arrest totals for “supporting terrorism speech” since January 20, when 117 arrests were acknowledged. People have been accused, tried, convicted and sentenced to multi-year prison terms in just 3 days, causing widespread accusations of “hysteria” and “witch-hunts”.

Among the convicted have been alcoholics, homeless people and the mentally ill. Critics contend that the wave of arrests is intended to have a “chilling effect” on all criticism of the government’s policies, as well as to intimidate the Muslim community.

“I’m here to support the liberty of expression, like we had in the past,” said Madame Lamarque, an interested citizen who also awaited the verdict outside the courtroom.

“I think we are losing this freedom, and I don’t understand why,” said Lamarque. “I do not think Dieudonné has been treated like other humorists.”

France made global news this week when an 8-year-old boy was interrogated for 30 minutes by police for allegedly making remarks supporting terrorism. Ahmed, whose last name has not been released, could not even explain what “terrorism” was, and his teachers and school principal have been sharply criticized for involving the police.

“The manner in which this was handled and became so overblown is totally unbelievable,” the head of the French Communist Party, Pierre Laurent, told Press TV.

“We cannot expose a child of 8 years to such a trauma,” said Laurent. “It’s the opposite of the mission of education: To care for and protect children, not to place them under the media’s glare and render them fodder for the public’s judgment.”

Ahmed is in the third grade in the southeastern city of Nice, an affluent region which is also a stronghold of the neo-fascist National Front party.

Related article: https://desultoryheroics.com/2014/01/14/comedian-dieudonne-censored-throughout-france/

State Department Discusses Banning Alternative Media Outlet

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By Justin King

Source: AntiMedia.org

The US State Department has openly discussed shutting down RT, the Russian news network. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was asked about the idea of shutting the company down at a meeting at the Brookings Institute. She said no, paying lip service to the Freedom of Speech, but citing RT’s limited reach as the real reason.

The incident goes to demonstrate exactly how much censorship exists in the United States. RT broadcasts a narrative that is undoubtedly pro-Russian. Now that the pro-Russian narrative is at odds with the Pro-US narrative, the government is willing to openly discuss simply shutting off American access to the network.

This isn’t the first time that RT was targeted by government officials. The Chair of the US Broadcasting Board of Governors equated RT to terrorist groups when he said:

“We are facing a number of challenges from entities like Russia Today which is out there pushing a point of view, the Islamic State in the Middle East and groups like Boko Haram.”

Why would such a question be asked of a State Department official to begin with? Because the US State Department is responsible for large portions of America’s propaganda efforts.

This is the United States of America. We are supposed to have a free press, but if you push a point of view contrary to the government’s, you’re likely to lose your broadcasting license. Regimes in the past held book burnings to remove unfavorable opinions from circulation. The US government doesn’t need to be so boorish. They simply remove the book from libraries or revoke the broadcasting license of the outlet that won’t read the government’s script.