French Police are now on the move now, hoping to get today’s shooting suspects in their sights.
After today’s fatal attack in Paris – at the offices of French political magazine, Charlie Hebdo, the French police have released the identities of 3 suspects, including photos of two.
Hamyd Mourad, 18 years old, is said to already be in custody after turning himself in to police, while the other two suspects, brothers Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, are said to be at large.
DEAD MEN WALKING: French Police released photos of the brothers Cherif Kouachi, 32, and Said Kouachi, 34.
According to French news agency AFP, police have issued arrest warrants for brothers Cherif, 32, and Said, 34. They have appealed to the public for information but warned that the men were “likely armed and dangerous”.
According to AFP, “after seeing his name circulating on social media”, 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad has since surrendered to local police at 23:00 local time and taken into custody late Wednesday evening.
Other reports reveal however, that Mourad was in fact in class while the shooting was taking place in downtown Paris. It is more likely then that student Mourad has in fact turned himself in to police in order to avoid harm. If you follow the trending French hashtag, #MouradHamydInnocent, it is said to have been started by Mourad’s classmates who say he was with them at the time of the attack. It’s worth pointing out straight away, that if police have mixed-up their first ‘suspect’ (which it appears they have), then this lowers the likelihood that their other two ‘suspects’ are genuine.
Multiple US and European media agencies, including CNN, are now announcing that at least one of the suspects was already “under surveillance” by French anti-terror authorities, and that his file was “shared with US security officials” as well. If this is indeed the case, then it’s highly improbable that the suspect would have staged his attack so easily. Once again, official admissions practically cancel out the official narrative.
Back in late September, French security officials suffered a huge embarrassment after three male ‘terror suspects’ who were on their way back from Turkey and Syria were allowed to walk free after landing at Marseille International Airport. All three were said to be “well known to French counter-terrorism officials” and were long been “under surveillance”. Some suspect that these were working with the security services, but that their cover may have been blown.
This latest revelation with the Paris Shooter suspect also matches the modus operandi of the likely informant, Sheikh Monis from Sydney’s Siegebefore Christmas, and also that of FBI informant, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, of Boston Bombing fame.
If this story plays out like previous high-profile ‘terror’ scenarios, then expect that both brothers Cherif and Said will go the way of the Tsarnaev Brothers, from the 2013 Boston Bombing. The fate of older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was recruited by US security services as a federal informant before the alleged bombing took place, was tragic. It turns out that Tamerlan was alive and well while initially in police custody – a fact blacked-out by the US media, but reported here at 21WIRE. Later on it appears that he was in fact killed in police custody before his mutilated body was dumped off at the local morgue.
As 21WIRE reported at the time, younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev narrowly escaped with his life during arrest, and was most likely severely injured while in custody.
Like with the Tsarnaevs, when authorities release the photos in public, it almost guarantees that the suspects will never make it out alive, and hence, will never tell their story in public.
Cherif and Said could very well be ‘dead men walking’ now, as police almost certainly be shooting to kill.
(As with most recent crimes attributed to groups or individuals before any hard evidence is presented, we need to question the official story and also ask ourselves: who benefits?)
We do not know what will come out of the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, but one thing we are pretty sure of: we will not get the real, complete story of what actually happened.
Keep this in mind: the prosecution’s job is not principally to fully explain the background of a crime that was committed. It is to convince a jury to convict. Also, in cases such as this, where a lot of questions about security state operations have been raised, the prosecution, as an arm of the federal government, will be under strict orders to win its case without unduly exposing “sources and methods.” That’s a polite way of saying, “let’s keep the skeletons in the family closet.”
Lead defense counsel Judy Clarke’s job, and her historic role in past cases, has been to do whatever is necessary to ensure her client avoids the death penalty. Meanwhile, the defendant’s job, right now, is to do what his lawyer tells him. It’s not his job to object or say, “Hey, there’s more to this story.”
Clarke’s interest in exposing the truth is strictly limited to: A) using the threat of embarrassing the government or B) casting doubt on its narrative solely as a bargaining chip to keep her client off death row. She has no particular mandate to find out what really happened. Even by her own pronouncements, Clarke either believes her client is guilty or, perceives that the only practical way forward is to accept that her client will be found guilty.
-What actual evidence exists that these brothers made such a sophisticated bomb—which some experts say they could not have? If not, then they had help and did not act alone, as the government insists. Aren’t the identities and roles of other possible players germane?
-What actual evidence exists that these brothers shot and killed an MIT police officer? We’re told that video cameras captured the act, but we’re also told that the video doesn’t make a positive ID.
-Why did the brothers’ uncle, who was the son-in-law of an important CIA official, quickly announce (within hours of their death/apprehension) his suspicion that his nephews were indeed the Boston bombers, despite the fact they had never done anything like that nor indicated that they may do such a thing?
-And what about the other CIA associate, a college professor and former case officer who corresponded with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev about Chechnya? Soon after the bombing, the professor, Brian Glyn Williams, was quoted as saying “I hope I didn’t contribute,” an apparent reference to Dzhokhar’s alleged radicalization.
-After being warned by the Russians, why did the FBI fail to monitor Tamerlan when he left the country to travel to restive regions of Russia where Islamists were active? And then how was it that an alert for him was lowered just before he re-entered the U.S.?
-Why has no one been allowed to talk to Dzhokhar to find out his version of events?
-Will the authorities ever explain why so many things that were leaked by the government to prejudice the public (and the jury pool) turned out to be untrue? The claim that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was guilty in a triple homicide in Waltham, Mass., is just one example. The police never questioned Tamerlan about the slayings, even though they knew he was close friends with one of the victims.
-Will the conflicting and dubious explanations about the FBI’s shooting of an unarmed Ibragim Todashev, friend of Tamerlan, in his Florida apartment while being interrogated, be resolved?
-What about claims that there were drills going on during or around the time of the Marathon—and why were there bomb-sniffing dogs at the finish line? Even the cautious Boston Globe noted that officials had planned a training drill eerily similar to what actually happened.
These are some of the things any fair-minded, thoughtful person would like to know.
But the whole thing appears to be sealed, a done deal. We’re hoping for revelations at the trial. But we aren’t expecting too many. The authorities don’t think we need to know much about our country and its doings in that shadowy arena called “national security.” So the chances of them wanting to enlighten us are depressingly slim.
With the closing of another year marked by media hysteria, the narrative that the crazed hermit North Korean regime orchestrated the hacking of the Japanese-owned Hollywood company Sony, thereby assaulting our precious freedom to crank out cultural subversion, has quickly begun to fall apart.
From the beginning the story never held neither consistency nor any forensic evidence. Yet the notion that ruthless Korean dictator Kim Jong Un wants to keep them from the movies, the modern substitute for the West’s emptying churches, has sent cable news consumers into a panic.
Elusive North Korean hackers have joined ISIS, Ebola, and a resurgent Russia on the ever- lengthening list of threats that government and media tell us we must fear. As it stands now, with the script quickly breaking down, the media and government (really two tentacles of the same power structure) are bound to quickly divert attention elsewhere; a new national security villain will be constructed and dangled in front of the attention-deficit public.
Meanwhile in France, several young radical Muslims have been attacking their host society, attempting to murder French police officers and Christmas shoppers. As has become standard fare in our era of political correctness, the French government quickly sought to dismiss the cosplay jihadists as having nothing to do with terrorism, casting them instead as a random assortment of mentally ill individuals senselessly lashing out. Similar ISIS-inspired escapades by marginal, ressentiment-driven characters have transpired in recent months, not only in France, but also in Canada, the United States, and Australia. Government authorities in these nations were equally quick to dismiss such attacks by self-styled holy warriors as aberrations that should not be seen as part of some wider pattern, lest the West’s entire secular multicultural project come under deeper scrutiny.
It is in this environment that the 20th century German philosopher Josef Pieperobserved that while modern man is “looking out for the powers of corruption in a mistaken direction,” the lords of the technocracy “establish their rule before his eyes.” Modern man is diverted down a multitude of false paths toward dead ends, but he remains all too often oblivious to what is happening right under his very nose. His ignorance, often willful, lends strength to those who would seek even more power to control and manipulate him.
So while the public is held in a state of anxiety over North Korea and other manufactured phantoms, media reports have surfaced (and not for the first time) revealing that US police departments are utilizing their position in the new security architecture to scan and monitor social media and other online activities. In his endless benevolence, Big Brother is peering over your shoulder in order to develop a color-coded “threat rating.” Hence, as the 20th century science fiction writer Philip K. Dickforesaw, the age of “pre-crime” is upon us. As is normative in our times, the blatant power grabs of the surveillance state go mostly unnoticed and unprotested by the masses.
There is a serious disconnect between what the elite tell us we must fear and the “threats” they themselves utilize. While do-it-yourself jihadists (often themselves manipulated by domestic intelligence agencies) and other manifestations of underclass violence are brushed aside, those who dare openly express their dissatisfaction with the policies of our beloved rulers risk finding themselves listed as threats by the surveillance state. Leviathan grows ever larger and more pervasive in the name of security, only to use its power not against actual threats, but those it claims to protect. The Swiss philosopher Éric Werner provides some illumination here:
The current function of the police is not to fight insecurity. It is, which is quite different, to control and monitor people. Not just some people, as claimed by authorities (offenders, criminals, terrorists, etc.), but all of them. Even if the whole country turned into a no-go zone, the surveillance society would keep functioning… We do not develop the surveillance society in the fight against insecurity; rather, insecurity is used as an excuse to justify the surveillance society.
He further notes that the ruling politicians and bureaucrats’ real fear “is not insecurity, but rather potential retaliations against insecurity.”
We must ask what that oft-used buzzword “freedom” actually means in the modern West. For many, the ability to stream an inverted universe of pornography, or order off of Pizza Hut’s “subconscious menu” from their iPads – is enough assurance that they are still free, but the ever-expanding Leviathan state and the spread of vapid consumerism should give us all more than a moment’s pause. If freedom is reducible to a dazzling array of consumer options and self-gratification, why is that worth dying for? We must strive toward being higher than the perpetually consuming, soulless homo economicus.
In order to resist and confront the forces arrayed against him and to achieve a higher freedom, man must begin with repentance and spiritual reformation. His soul must be cleansed of sloth and apathy, as well as the other enslaving vices that leave him open to fear, manipulation, and despair; or as Ernst Jünger put it, one “must be free in order to become free.” The German adventurer further said that for the spiritually free man, “this world filled with oppression and oppressive agents,” will only “serve to make his freedom visible in all its splendor.”
The great Russian thinker Nicolas Berdyaev, who himself openly defied the murderous Bolsheviks who overran his homeland, taught that the “victory over slavery is a spiritual act,” and that “social and spiritual liberation ought to go hand in hand.” Repentance and spiritual resistance are the first, and most important, steps in confronting the powers of our age.
Author Daniel Spaulding earned a BA in English literature from Bridgewater State University. He currently works and lives in Seoul, South Korea. He enjoys reading philosophy, history, politics, and science fiction.
Check out this fascinating summary of How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World. This particular summary looks at the part of the book that documents how our perception of time has changed, and how that has affected the modern world.
The book talks about something called the “Hummingbird Effect,” which describes the way in which various inventions and technical discoveries change the world in unexpected ways. Some of you may recall James’ Burke’s excellent TV show Connections on BBC/PBS (These used to be available on YouTube, but JamesBurkeWeb appears to have disappeared. Still, some episodes can still be found) which covered the same ground:
Johnson points out that, much like the evolution of bees gave flowers their colors and the evolution of pollen altered the design of the hummingbird’s wings, the most remarkable thing about innovations is the way they precipitate unanticipated changes that reverberate far and wide beyond the field or discipline or problem at the epicenter of the particular innovation. Pointing to the Gutenberg press — itself already an example of the combinatorial nature of creative breakthroughs — Johnson writes:
“Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press created a surge in demand for spectacles, as the new practice of reading made Europeans across the continent suddenly realize that they were farsighted; the market demand for spectacles encouraged a growing number of people to produce and experiment with lenses, which led to the invention of the microscope, which shortly thereafter enabled us to perceive that our bodies were made up of microscopic cells. You wouldn’t think that printing technology would have anything to do with the expansion of our vision down to the cellular scale, just as you wouldn’t have thought that the evolution of pollen would alter the design of a hummingbird’s wing. But that is the way change happens.”
It starts with Galileo’s observation that a pendulum always swings to-and-fro in a regular amount of time.
“But machines that could keep a reliable beat didn’t exist in Galileo’s age; the metronome wouldn’t be invented for another few centuries. So watching the altar lamp sway back and forth with such regularity planted the seed of an idea in Galileo’s young mind. As is so often the case, however, it would take decades before the seed would blossom into something useful.”
The ability to accurately measure time was a departure from before when:
“Instead of fifteen minutes, time was described as how long it would take to milk the cow or nail soles to a new pair of shoes. Instead of being paid by the hour, craftsmen were conventionally paid by the piece produced — what was commonly called “taken-work” — and their daily schedules were almost comically unregulated.”
Once the regimentation of the clock was introduced, many things followed from that due to the Hummingbird Effect:
Over the century that followed, the pendulum clock, a hundred times more accurate than any preceding technology, became a staple of European life and forever changed our relationship with time. But the hummingbird’s wings continued to flap — accurate timekeeping became the imperceptible heartbeat beneath all technology of the Industrial Revolution, from scheduling the division of labor in factories to keeping steam-powered locomotives running on time. It was the invisible hand of the clock that first moved the market — a move toward unanticipated innovations in other fields. Without clocks, Johnson argues, the Industrial Revolution may have never taken off — or “at the very least, have taken much longer to reach escape velocity.” He explains:
“Accurate clocks, thanks to their unrivaled ability to determine longitude at sea, greatly reduced the risks of global shipping networks, which gave the first industrialists a constant supply of raw materials and access to overseas markets. In the late 1600s and early 1700s, the most reliable watches in the world were manufactured in England, which created a pool of expertise with fine-tool manufacture that would prove to be incredibly handy when the demands of industrial innovation arrived, just as the glassmaking expertise producing spectacles opened the door for telescopes and microscopes. The watchmakers were the advance guard of what would become industrial engineering.”
Not mentioned is the introduction of public schools, designed to take farmers used to “cow milking time” and “discipline” them into a workforce able to sit still and obey and punch a clock, a system we are still living with today. Those of us who cannot or will not conform to this ruthless discipline are severely punished:
And yet, as with most innovations, the industrialization of time came with a dark side — one Bertrand Russell so eloquently lamented in the 1920s when he asked: “What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?” Johnson writes:
“The natural rhythms of tasks and leisure had to be forcibly replaced with an abstract grid. When you spend your whole life inside that grid, it seems like second nature, but when you are experiencing it for the first time, as the laborers of industrial England did in the second half of the eighteenth century, it arrives as a shock to the system. Timepieces were not just tools to help you coordinate the day’s events, but something more ominous: the “deadly statistical clock,” in Dickens’s Hard Times, “which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a coffin lid.”
[…]
“To be a Romantic at the turn of the nineteenth century was in part to break from the growing tyranny of clock time: to sleep late, ramble aimlessly through the city, refuse to live by the “statistical clocks” that governed economic life… The time discipline of the pendulum clock took the informal flow of experience and nailed it to a mathematical grid. If time is a river, the pendulum clock turned it into a canal of evenly spaced locks, engineered for the rhythms of industry.“
And as clocks became ever more precise and ubiquitous, things flowed from that – more regimentation, more standardization (village clocks used to be set by the sun’s position, but this introduced inaccuracies in railroad timetables – thus two inventions, one steam-powered and one not, are bound up together), and entirely new scientific discoveries which led to new inventions such as the computers that now rule over our lives:
Johnson goes on to trace the hummingbird flutterings to the emergence of pocket watches, the democratization of time through the implementation of Standard Time, and the invention of the first quartz clock in 1928, which boasted the unprecedented accuracy of losing or gaining only one thousandth of a second per day…But the most groundbreaking effect of the quartz clock — the most unpredictable manifestation of the hummingbird effect in the story of time — was that it gave rise to modern computing and the Information Age. Johnson writes:
“Computer chips are masters of time discipline… Instead of thousands of operations per minute, the microprocessor is executing billions of calculations per second, while shuffling information in and out of other microchips on the circuit board. Those operations are all coordinated by a master clock, now almost without exception made of quartz… A modern computer is the assemblage of many different technologies and modes of knowledge: the symbolic logic of programming languages, the electrical engineering of the circuit board, the visual language of interface design. But without the microsecond accuracy of a quartz clock, modern computers would be useless.”
And once the computer is invented – note that it becomes the new mega-metaphor taking over from the steam engine – the brain as “neural network” that can be simulated, the economy as a perfect “information processing machine” via the price mechanism and humans as “rational utility maximizers”of Neoliberal economics, and recasting the analog world as binary one of ones and zeros – art, music, literature, etc. that can be simulated through sufficiently complex algorithms. All this flows from our view of the world, which in turn is dictated by our technology.
More at the link. It’s worth noting that this entire thesis was laid out by Lewis Mumford as far back in the 1930’s in Technics and Society, and this book looks like it covers much the same ground.
Mumford’s these is that the Industrial Revolution did not spring forth fully-formed from nowhere, but came forth from changes in the human perception of the world and man’s relationship to nature that had been occurring for centuries beforehand. He called this the Eotechnic period, and points out that it needs to be understood to see how the modern world emerged. He classified the subsequent periods as Paleotechnic (centered around the stream engine, iron and coal), and the Neotechnic (centered around electricity and the scientific method). He stressed how much our perception of the natural world and human nature dictate the nature of our science and social organization.
Several intellectual revolutions had to take place in order to get us to the Industrial Revolution. One, as noted above and emphasized by Mumford, was the accurate measurement of time. Another was the increasing control over motive forces exemplified by the windmill and watermill. Another was individual perception, as indicated by the use of perspective in painting. Another was the increasing standardization, political centralization and bureaucracy. Another was the discovery of the New World of which the ancients had no knowledge or precedent. Another was the increasing use of the abstraction of money for trade. But perhaps the biggest one of all was recasting the natural world as a machine that could be analyzed and understood. These changes were all formative to the Industrial Revolution, which could not have come about without them.
Mumford writes extensively about the Medieval period, and how that period increasingly used technology to control the environment but in a genuinely humane way, one designed to enhance human needs and desires rather than control or eliminate them. Think of the medieval clock-making guild as opposed to the deskilled factory worker for example. The decentralized and localized nature of the Medieval period is what allowed technology to be used in this way.
But, beginning in the seventeenth century with the rise of the nation-state and the consolation of Europe’s kingdoms into large, centralized states with standards and bureaucracy (much of it due to the emergence of gunpowder and artillery, against which castles and mounted knights were useless), all that began to to change. Technology became increasingly tyrannical, and man was more and more forced into the “logic of the machine.” Consider the armies that emerged identical uniforms, identical weapons with interchangeable parts and drilled, regimented training designed to turn men into interchangeable parts themselves. Military training was the precursor to the disciplined workforce of the Industrial Revolution, which is why the connection between business and military discipline remains to this day (corporations today are run on the top-down hierarchical military model). Since battles were won by sheer numbers of “citizens” with rifles rather than an aristocratic warrior class who owned horses, the social relations changed, and the common man emerged with more importance. Population growth equaled national strength in the new order. Man’s rationality became celebrated, all other values were discounted. Productivity and technological “progress” became goals in the themselves rather than means to an end. Pursuit of growth and profit became all-consuming, human needs be damned.
In contrast to the Medieval period, today’s technology is dehumanizing, submitting man to centralized control, and seeing him as nothing more than a machine. Mumford envisioned a society where human values could once again take center stage instead of the productivist logic of “the myth of the machine” Thus Mumford was not anti-technology; rather he wanted a world in which technology served profoundly different values than in our present time. The brutal regulation of time, rather than the human time of being in the world – the difference between chronos and kairos, or the subjective and the objective – is one of the best illustrations of this difference. Just because we can measure time down to the nanosecond does not mean we have to be enslaved to it. That is a social choice, as Mumford would quickly remind us.
The Obama administration ratcheted up the pressure Friday on the isolated Stalinist regime in North Korea, with the FBI formally accusing North Korea of responsibility for the hacking attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment and Obama declaring that the US government would carry out an unspecified “proportionate response” against Pyongyang at “a time and place of our own choosing.”
Obama made no mention of the cyberattack or North Korea’s alleged responsibility in his opening statement at his end-of-the-year White House press conference, waiting until a suitable question was posed by the media to raise the issue.
The FBI offered no proof of a North Korean link to the hacking attack on Sony, which led to the studio’s cancellation of the planned December 25 release of the Seth Rogen film The Interview, a comedy whose premise is that two American journalists are contracted by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
The FBI statement claimed several similarities between computer code used in the malware deployed against Sony and that used in previous attacks linked to North Korea, but these claims are unsubstantiated and computer security experts interviewed in the press have cast doubt on whether any definitive links can be established.
The American public is asked to take on faith the FBI’s declaration that it “now has enough information to conclude that the North Korean government is responsible for these actions.” The statement continued: “North Korea’s actions were intended to inflict significant harm on a US business and suppress the right of American citizens to express themselves.”
Such language is ironic coming from a federal agency that plays a central role in the build-up of a police state apparatus in America. A recent report in the Wall Street Journal, citing figures from the National Center for State Courts, found that the FBI has accumulated criminal record files on 80 million Americans—more than one-third of the adult population.
Obama likewise provided no evidence of North Korean involvement, merely citing the FBI statement as authoritative. He criticized Sony Pictures for withdrawing The Interview from circulation in response to threats from the hackers, who called themselves “Guardians of Peace.”
“We cannot have a society where some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States,” Obama said, “because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they’ll do when they see a documentary that they don’t like, or news reports that they don’t like.”
He continued, “That’s not what America’s about. Again, I’m sympathetic that Sony as a private company was worried about liabilities and this and that and the other. I wish they’d spoken to me first. I would have told them, do not get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.”
This pretense of alarm over the threat to the civil liberties of Americans is just as hypocritical coming from Obama as from the FBI. His administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers for leaking information about government crimes to the press than any other in American history. Obama has presided over dragnet surveillance of the telecommunications and email of every American by the National Security Agency, trampling on the Bill of Rights. And he has asserted the unprecedented “right” of the president to order the drone missile assassination of anyone in the world, including American citizens.
As for censorship, this is a government that doesn’t hesitate to demand that major newspapers and television networks withhold information from the public, including information on massive violations of the Constitution by the government itself, in the name of “national security.” The media routinely complies, allowing the government to vet and/or censor articles and news reports before they are aired.
The latest charges against North Korea have provided yet another example of the American press corps’ readiness to function as a de facto sounding board for state propaganda. There has been no pretense of critical independence in the vast bulk of reporting on the hacking attack on Sony and the alleged responsibility of the North Korean regime, which has denied any involvement. The government’s claims are simply reported as facts, whether by the television networks and cable channels or newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post.
The government’s record of lying, whether on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, NSA spying, or, more recently, CIA torture, is simply ignored.
The daily newspapers and television networks have largely dropped any reporting on last week’s Senate Intelligence Committee report documenting systematic torture by the CIA of prisoners held in secret prisons overseas. Not a single question was raised about the torture report at Obama’s hour-long press conference.
Obama made it clear that the US government would retaliate against North Korea for the alleged hacking attack on Sony. “They caused a lot of damage, and we will respond,” he said. “We will respond proportionally, and we’ll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose.”
While the tone was matter-of-fact, Obama refused to rule out military action in response to a follow-up question by a reporter, saying only that he would not expand on his previous statement about an indeterminate future response.
White House, Pentagon and intelligence officials were holding daily meetings on North Korea, an Obama spokesman said. Before the FBI issued its finding, Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was “very concerned” about the US potentially concluding that a nation-state was behind the attack. “When and if that call is made, it will be a moment to confront that reality” of a state-supported cyberattack on a US corporation, Dempsey said.
The US military buildup in the Asia-Pacific region continues apace. Obama has just signed the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act, which provides for expanded efforts to establish a joint missile defense system in northeast Asia, involving South Korea and Japan. This would be directed against North Korea in the first instance, but ultimately against China, the main US target in the region.
On Thursday, Obama approved the sale of four US frigates to Taiwan, under the Naval Vessel Transfer Act, over the vociferous opposition of Beijing. The sale of the guided-missile frigates “blatantly interferes in China’s domestic affairs and undermines China’s sovereignty and security interests,” a Chinese defense ministry spokesman said.
While Obama said the FBI had not linked the Sony attack to any nation other than North Korea, other US officials pointed out that North Korea’s only connection to the World Wide Web is through China, an indication that further escalation of the Sony affair could involve charging China with at least a supporting role.
Meanwhile, evidence continues to surface that the entire Sony Pictures affair, going back to the original decision by the studio to make a film depicting the murder of Kim Jong-un, was a provocation inspired by the US military-intelligence apparatus.
Email communications obtained by the online publication Daily Beast and cited in many columns and commentaries Friday strongly suggest this. Sony Pictures co-chairman Michael Lynton is on the board of trustees of the Rand Corporation, a leading private consulting firm for the CIA and Pentagon, and it was Rand’s North Korea specialist, Bruce Bennett, who pushed hard for the Sony film to focus on the assassination of North Korea’s ruler.
According to one of these emails, Seth Rogen, the film’s co-director, had initially intended the film to target an unnamed leader of an unnamed country, and it was Lynton himself “that told them to not use a fictitious name, but to go with Kim Jong-un.” The same message, written by Marisa Liston, a Sony senior vice president, said that Rogen and co-director Evan Goldberg “mention that a former CIA agent and someone who used to work for Hillary Clinton looked at the script.”
An email from Bennett, the Rand analyst, to Lynton suggested that the film could actually help unseat the North Korean regime. “I have been clear that the assassination of Kim Jong Un is the most likely path to a collapse of the North Korean government,” Bennett wrote. “I believe that a story that talks about the removal of the Kim family regime and the creation of a new government by the North Korean people (well, at least the elites) will start some real thinking in South Korea and, I believe, in the North once the DVD leaks into the North (which it almost certainly will).”
Lynton responded, “Bruce—Spoke to someone very senior in State (confidentially). He agreed with everything you have been saying. Everything. I will fill you in when we speak.”
Other emails name two State Department officials—Assistant Secretary Daniel Russel and Ambassador Robert King, US special envoy for North Korea human-rights issues—as providing input to the film.
12/2: On The Progressive Commentary Hour host Gary Null has an in-depth conversation with Peter Levenda on the Nazi legacy, its survival and influence in world events, and its continuation to this day:
12/3: Host KMO and partner Olga have a wide-ranging discussion with podcaster Duncan Crary, and entrepreneur Vic Christopher on localism, architecture and regenerating community among other topics on the C-Realm podcast:
12/3: On the latest episode of Guns and Butter, host Bonnie Faulker interviews Judyth Vary Baker (an ex-girlfriend of Lee Harvey Oswald) on the connection between cancer causing bioweapons research and the JFK assassination:
12/5: On the Corbett Report, Lionel of LionelMedia.com joins James Corbett for an epic discussion on fake stories in the media, manipulation of the historical record, the fake Syria sniper boy video, the Corbett/Lionel law, and the importance of self-correction.
Miguel Conner and author Valarie Ziegler discuss the Gnostic subtext of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, one of the greatest television programs of the 60s:
Hope you all have a good Thanksgiving. While it’s always nice to celebrate special occasions with loved ones (if one is fortunate enough to be in a situation to be able to) and one should be thankful for what one has, we should also feel discontent for what so many do not have or for what they’ve had taken away from them.
An excerpt from The Hidden History of Massachusetts by Dr. Tingba Apidta:
Much of America’s understanding of the early relationship between the Indian and the European is conveyed through the story of Thanksgiving. Proclaimed a holiday in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln, this fairy tale of a feast was allowed to exist in the American imagination pretty much untouched until 1970, the 350th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims. That is when Frank B. James, president of the Federated Eastern Indian League, prepared a speech for a Plymouth banquet that exposed the Pilgrims for having committed, among other crimes, the robbery of the graves of the Wampanoags. He wrote:
“We welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people.”
But white Massachusetts officials told him he could not deliver such a speech and offered to write him another. Instead, James declined to speak, and on Thanksgiving Day hundreds of Indians from around the country came to protest. It was the first National Day of Mourning, a day to mark the losses Native Americans suffered as the early settlers prospered. This true story of “Thanksgiving” is what whites did not want Mr. James to tell.
What Really Happened in Plymouth in 1621?
According to a single-paragraph account in the writings of one Pilgrim, a harvest feast did take place in Plymouth in 1621, probably in mid-October, but the Indians who attended were not even invited. Though it later became known as “Thanksgiving,” the Pilgrims never called it that. And amidst the imagery of a picnic of interracial harmony is some of the most terrifying bloodshed in New World history.
The Pilgrim crop had failed miserably that year, but the agricultural expertise of the Indians had produced twenty acres of corn, without which the Pilgrims would have surely perished. The Indians often brought food to the Pilgrims, who came from England ridiculously unprepared to survive and hence relied almost exclusively on handouts from the overly generous Indians-thus making the Pilgrims the western hemisphere’s first class of welfare recipients. The Pilgrims invited the Indian sachem Massasoit to their feast, and it was Massasoit, engaging in the tribal tradition of equal sharing, who then invited ninety or more of his Indian brothers and sisters-to the annoyance of the 50 or so ungrateful Europeans. No turkey, cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie was served; they likely ate duck or geese and the venison from the 5 deer brought by Massasoit. In fact, most, if notall, of the food was most likely brought and prepared by the Indians, whose 10,000-year familiarity with the cuisine of the region had kept the whites alive up to that point.
The Pilgrims wore no black hats or buckled shoes-these were the silly inventions of artists hundreds of years since that time. These lower-class Englishmen wore brightly colored clothing, with one of their church leaders recording among his possessions “1 paire of greene drawers.” Contrary to the fabricated lore of storytellers generations since, no Pilgrims prayed at the meal, and the supposed good cheer and fellowship must have dissipated quickly once the Pilgrims brandished their weaponry in a primitive display of intimidation. What’s more, the Pilgrims consumed a good deal of home brew. In fact, each Pilgrim drank at least a half gallon of beer a day, which they preferred even to water. This daily inebriation led their governor, William Bradford, to comment on his people’s “notorious sin,” which included their “drunkenness and uncleanliness” and rampant “sodomy”…
The Pilgrims of Plymouth, The Original Scalpers
Contrary to popular mythology the Pilgrims were no friends to the local Indians. They were engaged in a ruthless war of extermination against their hosts, even as they falsely posed as friends. Just days before the alleged Thanksgiving love-fest, a company of Pilgrims led by Myles Standish actively sought to chop off the head of a local chief. They deliberately caused a rivalry between two friendly Indians, pitting one against the other in an attempt to obtain “better intelligence and make them both more diligent.” An 11-foot-high wall was erected around the entire settlement for the purpose of keeping the Indians out.
Any Indian who came within the vicinity of the Pilgrim settlement was subject to robbery, enslavement, or even murder. The Pilgrims further advertised their evil intentions and white racial hostility, when they mounted five cannons on a hill around their settlement, constructed a platform for artillery, and then organized their soldiers into four companies-all in preparation for the military destruction of their friends the Indians.
Pilgrim Myles Standish eventually got his bloody prize. He went to the Indians, pretended to be a trader, then beheaded an Indian man named Wituwamat. He brought the head to Plymouth, where it was displayed on a wooden spike for many years, according to Gary B. Nash, “as a symbol of white power.” Standish had the Indian man’s young brother hanged from the rafters for good measure. From that time on, the whites were known to the Indians of Massachusetts by the name “Wotowquenange,” which in their tongue meant cutthroats and stabbers.
Who Were the “Savages”?
The myth of the fierce, ruthless Indian savage lusting after the blood of innocent Europeans must be vigorously dispelled at this point. In actuality, the historical record shows that the very opposite was true.
Once the European settlements stabilized, the whites turned on their hosts in a brutal way. The once amicable relationship was breeched again and again by the whites, who lusted over the riches of Indian land. A combination of the Pilgrims’ demonization of the Indians, the concocted mythology of Eurocentric historians, and standard Hollywood propaganda has served to paint the gentle Indian as a tomahawk-swinging savage endlessly on the warpath, lusting for the blood of the God-fearing whites.
But the Pilgrims’ own testimony obliterates that fallacy. The Indians engaged each other in military contests from time to time, but the causes of “war,” the methods, and the resulting damage differed profoundly from the European variety:
o Indian “wars” were largely symbolic and were about honor, not about territory or extermination.
o “Wars” were fought as domestic correction for a specific act and were ended when correction was achieved. Such action might better be described as internal policing. The conquest or destruction of whole territories was a European concept.
o Indian “wars” were often engaged in by family groups, not by whole tribal groups, and would involve only the family members.
o A lengthy negotiation was engaged in between the aggrieved parties before escalation to physical confrontation would be sanctioned. Surprise attacks were unknown to the Indians.
o It was regarded as evidence of bravery for a man to go into “battle” carrying no weapon that would do any harm at a distance-not even bows and arrows. The bravest act in war in some Indian cultures was to touch their adversary and escape before he could do physical harm.
o The targeting of non-combatants like women, children, and the elderly was never contemplated. Indians expressed shock and repugnance when the Europeans told, and then showed, them that they considered women and children fair game in their style of warfare.
o A major Indian “war” might end with less than a dozen casualties on both sides. Often, when the arrows had been expended the “war” would be halted. The European practice of wiping out whole nations in bloody massacres was incomprehensible to the Indian.
According to one scholar, “The most notable feature of Indian warfare was its relative innocuity.” European observers of Indian wars often expressed surprise at how little harm they actually inflicted. “Their wars are far less bloody and devouring than the cruel wars of Europe,” commented settler Roger Williams in 1643. Even Puritan warmonger and professional soldier Capt. John Mason scoffed at Indian warfare: “[Their] feeble manner…did hardly deserve the name of fighting.” Fellow warmonger John Underhill spoke of the Narragansetts, after having spent a day “burning and spoiling” their country: “no Indians would come near us, but run from us, as the deer from the dogs.” He concluded that the Indians might fight seven years and not kill seven men. Their fighting style, he wrote, “is more for pastime, than to conquer and subdue enemies.”
All this describes a people for whom war is a deeply regrettable last resort. An agrarian people, the American Indians had devised a civilization that provided dozens of options all designed to avoid conflict–the very opposite of Europeans, for whom all-out war, a ferocious bloodlust, and systematic genocide are their apparent life force. Thomas Jefferson–who himself advocated the physical extermination of the American Indian–said of Europe, “They [Europeans] are nations of eternal war. All their energies are expended in the destruction of labor, property and lives of their people.”
Puritan Holocaust
By the mid 1630s, a new group of 700 even holier Europeans calling themselves Puritans had arrived on 11 ships and settled in Boston-which only served to accelerate the brutality against the Indians.
In one incident around 1637, a force of whites trapped some seven hundred Pequot Indians, mostly women, children, and the elderly, near the mouth of the Mystic River. Englishman John Mason attacked the Indian camp with “fire, sword, blunderbuss, and tomahawk.” Only a handful escaped and few prisoners were taken-to the apparent delight of the Europeans:
To see them frying in the fire, and the streams of their blood quenching the same, and the stench was horrible; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave praise thereof to God.
This event marked the first actual Thanksgiving. In just 10 years 12,000 whites had invaded New England, and as their numbers grew they pressed for all-out extermination of the Indian. Euro-diseases had reduced the population of the Massachusett nation from over 24,000 to less than 750; meanwhile, the number of European settlers in Massachusetts rose to more than 20,000 by 1646.
By 1675, the Massachusetts Englishmen were in a full-scale war with the great Indian chief of the Wampanoags, Metacomet. Renamed “King Philip” by the white man, Metacomet watched the steady erosion of the lifestyle and culture of his people as European-imposed laws and values engulfed them.
In 1671, the white man had ordered Metacomet to come to Plymouth to enforce upon him a new treaty, which included the humiliating rule that he could no longer sell his own land without prior approval from whites. They also demanded that he turn in his community’s firearms. Marked for extermination by the merciless power of a distant king and his ruthless subjects, Metacomet retaliated in 1675 with raids on several isolated frontier towns. Eventually, the Indians attacked 52 of the 90 New England towns, destroying 13 of them. The Englishmen ultimately regrouped, and after much bloodletting defeated the great Indian nation, just half a century after their arrival on Massachusetts soil. Historian Douglas Edward Leach describes the bitter end:
The ruthless executions, the cruel sentences…were all aimed at the same goal-unchallengeable white supremacy in southern New England. That the program succeeded is convincingly demonstrated by the almost complete docility of the local native ever since.
When Captain Benjamin Church tracked down and murdered Metacomet in 1676, his body was quartered and parts were “left for the wolves.” The great Indian chief’s hands were cut off and sent to Boston and his head went to Plymouth, where it was set upon a pole on the real first “day of public Thanksgiving for the beginning of revenge upon the enemy.” Metacomet’s nine-year-old son was destined for execution because, the whites reasoned, the offspring of the devil must pay for the sins of their father. The child was instead shipped to the Caribbean to spend his life in slavery.
As the Holocaust continued, several official Thanksgiving Days were proclaimed. Governor Joseph Dudley declared in 1704 a “General Thanksgiving”-not in celebration of the brotherhood of man-but for [God’s] infinite Goodness to extend His Favors…In defeating and disappointing… the Expeditions of the Enemy [Indians] against us, And the good Success given us against them, by delivering so many of them into our hands…
Just two years later one could reap a ££50 reward in Massachusetts for the scalp of an Indian-demonstrating that the practice of scalping was a European tradition. According to one scholar, “Hunting redskins became…a popular sport in New England, especially since prisoners were worth good money…”
The same technologists who protest against the NSA’s metadata collection programs are the ones profiting the most from the widespread surveillance of students.
Since 2011, billions of dollars of venture capital investment have poured into public education through private, for-profit technologies that promise to revolutionize education. Designed for the “21st century” classroom, these tools promise to remedy the many, many societal ills facing public education with artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, and other technological advancements.
They are also being used to track and record every move students make in the classroom, grooming students for a lifetime of surveillance and turning education into one of the most data-intensive industries on the face of the earth. The NSA has nothing on the monitoring tools that education technologists have developed in to “personalize” and “adapt” learning for students in public school districts across the United States.
(Mega)data Collection + Analysis
“Adaptive”, “personalized” learning platforms are one of the most heavily-funded verticals in education technology. By breaking down learning into a series of tasks, and further distilling those tasks down to a series of clicks that can be measured and analyzed, companies like Knewton (which has raised $105 million in venture capital), or the recently shuttered inBloom (which raised over $100 million from the Gates Foundation) gather immense amounts of information about students into a lengthy profile containing personal information, socioeconomic status and other data that is mined for patterns and insights to improve performance. For students, these clickstreams and data trails begin when they are 5 years old, barely able to read much less type in usernames and passwords required to access their online learning portals.
Data collection and number crunching aren’t the only technologies being explored to revolutionize education– technology billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates funded a $1.1 million project to fit middle-school students with biometric sensors to monitor their response and engagement levels during lessons, and advocated a $5 billion program to install video cameras in every classroom to record teachers for evaluation.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a law put in place in 1974 to protect student academic records, does nothing to protect student data when it is in the hands of education technology companies. Instead, FERPA threatens to take federal funding away from schools who are found to have breached student privacy while it fails to mandate bare minimum security standards for the storage and transmission of student data. In fact, a recent revision of FERPA increased the power that companies have to collect and mine student data. Though lawmakers and privacy advocates are regularly outraged at the immense volume of student data freely floating through the web, the repeated failure to create legislation that protects student data from being used for profit is astounding.
One thing is clear: those who have the power to protect student privacy will not do so as long as they can continue to subsidize the cost of public education with student data.
Internet Censorship in Schools
In most educational institutions, the vast majority of IT operations are focused on monitoring, filtering and blocking web traffic instead of building secure networks that safeguard student records and sensitive behavioral data. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the widespread adoption of web filtering software tools in K-12 schools. Usage of these technologies is required for compliance with programs like E-Rate, which grant federal money to schools to fund internet access for their students.
To be eligible for funding from the E-Rate program, schools are required to comply with federal regulations that ban access to websites displaying pornography, graphic material, or any other that could otherwise be judged as immoral, improper or lewd. More often than not, this subjective criteria is determined by the opinions and belief systems of school administrators under political pressure to deny students access to content on controversial issues about topics like evolution, birth control and sex education. These decisions disproportionately affect young girls and LGBTQ students by denying them access to sites that provide important information about their rights, their developing bodies, their sexuality and their access to contraceptives. In the case of Securly, the first filtering tool designed for schools, the controls set by IT and administration for web access can extend far beyond the walls of the school and determine what content students can access while using school- issued machines from their home internet connections.
Despite the many positive contributions of the internet in the distribution and dissemination of knowledge across the planet, students are regularly denied access to valuable information that could positively impact their learning… all to safeguard a small percentage of federal budget money granted to their schools. The implications of this are particularly severe for low-income students who do not have access to the Internet at home; without the ability to freely access the web on their own terms, their digital literacy skills lag behind those of their affluent peers. Though teachers request better and broader internet access for students in their classrooms, administrator-imposed blocks and filters on school internet leave most students woefully unprepared to navigate the realities of the web. When students do find a way around the tools used to limit their access to the outside world (this happened with a group of students who were given iPads in the Los Angeles United School district last year), they’re labelled as “hackers” or miscreants, and disciplined for using Tor, a tool popular among students for anonymous web browsing and circumventing blacklists that ban websites from school networks.
Social Media Surveillance
Schools are adopting many other surveillance technologies with unprecedented reach into the private communications and lives of students and their families. In Lower Merion, PA, a suburb outside of Philadelphia, educators engaged remote administration tools on students’ laptops to regularly spy on their activities while at home. In a case that made its way into federal courts, one student was punished by administrators who mistook candy pictured through his laptop’s camera for drugs. While the full extent of the spying was never exposed, parents and students have expressed concern about educators having the ability to watch young girls undress in the privacy of their homes, unaware that they were being watched through their school-issued computers.
In 2013, the Glendale Unified School District in Glendale, CA took a move straight from the NSA surveillance handbook by seeking out a $40,000 contract with Geo Listening, a social media monitoring company that charges schools to eavesdrop on student social media chatter. While the company claims to only access posts that are public in the school districts they work with, and says it works closely with school districts to tailor their monitoring programs to prevent cyberbullying, suicide and active shooter incidents, it is very easy— too easy, in fact— to use such technologies to identify and target students who have been labeled deviant or delinquent within their communities, or who are otherwise outspoken and critical of their teachers and schools.
Schools are also demanding access to students’ social media communications in ways that severely harm their constitutionally protected rights to free speech. In Minnewaska, MN, a female student who complained about a hall monitor’s behavior in a Facebook post was questioned and given in-school suspension. Later, when a parent reported the student for “sexting” over Facebook with a classmate, she was removed from class again as a group of educators and a police officer armed with a taser demanded that the student hand over her password. They then read private communications that took place outside of school through her Facebook account. After being pulled from class multiple times, suspended from school, and barred from attending a school field trip (the same punishment was not doled out to the male student involved in the messaging), the ACLU stepped in to defend the student’s right to privacy and free speech in communications outside of school property. Though the ruling in the case upheld students’ protection under the 1st and 4th amendments, school districts around the country continue to demand access to students’ social media accounts and threaten to mark students’ academic records to make it difficult to get into a desired university or to seek other avenues for continued education.
Physical Surveillance
In addition to the online monitoring taking place in schools, there are many surveillance mechanisms in place to enforce physical security in public schools. Since the shootings that took place at Virginia Tech in 2007, and again after those that took place in Sandy Hook, CT in 2012, technology companies have launched myriad tools designed to minimize the potential loss of life in the next active shooting incident at a school. Some of these technologies include:
Metal detectors and scanners, which despite efficacy concerns, are installed and require students to submit to being searched before entering a school building
Biometric identification software, which uses facial recognition and other traits to track attendance in some educational institutions.
By preying on the absolute worst fears of administrators and parents across the country, technology companies are earning millions of dollars selling security “solutions” that do not accurately address the threat model these tools claim to dispel. School districts that purchase these systems further perpetuate the farce of security theater and infringe on students’ rights to privacy and individual freedom.
A Lifetime of Surveillance
When we develop and use educational technologies that monitor a student’s every moment in school and online, we groom that student for a lifetime of surveillance from the NSA, from data brokers, from advertisers, marketers, and even CCTV cameras. By watching every move that students make while learning, we model to students that we do not trust them– that ultimately, their every move will be under scrutiny from others. When students recognize that they are being watched, they begin to act differently– and from that very moment they begin to cede one small bit of freedom at a time.
Though the education technology revolution continually promises a silver bullet that will be a great democratizing force for all of society’s ills, it categorically disregards the patriarchal power structures and biases that both legitimate and perpetuate discrimination against minorities and marginalized groups. Despite it being well within the scope of educational technology tools to track, identify and expose biases towards groups of students, technologists avoid implementing small changes that monitor educator performance and correct for unconscious biases that negatively affect student learning. Because the surveillance taking place in schools is typically based on qualitative criteria like morality, appropriateness and good behavior, these technologies extend current practices and prejudices that perpetuate injustices against marginalized groups.
There are few to no safeguards built into the online and offline monitoring systems to protect students from the abuse of these tools. Young female students who are active on social media can be unfairly targeted, slut-shamed and disciplined for suggestive language that takes place outside of school, while their male counterparts are not held equally accountable for participating in sexually charged online conversations. Youth of color, a group that is disproportionately stereotyped as angry, aggressive, and unpredictable by educators, can easily be monitored, disciplined, and entered into the juvenile justice system for any outburst that could vaguely be misinterpreted as a threat to a homogeneous caucasian school culture. Any student grappling with issues of abuse, depression, disability, gender identity or sexuality could easily be discovered by online surveillance tools, stigmatized and outed to their teachers, parents and wider community.
Education technologists also continue to widen the digital divide between affluent and economically oppressed. Despite an industry-wide insistence that technology is not being developed to replace educators in the classroom, many poor school districts faced with massive budget cuts are implementing experimental blended learning programs reliant on “adaptive” and “personalized” software as a way to mitigate the effect of large class sizes on student learning. This means that students who attend costly private schools or live within rich school districts that can afford to employ more educators and maintain smaller class sizes receive much more personalized instruction from their teachers. Instead of receiving much-needed interaction and personalized learning directly from educators, poor students living in disadvantaged communities receive instruction from educational software that collects their data (which is likely to be sold), and have less individual instruction time from teachers than their affluent counterparts.
By developing technologies that collect, track, record, analyze every move a student makes both online and off, technologists and investors and educators are ensuring that today’s students will have less privacy than any other generation that came before them, threatening to make privacy and anonymity unattainable for future generations. Though the surveillance mechanisms at play in education technologies affect the privacy of millions of students who pass through the education system each year, this system is a profound, persistent threat to the privacy and individual liberty of LGBTQ students, low-income students, and students of color who have already been so severely failed by the status quo.
Ironically, the same technologists and investors who protest against the NSA’s metadata collection programs are the ones profiting the most from the widespread surveillance of students across the country, by building educational tools with the same function.
After the Crash 