A hungry mob is an angry mob

In SADAT'S DAT, Adam Curtis revives a 1982 documentary on Egypt, which noted that food shortages and prices played a big role in Anwar Sadat's downfall. And of course the vision thing on our end. You'll have to visit his BBC website to see the doc Why Was Cairo Calm?

Here in Babylon, we may forget that 'a hungry mob is an angry mob'...

Chinese hackers used same back door as US govt 'wiretaps' + Cyberwar Hype

Following up on Clouds over Google in China? is this, via bldgblog -- Bruce Schneier's editorial on CNN, U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google:

"In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.

Google's system isn't unique. Democratic governments around the world -- in Sweden, Canada and the UK, for example -- are rushing to pass laws giving their police new powers of Internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell.

Many are also passing data retention laws, forcing companies to retain information on their customers. In the U.S., the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act required phone companies to facilitate FBI eavesdropping, and since 2001, the National Security Agency has built substantial eavesdropping systems with the help of those phone companies.

Systems like these invite misuse: criminal appropriation, government abuse and stretching by everyone possible to apply to situations that are applicable only by the most tortuous logic. The FBI illegally wiretapped the phones of Americans, often falsely invoking terrorism emergencies, 3,500 times between 2002 and 2006 without a warrant. Internet surveillance and control will be no different."

Read more...

Update: there's more from Wired in 2 articles. First see Cyberwar Hype Intended to Destroy the Open Internet for a reminder about claims from self-interested government contractors like The Carlyle Group.

Then there's ‘Google’ Hackers Had Ability to Alter Source Code,

"A white paper released by security firm McAfee during this week’s RSA security conference in San Francisco provides a couple of new details about the Operation Aurora attacks (.pdf) that affected 34 U.S. companies, including Google and Adobe, beginning last July. McAfee helped Adobe investigate the attack on its system and provided information to Google about malware used in the attacks. [...]

As previously reported, the attackers gained initial access by conducting a spear-phishing attack against specific targets within the company. The targets received an e-mail or instant message that appeared to come from someone they knew and trusted. The communication contained a link to a website hosted in Taiwan that downloaded and executed a malicious JavaScript, with a zero-day exploit that attacked a vulnerability in the user’s Internet Explorer browser.

A binary disguised as a JPEG file then downloaded to the user’s system and opened a backdoor onto the computer and set up a connection to the attackers’ command-and-control servers, also hosted in Taiwan.

From that initial access point, the attackers obtained access to the source-code management system or burrowed deeper into the corporate network to gain a persistent hold."

Clouds over Google in China? [updated]

In The Great Google Coverup? Douglas Rushkoff ponders the mysteries of the Chinese breaks-in at Google's Texas servers (and perhaps 33 others including Adobe). This case does not pose the usual false choice of privacy versus security:

"At least a conspiracy theory, in which Google willingly gave the Chinese authority over its clients' communications, offers the comfort of there being some human agency in all this. Just as we prefer to find out that a single pilot was drunk than that there's a problem with every plane in the sky, it is easier to contend with the notion that Google's young executives made a stupid decision by engaging with dictators than to consider the alternative: that the cloud being entrusted with an increasing amount of our banking, business, and everything else, is the for the taking."

For more on this see the Techmeme cluster headed by the McAfee Security Insights, which according to Arstechnica has found evidence that a vulnerability in Internet Explorer -- not Acrobat Reader as in recent attacks on the Dalai Lama’s computers -- was exploited in the attacks on individuals and corporate infrastructure.

Update: Techie Buzz says that "Reuters is claiming that the attackers were aided from the inside. According to its sources, one or more Google China employees colluded with the attackers. Local media has been reporting that, Google China employees were denied access to internal networks after January 13th, while several staff members were transferred or put on leave."

Also, Glenn Greenwald makes a good point, "It goes without saying that countries like China and Iran -- along with many of our closest allies -- are far more repressive of internal dissent than is the U.S. But the role of the American Congress is supposed to be to check surveillance abuses by the U.S. Government and to safeguard the privacy of American citizens inside the U.S. Instead, they do the opposite: flamboyantly condemn transgressions by other governments (at least the ones we don't like) while enabling, empowering and protecting our own government officials and private telecoms who illegally spy within our own country."

Update 2: as background, note that China and the US have been conduction trade negotiations, as well as relations on climate change and loan and other financial matters.

Update 3: Hackers target friends of Google, Adobe and other workers, and from the Christian Science Monitor (January 25), "At least three US oil companies were the target of a series of previously undisclosed cyberattacks that may have originated in China and that experts say highlight a new level of sophistication in the growing global war of Internet espionage." Read more in US oil industry hit by cyberattacks: Was China involved?

Meme tracking and the News Cycle

A new Cornell study, Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle, is discussed by the New York Times in Study Measures the Chatter of the News Cycle. This study is interesting on a few levels, since the Cornell project tracks "the quotes and phrases that appear most frequently over time across this entire online news spectrum. This makes it possible to see how different stories compete for news and blog coverage each day, and how certain stories persist while others fade quickly."

But so far the effort seems to be targeted to prove that blogs lag slightly behind mainstream media and other details which can safely be concluded from casual looks at Google Hot Trends, and aggregators like Techmeme, PopURLs, and Original Signal. Social problems and political hot potatoes are safely avoided, as are steps toward improved decision-making. For a neglected perspective, see the recent AEP post on Anthony Downs' "Issue-Attention Cycle."

The problem with news is that celebrity, impulse twit-ches, and emotion rules -- "if it bleeds, it leads" still applies. News mostly feeds us lurid filler. Recognized on a basic level since at least the time of Edward Bernays is that advertising and politics are propaganda. This can be seen in behavioral targeting, web tracking, and the careers of people like consultant Frank Luntz. For some background on "framing" for the social mind, see Douglas Rushkoff's PBS docs Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders. Right now the pitchman has a foot in the door, but there's more coming, like "social-networking TV," an electronic panopticon where you can "participate in your own manipulation," as EBN mused.

Still the Cornell study is worth a look, and we can expect more visualizations because you can download MemeTracker data. There's also a beginning of a discussion by Zachary M. Seward of the Neiman Journalism Lab, Chris Anderson, and Scott Rosenberg.

Here's an excerpt of the NYT article:

'The paper, “Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle,” was also written by Jure Leskovec, a postgraduate researcher at Cornell, who this summer will become an assistant professor at Stanford, and Lars Backstrom, a Ph.D. student at Cornell, who is going to work for Facebook. The team has set up interactive displays of their findings at memetracker.org.
Social scientists and media analysts have long examined news cycles, though focusing mainly on case studies instead of working with large Web data sets. And computer scientists have developed tools for clustering and tracking articles and blog posts, typically by subject or political leaning.

But the Cornell research, experts say, goes further in trying to track the phenomenon of news ideas rising and falling. “This is a landmark piece of work on the flow of news through the world,” said Eric Horvitz, a researcher at Microsoft and president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. “And the study shows how Web-scale analytics can serve as powerful sociological laboratories.”

Sreenath Sreenivasan, a professor specializing in new media at the Columbia Journalism School, said the research was an ambitious effort to measure a social phenomenon that is not easily quantified. “To the extent this kind of approach could open the door to a new understanding of the news cycle, that is very interesting,” he said.'

The "Issue-Attention Cycle"

Although Up and Down With Ecology: The "Issue-Attention Cycle" by Anthony Downs was written over 35 years ago (in The Public Interest, Summer 1972), the "issue-attention cycle" is perhaps even more problematic today.

[update] For an example, here's US Google searches for Boko Haram for a period in 2014, from "Forgetting Nigeria's girls" by Max Fisher on Vox:

It seems our society has an attention span problem, in addition to inavoidable cognitive bias like framing. Some scientists have even compared attitudes on some issues (and the issue attention cycle itself) to the Kübler-Ross model of the 5 stages of grief. There's also some similarity with the Hype Cycle (blog) and other models of technological innovation (which themselves can be the inverse of risk perception models).

Here's an excerpt and summary of Downs' 1972 framing of the "issue-attention cycle:"

"American public attention rarely remains sharply focused upon any one domestic issue for very long - even if it involves a continuing problem of crucial importance to society. Instead, a systematic 'issue-attention cycle' seems strongly to influence public attitudes and behavior concerning most key domestic problems. Each of these problems suddenly leaps into prominence, remains there for a short time, and then -- though still largely unresolved -- gradually fades from the center of public attention. A study of the way this cycle operates provides in-sights into whether public attention is likely to remain sufficiently focused upon any given issue to generate enough political pressure to cause effective change"

1. Pre-problem : A problem exists, but only some experts and interest groups are alarmed. 
2. Discovery and Enthusiasm : There is alarm and concern over a discovered environmental problem. People band together to support a solution and attack the problem. 
3. Realization : The public starts to understand the cost and difficulty of making progress on the issue. 
4. Decline in Interest : Because of this realization, there is a decline in public interest (and therefore media attention). 
5. Post-problem : The issue isn’t resolved but there is less attention on it. However, the overall level of interest is higher than when the problem was discovered. This may result in small recurrences of interest.”

Problems posed by the issue-attention cycle have only intensified since 1972, and we're left with the recurring question of agenda: 'What Is to Be Done?'. Confucius has better advice than Lenin -- though it's far more personally challenging:

If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation. If there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.

Update: A new Cornell study, Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle, discussed by the New York Times (Study Measures the Chatter of the News Cycle) is interesting, but so far seems to be targeted to something other than improved decision-making. Still it's worth a look; here's an excerpt of the NYT article:

'The paper, “Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle,” was also written by Jure Leskovec, a postgraduate researcher at Cornell, who this summer will become an assistant professor at Stanford, and Lars Backstrom, a Ph.D. student at Cornell, who is going to work for Facebook. The team has set up interactive displays of their findings at memetracker.org.Social scientists and media analysts have long examined news cycles, though focusing mainly on case studies instead of working with large Web data sets. And computer scientists have developed tools for clustering and tracking articles and blog posts, typically by subject or political leaning.

But the Cornell research, experts say, goes further in trying to track the phenomenon of news ideas rising and falling. “This is a landmark piece of work on the flow of news through the world,” said Eric Horvitz, a researcher at Microsoft and president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. “And the study shows how Web-scale analytics can serve as powerful sociological laboratories.”

Sreenath Sreenivasan, a professor specializing in new media at the Columbia Journalism School, said the research was an ambitious effort to measure a social phenomenon that is not easily quantified. “To the extent this kind of approach could open the door to a new understanding of the news cycle, that is very interesting,” he said.'

Sreenath Sreenivasan, a professor specializing in new media at the Columbia Journalism School, said the research was an ambitious effort to measure a social phenomenon that is not easily quantified. “To the extent this kind of approach could open the door to a new understanding of the news cycle, that is very interesting,” he said.'

Jure Leskovec of Stanford University explains his view of the internet news cycle (more data mining video), which at one point seemed to have a "heartbeat pattern" between established news sites and blogs. Please be aware that data miners did not prove that issue-attention cycle exist -- after all news and citation indices found in reference libraries provided the data before many of the newest data miners were born.

Batman vs. The Penguin: The Debate

Update: Who told McCain to blink so much (3000 times... video) during his debate?! Blinking is healthy, and who wants a robotic stare, but too much has consequences according to the International Journal of Psychophysiology:

"For eight U.S. presidential elections during the period 1960–2004, the rapid blinker during debates received fewer overall votes than his opponent. In seven of these eight elections, the rapid blinker also lost the electoral vote and was defeated at the polls. Furthermore, in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, seven out of ten presidential aspirants have shown elevated EBRs (over 50 blinks per minute) and have been defeated in their candidacies." (via Zack)

The Food Issue for the Farmer in Chief

As huge quantities of methane escape the unfrozen permafrost of Arctic landmasses in an ecological meltdown, the New York Times Magazine prints Michael Pollan's open letter on the food issue to President-Elect, the Farmer in Chief:

"...with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention."

'Grave Threats' To Economy

CNN notes the Fed chairman on 'Grave Threats' To Economy, but the lack of oversight clause seems more like a tactic to avoid a taxpayer equity stake and push instead a gift to Wall Street.

picture via Digby

Update: It's not a matter of the complexity of the "financial instruments" that a "computer tells you" are real. It's a matter of biased assumptions and dummy variables; see How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers at NYTimes.com. The finance guys weren't interested in resilient systems. The players already knew that these "instruments" were Ponzi schemes or something similar and that they couldn't always controls the herds.

Of course investors don't understand, because the game requires they don't! Now that The Fed and its allies want the marks to cover the losses, we should really question where "the money has just disappeared" to.

The actual wealth is still around; it was just skimmed off quick to protect it. After all, in Pottersville we serve hard drinks for men who want to get drunk fast.

With malice toward none, with charity for all...

After reading Robert Scheer and Gary Kamiya, I was reminded of the great Second Inaugural Address given by Abraham Lincoln on Saturday, March 4, 1865.

Fellow-Countrymen:

AT this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

MLK: not worried

Here's the last part of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1968 speech the night before he was assassinated. Like Malcolm X, he was murdered even though government agencies were present and monitoring through the COINTELPRO program. Democracy Now has the full speech and more.



Also very interesting is a speech MLK gave the previous year, "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam."

The Story of Stuff

What is the Story of Stuff? ... a movie from from Annie Leonard, Free Range Studios, and the Tides Foundation who say:

"From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world."

They produced a Flash move with nice interactive features and a QuickTime version. Here's the teaser on hidden costs:



Update: and a TED talk, via John Nack who has additional input...

"Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central belief of western societies: that freedom of choice leads to personal happiness. In Schwartz's estimation, all that choice is making us miserable. We set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them, and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, whom and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too many choices undermine happiness."

U.S. National Debt = $ 9,083 Billion

U.S. NATIONAL DEBT CLOCK says:
The Outstanding Public Debt as of 06 Nov 2007 is about:

$ 9,083,000,000,000.

That's $9 trillion.

The estimated population of the United States is 303,462,000, so each citizen's share of this debt is about $30,000. The National Debt has continued to increase an average of $1.43 billion per day since September 29, 2006. Debtor nations are subject to austerity programs under external control!

Update: Some people think that the deficit was a surplus under Clinton, but that was a brief period of yearly budget surpluses. Deficit spending became popular from the time of Keynes, especially with ex-prez Nixon who tried to hide the costs of the Vietnam War.

Joseph Stiglitz, a leading economic educator and professor at Columbia. explains The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush in Vanity Fair:

Think of the interest we are paying, year after year, on the almost $4 trillion of increased debt burden—even at 5 percent, that’s an annual payment of $200 billion, two Iraq wars a year forever. Think of the taxes that future governments will have to levy to repay even a fraction of the debt we have accumulated. And think of the widening divide between rich and poor in America, a phenomenon that goes beyond economics and speaks to the very future of the American Dream.

al-Qaeda in Iraq fighters = 850

Meeting Resistance is a new documentary making waves about the nature of the resistence to the US invasion of Iraq. It debuts as our American president warns of WWIII if Iran tries to build a nuclear power electricity plant -- though at the same time India is to be given actual nuclear material even after refusing to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty along with Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea. But what can you expect when the UN Security Council, the world's top arms dealers, is really a protection racket? Penny-ante games by regional drug lords and other gangstas pale in comparison.

Bush's only excuse for the war on Iraq is al-Qaeda, whose leaders roam about in other countries while we attack relatively innocent people at a high cost to soul and treasury. Or at least the American children's treasury, which Asian and European lenders will be waiting to demand when most manufacturing and programming jobs are finally offshored. Maybe the idea is that nothing matters but short run profit now that oil production has peaked.

In this light, globalization makes no sense, especially for the food security, since by the time the New World Order is in place, electric power and shipping resources to run it will be scarce. Too bad we didn't put that cool trillion into alternative energy resources!

Anyway, it's interesting to note that the "estimated number of full-time al-Qaeda-in-Iraq fighters is 850 or 2-5% of the Sunni insurgency, according to Malcolm Nance, author of The Terrorists of Iraq, who has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq." (from Launching Brand Petraeus). There more on this at Washington Monthly's The Myth of AQI: the military's estimation of the threat is alarmingly wrong by a former Iraq correspondent for the Stars and Stripes newspaper (interviewed on Counterspin). There are additional details in Dan Froomkin's Washington Post article Bush's Baghdad Mouthpiece.

There's more video of Meeting Resistance at Crooks and Liars and Democracy Now.

To put the threat in perspective, if all the suicide bombers blew themselves up at once they still would not pose a threat to the survival of the USA. The real danger is that our fate is almost entirely in our own hands in the form of arms and poison-making capability. Reminds me of a scary old song by the well-designed Savage Republic: "The Crisis of our Country is not caused by External Forces... The Danger Lies Within..."