Month: July 2014

Former NSA Chief Keith Alexander Quickly Becoming the Villain

Certain people, who had their egos (not national security) terribly hurt by the Edward Snowden revelations, continue to call Snowden names and stuff and show their outrage toward him for exposing the NSA’s wrongdoing.  It would seem, however, they might want to redirect their outrage toward another former employee of the NSA: ex-chief Keith Alexander.

It was revealed yesterday the NSA is now being sued by a reporter for not disclosing Alexander’s financial records in the interest of making sure there were no conflicts of interest occurring while all of the other civil rights violations were being carried out under his direction.  And it has been noted by the Atlantic that this information, by law, should be made public unless it is stopped by the president because it could be damaging to national security, a claim that would be completely absurd.

Just a million $ per month…

And this isn’t the only question (or even the most important one) about money surrounding Alexander.  He is now offering his consulting services on security for the tiny sum of $1,000,000…per month.  Looking at this situation and considering his expertise, it is hard not to see the obvious: he is offering his knowledge of classified government information and tactics for money.  This is illegal, as Representative Alan Grayson has pointed out:

Disclosing or misusing classified information for profit is, as Mr. Alexander well knows, a felony. I question how Mr. Alexander can provide any of the services he is offering unless he discloses or misuses classified information, including extremely sensitive sources and methods. Without the classified information that he acquired in his former position, he literally would have nothing to offer to you. (Emphasis added)

In other words, when Alexander isn’t busy getting annihilated in interviews by comedians or admitting he lied to Congress, he is asking for a ton of money to shield companies from the snooping of the agency he former headed.

And this is happening in comparison to the wrongful demonizing of Snowden, who did not sell his secrets to anyone and did his whistle blowing in a manner that was very controlled so as not to put any lives in danger or damage national security.  Unless, of course, someone can actually provide an iota of evidence to the contrary, which hasn’t happened even a year later.

This brings us to a very fair question: who is the real villain now, Alexander or Snowden?  The answer gets more and more obvious as time goes on.

Social Protest Lit: Grant Allen, “The Wrongfulness of Riches”

indexAn short essay from Grant Allen entitled The Wrongfulness of Riches from Book IV called “Out of The Depths.” This chapter is focused on man’s pursuit of remedy for social injustice:

If you are on the side of the spoilers, they you are a bad man. If you are on the side of social justice, then you are a good one. There is no effective test of the high morality at the present day save this.

Critics of the middle-class type often exclaim, of reasoning like this, “What on earth makes him say it? What has he to gain by talking in that way? What does he expect to get by it?” So bound up are they in the idea of a self-interest as the one motive of action that they never even seem to conceive of honest conviction as a ground for speaking out the truth that is in one. To such critics I would answer, “The reason why I write all this is because I profoundly believe it. I believe the poor are being kept out of their own. I believe the rich are for the most part selfish and despicable. I believe wealth has been generally piled up by cruel and unworthy means. I believe it is wrong in us to acquiesce in the wicked inequalities of our existing social state, instead of trying our utmost to bring about another, where right would be done to all, where poverty would be impossible. I believe such a system is perfectly practicable, and that nothing stands in its way save the selfish fears and prejudices of individuals. And I believe that even those craven fears and narrow prejudices are wholly mistaken; that everybody, including the rich themselves, would be infinitely happier in a world where no poverty existed, where no hateful sights and sounds met then eye at every turn, where all slums were swept away, and where everybody had their just and even share of pleasures and refinements in a free and equal community.”

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Latest Thoughts On Israel/Gaza Strip Conflict

20140730-ISRAEL-slide-C9B1-superJumboI was reading the front page story on the NYT’s website about the Israel/Gaza Strip conflict and found five bits of information that drew my interest.

First,

Israel’s aerial assaults on targets in Gaza broadened on Tuesday, with barrages that destroyed Hamas’s media offices, the home of a top leader and what Palestinians said was a devastating hit on the only electricity plant, plunging the enclave of 1.7 million into deeper deprivation with no power, running water or sewage treatment.

Second,

Israel’s military made clear it had widened the scope of the bombing campaign in Gaza to hit the political structures of Hamas and another militant group, Islamic Jihad, including the home of Ismael Haniya, the No. 2 Hamas official behind Khaled Meshal, its leader-in-exile in Qatar. But Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said it was unclear whether Israel had been responsible for the debilitating strike on the power plant, where an enormous fire hurtled thick, black smoke skyward, visible for miles.

Third,

The shutdown of the power plant, which Israel previously attacked in 2006 and which sat idle for weeks this past winter for lack of fuel, threatened to turn the situation in Gaza into a major humanitarian crisis. The facility powers water and sewage systems as well as hospitals, and it had been Gaza’s main source of electricity in recent days after eight of 10 lines that run from Israel were damaged.

Fourth,

F-16 and Apache helicopter strikes also ruined the headquarters of the Al Aqsa satellite television and radio channels affiliated with Hamas.

and Fifth,

Also flattened was the Financial Monitoring Authority, a government building where some Hamas leaders kept offices. Relatives of Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, own the home next door, which was damaged; Mr. Sourani said his brother, his brother’s wife and his 94-year-old aunt were in the house at the time of the strike and had received no warning.

My question here is what happened to the stated goal of stopping rocket fire into Israel and eliminating Hamas’ smuggling tunnels? What’s all of this now? Collective punishment and the destruction of Hamas is the only real goal.

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Social Protest Lit: George Bernard Shaw, Preface to “Major Barbara”

indexThe preface to “Major Barbara” from George Bernard Shaw from Book IV called “Out of The Depths.” This chapter is focused on man’s pursuit of remedy for social injustice:

The thoughtless wickedness with which we scatter sentences of imprisonment, torture in the solitary cell and on the plank bed, and flogging, and moral invalids and energetic rebels, is as nothing compared to the stupid levity with which we tolerate poverty as a if it were either a wholesome tonic for lazy people or less a virtue to be embraced as St. Francis embraced it. If a man is indolent, let him be poor. If he is drunken, let him be poor. If he is not a gentleman, let him be poor. If he is addicted to the fine arts or to pure science instead of trade and finance, let him be poor. If he chooses to spend his urban eighteen shillings a week or his agricultural thirteen shillings a week on his beer and his family instead of saving it up for his old age, let him be poor. Serves him right! Also-somewhat inconsistently-blessed are the poor!

Now what does this Let Him Be Poor mean? It means let him be weak. Let him be ignorant. Let him be a nucleus of disease. Let him be a standing exhibition and example of ugliness and dirt. Let him have rickety children. Let him be cheap and let him drag his fellows down to his price by selling himself to do their work. Let his habitations turn our cities into poisonous congeries of slums. Let his daughters infect our young men with the diseases of the streets and his sons revenge him by turning the nation’s manhood into scrofula, cowardice, cruelty, hypocrisy, political imbecility, and all the other fruits of oppression and malnutrition. Let the undeserving become still less deserving; and let the deserving lay up for himself, not treasures in heaven, but horrors in hell upon earth. This being so, is it really wise to let him be poor? Would he not do ten time less harm as a prosperous burglar, incendiary, ravisher, or murderer, to the utmost limits of humanity’s comparatively negligible impulses in these directions? Suppose we were to abolish all penalties for such activities, and decide that poverty is the one thing we will not tolerate-that every adult with less than, say, 365 pounds a year, shall be painlessly but inexorably killed, and every hungry half naked child forcibly fattened and clothed, would not that be and enormous improvement on our existing system, which has already destroyed so many civilizations, and is visibly destroying ours in the same way?

 

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Palestine Borders and Demographics Prove to be A Ghetto

Thanks to a good idea given to me by my partner here at STL, I started to research and analyze some geographic information regarding the Jewish land-grab in Palestine. I then followed by studying some demographic info on the Gaza Strip and drew some interesting conclusions. Here’s what I found:

First, some great maps over at Wikipedia with adjoining historical context info and links portraying the boundaries of Palestine/Israel since the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement (The linked information could have you reading for days it’s so interesting).

Evolution of Mandate Palestine and modern Palestinian Territories

150px-Proposals_for_the_Mandate_of_Palestine_1916-19.svg

1916-22 Proposals: Three proposals for the post World War I administration of Palestine. The red line is the “International Administration” proposed in the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement, the dashed blue line is the 1919 Zionist Organization proposal at the Paris Peace Conference, and the thin blue line refers to the final borders of the 1923-48 Mandatory Palestine.
Jewish_Land_Ownership_in_Mandatory_Palestine,_1947.svg1947 (Actual): Mandatory Palestine, showing Jewish-owned regions in Palestine as of 1947 in blue, constituting 6% of the total land area, of which more than half was held by the JNF and PICA. The Jewish population had increased from 83,790 in 1922 to 608,000 in 1946.

 

United_Nations_Partition_Plan_for_Palestine_map.svg1947 (Proposal): Proposal per the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine (UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), 1947), prior to the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The proposal included a Corpus Separatum for Jerusalem, extraterritorial crossroads between the non-contiguous areas, and Jaffa as an Arab exclave.

Palestinian_Territories,_1948-67.svg1948-67 (Actual): The Jordanian occupied West Bank and Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip (note the dotted lines between the territories and Jordan / Egypt), after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, showing 1949 armistice lines.

Palestinian_National_Authority_within_Israel,_2013.svg1993-Current: Extant region administered by the Palestinian National Authority (under Oslo 2).

 

Second, I found some telling demographic information from the CIA World Factbook regarding the Gaza Strip that I found profoundly important:

  1. The area of the Gaza Strip is only 360 sq. km., which is only twice the size of Washington D.C., yet, the population of the nation’s capital is only 632,323, while Gaza’s population is 1,816,379.
  2. Gaza has a 22.5% unemployment rate with 38% of its people living below the poverty line.
  3. Gaza is under siege by air, land, and sea. The World Factbook even includes in the information regarding Gaza’s maritime activities, that, “[E]ffective 3 January 2009 the Gaza maritime area is closed to all maritime traffic and is under blockade imposed by Israeli Navy until further notice.”

So what should we say is going on here is that the Israelis are trapping the prisoners of the Gaza Strip into, and I use this term in light of how controversial it is, a Ghetto. I am not contending that the Jews are consciously doing what the Nazis did to them. Far from it. I just believe that they need to look into their own tragic past and hopefully derive some empathy for the people they have been bombing now for two weeks now.

 

 

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Social Protest Lit: Ebenezer Elliot, “The People’s Anthem”

indexA poem from Ebenezer Elliot entitled The People’s Anthem from Book IV called “Out of The Depths.” This chapter is focused on man’s pursuit of remedy for social injustice:

When wilt thou save the people?

O God of mercy! when?

Not kings and lords, but nations!

Flowers of the heart, O God, are they!

Let them not pass, like weeds, away!

Their heritage a sunless day!

God save the people!

Shall bring crime for ever,

Strength aiding still the strong?

Is it thy will, O Father?

That man shall toil for wrong?

“No!” say thy mountains; “No!” thy skies;

“Man’s clouded sun shall brightly rise,

And songs be heard instead of sighs.”

God save the people!

When wilt thou save the people?

O God of mercy! when?

The people, Lord! the people!

Not thrones and crowns, but men!

God save the people! thine they are;

Thy children, as thy angels fair;

Save them from bondage and despair!

God save the people!

 

 

 

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Stephen Moore’s Ridiculous Anti-Clean Energy Rant

Hard right-winger Stephen Moore took a break from pushing debunked trickle-down economic policies to take a pathetic shot at clean energy.  Let the stupid begin.

…radical Greens, one of the most influential political forces in America today…

Seriously?  He goes on to mention the famed Sierra Club as one of these forces.  And where did they rank in 2013 on lobbying: 755.  In fact, if we look at the top 50 interest groups giving to members of Congress this year, no sign of a “clean energy” or “renewable energy” group in the rankings.  Yet, they are one of the “most influential” because Stephen Moore says so and not because any facts back it up.

…we could end up seeing “rolling brownouts and even blackouts in the years ahead.”

Kind of like the blackouts induced by the infallible private sector giant, Enron, in California over a decade ago?  Remember kids, always let the fossil-fuel guys have their way and nothing will ever go wrong.

America gets about 40 percent of its electricity from coal-fired plants.

Correct.  And one day, whether it’s because climate change has erased mankind off the face of the earth or because we run out of coal, that percentage will be zero, which is the whole point of finding renewable sources and getting them in use as fast as possible.  This ignores other ugly realities of coal, such as the destruction caused by mountain top removal.  Moore might want to look into that some time.

But the environmentalists are…raising unsupported objections to fracking.

Unsupported?  If they are so unsupported Mr. Moore, please allow a fracking operation to begin close to your home, just like the CEO of Exxon refused to do.  And what about the growing research showing the relationship between fracking and increased earthquakes?  Unsupported?  Not really.

Sorry, for the foreseeable future, we aren’t going to get our power for our $18 trillion economy from wind turbines and solar panels. And if we begin to try, prices are going to skyrocket.

This ignores the reality that the cost has been falling for things like solar.  As noted in this piece from the Guardian:

Panels now sell for less than a quarter of their 2008 price…Bloomberg estimates that the world will have 600GW of photovoltaic solar worldwide by 2020 (an increase from about 150GW today) and 1,900GW by 2030; making up 5-7% of the global electricity mix. These positive predictions are based on the falling prices of renewables.

And one last absurd quote from Moore:

…the Greens think oil is a “dirty” fuel that causes global warming.

Let me fix that statement for you.  Scientists know oil is a “dirty” fuel that causes global warming. There you go, Mr. Moore.  You’re welcome for the assistance.

Anti-Israel Policies/Actions Is Not Anti-Semitsim

latuff3-300x174There have been growing protests in Europe against the mass murder of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the State of Israel. These actions are in response to the IDF killing 500 Muslims there with the vast majority of them being civilians. But what is troubling about these movements is, according to this article in the NYT, an anti-Semitic tinge has taken place at these protests. The story reads that in France:

Several recent pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Paris have boiled over into violence, and earlier this month several hundred protesters sought to storm two synagogues in the French capital during an anti-Israel demonstration in which protesters chanted, “Death to Jews!” and “Hitler was right,” according to Serge Cwajgenbaum, secretary general of the European Jewish Congress, a Brussels-based organization representing European Jewry.

There is nothing sicker that anti-Semitic attitudes or beliefs, much less being a Holocaust-denier. But let us make something clear: Just because one is against Israeli policies or military actions does not mean one is anti-Semitic.

One of my heroes in life, the great MIT Professor Emeritus, political commentator, and activist, Noam Chomsky, is one of the forefront critics of Israeli policies and is, what may be a surprise to you, Jewish. In the collection of published transcripts from Chomsky speaking engagements, “The Indispensable Chomsky,” has provided me with the critical thought needed to interpret the Israeli-Palestinian conflict objectively.

Chomsky contends, with many other critics of Israeli policies regarding the Palestinians, that many pro-Israeli officials and commentators use the accusations of antisemitism to deflect criticism of Israel. If you do not support Israel in any form or fashion, you hate Jews.

Nothing could be further from the truth in my case and the majority of others.

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Warren For President?

Elizabeth_Warren_Nov_2_2012Today at the the annual Netroots Nation conference in Detroit, the nation’s largest gathering of liberal activists and organizers, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) reportedly drew an applause that Hillary could only dream of. According to NYT and Politico reports, Warren was a rock-star while Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic candidate for President, was absent.

Warren’s populist talking points and her history of taking Wall Street to task (remember that Warren was an early advocate for the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and later worked on the implementation of the bureau as a special assistant to the president) has the left-wing of the left-wing of the Democratic party dreaming of a Presidential run. A site has even popped up at ready4warren.com stating “Run, Warren, Run!”

But Warren has stated, over and over, that she will not run be running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, telling the Boston Globe “I am not running for president. Do you want to put an exclamation point at the end of that?” She is currently only serving as speaker at rallies for Dem candidates such as Kentucky’s Alison Lundergan Grimes and West Virginia’s Natalie Tennant. That’s all.

But it’s like the NYT wrote,

Progressives like Mrs. Clinton (and think she can win.) But they love Ms. Warren (even if they are not sure she can.)

I agree with the NYT’s observation. I see Warren as the Dem’s Ron Paul or Ted Cruz: a favorite of the fervent base, but not a viable candidate for November ’16. But if Warren could just move the dialogue a little bit to the left, just maybe Hillary will move a little to the left. And I believe, if presented in a balanced way, voters will be drawn to what Warren is espousing in some measure. For example:

A 6/16/2014 Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research Survey states:

Voters still regard Wall Street and big banks as “bad actors.” A 64 percent majority believes “the stock market is rigged for insiders and people who know how to manipulate the system.” Another 55 percent majority believes “Wall Street and big banks hurt everyday Americans by pouring money into ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes rather than real business and investments.” Therefore, not surprisingly, most financial institutions generate huge negatives among voters.

Those results are indicative that Americans still hold a grudge against Wall Street and the 1%. So if Warren’s critical stance against large financial institutions can find its way into the spotlight, in any amount, we could really get something going here.

 

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Social Protest Lit: Ruskin, “The Veins of Wealth”

A piece from “Book II: The Chasm” which regards economic/social inequality with an excerpt by John Ruskin from The Veins of Wealth:

Primarily, which is very notable and curious, I observe that men of business rarely know the meaning of the word “rich.” At least if they know, they do no in their reasonings allow for the fact, that it is a relative word, implying its opposite “poor” as positively the word “north” implies its opposite “south.” Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, and it were possible, by following certain scientific precepts, for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbors pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately upon the need or desire he has for it, – and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist’s sense, is therefor equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbor poor.

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