Privacy vs. Security, a Noisy Question.

A noisy question. Surveillance, resources, privacy, and asking the wrong things

Better shovel some more on there if we ever want to find that needle.
A quote you will see many times, especially if you live part of you life on the Internet and CERTAINLY if you discuss technology, surveillance, or politics online is this:

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
- Benjamin Franklin, 1775.

It is often shortened or paraphrased as such:

"Those who give up liberty for safety, deserve neither"
- Some guy on Facebook, all the time.

This quote implies there is some kind of trade off between one's Liberty and one's safety, as if increasing the communications, people, and property open to searches and seizures will make us more safe. This mindset is ingrained even more today than in Franklin's time - as recent revelations regarding the NSA and other agencies have made clear. The same conceptualization is made today, one of a "balance" between protecting our private affairs on one side and preventing terrorist attacks on the other. The White House spokesmen speaks speaks in such terms and even the Libertarian/Republican CATO institute discusses the issue in the same way.

The problem is that this conceptualization is, at least relevant to the programs recently brought to light, entirely wrong.

If you are asking the question "How much privacy am I willing to lose to mass surveillance in order to gain security from terrorist attacks?" or if you are asking "How many more terrorist attacks am I willing to allow to happen to our nation to prevent our government from engaging in mass surveillance?" you are wrong either way. These questions are "noisy" - they only serve to distract us from what we SHOULD be asking.

These questions imply that if we surrender our privacy then we automatically gain safety or at least a framework that could make us more safe. The evidence - as far as we know it at this time - leads us to believe the opposite. From the Civil Liberties Oversight Board Report:

"Based on the information provided to the Board, we have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation"
-The Final Report of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. (underline mine)
-Go read the Whole Thing

This implies that the safety gained from this sacrifice of our privacy for this particular program was Zero. That significantly changes the equation about how much privacy should be sacrificed because zero times any amount is still zero. Despite all the shows about NCIS super-hackers or Ex-CIA agents with A.I. best buddies... the number of real world plots that were stopped with this nonsense seems to be Zero.

Sorry I spent so much money on this cool spy scopeSorry I watched you all this time without y'alls permissionSorry I didn't catch any bad guys doing this stuff. My bad.
And, in a world of limited resources, every Law Enforcement or National Security penny spent on the Program to Observe Ominously but Prevent Few if Any Real Terrorists is one less dollar spent on resources that HAVE been proven to catch real terrorist and prevent actual attacks. Or... funds could be spent elsewhere on things we are desperately behind on (Education, Infrastructure) or could even not need to be spent at all to ease burdens on taxpayers or reduce debt.

A less noisy question would be "Has this program been necessary to stopping even one terrorist attack in the last several years?", which - if answered by the same rubric as the way the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board interprets it, is "No." Earlier claims had been made that 54 terror attacks were stopped by mass surveillance, but that started to seem fishy as those making the claim had little, if any, evidence to back up that claim.

That question only began to demand an answer after the Snowden leaks. And, sadly, we are all worse off for in not being asked long ago. We were all under the spell of "Losing Security vs. Losing Privacy" when the reality was "Losing NOTHING vs. Losing Privacy", which is a much easier choice. I was as guilty as the rest of us for assuming that if THAT much money and THAT many resources had unfettered access to ALL of communications of EVERYONE, they would surely catch a real terrorist now and then.

A friend of mine once joked a few years back that the various contractors that supplied "Intelligence" and "Analysis" to the Department of Defence and various other Three Letter Agencies were - first and foremost - a giant government welfare program to ensure 0% unemployment for former spooks and some types of us ex-military folks, and that if they occasionally found actionable intelligence or genuine insight that was just icing on the cake. He was joking, but now we can see how much closer to the truth he was than he thought.

Isn't preventing this all worth it?(Tom Tomorrow made this joke months ago.)
Questions can be "noisy". They can generate as much, or more, disinformation than information. They do this by implying statements in the way that they are asked. A famous example would be "Have you stopped beating your wife, yet?" which implies a history of spousal abuse. Another "noisy" question that has been asked is "How long would it take country X to have nuclear weapons?", again, this question implies the existence of a program well on its way to producing a nuclear weapon - when in truth ANY industrialized nation could produce nuclear weapons in a few years time. The United States developed the first Atomic Bomb - a concept not even proven possible at the time - in less than four years, using technology from more than sixty years ago.

The noisiest questions completely shut out the questions tuned in to the signals we should be listening for. Questions about how much value you place on security and on privacy are mostly opinion - anyone can chime in with their opinion, values, or analysis at any time. We can ask that question and divide into our Hippie and Fascist camps and yell at each other all day long without one second of research. The other question: "Did any of this crap accomplish anything other than making a few contractors super rich and wasting our agents' damned time?" required specific knowledge that only a few were allowed to have and which they were prohibited by law (classified) from being able to share with the general public. The noisy question was the easier to get answers to.

For what it is worth, the report itself discussed the fallacy of "Privacy vs. Security" and how its implications muddied the waters of our discussions about mass surviellance. Also, for the record, I am not opposed to surveillance as an activity... targeted surveillance has caught criminals and stopped horrible plots many times in our history, it is just the "lets spy on EVERYONE" method has a ZERO in the win column.

On an unrelated note, did you know that 70% of the Intelligence Budget is spent hiring private contracting firms, and that those firms have put MILLIONS of dollars in the PACs of the Congressmen specifically tasked with overseeing those very firms? It's true! . Hey those ugly black-and-white with red text attack ads aren't going to pay for themselves! One of those on the Senate Intelligence Committee was Saxby Chambliss, and he used his sweet security contractor money to fund an attack ad against his opponent Max Cleland, who lost several limbs serving in Vietnam if that stuff is important to you.

Attacking the patriotism of that disabled Vietnam Veteran was worth every penny.
And, for what it's worth, for the last five months some folks from Anonymous have been on the case of promoting just how much of a money game the mass surveillance apparatus is. They've been putting together videos detailing how leaders on the take misbehave, such as Senator (and former House Member) Chambliss explicitly misinforming TV audiences about the capabilities of the NSA programs while serving on their oversight committee AND taking hundreds of thousands in contributions from the very firms making millions on his watch. I've talked before about the legalized bribery nature of money in American politics and the Senator from Georgia does a great job of illustrating this at its most blatant:

Someone is making a fortune selling Guy Fawkes masks
My takeaway from this is going to be:
#1) Ask the right questions
#2) Think about the implied assumptions of the questions we all ask each other.
#3) Never underestimate the power of cash and secrecy to hide waste.

It will be good to see how this discussion takes place. Will the same people that want Edward Snowden tried and imprisoned for his crimes demand the same of those running programs also determined to be crimes? Will people still accept the "Privacy vs. Security" dichotomy without questioning its assumptions? Will Anonymous members ever change up their style beyond basing it on a movie from 2005 (that was based on a comic book from 1982)? Time will tell. At the very least, let's not let "Privacy vs. Security" slide into our conversations without questioning it.

#BearFalseWitness

The King James Bible, Exodus 20:16
"Thou Shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor"
Social media exists. It exists so pervasively that still having a two-word label for it feels overly cumbersome, like hearing someone say they just received an "Electronic Mail" or that their phone has "Short Message Service" features. Like it or not, it is here to stay and touches our lives more days than not.

An idea that I have an almost cultish devotion to is that our lives are enriched when we either increase "signal" and learn new truths, or when we fend off falsehoods and reduce the "noise" in our daily communications. This ratio of knowledge to bullshit defines much of our ability to function as adults and to improve our lives, our communities, and the lives of those around us. If you have more than three people in your Facebook feed you might see where this is going.

If you have grandparents who are somehow still angry that some teens wore baggy pants several years ago, then you are familiar with these Memes.
I am using the above as an example. It implies that during the evacuation operations in Benghazi, while the Consulate in that town was being overrun, that US Navy Seals requested additional military assets of some kind and that those assets were denied specifically because of executive decisions, perhaps involving the personal demands of the President of the United States. The further implications is that the President is somehow engaged in covert cooperation with Islamic Militants in Libya, if not throughout the world, and that he chose to protect those individuals over the lives of Americans.

This is, of course, a verifiable 100% falsehood, silly, and an indicator of a weakness either in the intellect or integrity of every individual who has ever made this assertion. Some versions of this lie are more elaborate than others. Here is one - from TheDailySheeple that goes on to allege General Carter Ham was arrested for mobilizing Special Operations Forces in violation of a stand-down order (Of course this never happened).

These lies - and I am focusing more on the right wing falsehoods at this moment - are truly multi-media. The highest level of involvement comes from agitation and statements by those in authority such as Senator Darrel Issa of California or Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. These individuals don't handle the most blatant of falsehoods, they merely abuse their authority to imply there are scandals to be found and continue to keep poking a prodding and maintaining a rationale for this issue to be discussed by the next level.

The Next Level
The next level is, of course, the Right Wing News collectives. This includes Fox News and other News Corporation outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, openly conservative media such as National Review, and talk radio programming such as Rush Limbaugh and the many Fox Hosts who also have radio broadcasts. These "journalists" will take this to the next level and ask leading questions and make unsourced assertions, but generally try to steer clear of the explicitly stating the conclusions they wish their viewers to come to. That brings us to the final level...

Sadly, it's not this awesome
The final level is a network of online groups who utilize everyday folks to spread the most blatant parts of these lies by way of social media. These groups are usually funded by way of a fraudulent filing as 501(c) status with the IRS and claim they exist as being "educational" when in reality they are 100% political in their orientation and only want the 501(c) status for a tax write-off and so their donors can remain secret. So, FYI, your tax dollars are subsidizing this nonsense.

Examples of such groups include Special Operations Speaks, which is funded by the donors behind the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" and which exists to promote falsehoods aimed at our President, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and any other non-Republican who they wish to debase. Another is True The Vote which is funded by a handful of wealthy Republicans from the Houston area and exists to spread the falsehood that pervasive voter fraud exists and onerous Voter Restriction laws are needed to combat it in ways that just happen to impact Democratic Voters (Working Class, Students, Minorities) more than Republicans. Another is GlobalClimateScam which exists to spread the falsehood that there is an international conspiracy involving thousands of scientists to invent and promote notions of climate change. They are maintainted by "The Minnesota Majority" another 501(c) with secret donors who are racist as all hell, and who also have maintained sites such as the old wewantvoterid.com and the more recent more focus-group sounding ProtectMyVote.com.

Old website banner with racist stereotypes from 2012....

NEW BANNER FOR 2013
So F'ing Diverse it BLOWS YOUR MIND!
We even have a lady in a wheelchair now!
These sites ALL have "Like Us On Facebook!" and "Share" links and newsfeeds where they generate and share Memes and articles that all have the purpose of promoting one or more of the falsehoods that they are paid to promote (The existence of pervasive voter fraud, the idea the Climate Change is a "scam", the idea the our President or leadership in collaborating with Al Qaeda, and so on). The spread of these lies is finally facilitated by social media users who are too ignorant, trusting, apathetic or filled with emotion regarding some issue to perform even the most basic checks for the truth of what they are sharing. Without these facilitators, the liars would have a harder time promoting and deceiving millions with their blatant lies. These groups succeed by using the trust you have earned with the people you know to inject lies into their minds.

It's 2014, so he has a Facebook account now..


My current issue with this - the constant bombardment of lies, half-truths, lies, manipulations, and more lies aimed at your friends, associates and loved ones day in and day out for as long as they stay in contact with you - is that most of the people doing this profess to be Christian...and Christians are not supposed to lie. It's in the 10 Commandments,"Thou shalt not bear false witness" (Exodus 20:16) and repeated again and again throughout scripture. (Leviticus 19:11, Proverbs 14:5, Proverbs 19:5, Proverbs 19:9 and so on all the way up to Revelations 21:8 "...all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.")

"Why did I have to click SHARE?"
Even without the religious implications, both from a Judeo-Christian standpoint and from other faiths, being party to a constant stream of lies is a failing by just about any moral standard... and it is done to us (or by us) every time we check our Facebook feeds and is facilitated by people who should know better.

If we didn't share lies without checking them out, or if we didn't just roll our eyes and think "Oh, Grandma!" when hateful lies were given a platform, then these groups would not be as successful changing mass behavior or influencing public policy. We would have a better national dialogue if it were not polluted by these interest-serving lies that infect our collective consciousness. What does it say when the highest praise one of the groups can receive for their efforts is that they have "gone viral"? The metaphor for disinformation is infectious disease. It spreads from cell to cell and weakens or kills the host. It is a truly harmful "noise" that blocks the "signals" we need to be focusing on.

So, the action step I have taken so very long to come around to is this: Every time someone who should know better posts/forwards/shares a blatant falsehood, don't just let it slide. Either debunk it (and point to where) or just tag it as such. I like #BearFalseWitness, as most of the carriers of viral disinformation I am friends with are professed Christians. I have given old folks here a hard time, but one of the most prolific promoters of viral bullshit on my F-list is barely an adult - it happens with all kinds and all ages. While the right-wing disinformation machine is the most streamlined and prolific, other groups promote their share of falsehoods too. We can, and should, do better.

I am going to leave you with a link to a recent bit from The Onion that related and made me laugh. The premise is what if one of these disinformation groups "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" was exactly what their name implied - a group seeking truth? Satire is best when it uses absurdity to point out falsehoods we have just learned to live with:


It's 2014. Please, let us take an extra few seconds and decide to promote fewer lies this year.

2013, Thoughts, Favorites, and Perspective

Each year I like to do a look back and try to make sense of the themes of the last twelve months, trends, culture, politics and life. This is my observations about 2013 and some of my favorite things from this year by category. Some of these may get fleshed out into longer posts, others not so much.

Trend: We have come to know Big Brother

I remember reading a couple years back an editorial in 2600, The Hacker's Quarterly, with the theme of "We've Won". The idea was that in 2012 or so, most people - if they want to - carry a powerful computer in their pocket that can talk to anyone else on the planet relatively cheap - if they choose to do so. This was one of the primary long term goals of old-school hackers - power to the people to utilize this wonderful, beautiful thing called "The Network" to at least some of its potential and it happened. This is not only technically feasible, it has achieved cultural penetration into our consciousness to the point where an 80 year old grandma reaching into her pocket to check her supercomputer because her son doing an engineering project halfway around the world just posted a picture of something he thought she should see on Facebook is no longer a "Whoa!" but just an accepted fact of everyday life. We are living in a Cyberpunk novel and it's wonderful.

I hope you brought your mirrorshades and pink leather trenchcoat

We have also accepted the ugly. That interaction was monitored a half-dozen ways by the United States alone (and maybe other nations' intelligence agencies along the way). Companies along the way are cooperative, coerced, or bribed to circumvent or allow for the circumvention of every "privacy" setting most of us ever think to enable or install. And, just as we have ingrained the ways technology has enabled us to do amazing things with ease, we have passively learned to love Big Brother.

Culture matters, and in many of the popular blockbuster films and television over the last several years and decades, we have seen "Heroes" access all manner of information to "Get the Bad Guy" with little, if any, haggling over whether or not taking all of this information was legal or moral. The NCIS team gets big data to lead them to the bad guy every week, Tony Stark or SHIELD doesn't fool around with all this "Due Process" nonsense, they get the data they need and save the day and that's all there is to it. Big Data saving the day is the entire premise of "Person of Interest" where the ultimate computer nerd and ass-kicking-CIA-Jesus team up to do the bidding of Big Data who is alive and who loves us and looks out for us.

The Passion of Big Brother

Culture matters, and our culture has been selling us super people with secret identities who save the day outside of the law for a long time. Just as 24, Taken, and Zero-Dark-Thirty led us to identify with a protagonist who tortures people, decades of stories in our culture have led us to identify with a protagonist, or entire team of them, who benevolently surveil us for our own good.

The reality, and bless Edward Snowden for shining a light on this, is that this information has been used widely beyond stopping terrorism, AND that it has not had much verifiable success IN its one and ONLY publicly accepted goal. It costs Billions and is used to gather evidence for the DEA (and likely others) then scrubs the evidence of its involvment. Unlike our worlds of fiction, this is not always a force for good and the time to discuss if this is the best, or even a wise, use of our resources is long overdue.

Person of the Year: Edward Snowden

This is the photo everyone has used for this guy for the last year
For the reasons listed above.

Book (Fiction):
Wages, Future Tales of a Hired Gun by Zach Parsons. Non-apocalypse future is the hardest kind to write. It's easier to imagine a future that throws back to the past than one that boldly forges ahead. This uses various future settings to make commentary on present events, getting sillier as we head towards the future, but I loved it all.

Book (NonFiction):
The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver. Silver writes a GREAT book about making better predictions and it is engaging from cover to cover.
(Last Year, Twilight of the Elites by Chris Hayes)

Movies: Much to say...
Biggest Grossing of the Year:
Iron Man 3

Big and Fun:
Pacific Rim

Big and Serious:
Gravity

More Serious:
Assault on Wall Street
(Uwe Boll made a movie that will make you cry. I am not joking.)

Weird Indie Movie:
John Dies at the End.

Trend in Movies #1: Class Warfare on the big screen. Hunger Games is a rather obvious embodiment of this theme, but so was Elysium and Now You See Me. Audiences LOVE watching the wealthy and smug have their wealth redistributed against their will on the big screen. This is the entire premise of Assault on Wall Street and it WORKS.

Trend in movies #2: Let's admit it, the Old Guys are Old. Sly and Arnold made a film that no one went to see because we aren't living in 1987. Arnold made a movie (The Last Stand) that no one went to see. The Last Die hard was likely the last Die Hard, and White House Down was a better Die Hard than the last Die Hard movie. The Lone Ranger did only OK. Oblivion did only OK. Yup, Tom Cruise and Johnny Depp are hovering around 50 years old.

On his way home to catch Matlock before eating dinner at 4:30pm

Other Movie Mentions with One Sentence or So:

Warm Bodies
(Somehow a Zombie movie is original in 2013)
The End of the World
(So much brilliance and silliness all in one film).
Oz Great and Powerful
(I love every Army of Darkness reference and it is awesome).
Pain And Gain
(Oh.. Michael Bay is a genius, we forget that)
The Purge
(Concept horror. I love it)
Superman
(For the first time we see a Blue Collar Superman... this is strongly in contrast to Billionaire Bruce Wayne)
World War Z
(Not at all like the book but a good movie still)
Elysium, Now You See Me, and Hunger Games
(As mentioned above)
You're Next
(Home Alone: The Reckoning)
Prisoners
(Whoa... torture is... bad?)
Frozen and The Croods
(Family Animation I actually liked)
Wolf of Wall Street
(Scorsese and DiCaprio tell a great story about a sociopath but go read this too)

(My 2012 Movies were The Avengers and Cabin in the Woods for a Joss Whedon Sandwich.)

Television: Breaking Bad Basing this on it being talked about more than any other. The Joke alternate ending is out there and great too.

If you got this joke in its entirety, you are OLD
(2012 Pick, Life with Louie)

Video Games:THE YEAR OF NEXT GEN!, but really "Meh"

Video Game Trend #1) Next Gen is HERE!!!! With features that I can't justify spending the money on, with games that I cannot yet justify spending the money on. At E3 this year the new
generation of consoles had features fans flat out rejected until things were changed, so there is that.

Video Game Trend #2) The PC is BACK as a serious game platform This owes much to distribution systems (Steam, GOG, Etc...). They make it more reliable, Cheaper, with more time having fun playing games and less time fiddling with settings. We finally have an option to play old games other than piracy.

Best Video Game: Shadowrun, at least for me, because I have been waiting for a sequel to Shadowrun on the SNES for 20 years. This was a big validation of the Kickstarter method to actually make a working, commercially viable game.

Other Games with Sentence or So: Another Year of Sequels!
Saints Row IV
(This managed to be fun and parody so many things)
Grand Theft Auto V
(A big event every release)
BioShock: Infinite
(This would actually be Bioshock III in standard naming conventions but this one is supposed to be a prequel)
Arkham Origins
(This would ALSO actually be a "III" in standard naming conventions and this one is supposed to be a prequel)
Metal Gear Solid: Revengence:
(I have no idea what this would be numbered... does anyone?)

Personal Technology:Smart Watches... anybody use those? Those are a thing now I guess.

I am the one jillionth person to make this joke.


Politician of the Year: Elizabeth Warren

Showing us EXACTLY how much crap she will take

She has started, or brought to the front, about a half dozen conversations we should have been having long ago. One for example, maybe we should put bankers who launder billions for the cartels in jail?

Other Trends in American Culture:

These people work for the richest family on Earth

A realization we have finally come to: Companies whose business model is dependent on their employees getting Food or Health Care from the state or community in order to survive to work another day... are every bit as much on the public tit as their poverty wages employees. This needs to end. If "Always Low Prices" means "But your local food pantry will need more donations" then forget it. Competent business people do not need to force employees into desperate grinding poverty in order to make a profit. Most companies do well paying living wages. There is no need for desperate poverty for those who work full time.

Another discussion we are finally having: Workplace safety is a real concern, for those who work there, for the community around it, and it should be a global concern. The horrible tragedies in Bangladesh this year reminds many of us of the Triangle Shirtwaist incident that moved worker safety into the political sphere and eventually gave some of us the safe workplaces we have today. The explosion in West, Texas, and the lack of accountability, oversight, compensation, or change in ANY of those things afterwords also reminds us that we need to address this at home too.

A third thing long overdue: Death of "The Middle". We are finally taking note how the "Sensible, Serious, Consensus" and so on is actually quite far outside the normal. Our Overton Window of acceptable political positions should not be determined solely by a handful of rich, comfortable, beltway commentators with inescapable conflicts of interest. Not only do they not represent the views of the "average joe" whom they tend to believe they understand, but they aren't a particularly smart, honest, or articulate groups of human beings. For years Very Serious People like George Will and David Brooks were understood to add no value to any conversation by a handful of hyper-literate political junkies. In 2013, we ALL seemed to be coming around.

I needed a graphic here and I am getting tired

Big news items that were covered well:
The Affordable Care Act's next phase:
(Some bugs on the rollout, but over a million people have signed up for private health insurance from an exchange and over a million have signed up for Medicaid in an expansion state)

End of the Senate Filibuster
(On nominations anyhow)

An actual budget!
(But it looks like there is institutionalization of the Sequester funding levels, so not so good.)

The Shut Down!
(Remember 1995? House Republicans didn't)

Biggest Typhoon Ever!
(A mind blowing tragedy. And an AMAZING response that saved thousands)

First Egyptian Snow in a century or so.
(Even if the pictures we all shared were fake)

New Pope!
(First Resignation in centuries! New Pope has no history I know of involving either actively protecting pedophile nor of collaboration with the Nazis, which puts him far and away above the last two)

One WTC is Completed!
(Only 12 years after 9/11 a complete structure has replace the "Freedom Hole" in Downtown Manhattan)

Big News Items that Should have been covered well but weren't
GOOGLE THESE IF YOU HAVE NOT HEARD OF THEM
The Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty!
(Remember when we at least had big discussions about NAFTA and GATT? Remember Seattle?)

The NDAA!
(MORE Executive Power to detain, spy, and kill in secret?)

The Bradley/Chelsea Manning Sentence
(The sentencing of MANY Hackers this year, from parts of Anonymous to the people who opened StratFor's files to the world. Snowden is wise to stay away from authority)

Stories that DIDN'T happen despite old clueless people predicting they would:
Shortly after bringing women into combat arms and letting gays serve openly in the military... THE MILITARY HAS COLLAPSED INTO A CHAOS!

Shortly after allowing gay marriage in several states... WE NOW HAVE LEGAL BESTIALITY AND POLYGAMY!!! MULTIPLE ANIMAL MARRIAGES ARE HALF OF ALL NEW WEDDINGS AT THIS POINT!!! CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER!!!

Shortly after some states legalize Marijuana for recreational use... THE STATES HAVE DESCENDED INTO A DRUG FUELED CHAOS!!! CRIME IS OUT OF CONTROL!!! WEST DENVER EMBROILED IN THE "CHEETOH WARS" OF 2013!!! THE BILLIONS SPENT AND YEARS LOST TO THE DRUG WAR WERE JUSTIFIED!!!

Well, this is by far my longest post of 2013. Happy New Year to everyone who has read any of my stuff and I hope to see you around in 2014 too!

8/25/2013... Never Forget

Vindication?

OK, Caveat... I don't see citations, sources, or other evidence for the veracity of the images presented, so I do NOT endorse this as evidence.


But this article from Political Blind Spot, and the images it shows makes it look like those of us who were rolling our eyes the entire time at the obvious publicity stunt were right to do so.

Before growing a Taliban beard, he was apparently attending Bayside High School with Slater and Screech

Even if it turns out this story isn't entirely accurate (I would like to know where they got the photos and how they are certain they are attributed correctly) I still feel vindicated that many others are coming around to the obvious publicity-stunt-by-way-of-manufactured-controversy nature of what happened last month.

Taking a Break with the Family for Christmas

Thank you to everyone who read anything I've posted over the last few months. Seeing your views double, then double again, and again really encourages a person to keep writing, editing, researching, and improving.

I leave you all with this, evidence that the dirty atheist communist multicultural conspiracy to replace "Merry Christmas" with "Happy Holidays" that some people believe is just pure malarkey pushed by Fox News and Talk Radio with little to no truth behind any of it.... goes ALL THE WAY BACK TO THE 1950s!

BING CROSBY AND FRANK SINATRA WERE IN ON IT!
(As a sidebar, I never understood what the audience response is supposed to be on those "WAR ON CHRISTMAS!" bits. If you buy some jewellery from Mr. Yurman and get a Falafel from Mr. Ahmed and they wish you "Happy Holidays!" or, god forbid, "Happy Channakah" or "Ramadan Kareem" are the Fox Viewers supposed to boycott their shops or come back and break the glass in their windows or something? I never got what the implied action step is in those narratives.)

Here is wishing a great Holiday season to each and every one of you!

Click here Frank and Bing sing classic Christmas tunes on Youtube

Duck Dynasty, False Realities, and the Return of the Kayfabe

IF A SHOW DOCUMENTS "REALITY"
HOW COULD ITS "CAST MEMBERS" BE "SUSPENDED"?So, in the reality we live in, the "News" cannot be only actual useful information about our lives and factors and decisions that impact it and the lives of the other people on the planet, how we have hit the lowest gas prices in about three years, how the recovery from the biggest Typhoon in history is going, the forced starvation of thousands in Syria, or that we can likely skip our multivitamins and antibacterial soap and be just as healthy.

No. That does not feed the beast. That doesn't generate enough viewers, "shares" or "clicks". The beast needs endless idiocy for idiots to consume. It needs to generate things that make the morons feel the need to wail and the smug feel the need to comment on (That's me!). There is another class that struggles to ignore the hose of idiocy fired their way by our culture 24/7, but I am not that enlightened.

The Idiocy this week is the interview a Duck Dynasty cast member gave in a promoted interview to GQ magazine. Phil Robertson, who plays the role of the "Patriarch" of the cast of the Duck Dynasty show, chose to make anti-gay statements in an interview in a national magazine known for fashion and liberal politics. This generated a response from many of the members of the majority of our society that do not harbor any special animosity to homosexuals. This was followed by a hideous non-apology, an attempt to use some paraphrased old testament bible verses to justify his position, and other actions and responses that are well documented here. Eventually A&E took action and "Suspended" actor Phil Robertson from playing his character for a season.

The other characters on other programs responded as the play went on. You see them ready to squeeze into the limelight at a moment's notice - ready to read their lines in an attempt to desperately grasp a little more of that attention they have learned to turn into money. Pretend Politicians like Sarah Palin and Hermann Cain, Pretend Ministers like Bryan Fischer, Fake Journalists like Todd Starnes, Sean Hannity and other FOX characters. The entire menagerie of miscreants who play roles for the more hateful half of America came out to recite their lines. I am personally surprised that Pretend Business Expert, Pretend Boss, and Pretend Presidential Candidate Donald Trump has not yet been trotted out to make his obligatory supportive statement.

As far as publicity moments go, this is a good one. Pretend controversy guarantees that even the least enlightened and least creative can participate in the conversation by having opinions they do not have to defend, justify, explore, or even come up with on their own. This phenomenon was on display just last September regarding Miley Cyrus and "Twerking". It worked well then too, I noted. This is a win for the Duck Dynasty cast, as they are paid $200,000 an episode to be split among family members and if one is "suspended" the family does not lose one single dime. This may put the network in a tough spot - they might lost some viewers if they do not reverse the suspension, but I doubt that Phil will be unsuspended, and also doubt that any measurable part of the fan base will turn away from the show. So, likely a big win with this stunt.

This also allows Mr. Robertson to focus on playing his character at other venues. These include Right Wing or Religious speaking engagements, a possible "Contributor" gig with Fox News or ClearChannel Radio, a 100% chance to run the FoxPublican "news" circuit and religious networks promoting his show (Expected interview statement "I felt obligated to speak the truth in the bible even it might cost me everything" he will say shortly before promoting the show and various other projects that make him money). Somewhere there exist people who can listen to this, nod their head at this "genuine heartfelt wisdom" and not realize they are the suckers whose attention, time, and money keeps the scam machine going.

I don't have a problem with reality television. Television will always have hours of stupid to fill. Maury is till seeing who the real father is, there are still fake courtrooms and fake judges, there is still Fox News. Sturgeon's law that 90% of everything is crap still applies. We get the culture we deserve.

What I DO have a problem with is that some of us don't realize this, all of this, is fake.

Do you remember growing up and meeting that kid who thought professional wrestling was real? It was an inevitable byproduct of the methods of professional wrestling that very young or very slow children will believe professional wrestling is real. Characters who play professional wrestlers are contractually required to practice Kayfabe, meaning they must remain in character whenever appearing promotionally or even when recognized in public by a fan. If Hulk Hogan wished to promote a product while under contract, he could not do it under his birth name of Terry Gene Bollea, he would have to do so under the name of "Hulk Hogan" and in character.

To do otherwise would be tasteless.

Kayfabe is a necessary part of wrestling, carnival freak shows, reality television, and other entertainment establishments of impeccable quality. This still does not bother me - usually only children or the mentally challenged accept such acts as "real". Here is where I am concerned... there are far too many of us who accept the actors in the never ending farce as human beings legitimately expressing their unrehearsed thoughts and feelings. The fictional reality constructed by Media establishments such as Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, or Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal have embraced the Kayfabe to such an extent that their consumers can no longer tell when the act ends and reality begins. Sarah Palin says her part, playing into the fake reality where a publicity seeking television actor is a genuine folksy American being persecuted by the big gay conspiracy for the crime of being a Christian - and that's fine - that is as expected as Macho Man Randy Savage trash talking his opponent before a match. But soon after REAL politicians such as Bobby Jindal and Ted Cruz have felt the need to play roles in this play as well. There are millions of Americans (including possibly your grandparents) taking to "The Facebook" and AOL accounts to "Share" and "Like" and forward chain emails in support of the phony struggle being waged in the play before them. Kids interning as "Social Media Experts" of something similar are spamming websites and Facebook pages for actual political groups and even political parties with support for their wrestler in the ring tonight.

Because a network not paying someone they don't like is "Censorship"

There are REAL struggles that REAL political and cultural groups should be weighing in on. There is going to be a struggle to succeed or fail at extending unemployment benefits in a few days, there is going to be a fight around raising the debt limit to pay for spending congress has already approved in a couple of weeks. There are always economic, health, political and technology stories that absolutely will impact our lives and that we SHOULD be discussing and sharing and learning from each other about. Emotionally investing in one staged struggle after another is exhausting to your soul. There needs to be some caring left over for you family, your work, and your community. The False World that somewhere around 27% of our culture is living in is killing us. It is killing our ability to have a functioning government it is destroying our ability to have a functional economy. It is stealing our lives one stupid minute at a time.

We get the culture we deserve... but I thing we can change our behavior to deserve better, to GET better. Let's not play our roles as passive observers and consumers and hosts to the latest mind virus. Let's challenge the whole system. Let's plant the seed this time, and the next time, when something so blatantly staged is injected into our national culture. If someone says "It's horrible what they did to Phil!" respond with "And it was terrible what The Undertaker did to that muscular man-pantied fellow in that cage match that one time!". If someone states how the Duck Dynasty people are being persecuted for being Christian, mention how it was sad witnessing Stone Cold Steve Austin suffering with alcoholism. Fakery not worthy of the belief of children needs to be known as such.

Maybe this would work. Maybe, on the other hand, this is the best we will ever deserve. There is a frightening trend of professional wrestling fans and devotees of certain political affiliations (That rhyme with "funservative") being of the same membership and tendencies in beliefs. The wife of the head of World Wrestling Entertainment ran for the Senate in Connecticut and now works with a consultancy in Washington D.C.. The WWE had a presence at The 2008 Republican National Convention. The overlap is so strong that the WWE had to have a rare moment in which they needed to break Kayfabe to inform angry Glenn Beck fans that Wrestling is performed by characters and that their struggles are not real. You can view the video here via the Majority Report.

So, short version: Tomorrow, when every homophobe that is showing the early signs of dementia that you know finds a way to email, text, facebook, or pony express you to draw attention to how Phil "Duck Dynasty" Robertson was illegally poked in the eye by AE "Big Gay" Media in last week's title match... remind them it's fake.

THE ULTIMATE HULKSTER IS COUNTING ON YOU!

I need to become inspired to write more. The purpose of blogging to me has always been threefold.

1) Practice Writing - every post is out there to be judged, critiqued, evaluated, argued with, responded to or ignored. This is true for the audience AND to author (upon revisions and other future visits.) No practice is better than doing and the only coest is time.

2) Articulation - Many forums out there - Facebook, Email, Comments sections and so on, do not lend themselves to longer and more thoughtful pieces describing one's thoughts, opinions, or random brain droppings as well as a blog. This was the reason for my first post.

3) Documentation - I like that I leave a footprint my future self or others can use to go back and see what I was writing/thinking/doing at a given time. This was more the purpose of my first blog MrVetinari that I started back in Baghdad in 2004 or so.

These are all fine motivations, there is only one problem, for any of them to be achieved, I have to, you know, actually write in the thing. One blog I follow had a good suggestion, which was to put "Updated Every (Tuesday or something)" at the top to always keep a sense of desperation going. It's a good enough idea, bloggers who have forced themselves to write weekly have managed to get enough material to have a book or other project they can piece together out of their writings.