Wired State

Salman Rushdie's Knife, Chatauqua, and the News Vendor's Fearful Face

Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Artifacture via MidJourney

This interview of Salman Rushdie in the New York Times by Ezra Klein is a must-read so here's a complimentary link.

If you, like me, or even the author, did not read Satanic Verses, let along Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder then at least read this interview, and it may get you to read the books, perhaps even me, too.

I try to think why I haven't read these books even priding myself being an intellectual of sorts, although not a highly educated one. I think it's because I associate the entire "Salman Rushdie" phenomenon as part of that irksome "bien pensant" New York City literary world which I came into touch with while working at Human Rights Watch and other non-profits, and came to associate with PEN Club leftwing selectivity and moral obnoxiousness. (More on PEN Club soon.)

Growing up in rural Upstate New York, I tried to reach this big-city literary world, getting into poetry seminars with Marvin Bell at a Rochester university or writing seminars where Yevtushenko spoke at University of Toronto or going to readings of people like William Stafford in Rochester who gave me my life-long mantra: "To get started, I will accept anything that occurs to me."

I recall going to a reading of Muriel Sparks in Rochester and went up to her afterwards to get her signature on a somewhat tattered page of a lady's magazine which had a poem of hers, illustrated by a lunch counter with two colours of drinks -- which I can't find now online and hope I can find in real life. She was surprised as she had forgotten about that little poem. 

What I felt with the phenomenon of Salman Rushdie in NYC -- then and now -- is that people rushed to appreciate and support him not really for the work's own sake or him (and his humour!) but because at long last they could give voice in a way to their dislike of radical Islam which they couldn't express, being good liberals. That is, they wouldn't outright condemn radical Islam because that was tied up with the Palestinian cause, but now they had a way to Do Something About It. 

It was so popularized and so crushing that I just didn't want to read the book like everyone else.

I was shocked and horrified at the knife attack precisely because it was at Chatauqua, a place in the Finger Lakes where I grew up, a place I once visited because my best friend in college had a cabin there one summer because her mother was somehow involved in the programs. I think of it as a place for elites who can afford it, for one -- the Upstate of wine tours and historically-preserved buildings where we didn't leave  -- but also a relatively obscure place where Islamists wouldn't bother to show up. I vaguely remember my friend in a granny gown, which I didn't own, and courses on Robin Morgan's books or composting or something. Honestly, I don't remember. But Chataqua is a thing. Right now it features John Meacham and the Beach Boys. Eep.

Knife has come out just in time for Chatauqua's 150th anniversary (!) President Michael E. Hill writes:

Chautauqua and Sir Salman will forever be linked because of this tragedy and because we stand as symbols of the importance of freedom of expression to our democratic way of life.  We will continue to support them on this journey.

Somehow, that statement feels rather anodyne and sanitized to me, and leaves me wondering what President Hill and Sir Salman think about the campus mayhem with the pro-Palestinian uproars. No doubt they support them. Or if a Muslim beats up a Jew or forces them to stay away from classes, even, the Jew is supposed to traverse a journey of understanding and compassion and even revisit the scene of the crime with healing. This is Christian in nature, in fact.

I think Sir Salman a) deserves maximum protection and support b) publishing, keeping in print, and display of his novels and teaching them in courses and featuring them c) condemnation of extremism in any form that seeks to silence him -- and I learn from this interview that even my beloved John Le Carre felt he shouldn't have dissed someone else's religion in this way and seemed to say he "asked for it."

All literay life is supposed to end in harmony -- though the Guardian couldn't help calling it "gloriously vituperative" -- so Le Carre and Rushdie made up after awhile.

Said Le Carre:

But I am a little proud, in retrospect, that I spoke against the easy trend, reckoning with the wrath of outraged western intellectuals, and suffering it in all its righteous glory. And if I met Salman tomorrow? I would warmly shake the hand of a brilliant fellow writer."

I personally don't go out of my way to dis other people's religions and I don't think they "deserve" punishment. I also don't feel I need to publish or link to cartoons of the Prophet and such -- America is based on the premise of religious tolerance and mutual respect of different religions which underpins the free speech doctrines. 

Even so, I want to try to convey to you my very real experience of these contradictions in real life, in an incident that I think Salman Rushdie himself would understand and appreciate.

So back when Rushdie's Satanic Verses came out in 1988, or not long after, and I worked at Human Rights Watch (where I was in Helsinki Watch dealing with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from 1981-1990), a demonstration -- a march, really -- was organized in support of Rushdie.

I don't recall which organization or organizations staged it. I don't think it was HRW, as they didn't "do" demonstrations. It might have been Amnesty, or perhaps the Freedom to Write Committee of the Association of American Publishers (whose meetings I used to attend regularly) but more likely it was PEN Club. It might not have been right then in September 1988 but later. But this was before 9/11, remember. (I can't find any record of it, although there were Muslim marches against the book in 1989.)

We assembled at the UN, and we had a police permit for the march, in which several hundred people took part -- not a huge crowd, but given that these organizations I highlighted usually do not stage marches, it was something. To get a permit, you merely have to inform the police for that precinct where you will assemble, and your route. It's not permission-based; it's notification-based, i.e. "not Russia". There are designated areas on Dag Hammarskold Plaza or the Sharansky Steps across the street from the UN by E. 42nd St. -- you can't go right in front of the UN.

So we assembled, then took a walk around the block -- it didn't really go further to my recollection. We marched along E. 42nd Street likely to the street before Grand Central Station, then round the block back to the UN demonstration point. It wasn't that big or long. I'm not sure why it took the form of a march, and not a stationery demonstration -- perhaps to give the illusion of "mass" and "big" although it was neither. I've been in many far, far bigger demonstrations and marches in NYC, e.g. against the war in Iraq.

I went to this demonstration as a job duty of sorts, although it wasn't mandatory; it's just what good young liberals did. I hadn't read the book but of course I got behind the cause.

But I was given great pause for thought on this march which I never forgot for the rest of my life, and which I often think about in pondering causes, demonstrations, and free speech.

As we rounded the corner on to E. 42nd Street, and got past the Ford Foundation, which is kind of an empty stretch, we approached Grand Central, and along the way we began to see now news kiosks, which then -- as now -- were staffed by Pakistani men. They sold newspapers, but also soda, gum and candy, aspirin, lottery tickets, little odds and ends.

I'll never forget the look on the face of the newstand vendor as our march passed by his modest, little wooden kiosk on the street.

It was stark fear.

It was the kind of stark fear I've seen on faces of people I don't know well that might be mistaken for anger or hatred but in fact is stark fear.

Stark fear on the face of this brown-skinned immigrant from Pakistan, no doubt Muslim, who saw this march coming at hin unexpectedly on a street where he made his living, and no doubt sent money back to his homeland to support relatives.

Fear.

Because he had no way of knowing that this crowd lumbering toward him, garbed in expensive clothing and haircuts (the non-profit world is filled with the children of rich parents), was peaceful, was not targeting him or "all Muslims" but was more about the positivity of supporting Rushdie. We had a police permit! Nobody was going to be knocking heads here.

But from where he came from, a crowd like this would be a mob, that might indeed knock heads and blow up things.

The fear was there because he never expected to encounter anything like this in America -- a crowd chanting "Hands Off! Salman Rushdie!" What would it mean for him and his fellow Muslim immigrants?

I can still hear the wind-rush of the syllable RUSH-die and its emphasis as we passed the kiosk of this Pakistani man with fear stamped on his face. Fear for his livelihood (what else?). Not the sort of abstract hatred or support that PEN Club members might get up to. More ordinary. At least that's what I felt it was. If people were now going to support this blasphemy, this infidel, that was a bad thing, right? Because they might come for newstand vendors next. 

As they would in not-America, not-land-of-the-free countries, right?

To say more about this, to make crappy MidJourney images, is to get further and further away from the shock and jolt it gave me, the feeling that maybe this march wasn't a good idea, if this was the result. Obviously, the fatwa-uttering mullahs were unaffected, the countries of the UN, as always with such demonstrations, mainly ignored it. So who was supposed to see this march, except news vendors on E. 42nd Street and passersby on their way mainly to the station and thus likely from out of town?

This is part of my long complicated relationship with PEN Club about which I'll write more (and I'm not even sure -- again -- they organized this particular march although it's the kind of thing they'd do). Maybe someone else will remember? Unfortuantely, the few people I know who would -- and were likely on that march with me -- are dead now.

When we rounded the corner, I seem to recall looking back and seeing the news vendors had shuttered their kiosks. This happens rarely in NYC -- it takes a flood, a blackout, not even 9/11 -- at least during the day. They didn't feel safe.  

So I feel as if I must read Rushdie's books to be a complete human being or at least New York intellectual, yet the news vendor's face looms before me. 

Somehow, I never spoke of it.

To write about, to make MidJourney images of, to try to reconstruct a memory -- is to erase. Yet I risk it anyways or it dies with me.

 

Yes, There is a Connection Between Violence and Autism

The documents and statements released recently in the Newtown Massacre case are chilling. Among them, there's these facts:

Lanza was diagnosed in 2006 with "profound autism spectrum disorder, with rigidity, isolation and a lack of comprehension of ordinary social interaction and communications," while also displaying symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, according to Dr. Robert A. King, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine Child Study Center.

But he also told investigators that he observed nothing in Lanza's behavior that would have predicted he would become a mass killer. Contacted by The Associated Press, King referred questions to the Yale University press office.

Peter Lanza, who was estranged from his son, told police that his son had Asperger's syndrome — a type of autism. Autism is not associated with criminal violence. Among the images released Friday was a photo of a birthday card he'd given Adam, offering to take his son hiking or shooting, though it's not clear when it was sent.

Kathleen A. Koenig, a nurse at the Yale Child Studies Center, told investigators that Lanza frequently washed his hands and changed his socks 20 times a day, to the point where his mother did three loads of laundry a day.

The nurse, who met with Lanza in 2006 and 2007, said Lanza's mother declined to give him prescribed antidepressant and antianxiety medication after she reported that he had trouble raising his arm, something she attributed to the drug.

This document and statement should put to rest the constant speculation and denial that Adam Lanza was diagnosed with autism. We were constantly told by journalists and bloggers and commenters that we had no proof of such diagnosis, or that it was never made.

We were told it wasn't autism, but Asperger's, which his less severe. Now we see that a recognized, authoritative doctor is explaining that it is "profound autism," and that it is co-morbid with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The father continues to describe it as Asperger's, but he is either in denial or ill-informed.

We can also note that this doctor doesn't have even the most basic background materials -- like Lanza's school essays that were disturbingly violent, that might have changed his opinion regarding potential violence.

Of course, there will be many who will continue to say "but there are other factors here, not autism," that led to this tragedy. Or they'll say "my autistic child is a sweet, peaceful kid, and it is so unfair to stigmatize him."

Neither of these attitudes will help avoid the next situation, which isn't going to come from the helicopter parents who interact constantly with their autistic child and are a huge factor in his peaceful outcome, but will come from parents in denial or who have ceased to cope with their autistic child, who then becomes violent.

Obviously, having this deeply upsetting news about your child puts some people in denial, as such parents themselves have described.

And there is an enormous amount of denial among parents and the liberal press that there is any connection between autism and violence whatsoever.

But there is, and this case shows it.

There may be factors that make this case rare or unique -- co-morbidity with untreated deprssion and OCD; dysfunctional parents; accessibility of guns; violent video games.

But certainly you couldn't say this case had "nothing" to do with autism. When a child has autism, the parents obviously also can become sick and dysfunctional. Here's a completely overwhelmed mother who has ceased listening to reason about a much-needed medication, and is also soothing herself with fairy-tales about "experiments" needed to see if her son can "handle" being home alone -- when he has not come out of his room for three months.

What should have happened is that this mother could call an ambulance and put her son in a psychiataric hospital, without a lot of resistance and obstruction. A person sitting alone in their room playing violent video cames is not someone you leave to their own devices, although we can understand how it happens that a mother in this situation begins to accept this profoundly dysfunctional situation as "the new normal." Society doesn't help her with this, because it either treats such behaviour as a source for comedy videos on Youtube, or says that it's even fine, and that it's wrong to put people in psychiatric hospitals againts their will.

The resistance to finding any link between autism and violence is as profound as the profound autism. And that's understandable, because parents don't want their children hurt, stigmatized, incarcerated against their will, harmed in any way. All understood.

But as with all things in life, there is a balance. All those things are desirable, but not having dozens of school children massacred is also desirable. And the key to preventing this again lies precisely in looking at the mother's situation -- it is one of no help, temporary measures, stigmatizing of her if she attempts psychiatric confinement or even the impossibility of getting good psychiatric confinement, despite her wealth, because of the profession's resistance.

The psychiatric profession resists this not merely because facilities are overcrowded or not very good at handling patients and improving them; they resist because they don't want to lose their licenses in a malpractice lawsuit for wrongful internment. If you don't believe me, ask them. Look at any court records where people tried to get psychiatric confinement for relatives beyond 3 days or 30 days, and see what the result was -- denial even for the 3 days, or refusal to follow up after the 30 days. Then they are back to square one.

We need to destigmatize psychiaric confinement, involve families and society more with it, make the facilities work, and stop exposing the general public to harm. That's all there is to it. Newtown proves this to us. And yet we are still hearing howling -- and will for a long time -- about making ANY association between autism and violence.

The chief reason we don'to see more cases of autism and violence isn't because of the lack of connection, but because hero-parents are bearing the brunt of the management of such patients on themselves, at enormous cost to themselves and the other members of their family. That's all good, if they have the will and resources to accept such a burden and can handle it.

Not everyone is a hero, and Mrs. Lanza is a good example of that fact -- a fact that -- again -- we shouldn't stigmatize, by telling her to become more of a heroine or even blaming her --as the hideous Sarah Kendzior did about another woman who came forward with her story -- we as a society should provide every support, approval, and means. Otherwise the results are deadly.

Here's a typical debate I have with people who bombard me with hate mail -- in this case, in Second Life after I published this lengthy piece raising the issue about the "hero-parents" who may be masking the violence of their children by absorbing it on themselves. Yes, I get it that they have "research" showing there "isn't" violence by and large. Yes, I get it that most autism cases appear to be unconnected whatsoever with violence.

But...some are, and one of the factors is the absence of a hero-parent. I'm not for waiting to see if hero-parents will break or not to deal with this problem -- a situation I've seen in both real life and in Second Life. I'm for being open and honest about the connection that does occur at times, and making it more than fine for such families to seek psychiatric confinement as a solution.

(Saved Tue Oct 29 20:48:08 2013)you have some interesting ideas/generalizations about autism.... some of which are rather hurtful.
[18:57] Jullianna Juliesse: (Saved Tue Oct 29 20:49:59 2013)As someone who works with kids an young adults on the spectrum, just saying......
[19:00] Prokofy Neva: That's great that you work with autistic kids. The public has the right to question some of the defensive myths built up around this subject by vested interests. Journalists and bloggers have a right to question it. When we have mass murders occur again and again with various factors converging, whether psychiatric drugs, video games, or autism spectrum, we have to investigate. It's not about hurting someone. You can go about your business. But you cannot deprive the rest of us from demanding answers and demanding protections. Adam Lanza's mother should have been able to get him into long-term residential treatment without facing so many barriers, end of story.
[19:02] Jullianna Juliesse: I live in CT
[19:02] Jullianna Juliesse: I know the people involved in that
[19:02] Jullianna Juliesse: I find your generalizations hateful
[19:03] Jullianna Juliesse: and I won't keep my opinions to myself.
[19:03] Jullianna Juliesse: autism does not equal hate, or violence.
[19:03] Jullianna Juliesse: ramble on missy.
[19:04] Prokofy Neva: Great. Then you should endorse locking up people who are a danger to themselves and others. Well, it's too bad. They aren't hateful.  They are a call to have less burden on families who turn themselves into burned-out heroes, and a call for society to do more. There's no reason why residential treatment has to be inhumane. But it does, though. Some of the people on the autism spectrum are indeed found to be violent. You'll have to accept this. And clearly one of the key reasons why we aren't seeing that is that parents hide this by absorbing all the difficulty themselves. I have seen it.
[19:04] Prokofy Neva: Well ramble on yourself "missy".
[19:04] Jullianna Juliesse: cut and paste.  yay
[19:04] Prokofy Neva: You don't sound terribly thoughtful or intelligent, but no doubt you do good work.
[19:05] Jullianna Juliesse: You are not a parent, clearly
[19:05] Prokofy Neva: So why don't you concentrate on doing your good work and stop trying to do thought-control and speech-control on other people
[19:05] Prokofy Neva: Um, yes I am, in fact.
[19:05] Jullianna Juliesse: thought control?
[19:05] Prokofy Neva: And I don't accept bullshit -- I counter it.
[19:05] Jullianna Juliesse: goodness
[19:05] Prokofy Neva: And on this question, we're getting  a lot of double talk.
[19:05] Jullianna Juliesse: I work to counter it.
[19:05] Prokofy Neva: No, you work to propagandize your PC thinking which is oppressive
[19:06] Prokofy Neva: and that means people in trouble then feel they can't get help by having their loved ones go into mental institutions
[19:06] Prokofy Neva: that's the problem
[19:06] Prokofy Neva: you help stigmatize in fact
[19:06] Jullianna Juliesse: oh?
[19:06] Prokofy Neva: by making it seem that no one should ever be violent because they can't be violent -- a tautology.
[19:06] Jullianna Juliesse: they are not.
[19:06] Prokofy Neva: When there are cases of violence, and by autistic and by Aspbergers
[19:06] Jullianna Juliesse: check the spelling.
[19:07] Prokofy Neva: It doesn't mean all of them are, but for those percentage who are, in combination with other factors, more restraint is needed
[19:07] Prokofy Neva: Check your snotty attitude
[19:07] Jullianna Juliesse: we all see the world a different way
[19:07] Prokofy Neva: I guess you're on the autistic spectrum yourself. Well, great, that should help your work with kids
[19:07] Jullianna Juliesse: I will fight snottiness
[19:07] Jullianna Juliesse: no, I am not.
[19:07] Prokofy Neva: I'm not required to shackle my own perceptions over your neuralgia
[19:07] Prokofy Neva: well whatever, you're a selfappointed heroine, clearly, and it's a bore
[19:08] Jullianna Juliesse: oh you are special!
[19:08] Prokofy Neva: No, I'm not special, I'm a normal person who calls out the truth on this issue, that's all.
[19:08] Jullianna Juliesse: You have no knowledge
[19:08] Prokofy Neva: Parents like Nancy Lanza bear too much and it's because people like you stigmatize the idea of them admitting their child is violent
[19:08] Jullianna Juliesse: and your ignorance of it is apparent.
[19:08] Jullianna Juliesse: and when I see prejudice, I get Mad.
[19:08] Jullianna Juliesse: MAD
[19:08] Prokofy Neva: No, your unwillingness to see the truth about some percentage of cases is the real problem
[19:09] Prokofy Neva: well get mad, you don't sound terribly bright
[19:09] Jullianna Juliesse: there are people without autism who are messed up
[19:09] Jullianna Juliesse: maybe I am not terribly bright
[19:09] Prokofy Neva: But Adam Lanza was on the specturm, he became violent, and should have had earlier intervention
[19:09] Prokofy Neva: your refusal to concede that is troublesome
[19:09] Jullianna Juliesse: get over Adam Lanza.
[19:09] Prokofy Neva: because it certainly doesn't harm the majority of non-violent autistic cases to admit that some are violent
[19:10] Jullianna Juliesse: there are others who have donw far worse.
[19:10] Prokofy Neva: No, I won't, because he massacred dozens of children
[19:10] Jullianna Juliesse: yes, and my priest buried them
[19:10] Prokofy Neva: Um, I think that's the largest number of children killed in America in one incident, or at least one of the largest
[19:10] Jullianna Juliesse: do not blame autism
[19:10] Prokofy Neva: so now I know that you ARE sectarian on this question and are trying to silence truthful discussion
[19:10] Prokofy Neva: but he was on the spectrum, that was amply documented
[19:11] Prokofy Neva: it's great that your priest helped the families. That doesn't make you an expert or the only legitimate voice on this subject
[19:11] Jullianna Juliesse: you are singling out all people with autism
[19:11] Jullianna Juliesse: fot the act of one
[19:11] Jullianna Juliesse: *for
[19:11] Jullianna Juliesse: which I find offensive
[19:11] Prokofy Neva: No. I'm saying that this small minority of people who are violent need extra special treatment
[19:11] Jullianna Juliesse: that is all.
[19:12] Prokofy Neva: that doesn't mean all of them have to be arrested or forcibly treated. They aren't anyway. Getting treatment is a hugely difficult job.
[19:12] Jullianna Juliesse: you are crazy.
[19:12] Prokofy Neva: I'm for those cases where families can't cope with difficult and even violent children that they can get help and get residential treatment
[19:12] Jullianna Juliesse: Autism is a neurological condition
[19:12] Prokofy Neva: without the stigma that it "can't be" because "it can't be"
[19:12] Prokofy Neva: So?
[19:12] Prokofy Neva: so what?
[19:12] Prokofy Neva: that doesn't change that it can be a factor for violence
[19:12] Jullianna Juliesse: a sensory processing thing
[19:13] Jullianna Juliesse: no speaking with you.
[19:13] Jullianna Juliesse: Good night@
[19:13] Prokofy Neva: It doesn't matter the etiology.
[19:14] Jullianna Juliesse: %^&^%^%^%^%^%^
[19:14] Prokofy Neva: What matters is that parents get help without judgement.
[19:14] Prokofy Neva: You're one of the judgers.
[19:14] Jullianna Juliesse: You do not know me
[19:15] Jullianna Juliesse: Kindly do not pass judgment on those are different than you
[19:15] Prokofy Neva: But that's what you're doing, trying to round me up and suppress my speech and override me
[19:15] Jullianna Juliesse: Come spend a day with me and me kids
[19:15] Prokofy Neva: I won't be changing my mind or my blogging
[19:15] Jullianna Juliesse: fine
[19:16] Prokofy Neva: I don't need to do that. I have my own kids to take care of and my own life. I have my opinion, that is valuable, and I will stick to it.
[19:16] Prokofy Neva: I'm sure you do important work, don't try to be hegemonic about it
[19:16] Jullianna Juliesse: well done
[19:16] Prokofy Neva: It's not necessary for everyone in the world to believe your sectarian beliefs about your children in order to help them
[19:16] Jullianna Juliesse: big word, yay
[19:16] Prokofy Neva: No one is out to "get" your autistic children
[19:16] Jullianna Juliesse: back the fuck off my friends, ok?
[19:16] Prokofy Neva: But they sure as hell will not let any small percentage of violent autistic children with other factors like gun access kill the rest of our children. No thanks.
[19:17] Prokofy Neva: Back the fuck off me.
[19:17] Prokofy Neva: The end.
[19:17] Prokofy Neva: You are not interesting to talk to
[19:17] Jullianna Juliesse: people with autism are not violent
[19:17] Prokofy Neva: Hilarious for YOU to tell me to back the fuck off, when you crossed the street to come in here and tell me your beliefs forcibly
[19:17] Prokofy Neva: I didn't seek you out
[19:17] Jullianna Juliesse: your are ill-informed, dearest.
[19:17] Prokofy Neva: but some of them are
[19:17] Prokofy Neva: that has been established
[19:17] Prokofy Neva: and the questions have to be asked again and again
[19:17] Prokofy Neva: precisely becuase of this stubborn omerta you have built up around the subject
[19:18] Jullianna Juliesse: I write the grants, have the research.
[19:18] Jullianna Juliesse: what do you do?
[19:18] Jullianna Juliesse: oh wait, nothing!
[19:18] Jullianna Juliesse: mute!
[19:18] Prokofy Neva: So what? I have researched too, I've documented it on my blog, and I stand by it.
[19:18] Prokofy Neva: I will continue to raise the issue.
[19:18] Jullianna Juliesse: yay.

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Here's Why I Oppose Drug Legalization and "Harm Reduction" Without Compulsory Treatment

I get sick of the Soros-funded, constantly showing up in my feed with their whining about the war on drugs, about supposedly "misguided" policies combating drug abuse and drug lords selling drugs, and even the "reconstruction" by the DEA of NSA intelligence about, say, Mexico or Afghanistan.

That's because drugs and their addicts and sellers wage war on me, my family, my community, my neighbourhood, and I think it's more than fine to fight back.

Many people who have never watched the justice system actually work in New York City have this illusion that there are "all these people" that are poor, black, Hispanic, minorities who are arrested for small amounts of marijuana and locked up.

That's not true, as the vast majority get a desk appearance ticket, and if they show up, the charges are often dismissed, in my experience watching how it works *directly*, not from theory.

If they are recidivists, if they have a little more amount of the drug, yes, they might find themselves forced into a plea-bargain, which is arguably overused in the system, or they might, if they are poor and black and forced to rely only on the Legal Aid Society, be shuffled into the poor people's court system, which indeed works very different than the rich people's court system, and be forced to go to jail or 30 days or do community service or worse. An expensive lawyer meanwhile may get his rich client off.

The rich can afford bail; it's impossible to even get bail if you are in debt or owe taxes or have some lien in your record -- it won't be given to you, even if you produce the 10 percent amount. Many attempts have been made to reform he bail system desperately in need of reform; it's currently unaccessible.

Stop and frisk is over used -- my son was among a group of youths hanging out in Brighton Beach, he dropped a kleenex on the ground while the police were trying to shake down these kids and find out if they had any drugs, and when the police accused him of throwing away drugs, he retrieved the dirty kleenex and explained he had allergies. This was considered sassing the police, and he got a desk appearance ticket. He had no drugs; none of them did. He complied with a request to retrieve and show what he had thrown away; he was not charged with any offense. Even so, he got the DAT. The DAT is WAY overused and I've seen this over and over again.

Yes, stop and frisk is overused on the poor and the black and Hispanic, and it should be reformed -- it is overbroad, in the apartment complexes, the homes, chasing people up stairwells into their apartments -- all of this is overkill. We all know this, but the judge in the case where it might have been reformed was too zealous and politicized and tried to throw the justice system toward her "progressive" beliefs and now the results are overturned. Pity.

So I don't have a problem understanding the justice systems flaws, and I'm four-square for civil rights.

here's the problem. There still needs to be a war on drugs *anyway*. Here's why.

The oxycontin epidemic sweeping over our state (roxies, blues) is hugely scary. It leads people to go to heroin and crack very quickly, they start powdering and smoking roxies then move to heroin.

It has been shockingly horrible for me to witness how neighbourhoods where I and my relatives live have been demolished by this drug epidemic that Soros thinks can be fixed merely by legalization or harm reduction and not combat with arrests, trials, sentences, diversion of youths into custody in juvenile homes, and compulsory treatment. I'm all for a separate drug court; then use it. Fight crime with it. It needs fighting.

Why? Because two children in my children's Facebook circles DIED from drugs. One minute my daughter is giving the homework assignment to a girl in front of her in a class; two hours later she is dead from a drug overdose. Another boy "wakes up dead" from taking a drug, his parents found him.

What's especially sad is how many Russians and Eurasians are caught up in this epidemic -- the children of dissidents, the children of Jewish refuseniks of the Soviet era, the children of Central Asians escaping tyranny of the Putin era, children of many scientists and mathematicians and teachers and computer programmerss who even got into good schools like Stuyvesant. Really, really sad to see this.

Kids maintaining drug dens in the rec room while their parents are at work -- and the police know it and do nothing. Why? They're waiting to catch the kingpins? So it's okay to watch dozens of our kids get addicted by these shadowy figures and do nothing in the mean time?! Kids arrested multiple times for bringing their friends to their parent's house even when they are home, getting them high, stealing all their computers and wallets. Kids arrested for stealing thousands of dollars of their parents' own jewelry to get drugs. Kids beaten by drug dealers to the point of disfigurement. Kids going to Rikers Island (prison) now instead of college.

I'm talking about dozens and dozens of kids -- it's a scourge. Kids who used to be on the playground, swinging, or on the basketball court, playing ball, or next to my kids in math class -- now on Rikers, now sent upstateto rehab, now in the hospital with broken bones from a drug dealer.

Please call me when you are a parent, and your kids have THIS happen to their friends. When you wake up every day thankful your kids aren't on drugs, and pray they will make it through another day in their drug-ridden schools without being harmed.

Harm reduction doesn't help -- I live in a neighbourhood chock full of hospitals where they all come for needles and methadone and the more popular suboxone which is really heroin, too, and all it does is add to more crime, more sales, more mayhem. I stood in line for a prescription for my son while he was in the hospital, and police are guarding the line, and trying to control the chaos caused by scamming drug addicts.

In between the time I handed my prescription in to the window, and the time I went to the line to wait two hours at another window for pick-up, *my son's prescription was simply stolen*. By the personnel. Before it even reached me. I had to go to doctors to get it again, who sighed because this happens a lot.

While in the hospital, I saw the personnel simply pocket the oxy that wasn't used -- say the patient was alseep, or didn't want the dose, or happened to have an allergy. Once issued, that medication doesn't go into a cabinet again -- it goes right into a pocket, and out the door.

The back ally is filled with personnel hanging out with homeless-like types doing..something. Whatever.

The streets are filled with hustlers, and they nod out in the parks. Then they start the cycle again stealing bikes, grabbing cell phones or jewelry.

A group of teens storm into a drug store, demanding the cough syrup required for Purple Drank as they call it. The clerk refuses. They threaten to trash the place. Or they grab the stuff for Drank and try to purchase it through the automatic checkout. The clerk casually lets it go through, chuckling as if "kids will be kids".

I once saw a mother of a boy high in class on dope all the time complain desperately to a principle. Why was he allowing smoking dope in school? The principle merely chuckled and joked about "red eyes". Why? Because it's a great management tool for violent youths -- let them dope themselves into a stupor, they sit quietly.  Especially after they've crushed their legal Adderol and smoked it and then need to "come down".

Sorry, I'm not for legalizing drugs. Maybe that's because I see a social and city policy of deliberately making especially black kids stupid -- a shockingly racist policy, in fact. That's the policy of looking the other way as they smoke pot openly outside the school doors, or inside in the stair wells. The principals and and even the police don't fight this blatant abuse. It's a management tool. That the kids are too stupid to study or learn doesn't matter. They are moved along, pushed along, kept high. It's like Orwell's Soma.  I have witnessed this countless times with my own eyes. Kids 12 and 13 getting stoned right in the school yard, damaging their growing brains, without any adults stopping them, anywhere, with police 10 feet away.

Doctors -- over and over again I see records where the doctor writes "home medications given" and oxy is listed, although in fact it wasn't issued, wasn't received - and once again pocketed and sold or used. I know two doctors who became addicts themselves -- and had to work painfully to overcome their addiction for years.

This is an epidemic. You don't fight epidemics with "harm reduction" like merely coughing into your sleeve or washing your hands. You combat it with real war. Stopping the root spreaders. Isolating and detoxing the spreaders. The sellers.

All of you human rights activists and other Soros-funded advocates -- you will never convince me. OSI has been mysteriously overthrown on this issue by powerful interests in California and elsewhere in the technolibertarian set who have coopted Soros into funding all this. Not that Soros apparently needed much persuasion, but it's mainly ideologues at the helm who have introduced this obsession with using stealth methods to work to undermine anti-drug legislation and move toward legalization. Hence:

o harm reduction, although it hasn't been shown to work, and no, not in Vancouver as claimed

o pain mitigation which is all well and good, but isn't accompanied by compulsory long-term court-ordered addiction treatment and tightening of procedures to prevent all the abuse I've just outlined above

o hospice/death amelioration which is used as a form of emotional blackmail to force people to legalize drugs in one medical setting, which is appropriate, but again, without the checks and balances of compulsory court-ordered treatment.

I saw what you did there, Soros; I'm unimpressed. Come and look into the face of a drug addicted 17-year-old boy who used to collect Pokemon cards with my kids who is now trying to steal my purse and who ends up in jail. Look into the face of a beaten-beyond-recognition addict who didn't have the promised drug money from sales to dozens of his friends he got hooked due to the flood. Come and sit with parents who lost their kids to drugs -- they come home and find a good student, age 18, lying dead with a needle hanging from his arm.

Many of you promoting this aren't parents at all. If you are, you  have only small babies, not teens. you don't get it. You don't see it. You live in wealthy neighbourhoods where the bums and the hustlers and the vets hooked on smack just aren't visible to you. I do. So stop lecturing about human rights. Stop lecturing me about how you don't see the harm to society.

I do, daily. We need to keep the war on drugs. Your child or my child might be the next casualty in the war waged against us, which can only be met with war in return. Peace didn't work.  If you don't believe me, send your children to public schools, like I do, and come back and tell me what you think in a year.

 Oh, and if you want "humanism," and you think drugs should be legalized, why stop there? Why legalize them, and allow the addicted to stumble around stepping in front of buses or pushing people in front of subway cars?

Put them in warehouses, give them all the drugs they want, like gerbils pressing levers in a cage, give them three healthy meals a day, give them clean bedding, showers and a few other amenities for free -- movies, Internet -- and store them until they die.

That sort of shocking dehumanizing of people is actually what you are advocating, and actually what we will see.

Because of opposition to law-enforcement and the "medicalization" of crime, we will come to such warehouses.

It will be cheaper for the government to put people in such government-run drug hostels -- and hold them there until they either die or agree to go into detox and anti-addiction programs -- than let drugs be sold openly and cartels fight each other (which they will only do more when it is legal).

Just don't cry when you see your loved ones end up in such a warehouse.

 

NO NO NO NO NO!!! NOT THE SOCIALIST ELIZABETH WARREN FOR PRESIDENT!

Noam Scheiber has a piece up promoting the idea of Elizabeth Warren for president. I personally am for Hillary in 2016 at this juncture, unless I see a better idea, even though I realize she may tack left. But I wonder if in fact that will be the strategy, as people will be good and sick of Obama's failed stealth socialism by 2016.

Basically, this Warren thing is the Silicon Valley technocommunism perspective -- those that have already made their riches (the owner of The New Republic is Chris Hughes, who made his fortune from Facebok) are happy to prescribe socialism for the rest of us. They figure they not be required to crack loose any of their own stash, or cease their practice of shipping jobs and manufacturing abroad, if they keep funding the campaigns of people like Cory Booker, Bill DeBlasio, and now Elizabeth Warren.

My response:

At least Noam is admitting that young people openly opt for the "s" word.

So make a Socialist Party, or revive the Democratic Socialists of America, and go into that, rather than wrecking the Democratic Party.

Ever since I saw Warren's clip about "you didn't build that," I've watched her closely to see whether that was a one-off or in fact emblematic of her socialist "progressive" views. And the answer is: the way you know she is a stealth socialist even worse than Obama is her harping on the "middle class". Whenever you hear somebody blathering about "the middle class," you know their real agenda is socialism. They think that is a supercool way to cloak their hidden agenda, like any "single issue" fake politics concealing hard-core cadre organizing for socialist programs. They think that "ordinary people in the middle class" will then follow them. Baloney.

I'm not in the middle class; I'm in the lower class as a single mom of two in the non profit sector.  But I'm not fooled by all his talk of middle class. The way to lift all boats is to encourage business to thrive, which creates jobs and commerce. Warren is afraid of commerce; she's a scold and takes a punitive approach to commerce.

She adopted the Bolshevik Occupy rhetoric of wanting to hang the rich from the lamp-posts, asking when these regulators stopped beating their wives. The objective is to regulate, not send to prison. Good Lord. If there is no crime committed worthy of sending someone to prison like Madoff, then fines are the appropriate way to go, and certainly Chase is being shaken down. Punitive practices regarding non-cronies is like Russia; it has no place in America. Keep it away.

First come people's hard work, and for some, entrepreneurialism. Then comes the paying of their taxes. Then comes using that taxes to build roads to sustain them, as government for and by the people. It's not about putting first the socialists in the redistribution committee in power and having them extract and redistribute. Warren doesn't get that. It's not about her and her power to redistribute; it's about people's work and their entrepreneurial achievements.

If the Democratic Party doesn't realize that they cannot have Warren or leftist clones worse than Obama, and can't produce Hillary in 2016 or some reasonable moderate candidate who doesn't hate business, then we will be forced to put in protest votes with the Republican Party. And not for the first time.

And further, to those who object and keep ranting about "banksters":

Oh, not at all. I challenged Warren specifically on the quote made by Noam in his article, in which he took great glee, where she confronts the Wall street regulators. She implies in her quote that the purpose of regulation is to produce criminal sentences. That implies that regardless of the truth, regardless of the facts, such boards should nail people to the wall to satisfy populism regardless of the truth. That *is* what Bolshevism *is*.

She herself cites no cases; she doesn't supply any facts; she doesn't say, "I've been researching Jamie Diman and here's why I think that the hefty fine is not enough, he needs to go behind bars because of X, Y, Z facts and argumentations I'm bringing." Instead, she implies in a highly politicized manner that ONLY if people are put in jail -- like Russia -- without due process, without facts, can she "win". Win for her Bolshevik cause, of course, because it's not a win for any just justice system.

Corporate lawyers with PhDs themselves aren't businessmen and aren't even practicing lawyers if they go into politics, and begin to spew ideological statements in a partisan manner. It's great she has a legal background, but she never seems to have run a business and she has a great animus to commerce and capitalism.

Fox News is watched by only 2 million people. The Tea Party is waning. What you're really up against are liberals and centrists in the Democratic Party itself, as well as independents, who will not stand for this kind of socialist demogoguery.

If she really has found corporate fraud, let her bring the facts, let her have hearings, call witnesses, commission reports. I don't any of that. She has no case. She is substituting rhetoric and grand-standing for having a case. That's extremely dangerous and unjust.

 

 

But What Did Merkel Say On Her Phone? And Now What?

Obama follows a happier Merkel in 2008 when he was  campaigning. Barack Obama campaign.

I know it's almost blasphemous to point this out, so outraged should we be about all this but... we don't know anything of the *content* of what's in Angela Merkel's cell phone calls. It's like...what does the fox say...or something. What indeed?

All we know is that her phone number was on an NSA list for "collection." Like so many, many other Snowden stories, we have the contours without the content. Michael Hayden, the former intelligence chief, says Snowden took the "plumbing" whereas Manning only took random "cups and buckets of water." That is so well said. Snowden is indeed only a plumber. High IQ or no, he's just a plumber of computer pipes, at the end of the day. A lot of rote learning and rote routines encouraging dull, binary thinking. And what he stole isn't the contents of the pipes, but just the blueprints -- to use Glenn Greenwald's word.

So...what in fact did we have from Merkel's phone? Did US Tap Chancellor Merkel's Phone? -- the Der Spiegel headline is an interrogative with good reason. We know this from what amounts to pretty dubious sources with a decided anti-US agenda -- Holger Stark, Jacob Appelbaum and two other people at Der Spiegel (I just don't know why *so many* names are required as bylines on this story:  Marcel Rosenbach and Jörg Schindler are two others.)

If I were running the NSA, I wouldn't order the nerds to tap the phones of heads of allied states. Mainly because the fallout would be so great for doing so, but also because I think HUMINT is just way, way more important. I'd much rather have people in place, diplomats and intelligence and counter-intelligence agents who made relationships, talked to people, listened to how they present themselves over time, studied them through the press and other sources, etc. I just think that's more valuable. I think we've gotten out of the habit of both HUMINT and counterintelligence and we need to know more of those and less machine-culling of people. I'd imagine that on her official government phone, she might be so circumspect as to make it pointless to bug. We also don't know if they bugged her old party phone or her current phone as leader of Germany.

The problem with tapping the phone is that you can't use the material justly; but something said even in an off-the-record meeting can be referenced legitimately. And that's better for relationships between states. Of course you need signals intelligence and I'm not the one complaining about the NSA and SIGINT and I'm not at all sure that it needs reform. I don't think reform comes from undemocratic debate coerced by anarchist hackers in any event. But I'm pointing out that to be reliant on in -- just like to be reliant on wikis -- is what has set us up for this massive failure.

THAT we have to run intelligence on Germany is obvious -- they are too close to Russia, which is our decided enemy, and continues to make us an enemy, not the least by by harbouring Snowden.  They have enabled terrorists to live and plot on their land -- think of the 9/11 hijackers in Hamburg and others. It's not just the past it's the present, and even Merkel -- she's great on standing up to Russia on certain things even more than Obama, i.e. human rights rhetoric. But she still presides over a vast German-Russian business empire, and that's not in our interest. Germany and Russia are bound, and that means we can never fully trust Germany, sadly.

Or at least...some part of Germany. I'd prefer to think of it that way, as I think there's a war for the soul of the world everywhere, and there are different features and movements and tendencies and you should pick. Germany has always seemed to me to be divided. That is, not the obvious divisions of East Germany (the GDR) and West Germany, but the West Germany that inclued leftists and fellow travllers and outright communist sympathizers and Stasi-supported agents, and then Germans who were liberal or conservative and opposed communism and the Soviet Union. I have been to Germany a number of times and even had the occasion to meet with Willy Brandt and Petra Kelly a number of times, as well as various German human rights advocates, lawyers and scientists. And I distinguished them in my mind between those willing to criticize Russia and work against communism and those not.

Of course Germany is more complex than this, especially in the minds of Germans themselves. So I do take the time to subscribe to several publications from the German embassy and foreign ministry that I read every week to try to understand.

In the 1970s and 1980s, I recall how the  Soviets would sometimes leak stories about dissidents -- sometimes disinformation, sometimes a sensation -- through Der Spiegel and other German papers, and also some British and Italian papers, the veneer of foreign authenticity. This was to give their active measures with agents of influence more heft. There were certain Soviet journalists or writers who would regularly perform this function. I believe Julian Semyonov was one -- perhaps those who lived through that era can recall what I mean. They would put out stories that Sakharov was fine in Gorky when in fact he was being force-fed from a protest hunger strike, things like that.

So these old networks die hard. There has always been a Kremlin connection to the radical circles in Germany and there remains one, even if Russia has supposedly dismantled its communism (its authoritarianism remains in place with the same old methods). There's the Chaos Computer Club, where Julian Assange first recruited for WikiLeaks, and where he met Jacob Appelbaum, and whose members were involved in a scandal caught working for the KGB in the 1980s and to this day who are more animated with the fight against the NSA than the FSB.

It seems like the Snowden nest is well-established in Germany with Laura Poitras, Jacob Appelbaum now "in exile" there and others working with CCC and Der Spiegel - so Sarah Harrison has a circle to join. But this isn't new, and goes back for ages and involves many more people, like the professor who wants to overthrow the banks and obtain absolute encryption.

I'm trying to make sense of the German story and I point to these stories for reflection:

o Jamie Kirchick, who has spent a lot of time in Germany, asks Whose Side Are You On, Germany? And that is the question to ask, but the reality is, by asking it, you don't get anyone to change sides. I think we have to identify who the US friends are, especially the forces pressuring Merkel, who was a friend before the phone incident, and reach out to them. It's good to isolate the left which is hugely aggressive on this -- and the far left of not only Pirates and hacker anarchists but violent terrorists of course.

Moreover, by granting Snowden asylum, Germany would be playing right into the hands of Vladimir Putin. Whatever his initial motivations might have been in exposing American intelligence practices, Snowden has essentially become an instrument in the Russian President’s plan to weaken the transatlantic relationship and divide the West. Ströbele would never have been able to score his meeting without Putin’s permission; indeed, there is nothing more that Putin could want than for Germany to welcome Snowden with open arms, thus allowing the former NSA contractor to denounce the imperialist Americans from the capital of an allied nation. 

"After analyzing the course of the visit, German security experts came to the conclusion that the FSB completely organized and monitored Ströbele’s visit to Moscow and effectively used it for its purposes," the German daily Die Welt reported. "The goal of the visit had been to rekindle the debate about the NSA spying affair, thus burdening relations between Germany and the United States even more."

o Malte Lehming in The National Interest asks Why Germans Like Being the NSA's Victims.

This is a somewhat roundabout way of saying that slipping into the role of the victim has a long tradition in Germany. The special sensitivity, for example, that the Germans are displaying in the NSA spying affair on Angela Merkel in particular and the country generally is often explained as a direct product of the historical experience of the Germans in two dictatorships. The shadows cast by the memories of the Gestapo and Stasi, we are told, have made the Germans particularly neuralgic to the megalomaniac tendencies of the secret services—as though it wasn’t the Germans themselves who were carrying out the spying.

This, of course, is a beloved German theme ever since the end of World War II, which is to say that whenever they can Germans stylize themselves as victims rather than perpetrators, the objects rather than subjects of history. Today the rhetoric is correspondingly radical. The talk is of a “United Stasi of America,” the grasp for digital world hegemony, even of “cyber-fascism.” Then what would left-wing anti-fascism be without fascism—antifa, as it is known in Germany without the “fa”? Suddenly Edward Snowden is not merely a whistleblower—no, he is a resistance fighter following in the footsteps of Carl von Ossietzky, the publisher of the “Weltbuhne,” whom the Nazis imprisoned in a concentration camp.

o Then there's Karl Theodor Zu Guttenberg, former Defense Minister of Germany, who yes, was disgraced by a plagiarism case regarding his PhD but who apologized and has gone on with his life. (BTW, a victim of a concerted plan by the German SPD to discredit him in every way throughout the whole process.) He has a thought-provoking piece posted about admitted carelessness in opsec but also the need for the US to apologize.

Regrettably, US President Barack Obama and his administration have yet to comprehend the scale and severity of the damage caused to America’s credibility among its European allies. The problem is not that countries spy on each other (they all do). Rather, it is the extent of US intelligence gathering and America’s attitude toward allies that is most damaging.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/on-the-fallout-from-us-spying-on-its-european-allies-by-karl-theodor-zu-guttenberg#ZoXZlFtEtxMZv7iG.99

So I conclude that we have to mend fences after this rift, and that's being done without bloggers, obviously.

I don't think we can have Germany join the Five Eyes club of the Western intelligence agencies because of the Russian factor. As long as Germany is helping Southstream and a hundred other Kremlin plans and refusing to confront Russia over its awfulness on a 100 things from Magnitsky to the Trans-Dniester region to Belarus,  we can't have them a member. But as with NATO, maybe there has to be a Partnership for Peace where certain countries have special relationships or there's a formalized sharing of intelligence.

But this goes on anyway. I keep thinking of the John Le Carre novel, A Most Wanted Man. How authentic is it? I keep thinking of the Muslim charity -- and that last page about the 10% or was it even just 1% of funds that go to terrorism...

A link to the very first interview with Snowden by Appelbaum and Poitras which -- no coincidence -- was published in Der Spiegel.

Regrettably, US President Barack Obama and his administration have yet to comprehend the scale and severity of the damage caused to America’s credibility among its European allies. The problem is not that countries spy on each other (they all do). Rather, it is the extent of US intelligence gathering and America’s attitude toward allies that is most damaging.
Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/on-the-fallout-from-us-spying-on-its-european-allies-by-karl-theodor-zu-guttenberg#ZoXZlFtEtxMZv7iG.99

Regrettably, US President Barack Obama and his administration have yet to comprehend the scale and severity of the damage caused to America’s credibility among its European allies. The problem is not that countries spy on each other (they all do). Rather, it is the extent of US intelligence gathering and America’s attitude toward allies that is most damaging.
Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/on-the-fallout-from-us-spying-on-its-european-allies-by-karl-theodor-zu-guttenberg#ZoXZlFtEtxMZv7iG.99

Regrettably, US President Barack Obama and his administration have yet to comprehend the scale and severity of the damage caused to America’s credibility among its European allies. The problem is not that countries spy on each other (they all do). Rather, it is the extent of US intelligence gathering and America’s attitude toward allies that is most damaging.
Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/on-the-fallout-from-us-spying-on-its-european-allies-by-karl-theodor-zu-guttenberg#ZoXZlFtEtxMZv7iG.99

Related articles

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The Chaos Computer Club's Past Links to the KGB and Present Links to WikiLeaks, Assange, and Snowden

Germany 'should offer Edward Snowden asylum after NSA revelations' Writing in Der Spiegel, more than 50 high-profile Germans add to increasing calls for Berlin to welcome NSA whistleblower

Germany upset, but history is why US spied

Kremlin denies Snowden is breaking terms of asylum

Germany summons UK ambassador over spy report

In Germany Support Grows for Snowden Asylum

Angela Merkel Reveals Her Search History: Late-Night Comedy Roundup

Report: Obama OK'd NSA Spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel

US' NSA tracked Angela Merkel's phone since 2002

So I conclude that

Back to Benghazi: Twit Fight with John Hudson

You know, there's the way that the "progressive" adversarial journalists talk condescendingly to you, the reader...

 

A probe to aspects of the story never really followed up in #Benghazi still needed regardless of @John_Hudson gotcha.

— CatherineFitzpatrick (@catfitz) November 2, 2013

..and then there's the way they talk to their peers, other adversarial journalists...

@catfitz not gotcha in the least

  — John Hudson (@John_Hudson) November 2, 2013

Um... this seems like a pretty damning report by @John_Hudson. http://t.co/ZtmYJcxyNb

— Daniel Drezner (@dandrezner) November 2, 2013

@dandrezner always happy to bring the damnation!

— John Hudson (@John_Hudson) November 2, 2013

Sigh.

Copying the rest of it in case it's deleted. But basically, I summarized my problems with the way this story was covered in the comments, and now Eli Lake has actually interviewed the witness, who denies the claims and says he is smeared.

Let's see what happens next...

CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz

A probe to aspects of the story never really followed up in #Benghazi still needed regardless of @John_Hudson gotcha.

10:53 PM - 1 Nov 13

Tweet text

Reply to @John_Hudson 

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1. John Hudson ‏@John_Hudson 14h

   @catfitz not gotcha in the least

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2. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 11h

   @John_Hudson Then you've lost the feel for what gotcha is. Do you really think 60 minutes producers are stupid and craven?

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3. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 11h

   @John_Hudson How do u think it works? CBS-owned publisher calls up 60 min & says, "Please feature a compromised witness to flog our book?"

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4. John Hudson ‏@John_Hudson 10h

   @catfitz clearly you don't think his incident report days after the attack is newsworthy. I disagree.

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5. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 9h

   @John_Hudson Um, no. I think it's possible that his report filed quickly at the time showing him at the beach simply may not be complete.

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6. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 9h

   @John_Hudson And the way you find out whether he is now fabricating is by asking him directly. Did you do that? Because both may be true.

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7. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 9h

   @John_Hudson You're biased b/c of your general oppo research approach to journalism (the McCain Pravda story a good example).

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8. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 9h

   @John_Hudson So you a priori decide that it isn't he's scrubbing a report to his boss, you decide instead he's amplifying for 60 mins.

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9. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 9h

   @John_Hudson and *even if* it turns out to be true as you say that this guy lied & CBS has been deceived, that doesn't change Benghazi.

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10. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 9h

    @John_Hudson But for you, from the get-go it's about exposing the right as wrongfully obsessed about Benghazi, not really investigating.

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11. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 9h

    @John_Hudson And no, I don't watch Fox TV, I don't shop at Wal-Marts and I don't own a gun or drive an SUV. Try to hear it.

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12. John Hudson ‏@John_Hudson 8h

    @catfitz uh yes. I reached out. He hasn't responded.

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13. John Hudson ‏@John_Hudson 8h

    @catfitz another nonsense assertion

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14. John Hudson ‏@John_Hudson 8h

    @catfitz not true. Work on reading comprehension.

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15. John Hudson ‏@John_Hudson 8h

    @catfitz clearly you're not familiar with my work on Benghazi.

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16. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 6h

    @John_Hudson Uh, you didn't write that in your article.

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17. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 6h

    @John_Hudson You mean you don't agree with me catching you out in actually instigating news and not covering it. Okay. Understood.

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18. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 6h

    @John_Hudson Why is it that activist journalists always talk about "reading comprehension" merely because someone disagrees with you?

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19. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 6h

    @John_Hudson See if you can come up with an argument instead of an insult, then you're more persuasive.

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20. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 6h

    @John_Hudson And you *did* decide that because *that's what you wrote, duh*. You didn't include several hypotheses. Take ownership of it.

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21. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 6h

    @John_Hudson Um, you mean the one nailing Issa *just like this one* in spirit & method despite a few buried caveats? http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/09/20/documents_surface_that_undermine_issas_benghazi_report …

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22. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 6h

    @John_Hudson What would happen if you just sincerely reported the story, John? Why wd Jones call you bakc when you made up your mind?

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23. (learn more)
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    CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 2h

    @John_Hudson Now what? http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/02/exclusive-benghazi-whistleblower-says-he-was-smeared.html …

    Details

Honestly, "reading comprehension"? Bart Gellman tried the same thing on me. Do they all do that? It's so lame and gratuitiously insulting. Do you really think that just because people disagree with your blogs they're stupid? If you really think they missed something, couldn't you just correct them  normally? But in fact, Hudson *is* in a gotcha here because he ran this piece without first getting an answer from the witness and he couldn't seem to think of any other narrative -- or admit the existence of any other possibility -- except the one that fits his oppo research against conservatives/right-wingers.

This is all so tiresome.

I will insist on continuing to ask about Benghazi, like other people. I don't care if it is a vehicle for the right-wing. I don't care if Jay Carney says they already had 40 committees and briefings about it. I've never heard answers to the questions that Sean Smith asked about why the "police" guarding them from the February 17th Brigades were taking pictures of their compound hours before the attack.

I hadn't realized that he also called his mother and told her about this! That makes it even more creepy -- not only game chat with a buddy, but he goes out of his way to call his mother? That's just awful.

She asks simple questions that don't have answers. There are bloody fingerprints on the wall shown in pictures. Whose are they? Do they belong to her son? The fact is, maybe they didn't even bother to go capture them and investigate it. That may be the problem. I have to wonder when we are told stories like CNN "just happening" to pick up the ambassador's diary on the attack scene afterwards (!).

You hope they did sweep the scene and take those fingerprints and it's just that it is classified. But really, why classify something already in the news long after the fact?

As Lee Stranahan, formerly of Breitbart, has pointed out -- and again, I do not care in the slightest what political hay Breitbart is making with Benghazi -- the credibility of "Morgan Jones" is not required to make the case of a Benghazi cover-up. And if it turns out he's tainted goods, Eli Lake and Daily Beast, in covering this, have covered themselves -- they've interviewed him and gotten his story and compared and contrasted it, but of course it all still has to play out.

Imagine the spite and malice of the person who not only leaked this witness' report to his employer, contracted by the State Department, to the Washington Post, but also that his name was published! Not only is State to blame for endangering someone, so is the Washpo under Bezos. Awful. They are as bad as WikiLeaks.

I can understand why the GOP is holding up appointments, although I don't think that tactic is effective nor does it make the case. But I can see the frustration. There is a wall of deflection if not derision from the "progressives" on this. They want it to be forgotten and to go away. While Issa may seem obsessive and perhaps he has been wrongfully so, we still don't have these basic answers. Has anyone ever explained why they contracted the February 17 brigade and whether they were infiltrated by or collaborating with Al Qaeda -- the people taking the pictures were obviously casing the joint for an attack!

Imagine, Sean Smith's mother says Obama and Hillary spoke of a protest against videos (!). That's been long debunked, but is there then a recognition that they have to explain what really happened?

I think the placement of blame on Hillary is wrong because I really think she was too high up to be micromanaging this situation. I also don't think GOP de-funding is at issue re: security -- which is the answer the left always gives on this. I don't think Susan Rice is relevant and isn't at fault, she only had briefing papers.

I blame a different thing that is all throughout the building at State, which is the hubris that democracy promotion and civil society projects can proceed in war zones. I think this is just insane, as much as I'm supportive of such programs. There is always this idealization of the situation and our role in these cases and that leads to missing cues from the field. The UN convoy and chief of mission (Ian Martin) a very experienced field mission office, was attacked right before the September 11 attack -- and yet the American ambassador thought he could go out jogging alone and stay overnight in this compound in this area? In order to open up a hospital wing the next morning -- the hospital he then died in? It is so sad. But also so inevitable when we have such "progressive" idealism in the Democrats. I do think Hillary knows better. She has been on hundreds of trips and is nobody's fool about these oppressive regimes and war zones, as her off-mic remarks indicate. I'd much much rather have her president than Cory Booker or whomever Obama's annointed one will be.

 

 

 

 

 

Why I Don't Support ObamaCare and James Fallow's Extraordinary Delusion

Propaganda poster circulated by whitehouse.gov this month.

I voted for Obama in 2008 for a variety of reasons, one of which was I actually believed in his health care proposal because I didn't have health insurance and I was going broke with medical expenses for myself and family members.

I didn't vote for Obama in 2012, and voted for Romney instead, for a number of reasons, among which is that I ceased to believe in the health care program.

Let me explain why.

I thought originally that ObamaCare, whatever its socialist ideological problems, would basically do what state public insurance programs like Child Health Care Plus and Family Health Care Plus are able to do in New York State.

Because I work, I was not eligible for the state health insurance, but because I'm a single mother with low income, my children are eligible for Child Health Care Plus, and I can pay a low premium of around $100 a month, plus co-pays and with high deductibles, and more or less prevent at least horrendous costs from their emergencies -- which involve a notorious punishing $1000 ER fee just to walk in the door in New York City. (The people who feel the pain of this whopping fee are not people with insurance -- their companies pay it without complaint; the homeless or indigent don't feel it because they never have any intention of paying their bills anyway. It's law-abiding people who pay bills, with stable addresses so debt collectors can easily harass them, who wind up paying the cost for the uninsured, including themselves, to use ERs as clinics or even just as ERs.)

So I figured that ObamaCare would be something like this, only for adults, and with a higher threshold of means-testing. I never dreamed it would have fines if you didn't join, or that it would have subsidies to state exchanges, rather than clear-cut means-testing.

Of course, I've always wondered why those who want socialized health care don't have states just do this, and have the federal government assist some poorer states and some poorer populations in increasing coverage and creating more free or low-cost prevention programs like a standard package of testing for everybody -- say, one strep throat test, one Pap smear, one mammogram, one prostate test per year for everybody depending on age or sex -- but not taking on the burden of universal coverage. And to be sure, this is being administered through state exchanges, but the premiums do not at all seem to be the mere $100 that Obama Truth Team propagandists claim but more like $200 or even $300 for the same family sizes and income. I just don't see the reality of the $100 premium anywhere, even in the most sympathetic press.

The notion of just how you're going to get subsidized - what the process will involve, what paperwork you might have to submit, etc. was very hazy -- but I knew that's just exactly where all the troubles are for the average person getting state-subsidized insurance.

And the question of the high deductibles we already see in insurance programs for the poor that almost make them not worth it for some is now being looked at more closely with ObamaCare.

With good reason, these companies providing this state insurance do not make it easy, create many hurdles, and are arbitrary in the direction of trying to shake you off. That's because it's just too great a cost for any company to bear and not go broke, and so they use every trick in the book to keep people undercompensated or off the program entirely -- especially in anticipation of ObamaCare.

Example: even though I provided my children's passports and Social Security cards and they were proven to be citizens when they joined the program years ago, and had been renewed each year when I re-qualified with new applications without any demand to re-show passports and SS cards already copied and on file, suddenly I was hit at the 11th hour before the deadline to supply proof of my daughter's citizenship after she had been on it for 10 years.

Or even when I already supplied my income tax, already supplied a letter from the employer, I was still hit with yet another form for the employer to sign -- and when the employer submitted it without specifying a salary was monthly -- which was already specified in the cover letter initially supplied AND visible in the totals on the 1099 also sent with the income tax -- it was declared invalid after the deadline passed and then made the whole application invalid.

You would think that if ObamaCare managed fines through the IRS, it would also end this burdensom process of forcing people to show income letters, paycheck stubs, returns, forms, etc. if they simply checked off a box that they had an income tax return and a Social Security Number - then they would be issued the subsidy accordingly. But that's never how it's done.

I also assumed that Obama would be serious about tackling the huge cost of medical expenses with more preventive care, more "standard package" options and delivery of them more efficiently -- for example, in NYC, many high schools have nurse's offices that are essentially branch medical clinics tied to hospitals, with doctors available in them and can administer vaccines. Since the school system requires the vaccines, and the government is paying for health care, why not offer it as a feature of the school system everywhere, and pay the $1000 that it costs to vaccinate a young teen? (Yes, that's the bill I got -- $1000 for a routine set of vaccinations -- and that's likely inflated).

Obviously a big medical cost comes from malpractice insurance -- my OBY/GYNs were nearly driven out of business by these huge costs. They are huge -- and those trying to prove they aren't simply won't think in terms of an individual local practice and what it means to less wealthy urban doctors in particular, and insist on looking at this problem only system wide and trying to minimize it.

The Trial Attorneys of America and other lawyers' lobbying groups and individual law firms are Obama's largest campaign contributors. Naturally they don't want to see this cash cow tackled and Obama won't touch it.

I'm quite aware that as the ObamaCare debate dragged on, there were other hard facts that Obama couldn't address -- big employers moving employees to part-time or contract status to avoid the burden; small companies worried about going out of business if they had to pay for the costs -- and of course the completely ideological and politicized insistence that ObamaCare pay for birth control and abortion-inducing medications, which was unnecessary and needlessly alienated the Catholic Church -- which rightfully questioned why the First Amendment had to be violated in order to put in a health care plan -- given that Planned Parenthood, also funded by the government, exists to provide birth control and abortions for free or low cost for the poor.

But most of all what I have hated about ObamaCare is the inability of Obama himself and his acoltyes and fanboys to compromise.

Government is about compromise. Like many people, I assumed Obama would be forced into the reality of having to compromise once he came to office -- instead, he swung harder to the left, fell more under pressure from the hard left, and has rigidly clung to his socialist orthodoxy. Yes, socialist, and don't pretend it's not, when I went to the same socialist meetings as Obama did in the 1980s in New York City and I know exactly what stealth socialism under "community organizing" is all about.

Obama's unwillingness to get rid of some of the most costly and onerous sides of his plan, his unwillingness to reach a deal over this, is what is most worrisome of all.

What the "progressives" have done with this is enter a realm of ideological shrillness and brittle rigidity the likes of which I've never seen. They claim this rigid sectarianism is the feature only of the Tea Party and figures like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz; they are oblivious to their own rigid ideological insistence that the world contort to fit the socialist view Obama had in his youth and has stealthily tried to impose since he came in office, under cover of supposedly single issues like "health" or "education".

James Fallows provides a horribly emblematic example of this writing in the Atlantic (which has gone all technocommunist in recent years, one of my great sorrows). He writes:

We're used to thinking that the most important disagreements are between the major parties, not within one party; and that disagreements over policies, goals, tactics can be addressed by negotiation or compromise.

Right. So why can't Obama compromise, James? Obama. He's the one who was only elected by half the people; he's the one who does not have even less than half of the country's approval now. Why can't HE compromise?!

I don't care how stupid, insane, clownish or discredited the GOP is and figures like Ted Cruz for whom I have no use and will never vote for.

Why can't Obama change? Why?

Fallows pretends that this fight is only within the Republican Party, between Tea Party types and the more "normal" conservatives. He claims the Obama bots are only bystanders:

This time, the fight that matters is within the Republican party, and that fight is over whether compromise itself is legitimate.** Outsiders to this struggle -- the president and his administration, Democratic legislators as a group, voters or "opinion leaders" outside the generally safe districts that elected the new House majority -- have essentially no leverage over the outcome.

Um, outsiders? But ObamaCare was pushed through and still exists as an imposition despite numerous attempts to defund it and make it less of a monster in the House. Er, leverage? Politics is a process of compromise. It's not about one half of the country bludgeoning the other half into doing something they don't want or need and we all can't afford.

And indeed, in the House, we see more clearly the attitude of most of the country to having to take on the burden of a complex and costly health care program that doesn't just reasonably subsidize at least more of the poor, but tries to lure the healthy and wealthy into giving up more of their wealth to sustain an uncurbed monster with no cost control, and then punishes the poor who refuse to go along with this ruse by making them pay fines. The means-testing and application process have always been kept deliberately vague.

Yet instead of accepting that elected representatives of his fellow Americans who don't believe in socialism as he does as a "progressive," and instead of conceding that when you have half the country only voting for a president, and less than half supporting this particular program you have to compromise, James Fallows comes up with this APPALLING formulation that the problem is journalists who won't do as he say, and become scribes and propagandists for his "progressive" cause and take on reality:

As a matter of journalism, any story that presents the disagreements as a "standoff," a "showdown," a "failure of leadership," a sign of "partisan gridlock," or any of the other usual terms for political disagreement,represents a failure of journalism*** and an inability to see or describe what is going on.

No. It represents free press that is reporting that Obama and the Democrats aren't willing to compromise either. It's not true that no compromise is acceptible as Fallows claims -- compromises have never really been tried. Hard-core socialist ideological militancy is the problem here.

It's scary that legitimate coverage of this as a stand-off -- which it is because Obama will not compromise and thinks he can impose sharp socialism by indeed digging in his heels and waiting out Republicans by causing pain with government shut-down -- would somehow be a "failure". James Fallow is a failure -- a failure of intellectual freedom, indeed a failure of intellectual  honestly.

Most Americans feel like they won't miss the government much, even if it does shut down for 10 days or 30 days. Fallows scurries to find emotional examples of ill effects -- like failure to deliver flood assistance in Colorado to try to make the case that it will matter. I think most people think that the shut-down won't happen, and that it's brinkmanship.

So the reality of what should happen when the GOP is forced into such brinkmanship is that Obama should compromise. We have a two-party system -- it's really four parties these days with one in power (the Democratic Socialists of America) with significant Congressional forces like Elizabeth Warren or Ron Wydell adding to the presidential stealth socialism; one (the Democrat Party) unable to curb its minority leftist extremists who are really in a separate, unelected party; and two not in power except in the House, with the fourth, or Tea Party, able to deploy some individual GOP members in its favour. I think we'd all benefit from a multi-party system that would force DSA socialists to get elected and not use stealth methods, and ditto the Tea Party.

But compromise is what has to happen, and that means offers have to come from Obama on what he could de-fund out of his over-costly program. It has to be a significant unilateral move now, and an end to grand-standing on his part. The socialist journalists who keep crying that there is no truth, or that there is a lie only discredit themselves and should themselves run for office as the propagandists of the party they support.

 

 

Tracking the Social Graph Online: How it Began in Worlds and Games

Sims Online cooking skills lot in 2008. Photo By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

The "social graph" -- the exposure of the network of connections of human beings, combined with other data, and the implications involved -- first was created and followed in online virtual worlds and MMORPGs (massive multi-player online role-play games). The same coders and engineers who perfected these in games and worlds went on to social media where they perfected them further, ultimately for use in elections (Obama was the first candidate to win using the drilling of social network data). Now the notion of the social graph has hit the headlines in relationship to the NSA Snowden scandals (and perhaps a related concept, the social gesture, i.e. every little thing you do online, will be next).

I first encountered the social graph in the hands of Will Wright, designer of The Sims Online, an outgrowth of the hugely popular Sims game moved to real-time interaction by real humans online. The humans obviously weren't automated like the Sims offline game, but they were automatized by having only a limited repertoire of automatic actions they could perform, and a rote set of chores and tasks they had to complete in order to stay functioning -- the diamonds above their heads had to be "kept green" and "out of the red" by having the Sim play pool, socialize, sleep, go to the bathroom, eat, dance, work, etc. Interestingly, even within the confines of this open-ended but regimented game, people devised all kinds of creative ways to do two things people like to do most: a) make money b) have sex.

Will Wright had various collectivized collaborationist "better world" notions he forced on the population, i.e. creating "group jobs" that would force people to socialize and collaborate to complete tasks. These were quickly sabotaged. Either people just built bots and made alts to run through the chores at top speed and generate "simoleons" as the world's cash was known (which had a real black market value on e-bay and gaming exchanges), or they would devise extra rules, like making bets on the outcome of pizza options, or they would optimize the aspects of the game in superior ways to try to beat their adverse disruptions -- i.e. placing toilets next to wood-working benches for the Sim to toilet while he worked as it really didn't matter if he ran across the screen to a sheltered toilet -- he was an imaginary character and there was no need for him to experience shame if that was actually reducing his income generation by taking up precious time and steps and reducing his maximum output.

If anything, it was funny to see how most people -- even with robot routines imposed on them - kept to their offline culture -- they insisted on toilets removed from workplaces and eating areas and insisted on doors and walls; they didn't want gambling and cheating because that "ruined the fun," and they chose esthetic beauty of their homes and stores rather than maximized job production or Sim recovery. It is very hard to eradicate human culture and spirit.

One of the aspects Will Wright built into the game which caused universal havoc was "Friendship Balloons". This was my first experience of the social graph -- unfortunately, I don't seem to have any screenshots left and I can't find any online today although surely someone has one, given their huge importance to this virtual world.

Everyone had a "balloon graph" or social graph that showed visually who they were friends with, how good and close their friendship was, and who their enemies were. So each time I met someone, I could choose an option to hand them a balloon, and we would be linked by "friendship". Our balloons would start out bright green in colour, but if we didn't keep visiting each others' homes, and didn't keep interacting, say, by dancing the jitterbug or at least chatting and shaking each others' hands once in awhile, the green would fade, the once-bright balloon would fall to the bottom of the graph, and then even disappear beneath pages and pages of such balloon stories.

By the same token, if someone came and slapped me or "gloved me" as the game mechanics showed, i.e. throwing down a gauntlet, then our relationship would be recorded as red. Someone would have to come back again and "piledrive" or otherwise use negative attacks on me to keep the red in -- otherwise, it, too, would fade.

The balloons picked up not only people you actually friended with the balloon gesture, it picked up other metadata -- other people who simply happened to be at the same job location or club location as you. So if you walked into a bar, all the other people would "show up in your balloons" and show up faintly as green -- if you didn't interact with them in any way, they would fade and drop down in the pages and ultimately disappear.

Naturally this system was gamed and led to horrible consequences for its players -- and even attracted the attention of real-life media.

The game designer himself -- Will Wright on his alts -- was the first one to pollute it by buying friendship -- he paid 100 simoleons to people to friend him, so he could gather more balloons and move up the friendship list -- there were leaderboards as in all games. We could also tell that he had friended -- or accepted 100 from -- Mia Wallace, the most notorious mafia queen who ran the Sim Shadow Government which ultimately took over and ruined the Sims Online for many people with its corruption and terror -- I've always thought Will Wright deliberately allowed evil to enter his world "to see what would happen" and to see how the human spirit would attempt to overcome it (which it did, but just not sufficiently, in part because of constraints in TSO's own rules, chief of which was suppression of press freedom -- because the game company felt it couldn't check rumours and police libel, you were not allowed to report the bad behaviour of any other individual or group on the forums, and that meant no one could ever warn other players or rally against the Shadow Government.)

Besides buying friendship, what happened is that virtual wives soon discovered their virtual husbands were cheating on them -- they would see a suspiciously green balloon at the top of their boyfriend's pages -- was he dancing the jitterbug just a little too often with that certain Sim?

Another negative side effect was that people came deliberately to slap you to "red up your balloons" -- and it would spoil your reputation because people thought perhaps you got into bar fights or didn't cooperate sufficiently on group job objects and were "trouble". Some people automatically ejected from their establishments anyone who entered with a lot of red balloons in their pack.

People would endlessly study these balloon graphs --and I mean endlessly -- you could tell at a glance who was a friend or foe of whom by red or green status. They would see who were the most green; they would be jealous over literal greenness if a special friend didn't "keep them in their balloons". They would deliberately go over and try to socialize to keep certain popular people "at the top of their balloons". They would avoid others and push them down the pages out of sight.

Of course, all of this had the extra added headache or pleasure, depending on how you looked at it, of "mapping" and the option to "map" or "not map" a friend and give out those permissions. So you could open up the world's master map, and spot where your friends were, and teleport to them to keep green -- or they could block you, so you couldn't find them and keep up that green -- and would have to guess where they might be -- perhaps by checking their balloons and see who was in their inner, greenest circle -- and then guess where that person might be and teleport there. People naturally developed all kinds of mapping strategems -- knowing that people had to keep up their jitterbug and piledriving skills, they would go to the skill lots where these skills had to be kept up by interacting with various objects, and then head there.

As all MMORPG players know, there are always a set of concerted players who want to nerf or dumb down or disable the negative features of games -- so it wasn't long before people began to lobby to get rid of the "red balloons" idea as it harmed their reputations and some were deliberately going around gloving others to make them look bad.

By the time we migrated to Second Life or There or other open-ended social worlds, the balloons had been replaced by friendship cards, but these were not made visible. So it wasn't long before some bright young coder thought it would be great to design what he called the SL Wristwatch which would track all the people near you within 96 meters, track how often you were in each other's proximity, and then post this online so that people essentially could make the same kind of TSO balloons in rough fashion.

But very soon people began to howl. The online edition of these early social graphs that existed before Twitter was born, before Facebook was widely used and popular -- in 2004-2005 -- showed up people that other people didn't want their friends to know about. The same problem developed -- a sim wife would find that her sim husband was shown 96m near his old girlfriend or near some other woman and that became suspicious.

Or enemies or griefers who wanted to discredit others would keep showing up in their 96m range to make it look like they were friends, constantly showing their proximity.

This proximity data would be used to find out where the most people were and where they went hte most; who was the most popular; who was related to them, and of course led to friendship and influence seeking behaviour. But it was fairly rapidly shut down -- just like years later GirlsNearMe was shut down for the same privacy-exposing behaviour.

Then the next scandal involved another "improvement" on this proximity data -- now the IP addresses of every one coming to the sim were collected, and this led not only to showing who was with who, but it also outed alts -- people with the exact same IP address (and yes, many are in fact dynamic, or fluctuate within a close enough range) but who had different alt accounts would be outed.Also their habits would be on display -- if they went to a gay club or shopped at a BDSM mall.

So there was an enormous outcry over this privacy-stripping function -- even in a virtual world where most people were anonymous -- or thought they were. And this function was banned.

Activists in worlds and games who tried to stop greedy coders from scraping enormous amounts of data and displaying it in order to change behaviours -- all as ultimately a marketing test -- were strong enough to stop some of the geek game-god practices but didn't have enough social cohesion and sophistication and power to be able to stop them more broadly as they moved from games to social networks.

No one complained when Barack Obama drilled the social graphs everywhere to construct polling data and organize massive Get Out the Vote phone calls based on issues or demographics -- Obama for America grabbed all that right off the top, mixed it and drilled it and won, then morphed into Organizing for Action, and took all that data with them, and few complained that a Democratic Party candidate had now taken with him for his private use in a nonprofit the people's data gathered in a national election.

Those to the hard left or hard right of even "progressive" Obama only complained when the NSA, an institution with far more checks and balances and compliance with the rule of law than game or virtual world companies or social media compaines or OFA did this lawfully in pursuit of criminals.

No one complained when the chief of police in Steubenville gathered social media and cell phone data, texts and photographs, and used it to prosecute two young men who had raped a girl at a party. If anything, Anonymous, which used brutal vigilante tactics to out many others in the social graph with these men and this girl, falsely accusing innocent people and permanently ruining the lives even of those who were rightly disciplined or prosecuted with this case, was applauded by feminists for "getting" those football team members with "rape culture". The kind of "rape culture" that coders routinely disdainfully indulge in when a company or government is hacked, and they blame the victim for wearing too short a skirt, i.e. failing to salt or hash data base tables.

Today, when anthropologist Katy Pearce routinely collects openly-available Twitter accounts and elaborately tracks who has tweeted to whom about what in Nodex and other programs, nobody complains except me. She can claim to out government informants or pro-government supporters with these methods by seeing what they say and to whom, although I've cautioned, being even more a supporter of independent (as distinct from GONGO-ized) civil society than she is in Azerbaijan, that people sitting on the fence, or ordinary people still shaping their opinion, or people who just might not like the opposition for various reasons, can be mistaken in these methods for "pro-government" and in fact alienated and not won over by the movement. There are also many alts and bots polluting the information but you can't always tell the difference.

 

Why?

Once again, a mass shooting by a deranged killer -- again, in a military setting, this time, the Navy Yard in Washington, DC.

Once again, the fear, the lock-downs, the shelters-in-place, the sirens, the helicopters -- even with people dangling in a cage over roof-tops. Then Google and Facebook and Twitter searches to find pictures and past and explanations, then candlelight vigils and grim lists and crying relatives and grave presidential pronouncements.

It is all so familiar and predictable now that it is almost like reciting a set of prayers or going to a religious ritual.

Of course, we've learned our lesson from the net-nannies of social media -- we must never, ever ask questions, especially in the first 24 hours. We must never make assumptions or find the wrong people on social media.

So we can never ask if it is a terrorist attack, and instead, we have to rush to explain it away as workplace violence or merely somebody with a grudge.

The shooter turns out to be black -- but nothing to see there, move along, but do note that all those theories that "white crime" means mass school shootings and blacks never commit these types of mass shootings go out the window.

Once again we're instructed that it's all prejudices -- if the shooter is white, we say mentally ill, if black, we say angry, if Muslim, we say terrorist, if Asian, we say cryptic. Ismail Ax!

Once again, the shooter himself is shot dead and so we can't really find out. Once again, there's a second shooter -- and then there isn't.

There's been so many of these, and so well-spaced and seeming to come after other weakenings of the country and society or times of turmoil (like presidential elections or Snowden) that you wonder if there is a foreign enemy that has acquired a secret weapon that can ferrett out via Internet searches persons who are "off" or "ready to explode," and then send microwaves of mind-suggestions to them to turn them into robotic mass killers to create these devastating incidents.

Yeah, that's a loony conspiracy theory, and of course it's impossible.

So it's likely just that strange amalgam that comes up each time -- first, the access to guns -- say, that's the most important! Second, mental illness that no one seems to ever be able to do anything about, or perhaps a form of autism that we're supposed to know is never violent. Then it spills out later --  violent TV and violent video games (which we're supposed to pretend have absolutely no effect on anybody because, why, everyone would be a killer then), or drugs (which we're supposed to be for legalizing).

In this killer's case, he had a past history of guns and once a strange fugue state where he shot out a guy's tires but didn't seem to realize he had done this.

Seattle police released details late Monday of another shooting incident from 2004 in which Alexis shot the rear tires of a vehicle owned by a construction worker doing work in his neighborhood. Alexis told police he had an anger-fueled "blackout" but added that he felt he had been "mocked" by the workers and "disrespected" by the workers.

Alexis also told police he was present during "the tragic events of September 11, 2001" and described "how those events had disturbed him." Detectives later spoke with Alexis' father in New York, who told police Alexis had anger-management problems associated with PTSD, and that he had been an active participant in rescue attempts on 9/11.

 

He also double-talked his way out of an incident where he shot at the ceiling through a neighbour's ceiling -- a neighbour about whom he'd complained before -- but then said it was an accident cleaning his gun. So each time, he was excused, and went on being mentally ill or angry or bearing a mysterious grudge and of course keeping his gun access and possession. And there we have it. You can look for Iranian secret zap weapons over wireless, but you can also just look at our typical homegrown circumstances that always seem to come together the same way again and again.

Even so, there might be terrorism, or some radical act of sabotage with some kind of political agenda here, and it has to be investigated. Maybe there isn't, when we're told within 24 hours about the workplace anger narrative and told over and over and over by pundits and thought influencers and experts to shut up, and not make assumptions.

So here comes J.M. Berger, the expert on terrorism, to explain it all to us. First, he implicitly tells people not to make judgements early on, especially on Twitter or from tweets, by approvingly noting those who counsel caution. Then he proceeds to indulge in just this himself.

 

CNN says Alexis was angry over not getting paid.

— J.M. Berger (@intelwire) September 16, 2013

He says CNN says it is merely that the shooter wasn't paid. Then he makes a macabre MT comment about the other incident today, when somebody lobbed a firecracker over the White House wall. Funny two things like that happening the same day.

Hope it was worth it MT @New_Narrative: Picture of individual being taken down at WH by uniformed personnel @FoxNews http://t.co/mznwy6AU4V”

— J.M. Berger (@intelwire) September 16, 2013

Yes, J.M. quips "Hope it was worth it" about this person's "cause" involved in throwing that firecracker, which obviously led to his arrest.

As if any cause would be worth it, or worthy of any type of praise, even ironical, if it involved throwing a firecracker at the White House. On a day when 12 people were shot dead in the Navy Yard.

There are worse things.

There's J.M. Berger's Omar and Me. Yes, it's as bad as you might think -- or worse. I almost couldn't look. Before I looked, I had very vivid in my mind the briefings that UN security officers give to humanitarian groups about terrorist groups, where they show you their video messages where they tell you in very clear terms, with sprightly music and song sometimes, that they want to kill you, a humanitarian worker -- because they tell you in no uncertain terms that their job is to kill white, Western, Christian, Jewish infidels -- in as large numbers as possible.

I made the statement some weeks ago that J.M. Berger minimizes terrorism. That has been my consistent experience with him over and over again, watching his comments on Central Asia, the Tsarnaev Brothers and the Boston bombing and so on. Oh, I totally get that he is a world-renowned expert on terrorism with publications and a think-tank position and lots of Twitter followers and a person of stature. That's all a given. I get all that. I just won't go along with it, however. I think he consistently minimizes terror. He dismissed the Navy Yard shooting instantly, before we really had enough information by retweeting CNN's workplace violence narrative. Please don't tell me RT doesn't equal endorsement -- of course it does.

And then..."Omar and Me" is hugely troubling. Basically what happens here is that Berger befriends a terrorist -- a spokesman and propagandist for Al Shabab, one of the deadliest terrorist groups in the world, which has ruined Somalia and killed our colleagues in the humanitarian field and of course numerous civilians.

It's like a bigger and more sinister version of those rushing to turn Barrett Brown into a journalist although he is mainly a hacker saboteur and destroyer of other people's servers he doesn't like. J.M. Berger decides that merely propagandizing for a terrorist group isn't the same thing as being a terrorist and that befriending him is a legitimate intellectual and scholarly and even civic activity. I disagree, and so do the US courts, since they put a translator of Al Qaeda who put up pages praising them in jail for abetting terrorism, despite all the civil libertarians who complained.

It's not just the role confusion, however, it's the way J.M. Berger purports to speak for all of us, as some sort of enlightened intellectual advance-guard, some elite in the capital that can decide just how much terror is needed to pass or not pass as a liberation struggle:

Our conversations turned more ideological, pushing and pulling over terrorism and the intentional targeting of civilians, the significance of the Arab Spring, and Omar's belief that the United States was oppressing Muslims around the world. We sparred over whether America had a national security interest in the establishment of an Islamic caliphate, one of his pet obsessions. He argued that the United States feared the caliphate; I argued that we wouldn't much care as long as terrorism wasn't the method for its establishment. Just when the conversation would start to get interesting, he would pull back.

No, J.M. No. We do care. Few of us want a caliphate that would take away all our rights. It's hard to think of how a caliphate would be installed in a blanket way without the use of force so it's naive to think it won't be. If for some reason this was achieved through stealth and deception and elections but not actual terrorist attacks, many would still fight against it intensely -- the idea that we "wouldn't care much" and have all pre-capitulated to a theocratic society is just scary -- and you can see how the right-wing bloggers go crazy with this kind of red meat.

Maybe J.M. Berger means well -- he's all understanding and empathetic to this terrorist speaking on behalf of despicable human beings committing atrocities (all of which remain off-stage vaguely in the distance through Berger's lengthy description of his lovely conversations). But I actually think he doesn't mean well at all. I actually think this kind of intellectual depravity and slide into moral degradation is what happens when people want power for their class or tribe. I think like others in this particular punditocracy, he wants to slay real or imagined neo-con or conservative or even just liberal thinkers, journalists or politicians he sees as opponents for media influence or grants or the ear of Congress. I think this group works to stay in power by portraying others more critical or troubled by terrorism as causing the very thing they loathe or in any event being ineffective at fighting it - and it wasn't so bad to start with.

There's the supreme vanity of the scholarly expert at play here, too -- that demanding the right (despite the social and moral taboos) to get close even to a loathsome subject so as to be able to understand it and explain it -- and then, of course, become the go-to guy about X or Y brand of terrorist movement. I'm sure there will be a wave of adulation and envy over J.M. "Omar and Me" because he got this story -- and lucky for him and all his admirers, Omar's dead now, so we don't have to see how the real end of the story might turn out, with Omar participating in some horrid atrocity even as he is DMing thinky pearls of wisdom to J.M. on Twitter.

I don't think there was a terrible lot to learn from Omar -- just like Orwell might say there isn't a lot to learn from befriending yet another communist or fascist up close and personal. Isn't it all pretty clear? Is "dialogue" about unhappy childhoods and economic beefs going to woo these terrorists out from terror to deals that American think-tank elitists arrange for them to come to safety and serve ever more as an interesting exhibition? No, it seems not.

J.M. didn't even seem to want to learn what Omar had to tell him -- that he found that Boston thing pretty odd. How could there be terrorism with no message? he asked. Good question! That should be a red flag to ask more questions about whether in fact it was an "authentic" terrorist act, or something else that had to do with Putin or Kadyrov either scripting the propaganda of the deed (there's the line Putin left out of his infamous op-ed piece) or letting nature take its course out of spite.

Instead, he hurried to explain to Omar that these terrorists were homegrown.

One of the things J.M. wants to do is be "balanced" and "respectful" -- and he hastens to tell his jihadist subjects that he covers other types of American extremism, too (that's why he needs the Tsarnaevs to be homegrown bombers without serious overseas ties, and why he needs  to cover other kinds of right-wing terrorism on American soil, the better to be persuasive in getting the Al Qaeda story). He also wants to make sure no one will ever criticize him for Islamophobia. Hence, this conversation -- which shows in the end, in fact, that it's pointless to play these politically-correct games, extremists determined to commit violence are not persuaded:

I sent him samples of interviews I had done with jihadists and conservative Muslim clerics in the past to show him that I treated my subjects respectfully. In response to a question, I told him I don't write solely about Muslims; I was interested in all types of American extremism. Abu M agreed to consider my request, probing my intentions in the meantime. He said my respectful tone in the interviews was not consistent with the mocking comments I had posted about his autobiography.

I get it that J.M. has a right to this approach and that it is in demand and has more credentials than anything I might say. Even so, I'm going to insist also on the right to express revulsion at this  -- and beg for a "team B" to study these same set of facts with a different lens.

As always the case -- I remember the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, and the current one, Navi Pillay using this term -- Obama deemed the shooting "cowardly".

It's as if liberal adults can rise up and try to shame the shooter by pointing out that far from being a big man who has scared everyone, he is a cowardly mouse who had to use terrorism to address his grievances and not behave like a real man.

I find that whacky. Terrorists -- and mass shooters, ideological or political or even just deranged -- have powerful will and determination and don't suffer from any lack of courage or failure of nerve. They are not cowardly but in fact incredibly bold. That's how they're able to kill people and we're not able to stop them.

I think to understand the nature of horror and moral terror like this, you do have to go back to the version of Joseph Konrad's Heart of Darkness portrayed by Marlon Brandon in Apocalypse Now. Like a diamond bullet, we should realize that somebody has men like this -- somebody does have ten divisions of men like this. It's just a question of finding out who, mindful that it may be among ourselves, and maybe some in our society do have such a life-or-death cause.

 

 

Why Must We Hate on the Banksters?

Photo of Code Pink by PaulSteinJC

I hate my banks. I've never found a good one, and I've tried multiple ones. They have those horrid $35 overdraft fees that you get whacked with no matter how hard you try because they cunningly change the dates that certain debits hit automatically -- like some $3.00 charge suddenly hits out of nowhere that you had thought debited long ago when calculating your accounts -- and whoops, 6 other checks mess up and you get whacked. Really nasty.

Or take this -- I deposit a check, some of it clears as it always does, I happily go away on vacation, and then suddenly discover that a hold has been put on my check and the amount that wsa initially made available is now locked. The hold is put on for *11 business days*. Huh? I call and call and discover that it's because the issuer of the check has forgotten to put the date on the check. The person calls their bank, straightens it out, and I call back my bank to tell them.

But then...They buck me again and I go in circles. Ultimately, I come back from vacation and go in to the branch in person -- but going in person to a bank does no good nowadays, they merely call their 1-800 number for you -- it's eerie. They have no power to do anything in that branch about that check physically deposited in their ATM. I go back to the issuer -- and they confirm that their bank has already debited the amount *on the first day*. Naturally, after doing that, the issuer's bank felt their job was and wasn't interested in pursuing it.

But meanwhile, my bank held that check for *10 days needlessly* just on that excuse of the lack of a date -- which the bank of the issuer didn't care about and let go through. It did that because it was a convenient excuse to make interest off the float -- that's the principle of banks and I get it. No amount of effort to try to get these two banks to talk to each other and release my funds would work.

I had the same sort of endless loop and paralysis from the branch when I put cash in the machine -- and it didn't record and show on my balance. I was really hopping mad on that one and asked them to get back to me when they counted the drawer that day. They said that some other unrelated service did that and they couldn't do anything. Again, for 14 business days,  I struggled to have them reflect that actual cash that had actually gone into their ATM reflect on the balance -- finally it did.

Or take the time that one of those evil debt collectors with sewer-service (i.e. no proper service at all), who I'd actually been sending regular payments to, suddenly slaps a lien on my account, but I don't know that because no notification is given by that sewer-server or by the bank. I go in and deposit a large check. Although the lien amount is small, and easily covered by the large check, the *entire amount* is held *for 30 days* causing major life havoc. Can you imagine such idiocy? Why? Because the lien technically put the account into negative, before the large check cleared -- which normally it would do in 2-3 days. So that became an excuse to freeze the entire thing. The bank demanded that I get a statement from the debt collector that they were satisfied now and had been paid. They refused until I got a notarized statement from the bank -- which I immediately did -- that there were plenty of funds available to cover their lien the following day.

Despite the eventual clearance of the check and plenty of funds available to clear the lien, both sides kept circling endlessly each requiring the other to produce proof of this already-happened event in order to unfreeze the account, pay the lien, and give me access to the rest of my money. It was insanity, and I kept calling all kinds of offices; my favourite was when I called some department or something or another that happened to be in Louisiana, and I heard the people just laughing out loud with each other when I called them. I finally just closed the account to try to force the issue. Whereupon I was billed for all the $35 charges for various automatic payments that hit the bank account *with a perfectly cleared check with its funds availbale on it* but then got rejected. It was Kafka. No, it was a bank.

So yeah, I get it about banks -- insanity. I always marvelled that those Occupy Wall Street freaks never took up the *consumer* issues of banking that are like this -- the $35 charges, the wild occurrences with holding of funds that are really available, etc. We all have these stories. Why didn't they picket banks over the $35 charge? Had they done that, I *might* have come to a demonstration, although likely not, as I don't share their radical solutions of overthrowing capitalism to solve these things. I'm for reform, not revolution.

In fact, litigation has helped to mitigate the $35 issues. There are several successful class-action suits that have forced some of these banks to reform their evil practices -- like those ones where they suddenly rearrange all the dates of when charges hit to make more checks bounce to their advantage. And nowadays, banks don't have those charges if you specify that you opt out of them when they involve certain kinds of transactions -- although it doesn't free you from the scourge forever.

Of course, I remember when the "funds not arranged" fee was $5 or $10, not $35, and when checks didn't take so long to clear or didn't get held. Oh, and I remember when we had 10% interest on our savings accounts, too. Oh, well.

But despite all these negative experiences with banks, which have actually driven me to use check-cashing agencies and post office money orders instead -- despite their fees -- simply because they are more fast and reliable and ultimately cheaper in the end -- I don't have any hatred for "banksters".

First of all, it would be awfully hard to hate the poor tellers and managers in the branches, many of them minorities in entry-level positions with low-paid jobs because it's not their fault at all.

Yeah, I get it that the real people with the money are way above them and live in palaces and all the rest, empires made out of our $35 charges. But you know, we could also just manage our accounts better -- and one way to do that is to buy a money order, because when it's debited, it's really debited as cash, and you have a way to trace it, and it doesn't come back and "hit" much later to surprise you. Yes, it costs a $1, but why not keep the post office going? I'm happy to do this. It works for me.

Which brings me to this Washington Post article that sounds like it's straight out of Occupy.

I'm sorry, but every time one of these Occupiers rants on about how the banksters haven't gone to jail even as the hackers have, I shrug and say, "Good!". The hackers have been guilty and belong in jail. I'm not seeing what the evidence is for cases to be tried as *criminal offenses* rather than civil.

For one, this article, while it admits some have gone to jail, doesn't really give us the full monte: lots of bankers have gone to jail in fact. Here's ten right here.

They're just not happy that the CEO of companies haven't gone to jail. Well, I'd like them to report out evidence that isn't ideological, that isn't hatred of capitalism, that isn't just venom and spite, but is an actual list for a real indictment. I'm not seeing it. And so they are just posturing and propagandizing.

My answer:

What separates us from Russia or China is that we don't jail people for practicing capitalism because we have a free society with a free market. In Russia, there isn't due process or justice for people like Mikhail Khodorkovsky who would never be in jail in America. 
 
And that's just it. You sound like the wildest Occupy Wall Street nutter wanting people to go to jail to satisfy some sense of "justice" you have. But you and others making this demand never, ever explain what the actual criminal charges, and criminal EVIDENCE would be to charge these people with *crimes*. It's especially puzzling when they've had civil charges and faced stiff penalties, yet it's never enough for you, you won't be happy until they are behind bars. 
 
Yet you don't report any evidence that would justify turning these cases into *criminal* cases, and you just wave your jazz hands and say oh, they must be too big to try. 
 
Oh, and you're too big to come up with actual reported evidence?