The Hunter Biden Emails Are Authentic And The FBI/DOJ Sitting On Them Is Unconscienable

Rep. Adam Schiff says he’s concerned that he hasn’t “gotten much from the intelligence community” on Russia peddling disinformation.

“At times, some of the leadership, like Director Ratcliffe, not been very forthcoming in terms of the intelligence on the Russian threat.” pic.twitter.com/JhcVYlCgcf

— The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) October 16, 2020

turcopolier  |  This is the story of an American patriot, an honorable man, John Paul Mac Issac, who tried to do the right thing and is now being unfairly and maliciously slandered as an agent of foreign intelligence, specifically Russia. He is not an agent or spy for anyone. He is his own man. How do I know? I have known his dad for more than 20 years. I’ve known John Paul’s dad as Mac. Mac is a decorated Vietnam Veteran, who flew gunships in Vietnam. And he continued his military service with an impeccable record until he retired as an Air Force Colonel. The crews of those gunships have an annual reunion and Mac usually takes John Paul along, who volunteers his computer and video skills to record and compile the stories of those brave men who served their country in a difficult war.

This story is very simple–Hunter Biden dropped off three computers with liquid damage at a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware on April 12, 2019. The owner, John Mac Issac, examined the three and determined that one was beyond recovery, one was okay and the data on the harddrive of the third could be recoverd. Hunter signed the service ticket and John Paul Mac Issac repaired the hard drive and down loaded the data. During this process he saw some disturbing images and a number of emails that concerned Ukraine, Burisma, China and other issues. With the work completed, Mr. Mac Issac prepared an invoice, sent it to Hunter Biden and notified him that the computer was ready to be retrieved. Hunter did not respond. In the ensuing four months (May, June, July and August), Mr. Mac Issac made repeated efforts to contact Hunter Biden. Biden never answered and never responded. More importantly, Biden stiffed John Paul Mac Issac–i.e., he did not pay the bill.

When the manufactured Ukraine crisis surfaced in August 2019, John Paul realized he was sitting on radioactive material that might be relevant to the investigation. After conferring with his father, Mac and John Paul decided that Mac would take the information to the FBI office in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Mac walked into the Albuquerque FBI office and spoke with an agent who refused to give his name. Mac explained the material he had, but was rebuffed by the FBI. He was told basically, get lost. This was mid-September 2019.

Two months passed and then, out of the blue, the FBI contacted John Paul Mac Issac. Two FBI agents from the Wilmington FBI office–Joshua Williams and Mike Dzielak–came to John Paul’s business. He offered immediately to give them the hard drive, no strings attached. Agents Williams and Dzielak declined to take the device. Two weeks later, the intrepid agents called and asked to come and image the hard drive. John Paul agreed but, instead of taking the hard drive or imaging the drive, they gave him a subpoena. It was part of a grand jury proceeding but neither agent said anything about the purpose of the grand jury.

Rudy’s Laptop Authentication Process. This Isn’t His First Rodeo. Yeeeehaw!!!

archive |  Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani says he spent three weeks authenticating the materials on a copy of a hard drive that once allegedly belonged to Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

The contents of the drive are the subject of a series of explosive reports by the New York Post that shed further light on Hunter Biden’s dealings with China and Ukraine.

Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, told The Epoch Times that he and his attorney, Robert Costello, checked some of the written notes in the drive against samples of Hunter Biden’s handwriting, matched details about undisclosed meetings with confidential information they had already obtained from other sources, and verified the email addresses in the data trove, among other steps. Giuliani said the drive contains roughly 800 of Hunter Biden’s personal photos, including some which Giuliani alleges show illegal acts. The Epoch Times could not independently verify the claim as Giuliani declined to provide a copy of the files.

Costello allegedly received a copy of the hard drive in August from the owner of a Mac repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, and handed it to Giuliani three weeks ago, according to the former mayor. Trump’s former chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, negotiated an exclusive deal with the Post and Giuliani handed a copy of the drive over to the newspaper on Oct. 10. The Post conducted its own authentication effort, Giuliani said.

The exclusive deal with the Post gave the newspaper a head start on covering the material but allows Giuliani to eventually begin disclosing the material to other media, the former mayor said.

Along with the copy of the drive, the owner of the Mac repair shop gave Costello a receipt dated April 12, 2019, which he allegedly generated on the day Hunter Biden dropped off a water-damaged laptop and requested the data to be recovered. After Biden failed to pick up the laptop for 90 days and the shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, was unable to reach him, Mac Isaac took possession of the laptop and reviewed its contents. Mac Isaac also gave Costello a copy of an alleged subpoena for the laptop, dated Dec. 9, 2019, which the FBI allegedly used to seize the laptop the same month.

An FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware declined to confirm the authenticity of the subpoena. Hunter Biden’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. Mac Isaac did not respond to requests for an interview.

Profound Suffering Is The Fire In Which Herd Mentality Is Forged

consentfactory |  There comes a point in the introduction of every new official narrative when people no longer remember how it started. Or, rather, they remember how it started, but not the propaganda that started it. Or, rather, they remember all that (or are able to, if you press them on it), but it doesn’t make any difference anymore, because the official narrative has supplanted reality.

You’ll remember this point from the War on Terror, and specifically the occupation of Iraq. By the latter half of 2004, most Westerners had completely forgotten the propaganda that launched the invasion, and thus regarded the Iraqi resistance as “terrorists,” despite the fact that the United States had invaded and was occupying their country for no legitimate reason whatsoever. By that time, it was abundantly clear that there were no “weapons of mass destruction,” and that the U.S.A. had invaded a nation that had not attacked it, and posed no threat to it, and so was perpetrating a textbook war of aggression.

These facts did not matter, not in the slightest. By that time, Westerners were totally immersed in the official War on Terror narrative, which had superseded objective reality. Herd mentality had taken over. It’s difficult to describe how this works; it’s a state of functional dissociation. It wasn’t that people didn’t know the facts, or that they didn’t understand the facts. They knew the Iraqis weren’t “terrorists.” At the same time, they knew they were definitely “terrorists,” despite the fact that they knew that they weren’t. They knew there were no WMDs, that there had never been any WMDs, and still they were certain there were WMDs, which would be found, although they clearly did not exist. 

The same thing happened in Nazi Germany. The majority of the German people were never fanatical anti-Semites like the hardcore N.S.D.A.P. members. If they had been, there would have been no need for Goebbels and his monstrous propaganda machine. No, the Germans during the Nazi period, like the Americans during the War on Terror, knew that their victims posed no threat to them, and at the same time they believed exactly the opposite, and thus did not protest as their neighbors were hauled out of their homes and sent off to death camps, camps which, in their dissociative state, simultaneously did and did not exist.

What I’m describing probably sounds like psychosis, but, technically speaking, it isn’t … not quite. It is not an absolute break from reality. People functioning in this state know that what they believe is not real. Nonetheless, they are forced to believe it (and do, actually, literally, believe it, as impossible as I know that sounds), because the consequences of not believing it are even more frightening than the cognitive dissonance of believing a narrative they know is a fiction. Disbelieving the official narrative means excommunication from “normality,” the loss of friends, income, status, and in many cases far worse punishments. Herd animals, in a state of panic, instinctively run towards the center of the herd. Separation from the herd makes them easy prey for pursuing predators. It is the same primal instinct operating here.

Elven Queen Plumbing The Abyssal Reaches Got Me Wanting To Live Forever...,

Quantamagazine |  Furey has gone further. In her most recent published paper, which appeared in May in The European Physical Journal C, she consolidated several findings to construct the full Standard Model symmetry group, SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1), for a single generation of particles, with the math producing the correct array of electric charges and other attributes for an electron, neutrino, three up quarks, three down quarks and their anti-particles. The math also suggests a reason why electric charge is quantized in discrete units — essentially, because whole numbers are.

However, in that model’s way of arranging particles, it’s unclear how to naturally extend the model to cover the full three particle generations that exist in nature. But in another new paper that’s now circulating among experts and under review by Physical Letters B, Furey uses C⊗O to construct the Standard Model’s two unbroken symmetries, SU(3) and U(1). (In nature, SU(2) × U(1) is broken down into U(1) by the Higgs mechanism, a process that imbues particles with mass.) In this case, the symmetries act on all three particle generations and also allow for the existence of particles called sterile neutrinos — candidates for dark matter that physicists are actively searching for now. “The three-generation model only has SU(3) × U(1), so it’s more rudimentary,” Furey told me, pen poised at a whiteboard. “The question is, is there an obvious way to go from the one-generation picture to the three-generation picture? I think there is.”

This is the main question she’s after now. The mathematical physicists Michel Dubois-Violette, Ivan Todorov and Svetla Drenska are also trying to model the three particle generations using a structure that incorporates octonions called the exceptional Jordan algebra. After years of working solo, Furey is beginning to collaborate with researchers who take different approaches, but she prefers to stick with the product of the four division algebras, R⊗C⊗H⊗O, acting on itself. It’s complicated enough and provides flexibility in the many ways it can be chopped up. Furey’s goal is to find the model that, in hindsight, feels inevitable and that includes mass, the Higgs mechanism, gravity and space-time.

Already, there’s a sense of space-time in the math. She finds that all multiplicative chains of elements of R⊗C⊗H⊗O can be generated by 10 matrices called “generators.” Nine of the generators act like spatial dimensions, and the 10th, which has the opposite sign, behaves like time. String theory also predicts 10 space-time dimensions — and the octonions are involved there as well. Whether or how Furey’s work connects to string theory remains to be puzzled out.

So does her future. She’s looking for a faculty job now, but failing that, there’s always the ski slopes or the accordion. “Accordions are the octonions of the music world,” she said — “tragically misunderstood.” She added, “Even if I pursued that, I would always be working on this project.”

eigenvalues: influence of hyparchic folding via the backward arrow of time...,

parabola |  For thousands of years people have wondered about creative power. All this world around us was believed to have been made and did not just happen. Yet humans themselves make things. Are we then creators within a meta-Creation or mere “apes of god”? A primary realm of experience in which these and far more profound questions played out was in the making of words, or poetry. The authenticity of our poetry had to be granted us. This was the origin of the idea of the muse. The word itself has origins associated with mind, deriving from the proto-Indo-European root men “to think.” 

Mousika, from which we get our word “music,” was performed metrical speech. The speaking of verse was once the recognized form of intelligence and Plato had to argue it should be superseded by philosophical discourse (prose one might say) to open up to sceptical enquiry. This had vast implications since the very meters of verse were considered gods. (The secularization of language was completed only about five hundred years ago with the emergence of the form we call “sentence.”) Practically, for example in Norse poetry, there were different meters for different purposes, such as Fornyrðislag or “meter of ancient words” and Malahattr or “meter of speeches”.  By following and excelling in the forms, the bards were in tune, we could say, with the gods. The idea of intelligence and even “sacredness” residing in language itself rather than in people (capable only of temporary ableness) came down through the ages to Giambattista Vico and James Joyce and continues in modern commentators such as R. Calasso and George Steiner.

The making of verse and other manifestations of the Muses were expressions of making as such, including the making of the world and even evolution (in its various senses over the ages) once identified by the idea of the demiurge as in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. The demiurge became the arch-villain in Gnostic writings because he was seen as tied to the material world and creating a “prison-reality” such as depicted in the film The Matrix.

In many cultures the role of the demiurge was symbolized by the potter. Pottery and its art were deeply revered and appear to go back at least to Palaeolithic times. The abstract idea of it is that the demiurge has to use already existing material to fashion a world in contrast to the higher creation of ex nihilo, “out of nothing.”

On a personal level, the early Greeks had the idea of the daimon. It is mentioned in the Symposium that Socrates had problems with his daimon because it would indicate dangers but never tell him what to do–which is rather as we picture the unconscious these days.

R.B. Onians, who comments extensively on the terminology of early Greek thought, avers that the daimon had a personal physical location in the head and was associated with sex. It was only later, around the time of Plato, that the idea of thought originating in the brain was entertained. It is possible then to see the daimon in the head as a placement of creativity beyond the conscious mind. Onians traces the image into later times and links it with the appearance of energy around the head that became the “halo” of sacred individuals. The daimon as sexual and creative was also considered “irrational” and then became the “evil” demon. There are a myriad of evolutes of the idea including its translation in Roman times into the term “genius.” This very multiplicity of meaning is essential to its meaning. Just consider that special people (such as Lamia the queen of Libya) could become a daimon. Philip Pullman turned daimons into animals in his novels.

The people we imagined around their camp fire look to their artificial blaze and cannot see the deeper light in the “black” that surrounds them. Creativity has to be beyond consciousness. Yet, only in the world of consciousness can we seem to have choice and will. In the practical world–such as in industry or in psychotherapy–we strive to find ways of co-operation between the conscious and trans-conscious realms.  Nobody knows what happens at the critical moment which makes a process creative; consciousness is always somewhat downstream from reality. When Christ said while on the Cross, “Forgive them for they know not what they do,” it was the declaration of the central human predicament.

Commonly, people have located higher intelligences in the atmosphere or inside the sun. A more interesting “location” is the future, or at least in some order of greater time than our own moment. Until quite recently these intelligences were located in the “far-past” as in the days of creation. Bennett places them in a special time he called the hyparchic future, a phrase which means what is ahead of us capable of altering present time. Such a quasi-scientific view carries a sense of dealing with the higher intelligence and ourselves as a system. 

There is an aspect of all this that is mathematical and technical with no particular stake in spirituality. This is to look into process or action when they are self-reflective. An action that feeds into itself is infinite and requires no entity to “do” it but will exhibit what are called eigenvalues that appear as entities (that can be named). Speculatively, then, higher order operations or actions will incur higher beings. One of the most intriguing speculations in modern physics is that the very existence of the universe requires a multitude of what are called “Boltzmann observers.” And, as far as the reality of “I” is concerned there is a parallel in the singularity at the heart of a black hole in that it remains uncertain whether it can ever be observed.

scientific american's predictions from just 10 years ago are all wrong...,

gizmodo |  Recently, we did an experiment: We took an outdated issue of a respected popular science magazine, Scientific American, and researched exactly what happened to the highly-touted breakthroughs of the era that would supposedly change everything. What we discovered is just how terrible we are at predicting the long arc of scientific discovery.

The daily churn of science news tends toward optimism. You know what I’m talking about: New cure! New breakthrough smashing Moore’s law! New revolutionary technology! I write about science, and I am always uncomfortable trying to predict how a new piece of research will change the future. 

That’s because science can be wrong. It can go down dead ends. And even when it doesn’t, almost everything is more complicated and takes longer than we initially think. But just how wrong and how long? 

We can’t very well time travel to the future for those answers, but we can look backward. I recently dig up the 2005 December issue of Scientific American and went entry by entry through the Scientific American 50, a list of the most important trends in science that year. I chose 2005 because 10 years seemed recent enough for continuity between scientific questions then and now but also long enough ago for actual progress. More importantly, I chose Scientific American because the magazine 

publishes sober assessments of science, often by scientists themselves. (Read: It can be a little boring, but it’s generally accurate.) But I also trusted it not to pick obviously frivolous and clickbaity things.

Number one on the list was a stem cell breakthrough that turned out to be one of the biggest cases of scientific fraud ever. (To be fair, it fooled everyone.) But the list held other unfulfilled promises, too: companies now defunct, an FBI raid, and many, many technologies simply still on the verge of finally making it a decade later. By my count, only two of its 16 medical discoveries of 2005 have resulted in a drug or hospital procedures so far. The rosy future is not yet here.

Science is a not a linear march forward, as headlines seem to imply. Science is a long slow slog, and often a twisty one at that. That’s obvious in retrospect, when we can see the dead ends and the roadblocks. It’s less obvious looking ahead, as we’re being bombarded with promising new drugs and wondermaterial breakthroughs. So let’s take a look together.

searching for wizard of watts I chanced upon a magical bon mot...,

Órale buybull buddies - use culo-calming ointment if you go and see this movie...,

quantum solution to the arrow of time dilemma?

physorg |  Entropy can decrease, according to a new proposal - but the process would destroy any evidence of its existence, and erase any memory an observer might have of it. It sounds like the plot to a weird sci-fi movie, but the idea has recently been suggested by theoretical physicist Lorenzo Maccone, currently a visiting scientist at MIT, in an attempt to solve a longstanding paradox in physics.

 

The laws of physics, which describe everything from electricity to moving objects to energy conservation, are time-invariant. That is, the laws still hold if time is reversed. However, this time reversal symmetry is in direct contrast with everyday phenomena, where it’s obvious that time moves forward and not backward. For example, when milk is spilt, it can’t flow back up into the glass, and when pots are broken, their pieces can’t shatter back together. This irreversibility is formalized through the second law of thermodynamics, which says that entropy always increases or stays the same, but never decreases.

This contrast has created a reversibility paradox, also called Loschmidt’s paradox, which scientists have been trying to understand since Johann Loschmidt began considering the problem in 1876. Scientists have proposed many solutions to the conundrum, from trying to embed irreversibility in physical laws to postulating low-entropy initial states.

Maccone’s idea, published in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters, is a completely new approach to the paradox, based on the assumption that quantum mechanics is valid at all scales. He theoretically shows that entropy can both increase and decrease, but that it must always increase for phenomena that leave a trail of information behind. Entropy can decrease for certain phenomena (when correlated with an observer), but these phenomena won’t leave any information of their having happened. For these situations, it’s like the phenomena never happened at all, since they leave no evidence. As Maccone explains, the second law of thermodynamics is then reduced to a mere tautology: physics cannot study processes where entropy has decreased, due to a complete absence of information. The solution allows for time-reversible phenomena to exist (in agreement with the laws of physics), but not be observable (in agreement with the second law of thermodynamics).

In his study, Maccone presents two thought experiments to illustrate this idea, followed by an analytical derivation. He describes two situations where entropy decreases and all records of it are permanently erased. In both scenarios, the entropy in the systems first increases and then decreases, but the decrease is accompanied by an erasure of any memory of its occurrence. The key to entropy decrease in the first place is a correlation between the observer and the phenomenon in question. As Maccone explains, when an interaction occurs between an observer and an observed phenomenon that decreases the entropy of the correlated observer-observed system, the interaction must also reduce their quantum mutual information. When this information is destroyed, the observer’s memory is destroyed along with it.

the arrow of time

informationphilosopher |  The laws of nature, except the second law of thermodynamics, are symmetric in time. Reversing the time in the dynamical equations of motion simply describes everything going backwards. The second law is different. Entropy must never decrease in time. 

Many natural processes are apparently irreversible. Irreversibility is intimately connected to the direction of time. Identifying the physical reasons for the observed irreversibility, the origin of irreversibility, would contribute greatly to understanding the apparent asymmetry of nature in time, despite nature's perfect symmetry in space. 

In 1927, Arthur Stanley Eddington coined the term "Arrow of Time" in his book The Nature of the Physical World. He connected "Time's Arrow" to the one-way direction of increasing entropy required by the second law of thermodynamics. This is now known as the "thermodynamic arrow."

In his later work, Eddington identified a "cosmological arrow," the direction in which the universe is expanding, as shown by Edwin Hubble about the time Eddington first defined the thermodynamic arrow.

There are now at least five other proposed arrows of time (discussed below). We can ask whether one arrow is a "master arrow" that all the others are following, or perhaps time itself is just a given property of nature that is otherwise irreducible to something more basic, as is space. 

Given the four-dimensional space-time picture of special relativity, and given that the laws of nature are symmetric in space, we may expect the laws to be invariant under a change in time direction. The laws do not depend on position in space or direction, they are invariant under translations and rotations, space is assumed uniform and isotropic. But time is not just another spatial dimension. It enters into calculations of event separations as an imaginary term (multiplied by the square root of minus 1). Nevertheless, all the dynamical laws of motion are symmetric under time reversal. 

So the basic problem is - how can macroscopic irreversibility result from microscopic processes that are fundamentally reversible? 

the ineffable lucidity of school in a matinee..., accept no substitutes!

guardian | “I’ve always loved films that approach sound in an impressionistic way and that is an unusual approach for a mainstream blockbuster, but I feel it’s the right approach for this experiential film,” said Nolan. “Many of the film-makers I’ve admired over the years have used sound in bold and adventurous ways. I don’t agree with the idea that you can only achieve clarity through dialogue. Clarity of story, clarity of emotions — I try to achieve that in a very layered way using all the different things at my disposal — picture and sound.”

One scene in which some viewers struggled to hear dialogue featured Michael Caine’s character revealing key information to Jessica Chastain’s from his hospital bed. “We are following the emotional state of Jessica’s character as she starts to understand what he’s been saying,” said Nolan. “Information is communicated in various different ways over the next few scenes. That’s the way I like to work; I don’t like to hang everything on one particular line.”

a wrinkle in time

eight years ago I told Cobb exactly what would happen in iraq after the u.s. pullout...,

How destabilized could Iraq become after an American pullout?

When you peel the rhetorical/propaganda onion and get to the essence of what the PNAC crew has unleashed - I'd say GAME OVER..., cept for the Ayatollahs counting and consolidating their winnings.

Solipsism (what a splendid term for ignorance, arrogance, and stupidity) done sealed the fate of this new american century...,

Islam declares in unequivocal terms that the real cause of our miseries is not economical. It holds that economic disorder is not the cause but a direct effect of moral degradation. Character building and development of moral health are the only remedies man is in need of. Without them social, political, economic or any other reform is simply unthinkable. Moral health is the master-key that opens all gates of progress and prosperity. It is the only power that can chase away all injustices, jealousies and the causes of conflicts and bad blood. To have a clear idea of the method we must know the real position of man.

The ultimate objective of Islam is to abolish the lordship of man over man and bring him under the rule of Allah (One God). To stake everything Muslims have - including their lives - to achieve this purpose is called Jihad. The Prayer, Fasting, Almsgiving and Pilgrimage, all prepare the Believers for military Jihad. But as they have long since forgotten this objective as well as the mission entrusted to them, and because all acts of worship have been reduced to their spiritual contents – they have gone from ‘the top to the bottom’ of world’s leadership.

This brother was on a roll..., too bad he doesn't know about the prosperity pimps infesting the black church, then he'd really have an example of abject debasement and the extreme reaches of subhuman apostasy that reduce ones moral stature from the heights to the degenerate bowels of world leadership. Drug along like so much helpless and impotent intestinal flotsam and jetsam in the belly of this big blundering beast.

In the end, which will be in about 10 or 15 years, the Muslim world and the rest of the world will iinevitably face the fact that the islamic fascists are for the most part, illiterate and incapable of marshalling the military force required for their vision of dominance. Their ambition is, by definition, that of a political play against the center, which will hold. The Arab states won't stand for it, nor will any other. They will be mercilessly crushed for the good of Islam and the region.

I say that it is impossible for nationalism to be toppled by these groups. Your boy is trippin hard when he says:

    Once and for all we better face it. Arabs are far from being at their very best if they are operating in the format of a ‘national state’. The Arab soldier may lack the necessary will to die for an idiotic flag. Both in the case of Saddam’s Iraq or Nasser’s Egypt, once within a conflict, a growing gap reveals itself between the charismatic, assertive, far over the top demagogue leader and some serious malfunctioning performance in the battlefield. Unlike the American, British, French, and Israeli soldiers who have proved throughout history to have some real tendency towards collective suicide for some empty promises shaped as ‘ideology’, the Arab platoon is slightly behind in exhibiting this kind of idiotic national patriotic militant zeal. He may as well be just too clever for those kind of deadly games.

There is no precedent in Africa, Asia or the Americas for a non-national military force to ultimately perservere. The Arab platoon is a myth on the same level as the 'politics' of the 'Arab street'.

There is no precedent in Africa, Asia or the Americas for a non-national military force to ultimately perservere.

In the course of your theoretical examination of the unusual properties/characteristics of virtual social networks - haven't you ever stumbled into big chunks of military operations research on netwar?

I mean really, the first time I ever encountered William S. Lind was during the late 80's as I pored over military operations research on network security. The theoretical constructs undergirding assymetrical warfare and hacking have gone hand-in-glove ever since. 

Theoretical synergy aside, perhaps it is only the direct experience of two or three people rooting a global corporate computing infrastructure in a matter of hours - that is capable of fully preparing one for appreciating the emergent/cascading effects of masterful exploitation of systemic vulnerabilities in large, massively interdependant constructs?

There's that.  As well, the question of expense.  The fact that the military requires 8 times the U.S. per capita expenditure of petroleum to operate - ungodly debt runups to enrich the weaponeers - and lastly the political capital squandered in maintaining the just-so-stories to mask unjust imperial aggression.

It would be bad enough if the PNAC-ians were winning.., but their strategies and tactics are vintage WW-I, and they're getting their hats handed to them with no end in sight.

In a contemporary war of attrition, in the cheap petroleum fin d'siecle, I'll bet on the hackers with a centuries old modus operandi of social networking that has proven massively successful at standing the test of time.

I concede that. You are right with regard to the efficiencies of the cellular and networked. But those things work because the individual participants are modern - they must buy into the concept of interchangeability. Essentialists cannot make networks work, and it is the fundamental illiteracy of Jihadists and their audience that will cause them to fail to exploit such capabilities.

The educated, modern Arab and Muslim world is under no threat from neocons or 'zionists'. When islamic bombs start exploding in Dubai the way they do in Palestine, then we'll see the world do, once again, what they did for Kuwait. Jihadis will be routed like Chechens.

Essentialists cannot make networks work, and it is the fundamental illiteracy of Jihadists and their audience that will cause them to fail to exploit such capabilities.

Surely you jest? Either that, or you haven' been in an engineering classroom anytime over the last 20+ years!!!  Cause the very last thing in the world that the jihadists are is illiterate, innumerate, or technically backwards. The president of Iran gots a PhD in engineering, what's G-Dub got?  I mean seriously.., you know good and gotdamn well them Ivy League skins he picked up in beer drinking and hell raising aren't worth the vellum they're printed on. ROTFLMBAO!!!!

The educated, modern Arab and Muslim world is under no threat from neocons or 'zionists'.

Oh yes it is. Iraq was highly educated, relatively highly modern, and no more scandalously oppressive than let's saaaaay...., China!  The real and present danger posed by the PNAC crew is that their catastrophic mis-steps have already undermined the tenuous at best hold of middle-eastern elites.

This is precisely why those same elites have done a 180. 

At the onset of the Lebanese crisis, Arab governments, starting with Saudi Arabia, slammed Hezbollah for recklessly provoking a war, providing what the United States and Israel took as a wink and a nod to continue the fight.

Now, with hundreds of Lebanese dead and Hezbollah holding out against the vaunted Israeli military for more than two weeks, the tide of public opinion across the Arab world is surging behind the organization, transforming the Shiite group's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, into a folk hero and forcing a change in official statements.

Cobb said...

I am but I'm not paying attention to official statements two weeks into a war. That's not telling me anything but the opinions of third parties. If Iran is sending fighters, that's something I care to know about. If the Syrian army is on high mobilization, that's news I can use. But the tide of public opinion across the Arab world is not. Who is showing up with rifles and orders, that's what I'm talking about.

Today there is no consensus about the sentiments of the Lebanese. When are we going to see a poll that breaks down Druze, Christian and Muslim opinion in Lebanon? Nasrallah is acting like Lebanon belongs to him and all his apologists say so too. I doubt it.

Furthermore, there are no reliable accounts of Hezbollah troop strength or casualties. As one person noted at Drezner, there hasn't been a rocket sent Haifa in two days. Does that mean they're out of rockets or shifting tactics. Israel is calling up 30k troops for training, does that mean they are escalating or losing too many on the front?

Bottom line - this war is far from over or decisive and all the opinion about it means nothing until some decisive battles are fought. That has yet to occur.

Hezbollah holds out for two weeks and that's a victory? Only for fluff journalists at CNN and Al Jazeera, but not in the real world.

Additionally, we both know this isn't about Amindinijad vs Bush. Even so, what's more crazy, snorting coke or taking hostages? This is about the willingness of an educated populace to support the direction of its government. And if you count Crazy A. as a jihadist, then we'll see how much tax and oil revenue he can collect from a repressed Iranian middle class.

As for the long term effects of hackers.. the black hats know little more than the white hats. When we're living in an age where people prefer the chaos of anarchy over the stupidity of conformity, all of the Jihadi dreams will come true. And then they'll enact Sharia and try to be the powers that be. I think it's un-bloody likely that smart people will stick with the Taliban template - they'd rather have Bush, Citibank and Walmart.

Aight, back to the high-level binnis at hand..., (bear with me, this does come back around to Islam and what happens when cruel, puerile PNAC-ians beat on the global hornets nest and morally indecent TFM's support it)

You've seen my orthodox interpretation of Blackness as interpersonal communion - as far I'm concerned - it is the quintessential disambiguation of the culture/concept. (when considered from a social networking theoretical perspective, it's not a simple statement of the obvious, though that's not the angle of attack that led me to the interpretation) You're also aware of my conviction that the zenith of old school Blackness instantiated a moral dimension and value that is unparallelled in the history of this country, possibly the history of the world. (the latter is a debatable contention - the former is not - because only within Blackness have American ideals been exemplified).

After political civil rights were obtained, brand "Black" was at its moral zenith.  MLK began aggressively wedding the moral qualities the core social capital of American Blackness to the cause of uplifting the poor and opposing American interventionism in Vietnam.  This was clearly an archetypal Christian imperative - and one which I've come to believe not only signed his death warrant, but also shaped the way in which subsequent political and media propaganda have been directed at and influenced both perceptions of Blackness and the behaviour of lots of Black folks.

A concerted political and  media effort has been underway for decades to undercut the superlative moral value with which Blackness was once imbued.  It's obvious in the code words used by the post Southern Strategy GOP. While the authors of the Southern Strategy - such as Pat Buchanan - claim that "morality" not "race" was the chief selling point of the GOP in the south, I am convinced that that question of morality had as much to do with wresting control of the moral high-ground away from Blackness and reasserting it in the authoritarian and moralizing terms that have been established within the Evangelical base.


It's not even debateable whether MLK's Christianity had any semblance or relationship to the kind of insane garbage preached and practiced by John Hagee and others of his ilk.

Now, the current state of Blackness has been profoundly degraded - in large measure - because our formerly great interpersonal communion has succumbed to the withering effects of Americaness.  We've lost the self-conscious moral compass articulated by MLK (post civil rights), and great efforts have been made to ensure that we never recover that degree of moral self-consciousness.  (I'm getting back to the social networks, moral value, and long-term potential theme here) You stated that;

There is no precedent in Africa, Asia or the Americas for a non-national military force to ultimately perservere. The Arab platoon is a myth on the same level as the 'politics' of the 'Arab street'.

From a social networks perspective - you've misjudged the long-term power/value of Al-Islam and wagered on the long-term power of the relative newcomer to the game, the nation-state.  My contention, very simply, is that in terms of its collective self-consciousness Al-Islam had been seriously degraded along its core competencies by the emergence of Trans-European Protectorate nation states as colonial powers and their installation of puppet elites to run their artificial and imposed national constructs. 

Blackness has been similarly degraded in the post-Civil Rights era by subordination to Americaness, i.e., the installation of puppet Black elites in nominal positions of authority but with no genuine constituent fueled authority.  However, the post-colonial era has seen the serial decline of nation states - cause as you know - the sun surely does set on the contemporary British Empire. 

The PNAC-ians have blundered on some very very fundamental levels.  On the trivially obvious level, by ignoring Santayana/Powell in Iraq.  They simply didn't learn from the British historical example and plumb phukked up. 

From a more sophisticated perspective, had they been technocrats rather than ideologues, they might have understood what kind of sleeping giant they threatened to activate/vivify by continuing unjustifiable and disproportionate aggression against increasing numbers of Muslims.  Do you genuinely care to try to measure the "enterprise-wide" assymetrical military potential of an angered, self-conscious, and militarized Islam?

Also, consider the fact that Sheiks and Imams have actual constituencies which empower them.  These are not like simple negro agitators with no actual constituents and no autonomous means of political and economic support.

IMOHO - the Muslim agents provacateur of these crises understand exactly what it is they're seeking to activate. Ultimately, I believe they'll prove successful because the folks in charge on the nationstate side have proven themselves completely soft-headed and utterly contemptful toward soft targets.

It's even possible that the domestic non-agenda of the PNAC-ians will have the same vivifying effect on latent collective Black self-consciousness. One would at least hope so...,

Cobb said...

That's a lot of dimensions to chew on at once so I'm only going to spit back a little bit.

1) Your global hornet's nest is a bunch of arrogant rock throwers who don't have the decency to fight as men but instead hide behind women and children. They haven't developed enough to form a nation and seek to hijack the one they're in without the least of consent of the people they would govern, were they capable of that. But even so have demonstrated they are determined to be more bringers of destruction to Israel than protectors of their 'own'.