but the rest of you stinking stem-sacks gotta go, gotta go, gotta go....,

jacobinmag |  As William Gibson famously remarked, “the future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.”

But what if resources and energy are simply too scarce to allow everyone to enjoy the material standard of living of today’s rich? What if we arrive in a future that no longer requires the mass proletariat’s labor in production, but is unable to provide everyone with an arbitrarily high standard of consumption? If we arrive in that world as an egalitarian society, than the answer is the socialist regime of shared conservation described in the previous section. But if, instead, we remain a society polarized between a privileged elite and a downtrodden mass, then the most plausible trajectory leads to something much darker; I will call it by the term that E. P. Thompson used to describe a different dystopia, during the peak of the cold war: exterminism.

The great danger posed by the automation of production, in the context of a world of hierarchy and scarce resources, is that it makes the great mass of people superfluous from the standpoint of the ruling elite. This is in contrast to capitalism, where the antagonism between capital and labor was characterized by both a clash of interests and a relationship of mutual dependence: the workers depend on capitalists as long as they don’t control the means of production themselves, while the capitalists need workers to run their factories and shops. It is as the lyrics of “Solidarity Forever” had it: “They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn/But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.” With the rise of the robots, the second line ceases to hold.

The existence of an impoverished, economically superfluous rabble poses a great danger to the ruling class, which will naturally fear imminent expropriation; confronted with this threat, several courses of action present themselves. The masses can be bought off with some degree of redistribution of resources, as the rich share out their wealth in the form of social welfare programs, at least if resource constraints aren’t too binding. But in addition to potentially reintroducing scarcity into the lives of the rich, this solution is liable to lead to an ever-rising tide of demands on the part of the masses, thus raising the specter of expropriation once again. This is essentially what happened at the high tide of the welfare state, when bosses began to fear that both profits and control over the workplace were slipping out of their hands.

If buying off the angry mob isn’t a sustainable strategy, another option is simply to run away and hide from them. This is the trajectory of what the sociologist Bryan Turner calls “enclave society”, an order in which “governments and other agencies seek to regulate spaces and, where necessary, to immobilize flows of people, goods and services” by means of “enclosure, bureaucratic barriers, legal exclusions and registrations.” Gated communities, private islands, ghettos, prisons, terrorism paranoia, biological quarantines; together, these amount to an inverted global gulag, where the rich live in tiny islands of wealth strewn around an ocean of misery. In Tropic of Chaos, Christian Parenti makes the case that we are already constructing this new order, as climate change brings about what he calls the “catastrophic convergence” of ecological disruption, economic inequality, and state failure. The legacy of colonialism and neoliberalism is that the rich countries, along with the elites of the poorer ones, have facilitated a disintegration into anarchic violence, as various tribal and political factions fight over the diminishing bounty of damaged ecosystems. Faced with this bleak reality, many of the rich — which, in global terms, includes many workers in the rich countries as well — have resigned themselves to barricading themselves into their fortresses, to be protected by unmanned drones and private military contractors. Guard labor, which we encountered in the rentist society, reappears in an even more malevolent form, as a lucky few are employed as enforcers and protectors for the rich.

But this too, is an unstable equilibrium, for the same basic reason that buying off the masses is. So long as the immiserated hordes exist, there is the danger that it may one day become impossible to hold them at bay. Once mass labor has been rendered superfluous, a final solution lurks: the genocidal war of the rich against the poor. Many have called the recent Justin Timberlake vehicle, In Time, a Marxist film, but it is more precisely a parable of the road to exterminism. In the movie, a tiny ruling class literally lives forever in their gated enclaves due to genetic technology, while everyone else is programmed to die at 25 unless they can beg, borrow or steal more time. The only thing saving the workers is that the rich still have some need for their labor; when that need expires, so presumably will the working class itself.

geneticists/molecular biologists are indispensible knowledge-workers...,

harvarddesignmagazine |  GC  The synthetic biology revolution is not just about going from reading to writing. Genomics already went from reading single genes to reading multiple genes; now synthetic biology is going from writing single genes to writing whole genomes. Both reading and writing are tangled up in the design process. In many fields, there is a design-build-analyze loop: you build something, and then you look for its failure modes. After living in a building for a while, you notice that it leaks. Then you do another round of design; you radicalize your structures and hold them to stronger standards until they fail. Then you slowly eek your way back to something that works, but works better than before. The same thing is true in synthetic biology. We have design software, like BIOCAD, cadnano, Millstone, and others.

But I see two fundamental differences between synthetic biology and architecture. In architecture, you might start with walls and windows as your standard parts. In biology, our standard parts have been refined by three billion years of evolution, on 10²¹ liters of soil and water. That’s a lot of debugging. Also, in synthetic biology we have the ability to recreate that refinement process ourselves, on a smaller scale and in a more directed way. We can run our own evolutions. When you do the design-build-analyze loop for buildings, you might make one small prototype, build it, and, if it starts to go wrong, you debug it in real time. Like the John Hancock Tower, in downtown Boston—you know its history, right?

MA

Glass panels mysteriously falling off …

GC

It was being debugged as it was being used. With synthetic biology, we can make a billion or a trillion designs, build them all, test them all, take the winner from that testing, and then do it all again.

MA

What is the timescale for this type of experiment?

GC

It depends on your goal. If your goal is to make a chemical, say, or to build a little factory that makes chemicals, you can design, build, and test a billion things in one day. If your goal is to make a pig, you’re talking more in the order of years. And if you are creating a human pharmaceutical, you’re talking about 10 years just to get it through all the regulatory phases. You might find a clever way of doing billions of prototypes by working with human cells in the lab, but when you want to introduce it into the marketplace, you’re going to be testing one drug at a time, just like you test one building at a time.

MA

You’ve worked on some things that are pretty far removed from our daily concerns—like how to bring the wooly mammoth back to life—but a lot of your work stands to affect our everyday bodily experience. What are you working on that you might want to use to change your own genome?

GC

There is an APP (amyloid precursor protein) allele that I wouldn’t mind having—it gives an extra 10 years of resistance to Alzheimer’s. That’s something that’s preventative, and it’s something we more or less know how to do. But there are some things we don’t know how to do yet, such as having better memory or making more effective use of the brain. Those would be great. Reversing aging would be nice, too.

MA

Aren’t our inadequacies part of what makes us human? How would it affect the human experience if we could live much longer, for example?

GC

I think what makes us human is mainly our ability to plan and to care for others. Chimpanzees form little cliques, and they certainly care for their families, but I think our ability to imagine scenarios that have never happened—to think of ways to avoid having an asteroid eliminate all life on the planet—is uniquely human. We have an ability to be thoughtful about ourselves and oth- ers over long periods of time. I think that would remain true if we lived longer.

roboticists are crucial knowledge workers...,

theatlantic |  The year is 2016. Robots have infiltrated the human world. We built them, one by one, and now they are all around us. Soon there will be many more of them, working alone and in swarms. One is no larger than a single grain of rice, while another is larger than a prairie barn. These machines can be angular, flat, tubby, spindly, bulbous, and gangly. Not all of them have faces. Not all of them have bodies.

And yet they can do things once thought impossible for machine. They vacuum carpets, zip up winter coats, paint cars, organize warehouses, mix drinks, play beer pong, waltz across a school gymnasium, limp like wounded animals, write and publish stories, replicate abstract expressionist art, clean up nuclear waste, even dream.

Except, wait. Are these all really robots? What is a robot, anyway?

This has become an increasingly difficult question to answer. Yet it’s a crucial one. Ubiquitous computing and automation are occurring in tandem. Self-operating machines are permeating every dimension of society, so that humans find themselves interacting more frequently with robots than ever before—often without even realizing it. The human-machine relationship is rapidly evolving as a result. Humanity, and what it means to be a human, will be defined in part by the machines people design.

“We design these machines, and we have the ability to design them as our masters, or our partners, or our slaves,” said John Markoff, the author of Machines of Loving Grace, and a long-time technology reporter for The New York Times. “As we design these machines, what does it do to the human if we have a class of slaves which are not human but that we treat as human? We’re creating this world in which most of our interactions are with anthropomorphized proxies.”

In the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s 1807 opus, The Phenomenology of Spirit, there is a passage known as the master-slave dialectic. In it, Hegel argues, among other things, that holding a slave ultimately dehumanizes the master. And though he could not have known it at the time, Hegel was describing our world, too, and aspects of the human relationship with robots.

But what kind of world is that? And as robots grow in numbers and sophistication, what is this world becoming?

predictably, anonymous gots no beef with Mr. Miracle...,

Guardian |  The ripple effects of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy have led to a civil war in the Republican party. But they have also had the unexpected consequence of leading to a subterranean civil war within Anonymous, the mysterious hacking collective.

Most of the political operations targeted by Anonymous – including the Church of Scientology, Isis and the KKK – have instigated some level of internal dispute among people claiming to be part of Anonymous. But when the group announced their next target would be the Trump campaign, it set off the most heated debate yet within the movement – which has no leader and no specific set of aims.

Many disavowed the anti-Trump operation as being counter to Anonymous’s tradition of not taking sides in political contests. (A previous operation against Trump was similarly derailed, albeit on a smaller scale, when another hacker calling himself Black Mafia wrested control of the Twitter account.)

Others have even alleged the movement is being hijacked by either campaign operatives or activists trying to co-opt Anonymous for their own political ends. On 15 March, a video was released. 

“We are feeling deeply concerned about an operation that was launched in our name – the so-called Operation Trump,” says the video, which, in classic Anonymous style, is narrated by a disembodied computerised voice.

“We – Anonymous – are warning you about the lies and deceits pushed under our banner,” the voice continues.

UCOP doesn't have to listen to protest crap given our panoptic capacity to listen to ALL YOUR CRAP...,

utotherescue |  The San Francisco Chronicle has coverage of an issue that has been circulating on faculty email networks at UC Berkeley for a few days.  The piece, "Cal professors fear UC bosses will snoop on them," is behind a paywall. The first sentence reads, "UC Berkeley faculty members are buzzing over news that University of California President Janet Napolitano ordered the installation of computer hardware capable of monitoring all e-mails going in and out of the UC system."   UC's Chief Operating Officer says "that UC policy “forbids the university from using such data for nonsecurity purposes.”  UC Berkeley's Senate chair replies, "What has upset a lot of the faculty was that the surveillance was put in place without consulting the faculty. In fact, the people installing the system were under strict instructions not to reveal it was taking place."  On the blog's Facebook page, we've had some debate about how new this capability is, with some faculty from various universities saying they've always assumed their university email could be monitored at any time, and others saying this is a new level of intrusion.

Here are two communications from UC Berkeley faculty, one about how faculty there came to know about the program, and the other a timeline of events.

uc regents reject blanket censure of criticism of fascist ruling-class elites...,

LATimes |  University of California regents said Wednesday that anti-Semitism has “no place” on a college campus but declined to issue a broad condemnation of anti-Zionism as a form of discrimination.

Instead, they unanimously approved a report on intolerance that decried only “anti-Semitic forms” of the political ideology, which challenges Israel's right to exist in Palestine.

The move reflects the regents' struggle to balance their desire to combat intolerance with their commitment to protect free speech. The report provides no sanctions for anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist speech, but calls on educators to “challenge” bias.

Israel advocacy groups had pushed for a broad censure of opposition to Zionism, which they said was needed to protect Jewish students from hostile attacks. Last year, a Jewish fraternity house at UC Davis was defaced with a Nazi swastika and students at UCLAquestioned whether a Jewish sophomore should be disqualified from serving on a campus judicial panel because of her religion.

But free-speech advocates said the original, broader version of the statement would have illegally restricted the right to criticize Israel and its actions. If the regents had approved it, they would have become the first governing board of any major U.S. university system to condemn the rejection of Zionism.

speaking out against brazenly abusive members of the fascist ruling-class will soon be hate speech!!!

theintercept |  Adoption of this “anti-Semitism” definition clearly would function to prohibit the advocacy of, say, a one-state solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict, or even the questioning of a state’s right to exist as a non-secular entity. How can anyone think it’s appropriate to declare such ideas off limits in academic classrooms or outlaw them as part of campus activism?

To ban the expression of any political ideas in such a setting would not only be wildly anti-intellectual but also patently unconstitutional. As UC Irvine School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky put it today in an LA Times op-ed: “There unquestionably is a 1st Amendment right to argue against (or for) the existence of Israel or to contend that it should meet (or not have to meet) higher standards of human rights than other nations.” Even the now-retired Executive Director of the Anti-Defamation League Abraham Foxman — while arguing that “the effort to support boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, is sinister and malicious and is having a negative effect on Jewish students on some campuses and on the wider Jewish community” — acknowledged in May that such bans would be clearly unconstitutional:

Legislation that bars BDS activity by private groups, whether corporations or universities, strikes at the heart of First Amendment-protected free speech, will be challenged in the courts and is likely to be struck down. A decision by a private body to boycott Israel, as despicable as it may be, is protected by our Constitution. Perhaps in Europe, where hate speech laws exist and are acceptable within their own legal frameworks, such bills could be sustained. But not here in America. But none of that seems to matter to Dianne Feinstein and her war-profiteering husband, Richard Blum. Not only is Blum demanding adoption of the State Department definition, despite the fact that (more accurately: because) it would encompass some forms of BDS activism and even criticisms of Israel. 

But, worse, he’s also insisting that it be binding and that students who express the ideas that fall within the State Department definition be suspended from school or expelled. And he’s overtly threatening that if he does not get his way, then his wife 0- “Your Senior Senator” — will get very upset and start publicly attacking the university, a threat that public school administrators who rely on the government for their budgets take very seriously.

This behavior is as adolescent as it is despotic. Does anyone believe that college and post-graduate students should be able to express only those ideas about Israel that Dianne Feinstein and her war-profiteering husband deem acceptable?

It’s no mystery what this is really about. The Israeli government and its most devoted advocates around the world are petrified at the growing strength of the movement to boycott Israeli goods in protest of the almost five-decade occupation. As Foxman conceded, the boycott idea “seems to be picking up steam, particularly on college campuses across the United States. While no universities have yet adopted or implemented BDS, there are a growing number of campuses — now up to 29 — where student organizations have held votes to determine whether they support BDS.” Just this week, the City Council of Reykjavik, the largest city in Iceland,voted to boycott all Israeli goods as long as the occupation persists (days later, the City quickly retracted the vote, citing the unexpectedly intense “backlash” from Israel).

A World War Has Begun: Break the Silence

counterpunch |  In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist.  He is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure.  That alone should arouse our scepticism.

Trump’s views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.

According to one prodigious liberal commentator, Trump is “unleashing the dark forces of violence” in the United States. Unleashing them?

This is the country where toddlers shoot their mothers and the police wage a murderous war against black Americans. This is the country that has attacked and sought to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed from Asia to the Middle East, causing the deaths and dispossession of millions of people.

No country can equal this systemic record of violence. Most of America’s wars (almost all of them against defenceless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.

In 1947, a series of National Security Council directives described the paramount aim of American foreign policy as “a world substantially made over in [America’s] own image”.  The ideology was messianic Americanism. We were all Americans. Or else. Heretics would be converted, subverted, bribed, smeared or crushed.

Donald Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn’t want to go to war with Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted “exceptionalism” is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.

As presidential  election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies – just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about “hope”. And the drool goes on.

Described by the Guardian columnist Owen Jones as “funny, charming, with a coolness that eludes practically every other politician”, Obama the other day sent drones to slaughter 150 people in Somalia.  He kills people usually on Tuesdays, according to the New York Times, when he is handed a list of candidates for death by drone. So cool.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran with nuclear weapons.  As Secretary of State under Obama, she participated in the overthrow of the democratic government of Honduras. Her contribution to the destruction of Libya in 2011 was almost gleeful. When the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, was publicly sodomised with a knife – a murder made possible by American logistics – Clinton gloated over his death: “We came, we saw, he died.”

One of Clinton’s closest allies is Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of State, who has attacked young women for not supporting “Hillary”. This is the same Madeleine Albright  who infamously celebrated on TV the death of half a million Iraqi children as “worth it”.

Among Clinton’s biggest backers are the Israel lobby and the arms companies that fuel the violence in the Middle East.  She and her husband have received a fortune from Wall Street. And yet, she is about to be ordained the women’s candidate, to see off the evil Trump, the official demon. Her supporters include distinguished feminists: the likes of Gloria Steinem in the US and Anne Summers in Australia.

A generation ago, a post-modern cult now known as “identity politics” stopped many intelligent, liberal-minded people examining the causes and individuals they supported — such as the fakery of Obama and Clinton;  such as bogus progressive movements like Syriza in Greece, which betrayed the people of that country and allied with their enemies.

Self absorption, a kind of “me-ism”, became the new zeitgeist in privileged western societies and signaled the demise of great collective movements against war, social injustice, inequality,  racism and sexism.

the most violent gene-pools in action...,

chasfreeman |   American policies in the Middle East have produced a mess in which we are estranged from all the key actors – Arab, Iranian, Israeli, and Turkish – and on a different page than the Russians.  The state of our relations with the region is symbolized by the sight of U.S. diplomats cowering behind barriers surrounding fortress embassies that resemble nothing so much as modern-day Crusader castles.  Diplomacy is all but impossible when we must ask host governments to protect our diplomats from their people by placing our embassies under perpetual siege by police.  The fact that other countries don’t have to do this is suggestive of something.  After so many years, it should be obvious that bombing, drone warfare, and commandos just make things worse.  It is time for Americans to end our wars and support for the wars of others in the Middle East and to try something else.

What might that be?  Well, we might start by recognizing a few unpalatable realities.  In the Levant, the world brought into being by Messrs. Sykes and Picot has ended.  All of our bombers and all of our men can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.  We and our friends in the region are going to have to accept the rise of new states within changed borders.  Where we cannot fix things, we must at least do no harm.

The Arabs have made it clear that they recognize the reality of Israel’s presence in their midst and do not expect it to disappear.  It’s clear that, if Israel did indeed disappear, this would be because it did itself in, not because it was militarily overwhelmed.  Israel has had a free ride on the United States for forty years.  It is in denial about the ultimate consequences for it of moral self-destruction, political self-compression, and rising personal insecurity.  Israelis will not address these perils without shock treatment.  They need to make short-term political sacrifices to secure domestic tranquility and well-being over the long term.

If Americans could muster the political will, we could easily administer the requisite tough love to Israel through selective suspensions of the unconditional UN vetoes, aid, and tax subsidies that make counterproductive behavior by the Jewish state cost-free.  If we are politically unable to cease the enablement and creation of moral hazard for Israel, we should consider how best to minimize the damage to ourselves as Israel self-destructs.  We should not support or appear to support Israeli policies we consider misguided.

Similarly, America should restructure its relationship with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arabs to be more two-sidedly collaborative.  Like Israel, these countries have effectively declared their independence from us.  Their continued dependence on us does not oblige us to support their policies.  When these policies do not serve American purposes we should withhold our backing for them.

Americans neither understand nor have any interest in involving ourselves in theological rivalries between Sunnis and Shiites.  When it is in our interest to do so, we should feel free to cooperate with Iran, as we do with Israel, rather than automatically deferring to Gulf Arab (or Israeli) objections.  Our policies in Syria are the palsied offspring of an unholy marriage of convenience between liberal interventionists and Gulf Arab rulers obsessed with deposing Bashar al-Assad, establishing Sunni dominance in Syria, and breaking Syria’s alliance with Iran.

But, with the exception of the Iranian angle, would these outcomes necessarily serve U.S. interests?  Is the unconditional support of the Gulf Arabs for military dictatorship in Egypt likely to end well?  Is the perpetuation of the fighting in Yemen something we favor?  It is time to restructure U.S. relations with the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and Iran to reflect the challenges of the post-Sykes-Picot and Cold War eras, the need for mutual accommodation between Arabs and Persians, and the rise of Daesh.

Greater flexibility in the U.S. relationship with the Gulf Arabs as well as with Iran is essential to end our cold war with Iran and our hot wars elsewhere in the region.  It is necessary to restore a basis for a balance of power in the Persian Gulf that can relieve us of the burden of permanently garrisoning it.  We should be looking to internationalize the burden of assuring security of access to energy supplies and freedom of navigation in the region.  We should be using the United Nations to forge a coalition of great powers and Muslim states to contain and crush Daesh, criminalize terrorism, and build effective international structures to deal with it.

It is time to cut a knot or two in the Middle East. Enough is now enough.

wikileaks wednesdays are for remembering the heroic blows struck against global corporatism

wikipedia |  2012[edit]

The Global Intelligence Files[edit]

Main article: 2012 Stratfor email leak

On 27 February 2012, WikiLeaks began to publish what it called "The Global Intelligence Files", more than 5,000,000 e-mails from Stratfor dating from July 2004 to late December 2011. It was said to show how a private intelligence agency operates and how it targets individuals for their corporate and government clients.^[144] A few days before, on 22 February, WikiLeaks had released its second insurance file via BitTorrent. The file is named "wikileaks-insurance-20120222.tar.bz2.aes" and about 65 GB in size.^[145][146]

Syria Files[edit]

Main article: Syria Files

On 5 July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files, more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies, dating from August 2006 to March 2012.^[147]

2013[edit]

PlusD[edit]

In April 2013, WikiLeaks releases 1.7 million U.S. diplomatic and intelligence reports including Kissinger cables.^[148]

Prosecution and prison documents for Anakata[edit]

Released on 19 05 2013.^[149]

Spy Files 3[edit]

Wednesday 4 September 2013 at 1600 UTC, WikiLeaks released ’Spy Files #3’ – 249 documents from 92 global intelligence contractors.^[150]

Draft Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement IP Charter[edit]

Draft text for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Intellectual Property charter.^[151]

2014[edit]

Trade in Services Agreement chapter draft[edit]

WikiLeaks published a secret draft of the Financial Services Annex of the Trade in Services Agreement in June 2014. On its website, the organization provided an analysis of the leaked document. TISA, an international trade deal aimed at market liberalization, covers 50 countries and 68% of the global services industry. The agreement's negotiations have been criticized for a lack of transparency.^[152]

Australian bribery case suppression order[edit]

On 29 July 2014, WikiLeaks released a secret gagging order issued by the Supreme Court of Victoria that forbid the Australian press from coverage of a multimillion-dollar bribery investigation involving the nation's central bank and several international leaders.^[153] Indonesian, Vietnamese, Malaysian and Australian government officials were named in the order, which was suppressed to "prevent damage to Australia's international relations that may be caused by the publication of material that may damage the reputations of specified individuals who are not the subject of charges in these proceedings."^[154]

Public criticism of the suppression order followed the leak. Human Rights Watch General Counsel Dinah PoKempner, said “Secret law is often unaccountable and inadequately justified. The government has some explaining to do as to why it sought such an extraordinary order, and the court should reconsider the need for it now that its action has come to light.”^[155] At a media conference, Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono condemned the gagging order, calling for an open and transparent investigation.^[156]

2015[edit]

TPP Investment Chapter[edit]

On 25 March 2015 WikiLeaks released the "Investment Chapter" from the secret negotiations of the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) agreement.

"The TPP has developed in secret an unaccountable supranational court for multinationals to sue states. This system is a challenge to parliamentary and judicial sovereignty. Similar tribunals have already been shown to chill the adoption of sane environmental protection, public health and public transport policies." --Julian Assange

Sony archives[edit]

This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (November 2015)

Trident Nuclear Weapons System[edit]

Whistle blower, Royal Navy Able Seaman William McNeilly exposed serious security issues relate to the UK's nuclear weapons system.

Complete list[edit]

This article only covers a small subset of the leaked documents—those that have attracted significant attention in the mainstream press. Wikileaks has the complete list, organised by country or by year.

Fruity Pebbles Call Trump Fascist While Granny Goodness Partners With Googol to Overthrow Assad...,

 

WashingtonExaminer |  This sounds like a pretty huge deal, so you’d think the American media would be all over it. Not quite. In fact, the only story I’ve seen emanating from the U.S. press was published by the Washington Examiner.

Here are a few excerpts from the story titled, Clinton Email Reveals: Google Sought Overthrow of Syria’s Assad:

Google in 2012 sought to help insurgents overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to State Department emails receiving fresh scrutiny this week.

Messages between former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s team and one of the company’s executives detailed the plan for Google to get involved in the region.

“Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool … that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from,” Jared Cohen, the head of what was then the company’s “Google Ideas” division, wrotein a July 2012 email to several top Clinton officials.

“Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition,” Cohen said, adding that the plan was for Google to surreptitiously give the tool to Middle Eastern media.

Is this a technology company or the C.I.A.?

“Given how hard it is to get information into Syria right now, we are partnering with Al-Jazeera who will take primary ownership over the tool we have built, track the data, verify it, and broadcast it back into Syria,” he said.

“Please keep this very close hold and let me know if there is anything [else] you think we need to account for or think about before we launch. We believe this can have an important impact,” Cohen concluded.

The message was addressed to deputy secretary of state Bill Burns; Alec Ross, a senior Clinton advisor; and Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Jake Sullivan. Sullivan subsequently forwarded Cohen’s proposal to Clinton, describing it as “a pretty cool idea.”

Cohen worked as a low-level staffer at the State Department until 2010, when he was hired to lead Google Ideas, but was tied to the use of social media to incite social uprisings even before he left the department. He once reportedly asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to hold off of conducting system maintenance that officials believed could have impeded a brief 2009 uprising in Iran. Julian Assange, who founded the secret-leaking website WikiLeaks, has for years referred to Cohen as Google’s “director of regime change.”

Longtime Liberty Blitzkrieg readers will be familiar with the name Jared Cohen, a figure who played a key role in the post: Highlights from the Incredible 2011 Interview of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange by Google’s Eric Schmidt (must read if you missed it the first time).

Moving along, I want to once again stress the fact that the U.S. media has completely ignored this story.

Mr. Miracle Opposes The Unsustainable Orthodox Neocon Team-America World Police Fantasy

WaPo |  “At what point do you say, ‘Hey, we have to take care of ourselves?’ ” Trump said in the editorial board meeting. “I know the outer world exists, and I’ll be very cognizant of that. But at the same time, our country is disintegrating, large sections of it, especially the inner cities.”

Trump said U.S. involvement in NATO may need to be significantly diminished in the coming years, breaking with nearly seven decades of consensus in Washington. “We certainly can’t afford to do this anymore,” he said, adding later, “NATO is costing us a fortune, and yes, we’re protecting Europe with NATO, but we’re spending a lot of money.”

Trump praised George P. Shultz, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, as a model diplomat and, on the subject of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, said America’s allies are “not doing anything.”

“Ukraine is a country that affects us far less than it affects other countries in NATO, and yet we’re doing all of the lifting,” Trump said. “They’re not doing anything. And I say: ‘Why is it that Germany’s not dealing with NATO on Ukraine? . . . Why are we always the one that’s leading, potentially, the third world war with Russia?’ ”

While the Obama administration has faced pressure from congressional critics who have advocated for a more active U.S. role in supporting Ukraine, the U.S. military has limited its assistance to nonlethal equipment such as vehicles and night-vision gear. European nations have taken the lead in crafting a fragile cease-fire designed to decrease hostility between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists.

Trump sounded a similar note in discussing the U.S. presence in the Pacific. He questioned the value of massive military investments in Asia and wondered aloud whether the United States still is capable of being an effective peacekeeping force there.

“South Korea is very rich, great industrial country, and yet we’re not reimbursed fairly for what we do,” Trump said. “We’re constantly sending our ships, sending our planes, doing our war games — we’re reimbursed a fraction of what this is all costing.”

Such talk is likely to trigger anxiety in South Korea, where a U.S. force of 28,000 has provided a strong deterrent to North Korean threats for decades.

Asked whether the United States benefits from its involvement in Asia, Trump replied, “Personally, I don’t think so.” He added: “I think we were a very powerful, very wealthy country. And we’re a poor country now. We’re a debtor nation.”

One Aspect of Corporatist Fascism Pretending To Be Manners...,

What Exactly Does The Costly Little Apartheid Garrison State Contribute to U.S. Security?

WaPo |  Trump has elicited strong reaction from many U.S. Jews, who are divided about how to respond to a candidate who has set off so much concern about racism and xenophobia — causes Jewish leaders say are of particular alarm to their communities.

Among the hundreds who waited to get into the Verizon Center before the talk were Debbie Kurinsky and Jacquelyn Furman, who came from Needham, Mass. They had no problem with the organization’s decision to invite Trump to speak.

“I don’t understand it. I think it’s not respectful of what the organization is trying to achieve,” Kurinsky said of people who planned to walk out.

Furman said attendees should listen to Trump regardless of their own politics.

“I personally think he’s a bigot. I’m not planning to endorse him. I plan to welcome him civilly.”

Milling around with those waiting to get in and a few protesters was a man selling $15 yarmulkes with the candidates’ names on them.

Among those who walked out was rabbinic student Rena Singer. Before the event, waiting in line, said she and her classmates at Hebrew Union College in New York had discussed how to handle the AIPAC talk. Some wanted to listen, saying that AIPAC had as much of a duty to invite Trump as any other candidate, or that the Jewish community needs to be able to work with any politician.

Singer said that at first she was unsure. “But then I thought about the reason I decided I wanted to be a Reform rabbi in the first place,” she said. “It’s a movement that has historically stood up to hatred and injustice.”

So as she waited in a long line to enter the Verizon Center, she didn’t plan to stay inside long. “I look forward to walking out.”

Waiting just behind Singer, David Rubin, 18, of Woodbine, N.Y., said he planned to stay for the speech. “Whether I agree with him or not, he is running for president.”

I'm Granny Goodness and I Absolutely Approve of Institutional Violence and Coercion!

theatlantic |  At the University of California, there are students who believe that Israel’s creation was a mistake, that its occupation of Palestinian territory is unjust, that it should cease to exist as a Jewish state, or even that it should cease to exist entirely. And there are students who believe that Israel’s creation was an indispensable lifeline for Jews, that its residents have been under siege for most of the country’s existence, that Arabs and Palestinians bear outsized responsibility for regional conflict, and that anti-Semitism lurks beneath many condemnations of Israel.

Thanks to liberal norms and speech protections, these students co-exist at public institutions of higher education, where all can voice their opinions. Yet the illiberal temptation to declare the other side’s position to be illegitimate is ever-present.

Enter the UC regents. As yet, the body that governs one of America’s largest systems of higher education hasn’t weighed in on whether human life begins at conception, whether or not God exists, or whether the Yankees or Red Sox are the better baseball team. But it just decided to declare that “anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and other forms of discrimination have no place at the University of California.”

Almost no one objects to non-coercive denunciations of anti-Semitism. But the declaration that anti-Zionism has no place on campus has divided the UC  system’s faculty:

One letter signed by more than 130 UC faculty members supported naming anti-Zionism as an expression of anti-Semitism, saying students need guidance on “when healthy political debate crosses the line into anti-Jewish hatred, bigotry and discrimination, and when legitimate criticism of Israel devolves into denying Israel's right to exist.”

But another letter from more than 250 UC professors expressed fear that the proposed statement would restrict free speech and academic freedom to teach, debate and research about the complex and tumultuous history of Israel and the Zionist movement.

The latter group has the better argument. The UC regents’ position seems like “a warning to those students or faculty members who have fundamental disagreements with the state of Israel,” the Los Angeles Times editorializes. “It apparently rules out of bounds an assertion by, say, a Palestinian professor that Israel's creation was unfair and unjustifiable, or by a Jewish student that Israel should be replaced by a nonsectarian state. Both are ideas that this page opposes but they are fully entitled to protection at a public university under the 1st Amendment.”

I don't recall Charles Murray discussing globalization in Coming Apart...,

WaPo |  The Republican establishment began losing its party to Donald Trump on May 24, 2000, at 5:41 p.m., on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Urged on by their presidential standard-bearer, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, and by nearly all of the business lobbyists who represented the core of the party’s donor class, three-quarters of House Republicans voted to extend the status of permanent normal trade relations to China. They were more than enough, when added to a minority of Democrats, to secure passage of a bill that would sail through the Senate and be signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

The legislation, a top Republican priority, held the promise of greater economic prosperity for Americans. But few could predict that it would cause a series of economic and political earthquakes that has helped put the GOP in the difficult spot it is in today: with the most anti-trade Republican candidate in modern history, Trump, moving closer to clinching the party’s nomination.

“I try not to regret things,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a Trump supporter who was one of 83 senators to vote for the China bill. “That’s one I regret.”

“The Republican electorate√ has gone along with their leaders, begrudgingly, for 20 or 30 years,” Sessions said. “I supported all these trade agreements . . . but it’s becoming clear that the promises that were made weren’t true.”

The 2000 vote effectively unleashed a flood of outsourcing to China, which in turn exported trillions of dollars of cheap goods back to the United States. Over the next 10 years, economists have concluded, the expanded trade with China cost the United States at least 2 million jobs. It was the strongest force in an overall manufacturing decline that cost 5 milion jobs. Those workers were typically men whose education stopped after high school, a group that has seen its wages fall by 15 percent after adjusting for inflation.