A comment I posted at The Daily Bell, recently:

Dear war-mongers:

I’ve seen the light. I was so dumb, bigoted, anti-American, anti-Semitic, ungrateful, and downright all-round stupid (put it down to being from an inferior culture) that I really, really thought that ratcheting up tensions with over one billion Muslims was a bad idea. Might lead to real war. How idiotic of me.

(Slap on forehead).

Now I see. Real war is JUST what we need.

All this back and forth is simply a waste of time. Get a move on it, folks. Quit talking. Get to bombing.

Lookit. I’ve done the math.

We have so many unemployed people – at least 10% of the population, 15-20% if you believe John Williams at Shadowstats.

Imagine how much better the job market would be if we could bundle a fifth of the population off to Kabul or Samarkhand or Whogivesaflyingheckistan? Less supply, more demand – didn’t Keynes say something about demand?

And yeah, we’re all Keynesians now, because, of course, Keynesians were the guys who called this way, way, way back in 2002…weren’t they?

(Another slap on forehead)

Comes right back to me, now. I remember one of them – guy by the name of Crockman. er…Krugman..telling us we needed to buy, buy, buy…houses, I think it was. (but no reason why we can’t just cross out houses on the loan form and put in daisy-cutters, instead)

So let’s pay attention to Keynesians when they speak.

And lo, they’ve come down from Mount New York Times and spoken:

Let there be demand.

What’s better for demand than war?
Especially war with a billion plus Muslims.

And remember, we have all that budget-surplus floating around.

And our creditors love us too. Companies are picking up from China and moving here. Woo-hoo. Look at all the factories going up in Florida.

We can afford it. We’re worth it…
Actually, we don’t spend near enough on defense. 30% of the budget, you say? 40%? More?

Wa–aay too little. Make it 80%. No, make it 100%.

That’s it. 100% of what we have should go to preemptive…er..defense.

That’s how they do it in North Korea – and you know, they tell me it’s not such a bad place….

An interesting development.

My webstalker’s post (Chicago Indymedia) had disappeared into about the third-fourth page of a google search of my name. Recently I posted negative pieces about google. I noticed that the webstalker post trashing me suddenly popped back onto my first page.

Wondering why that was, I did a search with Scroogle, which is just google, scraped. You’d think the results would be the same. But the trash post was at about 35 in the list of results, rather than 3rd or 4th, as it was on google.

Imagination?

Several up and coming bloggers have told me that they’ve noticed google manipulation of their results. I won’t specify how the search results were manipulated, though both had a good idea. They didn’t openly voice their findings on their blogs, though.

I’ll be more forthcoming.  Whenever I post a criticism of google or wikipedia, I tend to find the old trash post resurfacing to the front page. Criticism of certain elites also tends to produce the same result.

Shouldn’t I be more circumspect about criticizing Brin, Wales, and their merry men?

Probably. But circumspection has never been my strong point. Why start now…

With enough courage, you can do without reputation

—  Rhett Butler in “Gone With the Wind”

The spirit is life.
The mind is the builder.
The physical is the result

—    American psychic and healer, Edgar Cayce

I took this from the Scroogle site and urge everyone to use their service as much as possible. For Net newbies, if you run Mozilla Firefox (and it’s hoped that you use that or Linux in preference to Microsoft, another privacy offender), click on Tools, go to Options, and then set your homepage to http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm, which will take you directly to the search box. You won’t get Google’s ads, junk sites, or page counts and the like, but the results are more than enough for most everyday searches. If you have the money, please VISIT THE SCROOGLE SITE AT SCROOGLE.ORG (http://www.scroogle.org/donatesc.html) AND MAKE YOUR DONATION THERE.

“There are two reasons why an ad-free scraper of Google’s main search results is important. One reason is personal, and the other is political.

On a personal level, your support for Scroogle says that search engines should not be tracking you and retaining this information indefinitely. Not only does Google scrape much of the web, but they keep records of who searches for what. If information about your searching is accessible by cookie ID or by your IP address, it is subject to subpoena. This is a violation of your privacy. Someday Google’s data retention practices will be regulated, because Google is too arrogant to do the right thing voluntarily. In the meantime, you should not be leaving your fingerprints in Google’s databases.

There are other proxies that can protect your privacy on the web. Almost all are general-purpose proxies that cloak all of your web activity behind an IP address that is not easily traced to your service provider. One is Anonymizer.com. A possible problem with this one is that the founder, Lance Cottrell, has connections with the FBI and the Voice of America. It also costs money for a reasonable level of service. Another is Tor, which is much more secure. But it is also slow, because Tor is a complicated system that needs networks of volunteers to run server software. Juvenile surfers from video pirates to rogue Wikipedia editors tend to clog free services such as Tor, which slows them down even more.

Since Scroogle does just one thing, it is fairly fast and simple. But because it does only one thing, it is vulnerable to action by Google. They could block our IP address, which would require that we relay requests to other servers that are more difficult for them to locate. They could also centralize their system more in order to better detect and throttle any outside address that does too many searches per minute. Finally, they could make minor changes in their output format on a regular basis, which would break our scraper and require frequent reprogramming. Any of the above might quickly get too complex and expensive for us, and that would be the end of Scroogle.

One action that Google is less likely to take is to serve Scroogle with a cease and desist letter. This introduces the second reason why Scroogle deserves support. As a nonprofit with a history of activism on privacy issues, it would be difficult for Google to sue us on the grounds that their search results and rankings are copyrighted. The main reason for this is that we are noncommercial. None of our sites has ever carried ads, we have zero employees, and our gross annual income is about $10,000. Our lack of commercial intent strengthens our claim that we have the right to scrape Google. It’s obvious that we are doing it in the public interest.

Showing Google’s results without their ads is another political statement. About 99 percent of Google’s total revenue comes from ads, and these are ruining the web. Thousands of “Made for AdSense” domains are spewing garbage. Since these sites need content to trigger Google’s ads, they steal it by scraping legitimate sites, or generate their own by purchasing junk from bulk writers. Meanwhile, click fraud is rampant. Zombie botnets are used to click on ads. If you cannot afford to buy a botnet from some shady character, then you can contract with someone in a country where labor is cheap. They will hire people to click on ads all day at below-minimum wage.

It’s time to stop pretending that Google’s revenue model is anything more than a temporary bubble, and it’s time for Google to start developing more socially-responsible sources of income. Showing Google’s results without the ads amounts to more public-interest advocacy. It says that the web spam situation is intolerable.

We remain vulnerable to blocking, throttling, or breaking by Google, which unfortunately is legal if they decide to stop us. But the longer Scroogle exists and the more our traffic grows, the stronger our statements become. We cannot survive many more months without at least one more server, even if Google leaves us alone. While we could apply for foundation grants, our experience tells us that foundations are about ten years behind on Internet and other high-tech issues. Any funding proposals we send out would strike them as bizarre and incomprehensible. It’s not worth our time to send out proposals to foundations.

That leaves us asking lots of Scroogle users for small contributions. Searchers who prefer Scroogle are making a unique statement about important issues. Nothing else we know of is making the same points as effectively. “

MBP reader Clark posted this at Argentine survivalist Ferfal’s forum. I thought it worth republishing on the blog:

The Real US Border Fence

People seem to be focused on shoo-ing away the hands that reach out for free services rather than questioning the re-distributionist idea itself –  the idea of forcibly taking from one group and giving to another that started and still maintains the whole illegal immigration fiasco (not to mention the Al Capone-like environment created by bad laws).

What do people think happens when a store gives out free steak? Do they think people won’t show up in numbers and come back for seconds and thirds and hang around for more?

Rather than complain about (and take positive steps to end) the Free Steak Give-Away provided by the taxpayer, people focus on those who reach for the steak and the way they reach for it. Don’t get me wrong. People need to get mad as hell. But they need to focus on the true cause of the illegal immigration problem.

There’s a huge lack of clarity about this that needs to end. Does having a driver’s license mean a person knows how to drive? No. Obviously not. The same holds for immigration too. Documentation means nothing in the big scheme of things. Just look at the behavior of the fully legal American banksters who continue to do what everyone finds so repulsive. Obviously, it’s not legality that defines the morality or justice of anyone’s behavior.

On top of everything else, lawmakers are now talking about making a separate helot caste through Florida law. Don’t people realize that these sort of things have a tendency to expand and include everyone except the ruling class?

We don’t need an increase in tyrannical laws. We don’t need the the Berlin wall on America’s borders.

The notion that crime rates are specific to certain groups is misleading too. It’s not any particular group that’s the root cause of the problem. Just as an example, look at the black community in the U.S.A., prior to “goberment” stepping in and taking the place of the head of the household.  Before “goberment” assumed total responsibility for it (and, eventually, for all of us), the black community, especially in the DC area, was made up of  highly literate, low-crime, tightly-knit strong family units with a religious foundation –  just the kind people like Rush Limbaugh long for.

Forgotten history, I suppose, and perhaps the result of the Soviet-style subversion of education in America via “goberment” schooling.

So sure, people need to get mad as hell about illegal immigration.

But let’s also get mad at what’s really behind it.

Thomas Sowell at Lew Rockwell on when differences are just differences:

“In countries around the world, all sorts of groups differ from each other in all sorts of ways, from rates of alcoholism to infant mortality, education and virtually everything that can be measured, as well as in some things that cannot be quantified. If black and white Americans were the same, they would be the only two groups on this planet who are the same.

One of the things that got us started on heavy-handed government regulation of the housing market were statistics showing that blacks were turned down for mortgage loans more often than whites. The bean-counters in the media went ballistic. It had to be racism, to hear them tell it.

What they didn’t tell you was that whites were turned down more often than Asians. What they also didn’t tell you was that black-owned banks also turned down blacks more often than whites. Nor did they tell you that credit scores differed from group to group. Instead, the media, the politicians and the regulators grabbed some statistics and ran with them.

The bean-counters are everywhere, pushing the idea that differences show injustices committed by society. As long as we keep buying it, they will keep selling it – and the polarization they create will sell this country down the river.”

“The Constitution is like a chastity belt of which the lady herself has the key.”

—     Anthony De Jasay in “The State”

Tim Shorrocks notes the ties that blind at The Daily Beast:

“Sidney Harman, who just bought Newsweek magazine, has for years been influential in the area of national security—and not just through his marriage to Rep. Jane Harman.

It’s well-known that Sidney Harman, the electronics mogul who just bought Newsweek, is married to Rep. Jane Harman, one of Washington’s heavyweights on intelligence.

Rep. Harman, a Democrat, spent eight years on the House Intelligence Committee and is chairwoman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence & Terrorism. She has had an intimate, and sometimes controversial, relationship to America’s spy agencies during her eight terms in Congress.

But few in Washington are aware that the real intelligence insider of the Harman family may be Sidney himself, through his connections to an obscure but highly influential organization known as Business Executives for National Security.

In many ways, BENS can be considered the godfather of the contracting revolution that transformed the U.S. government into a vast, $600 billion market for corporate America and made national security—and spying in particular—a gross vehicle for private enterprise. Over the past 28 years, BENS has participated in dozens of high-level commissions that have altered the way the Pentagon and the intelligence community do business, and has become a favored perch for former high-ranking officials and generals, from Henry Kissinger to Gen. Peter Pace.

Its leaders have historically been quite conservative; barely two months after the 9/11 attacks, founding BENS Chairman Stanley Weiss called on the Bush administration to remove Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq in the pages of the International Herald Tribune.

But it can also be pragmatic and run against the grain, as it did last year when it sent a delegation of American executives, including Ross Perot, to North Korea to meet with the government of Kim Jong Il to use the incentive of U.S. investments to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear program.

Founded by Weiss, a mining and chemical executive who for years served as a director of Harman’s audio-equipment company, BENS today represents about 350 of the country’s largest manufacturing, transportation, information technology, communications, and national-security firms.

Harman himself chaired the organization’s executive committee from 1982 to 2009 and “contributed over $1 million over the years” to the organization, Weiss told The Daily Beast in an email from Indonesia. Although its CEO, retired Army General Montgomery C. Meigs, manages the organization, its corporate members, led by Harman, have set the pace. “Dr. Harman played an important role [in BENS] for a quarter century,” Weiss told me. “He was deeply involved in all aspects of BENS’ work.” Harman could not be reached for comment.

Originally, it was a kind of liberal alternative to the hawkish business organizations that flourished during the Cold War, and its early efforts focused on arms treaties. But it has evolved into a full-time consultant to the Pentagon on business practices, functioning as a liaison between government and industry. (Weiss, speaking for the organization, said BENS’ efforts in defense, intelligence and homeland security are aimed at “helping the country deal with the very bloated element of the miltary-industrial-congressional complex.”)

In its advisory role, BENS has been a driving force in the privatization of U.S. defense capabilities, including the outsourcing of the precious intelligence assets that Rep. Harman had direct oversight over for eight years as the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Since 2001, it has expanded its ties with the intelligence community; last year, it elected Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency (and now a contractor himself), to its advisory council.

One of BENS’ biggest advisory projects came during the “reinventing government” days of the Clinton administration. The Tail-to-Tooth Commission, which included Harman and numerous defense contractors and privatization advocates, proposed a sweeping array of policy changes, and its recommendations were enthusiastically embraced by both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Thus began a massive push toward outsourcing—and a new era defined by companies like Halliburton, and later, Blackwater……”

Update 1: Some previous posts on Wikileaks, for anyone who wants to see what changed my mind from positive… to wait-and-see…. to pee-yew. (I’ll add the rest soon..)

1. Iranian IT Expert Alleges Wikileaks Insurance Is Spy Trap

2. Douglas Valentine: CIA Tighter Than Ever With New Media

3. Open Society Institute Denies Its Foundations Fund Wikileaks

4. Wikileaks’ Sources In Sweden Unprotected, Report Confirms

5. The Ship That Leaks From The Top

6. State Department Report on Terrorism in 2009

7. Wikileaks Story Involves Fed Internet Spy Agency

8. The Tangled Web

9. Wikileaks On The Web

10. Chris Floyd On Wikileaks.

11. “Pirate” Site Hosted by Wikileaks’ ISP Publishes Data of Thousands of Facebook Users

12. Wikileaks Forces Debate On Afghanistan?

13. More on Assange and Wikileaks

14. Wikileaks’ Julian Assange In Danger From Pentagon?

15. Australia Confiscates Passport of Wikileaks Founder

16. Reports Suggest Wikileaks Might Be Front

Original Post:

Bill Engdahl seems to have come down in favor of the nay-sayers (and I suppose I’m one now).

Other than the usual suspects in the defense community and ardent terror-warriors, WL critics include:

1. Co-founder John Young (remaining agnostic about Assange’s personal credibility and reserving his strongest criticism for JA’s modus operandi, which is also my position)
2. Former NSA analyst Wayne Madsen (much more critical than Young of JA and fingering him as a CIA or Soros front)
3. Social anthropologist Max Forte (moderate skepticism about Assange’s MO)
4. Propaganda analyst and author of several books on the CIA and mind-control, Alex Constantine (citing Madsen)
5. Conspiracy site, Cryptogon, taking the position that disinformation should be suspect, by default. Also, Alex Jones and Co.
6. Parts of the center-left establishment (such as uber investigative mag, Mother Jones)
7. Former Larouche researcher and well-respected chronicler of the machinations of the Power Elite, Bill Engdahl

8. Former Larouche researcher and author of an internet classic on George Bush, Dr. Webster Tarpley

9. Long-time critic of empire, Chris Floyd.

Pro-Assange forces are broad and large and include the mainstream antiwar libertarian, liberal, and progressive crowd, most without reservation (LRC, Counterpunch, Kos, Antiwar, Scott Horton, Justin Raimondo etc.); others, with more circumspection.

The non-US media seems to be much more skeptical, if I can go by what I’ve read on the European and Asian blogosphere…..

Here’s Engdahl:

“Since the dramatic release of a US military film of a US airborne shooting of unarmed journalists in Iraq, Wiki-Leaks has gained global notoriety and credibility as a daring website that releases sensitive material to the public from whistle-blowers within various governments. Their latest “coup” involved alleged leak of thousands of pages of supposedly sensitive documents regarding US informers within the Taliban in Afghanistan and their ties to senior people linked to Pakistan’s ISI military intelligence. The evidence suggests however that far from an honest leak, it is a calculated disinformation to the gain of the US and perhaps Israeli and Indian intelligence and a coverup of the US and Western role in drug trafficking out of Afghanistan.

Since the posting of the Afghan documents some days ago the Obama White House has given the leaks credibility by claiming further leaks pose a threat to US national security. Yet details of the papers reveals little that is sensitive. The one figure most prominently mentioned, General (Retired) Hamid Gul, former head of the Pakistani military intelligence agency, ISI, is the man who during the 1980’s coordinated the CIA-financed Mujahideen guerilla war in Afghanistan against the Soviet regime there. In the latest Wikileaks documents, Gul is accused of regularly meeting Al Qaeda and Taliban leading people and orchestrating suicide attacks on NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The leaked documents also claim that Osama bin Laden, who was reported dead three years ago by the late Pakistan candidate Benazir Bhutto on BBC, was still alive, conveniently keeping the myth alive for the Obama Administration War on Terror at a point when most Americans had forgotten the original reason the Bush Administration allegedly invaded Afghanistan to pursue the Saudi Bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks.

Demonizing Pakistan?

The naming of Gul today as a key liaison to the Afghan “Taliban” forms part of a larger pattern of US and British recent efforts to demonize the current Pakistan regime as a key part of the problems in Afghanistan. Such a demonization greatly boosts the position of recent US military ally, India. Furthermore, Pakistan is the only muslim country possessing atomic weapons. The Israeli Defense Forces and the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency reportedly would very much like to change that. A phoney campaign against the politically outspoken Gul via Wikileaks could be part of that geopolitical effort.

The London Financial Times says Gul’s name appears in about 10 of roughly 180 classified US files that allege Pakistan’s intelligence service supported Afghan militants fighting Nato forces. Gul told the newspaper the US has lost the war in Afghanistan, and that the leak of the documents would help the Obama administration deflect blame by suggesting that Pakistan was responsible. Gul told the paper, “I am a very favourite whipping boy of America. They can’t imagine the Afghans can win wars on their own. It would be an abiding shame that a 74-year-old general living a retired life manipulating the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan results in the defeat of America.”

Notable, in light of the latest Afghan Wikileaks documents, is the spotlight on the 74-year-old Gul. As I wrote in a previous piece, Warum Afghanistan? Teil VI:Washingtons Kriegsstrategie in Zentralasien, published this June, Gul has been outspoken about the role of the US military in smuggling Afghan heroin out of the country via the top-security Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan.

As well, in a UPI interview on September 26, 2001, two weeks after the 9-11 attacks, Gul stated, in reply to the question who did Black Sept. 11?, “Mossad and its accomplices. The US spends $40 billion a year on its 11 intelligence agencies. That’s $400 billion in 10 years. Yet the Bush Administration says it was taken by surprise. I don’t believe it. Within 10 minutes of the second twin tower being hit in the World Trade Center CNN said Osama bin Laden had done it. That was a planned piece of disinformation by the real perpetrators…” [1] Gul is clearly not well liked in Washington. He claims his request for travel visas to the UK and to the USA have repeatedly been denied. Making Gul into the arch enemy would suit some in Washington nicely.

Who is Julian Assange?

Wikileaks founder and self-described “Editor-in-chief”, Julian Assange, is a mysterious 29 [39?, possibly] -year-old Australian about whom little is known. He has suddenly become a prominent public figure offering to mediate with the White House over the leaks. Following the latest leaks, Assange told Der Spiegel, one of three outlets with which he shared material from the most recent leak, that the documents he had unearthed would “change our perspective on not only the war in Afghanistan, but on all modern wars.” He stated in the same interview that ‘”I enjoy crushing bastards.” Wikileaks, founded in 2006 by Assange, has no fixed home and Assange claims he “lives in airports these days.”

Yet a closer examination of the public position of Assange on one of the most controversial issues of recent decades, the forces behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center shows him to be curiously establishment. When the Belfast Telegraph interviewed him on July 19, he stated,

“Any time people with power plan in secret, they are conducting a conspiracy. So there are conspiracies everywhere. There are also crazed conspiracy theories. It’s important not to confuse these two….” What about 9/11?: “I’m constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud.” What about the Bilderberg Conference?: “That is vaguely conspiratorial, in a networking sense. We have published their meeting notes.” [2]

That statement from a person who has built a reputation on being anti-establishment is more than notable. First, as thousands of physicists, engineers, military professionals and airline pilots have testified, the idea that 19 barely-trained Arabs armed with box-cutters could divert four US commercial jets and execute the near-impossible strikes on the Twin Towers and Pentagon over a time period of 93 minutes with not one Air Force NORAD military interception, is beyond belief. Precisely who executed the professional attack is a matter for genuine unbiased international inquiry.

Notable for Mr Assange’s blunt denial of any sinister 9/11 conspiracy is the statement in a BBC interview by former US Senator, Bob Graham, who chaired the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence when it performed its Joint Inquiry into 9/11. Graham told BBC, “I can just state that within 9/11 there are too many secrets, that is information that has not been made available to the public for which there are specific tangible credible answers and that that withholding of those secrets has eroded public confidence in their government as it relates to their own security.” BBC narrator: “Senator Graham found that the cover-up led to the heart of the administration.” Bob Graham: “I called the White House and talked with Ms. Rice and said, ‘Look, we’ve been told we’re gonna get cooperation in this inquiry, and she said she’d look into it, and nothing happened.’”

Of course, the Bush Administration was able to use the 9/11 attacks to launch its War on Terrorism in Afghanistan and then Iraq, a point Assange conveniently omits.

For his part, General Gul claims that US intelligence orchestrated the Wikileaks on Afghanistan to find a scapegoat, Gul, to blame. Conveniently, as if on cue, British Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, on a state visit to India, lashed out at the alleged role of Pakistan in supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, conveniently lending further credibility to the Wikileaks story. The real story of Wikileaks has clearly not yet been told.

Endnotes:

[1] General Hamid Gul, Arnaud de Borchgrave 2001 Interview with Hamid Gul, Former ISI Chief, UPI, reprinted July 2010 – read here

[2] Julian Assange, Interview in Belfast Telegraph, July 19, 2010.