Never Forget What We Have Forgotten.

There are many individuals, groups and even nations that have pledged never to forget the Holocaust. Anyone who lives just about anywhere automatically identifies the phrase "Never Forget" with this cause. Even folks who say the Holocaust never happened know the phrase.
And yet, we have totally forgotten how the Holocaust actually happened. Oddly enough, I have often been reminded of how the Holocaust began in Nazi Germany by older Germans who lived during that time. They are terrified by what they see in America today.
I asked Mr McGovern if I might reprint his article her in total because it outlines the parallels between '30's Germany and our current time so well. He was kind enough to grant my request.
I'm heading out to battle the Christmas returns crowd to buy the book,"The Story of a German", before I forget.
What will you do today?

Lessons from the Past
Creeping Fascism
By RAY McGOVERN
Former CIA analyst

"There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater ... Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later...."

These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a first-hand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as "Geschichte eines Deutschen" (The Story of a German). The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages-in English as "Defying Hitler."

I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that today is the 100th anniversary of Haffner's birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and emailed to ask me to "write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush's America...this is almost unbelievable."

More about Haffner below. Let's set the stage first by recapping some of what has been going on that may have resonance for readers familiar with the Nazi ascendancy, noting how "odd" it is that the frontal attack on our Constitutional rights is met with such "calm, superior indifference."

Goebbels Would be Proud

It has been two years since top New York Times officials decided to let the rest of us in on the fact that the George W. Bush administration had been eavesdropping on American citizens without the court warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. The Times had learned of this well before the election in 2004 and acquiesced to White House entreaties to suppress the damaging information.

In late fall 2005 when Times correspondent James Risen's book, "State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," revealing the warrantless eavesdropping was being printed, Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., recognized that he could procrastinate no longer. It would simply be too embarrassing to have Risen's book on the street, with Sulzberger and his associates pretending that this explosive eavesdropping story did not fit Adolph Ochs' trademark criterion: All The News That's Fit To Print. (The Times' own ombudsman, Public Editor Byron Calame, branded the newspaper's explanation for the long delay in publishing this story "woefully inadequate.")

When Sulzberger told his friends in the White House that he could no longer hold off on publishing in the newspaper, he was summoned to the Oval Office for a counseling session with the president on Dec. 5, 2005. Bush tried in vain to talk him out of putting the story in the Times. The truth would out; part of it, at least.

Glitches

There were some embarrassing glitches. For example, unfortunately for National Security Agency Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the White House neglected to tell him that the cat would soon be out of the bag. So on Dec. 6, Alexander spoke from the old talking points in assuring visiting House intelligence committee member Rush Holt (D-N.J.) that the NSA did not eavesdrop on Americans without a court order.

Still possessed of the quaint notion that generals and other senior officials are not supposed to lie to congressional oversight committees, Holt wrote a blistering letter to Gen. Alexander after the Times, on Dec. 16, front-paged a feature by Risen and Eric Lichtblau, "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts." But House Intelligence Committee chair Pete Hoekstra (R-Michigan) apparently found Holt's scruples benighted; Hoekstra did nothing to hold Alexander accountable for misleading Holt, his most experienced committee member, who had served as an intelligence analyst at the State Department.

What followed struck me as bizarre. The day after the Dec. 16 Times feature article, the president of the United States publicly admitted to a demonstrably impeachable offense. Authorizing illegal electronic surveillance was a key provision of the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. On July 27, 1974, this and two other articles of impeachment were approved by bipartisan votes in the House Committee on the Judiciary.

Bush Takes Frontal Approach

Far from expressing regret, the president bragged about having authorized the surveillance "more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks," and said he would continue to do so. The president also said:

"Leaders in Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this authorization and the activities conducted under it."

On Dec. 19, 2005 then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and then-NSA Director Michael Hayden held a press conference to answer questions about the as yet unnamed surveillance program. Gonzales was asked why the White House decided to flout FISA rather than attempt to amend it, choosing instead a "backdoor approach." He answered:

"We have had discussions with Congress...as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible."

Hmm. Impossible? It strains credulity that a program of the limited scope described would be unable to win ready approval from a Congress that had just passed the "Patriot Act" in record time. James Risen has made the following quip about the prevailing mood: "In October 2001 you could have set up guillotines on the public streets of America." It was not difficult to infer that the surveillance program must have been of such scope and intrusiveness that, even amid highly stoked fear, it didn't have a prayer for passage.

It turns out we didn't know the half of it.

What To Call These Activities

"Illegal Surveillance Program" didn't seem quite right for White House purposes, and the PR machine was unusually slow off the blocks. It took six weeks to settle on "Terrorist Surveillance Program," with FOX News leading the way followed by the president himself. This labeling would dovetail nicely with the president's rhetoric on Dec. 17:

"In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al-Qaeda and related terrorist organizations.... The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after September 11 helped address that problem..."

And Gen. Michael Hayden, who headed NSA from 1999 to 2005, was of course on the same page, dissembling as convincingly as the president. At his May 2006 confirmation hearings to become CIA director, he told of his soul-searching when, as director of NSA, he was asked to eavesdrop on Americans without a court warrant. "I had to make this personal decision in early Oct. 2001," said Hayden, "it was a personal decision...I could not not do this."

Like so much else, it was all because of 9/11. But we now know...

It Started Seven Months Before 9/11

How many times have you heard it? The mantra "after 9/11 everything changed" has given absolution to all manner of sin.

We are understandably reluctant to believe the worst of our leaders, and this tends to make us negligent. After all, we learned from former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill that drastic changes were made in U.S. foreign policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian issue and toward Iraq at the first National Security Council meeting on Jan. 30, 2001. Should we not have anticipated far-reaching changes at home, as well?

Reporting by the Rocky Mountain News and court documents and testimony in a case involving Qwest Communications strongly suggest that in February 2001 Hayden saluted smartly when the Bush administration instructed NSA to suborn AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest to spy illegally on you, me, and other Americans. Bear in mind that this would have had nothing to do with terrorism, which did not really appear on the new administration's radar screen until a week before 9/11, despite the pleading of Clinton aides that the issue deserved extremely high priority.

So this until-recently-unknown pre-9/11 facet of the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" was not related to Osama bin Laden or to whomever he and his associates might be speaking. It had to do with us. We know that the Democrats who were briefed on the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) (the one with the longest tenure on the House Intelligence Committee), Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-CA) and former and current chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham (D-FL) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WVA). May one interpret their lack of public comment on the news that the snooping began well before 9/11 as a sign they were co-opted and then sworn to secrecy?

It is an important question. Were the appropriate leaders in Congress informed that within days of George W. Bush's first inauguration the NSA electronic vacuum cleaner began to suck up information on you and me, despite the FISA law and the Fourth Amendment?

Are They All Complicit?

And are Democratic leaders about to cave in and grant retroactive immunity to those telecommunications corporations-AT&T and Verizon-who made millions by winking at the law and the Constitution? (Qwest, to it's credit, heeded the advice of its general counsel who said that what NSA wanted done was clearly illegal.)

What's going on here? Have congressional leaders no sense for what is at stake? Lately the adjective "spineless" has come into vogue in describing congressional Democrats-no offense to invertebrates.

Nazis and Those Who Enable Them

You don't have to be a Nazi. You can just be, well, a sheep.

In his journal Sebastian Haffner decries what he calls the "sheepish submissiveness" with which the German people reacted to a 9/11-like event, the burning of the German Parliament (Reichstag) on Feb. 27, 1933. Haffner finds it quite telling that none of his acquaintances "saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from then on, one's telephone would be tapped, one's letters opened, and one's desk might be broken into."

But it is for the cowardly politicians that Haffner reserves his most vehement condemnation. Do you see any contemporary parallels here?

In the elections of March 4, 1933, shortly after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi party garnered only 44 percent of the vote. Only the "cowardly treachery" of the Social Democrats and other parties to whom 56 percent of the German people had entrusted their votes made it possible for the Nazis to seize full power. Haffner adds:

"It is in the final analysis only that betrayal that explains the almost inexplicable fact that a great nation, which cannot have consisted entirely of cowards, fell into ignominy without a fight."

The Social Democratic leaders betrayed their followers-"for the most part decent, unimportant individuals." In May they sang the Nazi anthem; in June the Social Democratic party was dissolved.

The middle-class Catholic party Zentrum folded in less than a month, and in the end supplied the votes necessary for the two-thirds majority that "legalized" Hitler's dictatorship.

As for the right-wing conservatives and German nationalists: "Oh God," writes Haffner, "what an infinitely dishonorable and cowardly spectacle their leaders made in 1933 and continued to make afterward.... They went along with everything: the terror, the persecution of Jews.... They were not even bothered when their own party was banned and their own members arrested." In sum:

"There was not a single example of energetic defense, of courage or principle. There was only panic, flight, and desertion. In March 1933 millions were ready to fight the Nazis. Overnight they found themselves without leaders...At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown.... The result is today the nightmare of the rest of the world."

This is what can happen when virtually all are intimidated.

Our Founding Fathers were not oblivious to this; thus, James Madison:

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.... The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home."(emphasis added)

We cannot say we weren't warned.

The whole point of "Never Forget', the Holocaust Museum, and uncounted books, movies, documentaries and investigations is to prevent the wholesale slaughter of people again.

Why are we letting it start again?
How sad it will be if America, for all of it's good works and promise, becomes a Nation remembered for evolving into a Fascist state because we were too shallow to stop it.

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the US Government Totalitarians

It becomes pretty clear that the US Government and its private partnerships with major US corporations have been involved in the wholesale spying on US citizens all along.

The Government/Corporate eavesdroppers have long ago concluded that they will have immunity for their crimes no matter what. Normally, the standard meme which has been pushed, (and which has been readily generally accepted with little thought or circumspection), was that, "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear from surveillance and/or searches."

Of course the Information Haves enjoy a complete advantage over everyone else by maintaining and growing a total (insider) knowledge of the Global Information Grid.

Now comes an example of how things really work:

"House vote on illegal images sweeps in Wi-Fi, Web sites"

The Senate version is S.519.

It is likely that they expect the operation of the law to go down like this: "Someone has reported an illegal image. Someone is therefore offended, they have personally found that image obscene and have accordingly reported it and you. Therefore we have no choice but to act on the offended party's complaint."

And most likely, even that won't be enough. Parties will be obliged to comb through every bit and byte, through every virtual nook and cranny looking for anything in everything at all, to possibly get offended about. We will have wholesale packet-sniffing enough to satisfy even the most delicate of all sensibilities.

Gee, it seems like it wasn't all that long ago when we all took umbrage at merely this.

How many times have we heard that lawmakers have simply signed onto or voted for a bill because they never read it? That is like saying that they fired a gun in a crowded direction without looking and that explanation should somehow absolve them. Yet what is worse is that they more often do know, and the excuse that they didn't is a lie.

The so-called "SAFE Act" that was rushed through the House yesterday by a vote of 409 to 2, obliges vast numbers of parties to now become "snitches". No longer are court orders obliged, but rather many parties (the list will grow, it always does) are obliged by the bill to snitch and turn over records and data; but now compliance is mandated to snitch on Internet users, based upon broad undefined subjective interpretations of such nebulous concepts as art and drawings.

Explanations exist for why censorship was ever started in this country to begin with: that it was "to protect the children from starting to masturbate". The Irony is, that for that same reason, (and there is little doubt in this writer's mind), that coupled with the fact of the State having its own sexual appetites, totalitarians will eventually one day work government cameras into the bedrooms of both parents and children alike.

A quick check of the decoy sites last night showed that some of the sites had abruptly switched over to foisting hard core fare over their usual mere soft imagery, to unsuspecting down-loaders. Another deception they have also suddenly begun, is mislabeling downloads as uploads, presumably to misinform grand juries.

This totalitarian scheme will surely scale up to and be applied to music and video and file-sharing very soon as well, as the clearly (to us anyway) unconstitutional expedited "SAFE Act" serves as proof-of-concept for wholesale application to vast other areas of liberal arts and humanities as well.

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but it is happening already, Naomi

Naomi Wolf said:

[A]fter the first arrest, it generally goes in one direction, and according to the blueprint, the time has come for those first arrests. We're having this conversation now, before these arrests. But if tomorrow you read in the New York Times or the Washington Post that New York Times editor Bill Keller has been arrested, the staff will all be scared, others will get scared. And people don't are understand that that's how democracy closes down. And when that happens first, it's the tipping point at which we think it's still a democracy."

How very wonderful for Naomi Wolf, that in her world, the first arrest hasn't happened yet. It is happening now, it has happened already, for those fringe groups in society.

Just because the New York Times has been a shill for the 5th Estate, doesn't mean it won't reach them, too. Even the Sonderkommandos, were only buying a respite before they too were murdered by the Nazis.

My question to those that smite scapegoat groups, has long been this: "What is the critical mass necessary to escape persecution?"

Blacks at 11.5% of the population, arguably now have a right to exist. The gay and lesbian community is just over 5% of the general population, but until the US Supreme Court's LAWRENCE V. TEXAS decision, Pat Robertson was working toward a "Final Solution" to that "problem".

Since my area field and discipline is studying child porn, I can tell you this about that war: It is fought the same way they fight all wars. There is a kernel of truth to the initial accusation: child abuse within the world of child pornography. There are some victims. Some children have been raped. Some have been kidnapped. Not very many, though. They are by far the exceptions. There are pictures of children being raped. Some pictures show children tied up, some show hot candle wax dripped on them.

Opponents of child porn have taken those ugly extremes and painted everything else with that same very broad brush. But here's what they do, and they will wage war this same way, against everything: They go to the farthest extreme. By attacking child modeling as pornography, then everything in between is a slam dunk case.

Anyone who expects the war upon their particular social strata to go any differently, doesn't yet get it. Targeting won't be reasonable. It will go way beyond the pale. The Nazis deliberately targeted those of ancestors with even the smallest percentage of Jewish blood. Everything in between then became a slam dunk.

It works the same with the war on drugs. I remember this not long ago:

Safford Middle School officials did not violate the civil rights of a 13-year-old Safford girl when they forced her to disrobe and expose her breasts and pubic area four years ago while looking for a drug, according to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling.

The justices voted 2-1 in favor of the Safford School District on Sept. 21. The decision upheld a federal district court's summary judgement that Safford Middle School Vice Principal Kerry Wilson, school nurse Peggy Schwallier and administrative assistant Helen Romero did not violate the girl's Fourth Amendment rights on Oct. 8, 2003, when they subjected her to a strip search in an effort to find Ibuprofen, an anti-inflammatory drug sold over the counter and in prescription strengths." [note: none was even found]

Surely you are starting to see things like far more people being Tasered, usually merely because of attitude. Targeting, goes way over-the-top, way to the extremes, not by mistake, but by design. If it has to pull back, because of the courts or public outcry, then it at least drops back to a lesser extreme than it had been, but not to where it would have to, if it had only sought "reasonable" targets in the first place.

As with child pornography, government sets up a huge police machine and ancillary hysterical non-governmental base (in this case, known as the sex abuse industry), to fight their target, and even after they achieve their goals, they still continue to expand and they still grow their budgets. So they constantly have to identify new demons. Most of that "child pornography" which appears to be available on the Web, is simply decoy sites, established to give that appearance and to deceive the public into believing that there is a problem. That's how it works.

When they eventually get to your race, creed, ethnicity or social stratum, they will have started with some small kernel of truth as their pretext. They will then paint using that, with a very broad brush and sweep everything and everyone else up with it. That's how it's done.

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AT&T corporate environment

from slashdot:

AT&T is requiring thousands of employees who work from their homes to return to traditional office environments, sources say. 'It is a serious effort to reel in the telework people,' says the Telework Coalition's Chuck Wilsker, who has heard that as many as 10,000 or 12,000 full-time teleworkers may be affected. One AT&T employee says rumors have been circulating since AT&T's merger with SBC that the new upper management is not supportive of teleworking: 'We'd heard rumors to that effect, and all of a sudden we got marching orders to go back to an office.'"

my thoughts on this:

there are heady times ahead. AT&T knows that it has leak problems by employees, regarding its operations with the government, surrounding Total Information Awareness.

The law presently permits corporations to run Total Surveillance on their employee's workplace computers such as remote desktop viewing and keylogging, which they likely cannot yet do completely if their employees are at home.

There are important reasons that they feel that they must keep every employee under strict and absolute surveillance at this time, until such time that they are able to lock in Total Immunity for themselves.

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waking in time?

wow, C&L really scored finding this video:

From
Children of the Future
by Wilhelm Reich 1928-1951

...It is impossible to have healthy children growing up in a sick environment. It means, furthermore, that under no circumstances can we expect to jump suddenly from a sick past into a healthy future. It will take several generations of newborn infants growing up under ever-widening horizon of knowledge of the child's true nature before the first signs of the Children of the Future begin to appear.

It is not the inborn nature of the child that constitutes the difficulty. The trouble lies in the thinking and acting of the majority of educators, parents, and physicians. It lies in the maze of wrong opinions which have nothing to do with the child. It lies in the fact that, at present, social interest, as represented by the newspapers, magazines, ... etc., with very few exceptions, is completely centered on diplomatic maneuvering and not on our single most important hope: the child.

We have learned that instead of a jump into the realm of the Children of the Future, we can hope for no more than a steady advance, in which the healthy new overlaps the sick old structure, with the new slowly outgrowing the old."

from the Baltimore Sun:

FBI: No delay in hate-crimes data to wait out protest

When the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued its hate-crimes report this morning, a document which indicated a nearly eight percent increase in 2006 in such crimes compared with the year before, more than a few suspicions were aroused.

Why did the agency wait until the Monday morning of Thanksgiving week to issue the report and not do it last week when Congress was still in town, as were thousands of mostly African American marchers led by Rev. Al Sharpton marched around the Justice Department to demand more federal action against hate crimes?

Was the FBI trying to keep from further riling up the demonstrators who visited Washington on Friday to express their anger at the Jena 6 and other racial incidents?

Absolutely not, said FBI spokesman John Miller."

But just as psychologists have been implicated in human rights abuse by outright shilling for the government and doing things like driving BSCT Teams in interrogations and then neglect to include their own sins in the new DSM-V -- The FBI is itself a source and engine and vector of strife and hate, itself driving us headlong right towards the end-of-the-world. Physician heal thyself? The FBI cannot even seem to comprehend its own role in fanning hate and intolerance and in rapidly destroying mankind's fragile future. The FBI's own lead role is hardly included within its own report. Go figure.

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oh our righteous steadfast and stalwart State

SF Chronicle has this on Senator Diane Feinstein:

Feinstein is 'not one to simply take the direction or pressure from even very important and very responsible outside groups, including those in the civil rights community', said Douglas Kmiec, a Pepperdine University law professor and former Justice Department official under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. 'She has her own mind.'

Feinstein is usually described as a moderate, and her record varies from issue to issue. She voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq in 2003, supported Bush's initial tax cuts in 2001 and Republican-sponsored restrictions on class-action lawsuits in 2005, and often crosses party lines on immigration and crime.

[...]

'She has been critically important', said Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond (Va.) law professor. 'When it's close, she's the person the Republicans look to.'"

During last Thursday's whirlwind 4 hour Senate Judiciary meeting, the immediate passing of huge new Judicial Salary increases was repeatedly broached.

So now the courts show that they are really fine team players.

The People, as opponents to Telecom Immunity passing, should not lose stride over opposition to Telcom Immunity just because the courts at the moment are making it seem moot and meaningless by blocking discovery now, at seemingly each new turn.

If Telcom Immunity was such a moot point, the pols wouldn't be conspiring at this very moment on ways to ram it through.

I remembered that the home page of Build Freedom has a video that mentions that government plans to something like triple or quadruple our prison present populations very shortly. I think I'll post that here:

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Two Naomi's

h/t DU:

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is a parley with Feinstein wise?

from EFF: "Congress Keeps Telecoms on the Hook for Illegal Spying":

Full House and Senate Judiciary Committee Each Pass Bills with No Amnesty for Warrantless Surveillance

Washington, D.C. - Both the full House of Representatives and the Senate Judiciary Committee voted Thursday to keep telecommunications companies on the hook for their role in illegal government spying on millions of ordinary Americans -- at least for now.

The bills each make changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). But, despite veto threats from the White House, neither of the two bills give blanket amnesty to telecoms that took part in the massive warrantless domestic surveillance program. Both bills would allow dozens of lawsuits against the telecoms to proceed, thus allowing federal courts to rule on whether dragnet domestic surveillance documented is legal."

I watched the 4 hours of the Senate Judiciary on Thursday. I am not convinced that the Telcom Immunity scandal won't raise the specter of its ugly head again, before the Fisa bill gets voted on in full session. I would give high marks to Senator Dianne Feinstein for her performance on Thursday though. Her call was to slow down in order to ponder the implications of what they were doing.

I haven't written on this up to now, because I have been wondering: Is Feinstein being honest about how she wants to learn more about what it means to grant Telcom Immunity? I have been contemplating communicating with her and spelling it out. But I have also been reluctant because I have been factoring in this logic.

Senator Arlen Specter held some ground, but then he tried to help usher in other advances to strip away more constitutional rights. It was clear from watching the meeting though, that there is far more going on than they were saying. There are other things being spied on than just "Terrorists". They repeatedly referred obliquely to other purposes. There is much much more going on here than watching a handful of terrorists, overseas. One thing clearly jumped out at me: The word "Terrorism" is being used as a code word to cover all manner of operations they are engaged in.

I did notice that Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy's face, looked like that of a jolly old man. But the face of Senator Orrin Hatch seemed frozen like stone, locked in sheer and utter hate and rage, his looked exactly to me, like the face of a Gargoyle. I think it has to do with his Mormon religion. Like Mitt Romney as well, their religion simply will not scale up to encompass the entire country and be able to destroy by force, those who will not surrender to its harsh rigors and strictures and cruel and intolerant demands.

In fact, Mitt Romney recently remarked as how it was "unAmerican" to hold his religion up to him. Excuse me? Romney is running for the most powerful office in the land, expressly to be able to use force to make people surrender in obedience to his religious bent.

Ars Technica writes that AT&T has made a significant purchase of a company with technology to identify files that pass as traffic through their networks -- even those that have been substantially modified:

AT&T announced earlier this year that was planning to introduce content filtering of some sort for all video passing across its network. Exactly what AT&T was thinking remained unclear: would the company truly attempt to reassemble the fragments of peer-to-peer transmissions, then extract video from all sorts of different codecs, then attempt to match it-in real time-to some database of copyrighted works? Would such a thing even be possible?

It's still not clear how AT&T plans to deploy its system, but the company is serious about it. Further evidence of that came today, when a brief Wall Street Journal writeup (subscription) pointed out that the company has just invested in Vobile.

Vobile's core product is a screening technology that it calls "VideoDNA." Like other systems of its kind, VideoDNA develops a unique signature from every frame of video. The signature is meant to be robust enough to survive various transformations and edits, and it can then be used to run matches against incoming content."

What is clear is that AT&T is gearing up to do a whole lot more packet inspections, not less; a whole lot more spying, not less.

The Seoul Times is reporting: "Internet a Threat, Says UN Terror Chief":

The threat of global terrorism is starting to roll back in some areas, but the Internet is a potent weapon being used to rally militants and must be better monitored, the new UN counter-terrorism chief said on Nov.13..

"The Internet is a real worry and I don't think we've found the answer yet," said Mike Smith, an Australian who starts work on Nov.12 as head of the United Nations' Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate in New York.

"In the old days extremists used to have to cross borders to plan and attack sites," Smith told Reuters. "Nowadays a lot of that stuff can happen on the Internet, they can give instructions, they can coordinate, they can recruit through these jihadi websites."

Will doing the bidding of RIAA fall conveniently under the auspices of fighting "Terrorism" now? It is starting to look that way as tools start to fall in place.

The Intelligence Community sure appears to be gearing up for something far bigger than fighting Middle Eastern terrorists.

Thinking of agitating to attract like minded rebel-rousers via your blog? That's why this could be a one-size-fits-all political control law.

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Nietzsche niceties

from Build Freedom: What Nietzsche Said:

"There are still peoples and herds somewhere, but not with us, my brothers: here there are states.

The state? What is that? Well then! Now open your ears, for now I shall speak to you of the death of peoples.

The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth; 'I, the state, am the people.'

It is a lie! It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.

It is destroyers who set snares for many and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred desires over them.

Where a people still exists, there the people do not understand the state and hate it as the evil eye and sin against custom and law.

I offer you this sign: every people speaks its own language of good and evil: its neighbor does not understand this language. It invented this language for itself in custom and law.

But the state lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies -- and whatever it has, it has stolen.

Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth. Even its belly is false.

Confusion of the language of good and evil; I offer you this sign of the state. Truly, this sign indicates the will to death! Truly, it beckons to the preachers of death!

Many too many are born: the state was invented for the superfluous!

Just see how it lures them, the many-too-many! How it devours them, and chews them, and re-chews them!

...It would like to range heroes and honorable men about it, this new idol! It likes to sun itself in the sunshine of good consciences -- this cold monster!

It will give you everything if you worship it, this new idol: thus it buys for itself the luster of your virtues and the glance of your proud eyes.

It wants to use you to lure the many-too-many. Yes, a cunning device of Hell has here been devised, a horse of death jingling with the trappings of divine honors!

Yes, a death for many has here been devised that glorifies itself as life: truly a heart-felt service to all preachers of death!

I call it the state where everyone, good and bad, is a poison-drinker: the state where everyone, good and bad, loses himself: the state where universal slow suicide is called -- life."

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this now rogue government

Two salient videos that respond to this now rogue government which has clearly gone astray, include Amy Goodman's interview of Studs Terkel on Democracy Now!

The Huffington Post/Truthout's interview of Jeremy Scahill on the exigent dangers that Blackwater poses to America, is another.

Both videos are well worth your time, by going into explaining the illegitimacy of our government, as it has been unlawfully exercising its authority.

In "DECEPTION 101 - PRIMER ON DECEPTION", it states: "there is no constitutional principle that says that the President of the United States or the Executive Branch must tell the truth." -- Joseph W. Caddell (pdf)

That perhaps explains the cheap shot that George Bush took at teenagers on Tuesday, as if any teenager has ever burned money like him. The off-hand slight appears to have been timed to set the public up for agreement that teenagers are irresponsible, concomitant with government's plans to ram through yet more laws marginalizing kids on the Internet with yet even more child apartheid bills that they are constantly and malevolently springing by the fistfuls.

Next, consider how the deception practiced by government doesn't just trade genocide for oil, or treat people like the Blacks and Native American Indians were treated; they are presumably poised to hand out billions of dollars to private cronies such as Blackwater in order to enforce their frauds. Can you imagine Blackwater with billion dollar computers? Yet additional billions and billions of dollars have gone missing alongside government's myriad deceits, so how does the common man stand against that kind of wicked, crooked and ruthless power? Aside from government's weapons of killing and torture and imprisoning and taxing, deception appears to be their next effective cudgel. Should we believe anything then, that issues from the mouths of government?

By the time people realize that the State has its own sexual appetites and it will not be happy ultimately with its cameras only in the master bedrooms, it should at that point be easier for all to see that government cameras are eventually destined for the children's bedrooms and baths, as well, so that with all this newfangled micro-management, government will know the exact moment that the children step out of line as well.

Incidentally, the record shows that laws against pornography are of historically recent advent and that the initial purpose was to keep children from masturbating at all in the first place. That surely will make former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders scowl.

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word picture of government

from: "The Architecture of Modern Political Power":

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, directed, indoctrinated, numbered, estimated, regulated, commanded, controlled, law-driven, preached at, spied upon, censured, checked, valued, enrolled, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be, at every operation and at every transaction, taxed, stamped, registered, numbered, counted, noted, measured, assessed, authorized, licensed, admonished, prevented, forbidden, corrected, reformed, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, fleeced, drilled, extorted from, exploited, monopolized, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at slightest resistance and first word of complaint, to be sacrificed, betrayed, harassed, repressed, disarmed, hunted down, clubbed, abused, fined, sold, and, to crown it all, to be outraged, ridiculed, mocked, derided, dishonored. THAT is government; that is its justice, that's its morality."

-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Nicely put.

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Must See Wolf Warning

Naomi Wolf - author of "The End of America" Letter of Warning...

Would that every honest Senator sitting on the committee for confirming the new Attorney General would see this. Thanks to DU for the find.

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F.Y.I.

Aaron Russo:
February 14, 1943 - August 24, 2007

A successful producer, club owner, and political activist has passed away.
R.I.P.

Visit Wikipedia for more on this talented guy.

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Read Or Die

the anime music video. (Just something whimsical.)

However bad you think things are, they are so much worse.

As far as option 6 in jburke6000's "Response to ProfMarcus: What To Do Next?", no doubt the administration is counting on it.

As far as a previous comment I made, "what Posse Comitatus Act?", here's more:

Meanwhile, last October Bush and Cheney, with the help of a compliant Congress, put in place some key elements needed for a military putsch. There was the overturning of the venerable Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which barred the use of active duty military inside the United States for police-type functions, and the revision of the Insurrection Act, so as to empower the president to take control of National Guard units in the 50 states even over the objections of the governors of those states."

That entire article, "Martial Law is Now a Real Threat - Declaring the US a Battlefield", By Dave Lindorff (7/27/07),is well worth reading.

I notice that when I went to read a new article at the New York Times, about Bush challenges critics of new spy laws, it runs sponsored propaganda first about "Anti-Drugs", which has a message that pedophiles are not the only people our kids are meeting online.

We know that mainstream media shills for the government. The preferred order of alliance among states and in fact, probably true with the media, is:

1. To remain neutral
2. To join the side of the strongest
3. To join whichever side one must

many Right Wing apologists scoffed at the notion that when Bush and Putin met last, they may have discussed staying late at the party.

Now Pravda has this.

Many Right Wing apologists now scoff, in much the same way, at comparisons of present America to Nazi Germany.

uh, hello?

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Ed and Elaine Brown, tax protestors

i've been following this story off and on for some weeks, both out of my own curiosity and also since it relates to the aaron russo film i watched recently, America from Freedom to Fascism... casey's blog, open your mind's eye, is what keep me up-to-date... over the past week, there's been some interesting developments that now seem to be catching the attention of the more traditional media...

this from the concord (new hampshire) monitor thanks to casey......

A day after federal and state officers swarmed near the hilltop home of tax protesters Ed and Elaine Brown, the couple thanked a supporter from upstate New York, Danny Riley, for saving their lives.

Riley, who posted a video account of his experience on the internet, said he was walking the Browns' dog early Thursday when he discovered a large group of U.S marshals hiding in the woods near the Brown's Plainfield house. The marshals, he said, shot at him and shocked him with a Taser. If not for that encounter, Ed Brown said yesterday, he and his wife might be dead.

"If it wasn't for Danny Riley taking that walk yesterday morning with the dog the way he did," Brown said yesterday on his daily radio show, Ed Brown Under Siege. "The fact that he did probably saved our lives."

[...]

U.S. Marshal Stephen Monier said that the officers were near the fortified concrete home Thursday to watch the Browns and their supporters while marshals and IRS agents acted on a warrant to seize a commercial property owned by the couple in West Lebanon. He said his officers had never intended to arrest the Browns but wanted to monitor them in case they retaliated in response to the seizure.

[...]

Ed Brown told his radio audience that the marshals' actions suggested that they intended to kill him and his wife.

"If they were willing to shoot an unarmed guest of ours," Brown said, "then their intention was to come down and kill us."

[...]

Riley ... gives a detailed description of his experience. After walking down the Browns' long, wooded driveway, he came face to face with a man in camouflage. When Riley asked the man if he was a turkey hunter, he initially got no reaction.

"Then all of the sudden, the guy stood right up in front of me," Riley said. "And with a full camouflage suit on and yelled, 'Freeze.' At that point I turned around and ran, ran for my life."

On the video, Riley describes hearing bullets whiz by him as he yelled to the marshals that he was unarmed. Brown said on the radio yesterday that he also heard gunfire Thursday morning from his house. But Monier said that marshals never shot at the dog walker.

[...]

Riley said, and the law enforcement source confirmed, that marshals shocked him with a Taser before handcuffing him and placing him in a vehicle. Riley said that marshals, whose badges identified them as "special operations unit," asked him about who was at the house, what weapons were there and whether the Browns had a bomb.

i'm going to keep my eye on this... it looks like it's starting to get interesting...

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Ok, I've put it off this recommendation long enough. Watch "America: Freedom to Fascism"

aaron russo's well-done, very powerful movie... whatever your political persuasion, it's worth your time... you may or may not agree, but it's still something you should see...



(The above is Aaron Russo's "Director's Authorized Version.")

from the movie...

Stop Being Good Democrats.

Stop Being Good Republicans.

Start Being Good Americans.

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Full movie AMERICA: FREEDOM TO FASCISM

watch it... seriously...

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