Obey!

Milgram later commented, "I would say, on the basis of having observed a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town."(Article)

Or anywhere, I would suspect....


And then there's the Stanford prison experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo:

Not even "innocent" children are immune to the effects of socialized hate:
Part 1 of Frontline's "A Class Divided"

THEY can get to anyone one of us.

Fuck this guy

The nation's top spook Michael McConnell told El Paso Times reporter Chris Roberts last week that debating the nation's spy laws in public means "some Americans are going to die" and that companies being sued for helping the government spy on Americans did help the government, an admission that Bush Administration lawyers have repeatedly told courts was a secret that could put Americans at risk. The astounding interview was published on Wednesday. (Debating Spy Laws Kills Americans and Telcos Did Spy on Americans, Spy Chief Says)

What a weaselly mother fuckin' thing to say.
First, more Americans will die crossing the street. Do you think they'll ban cars?
Secondly, there are risks with Liberty. It is not only soldiers who take those risks. Who told the American people that Liberty was all safe and cushy? It's not. We all are at risk. That is the cost. If you are not willing to take that risk then I say you are not an American. You are a gutless pig.

Another one (Amendment) bites the dust

From Boing Boing

White House Kisses Goodbye to 5th Amendment
Todd says: The latest Executive Order from the War Criminal Administration facilitates and sanctions the taking away of property of anyone who is deemed to be "undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people". Left in those terms, it isn't too much of a stretch to envision this Administration deciding that any particularly vocal critic of the Iraq occupation is "undermining efforts" and thus a target for seizure of property or assets, Fifth Amendment be damned.

Big news indeed, and yet it has received scant little attention in the media. Shameful in every regard, but it troubles me even more that this latest criminal act has crossed a new threshold in reckless disregard for the US Constitution, and yet hardly a soul even knows about it.

Isn't this a grand war! Boy, I can't imagine anything that's been executed better. The motivations were so clear.
Can I genuflect now?
(Sorry, I own a home.)

FYI

Fifth Amendment - Rights of Persons
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Further Proof

I've been alternately busy and pessimistic about our species future lately so I haven't had much time to post.

Hope all is as well as can be hoped for in everyone's corner of the world.

With that, I offer another piece of evidence that the U.S. is closer to a fascist state:
Battlespace America @ Disinformation

The article discusses the formation of a new military command group (e.g. CENTCOM) that covers the US. By itself it's not a bad idea. However, considering the assault on basic American Liberties that this group known as the administration has been willing to dispatch, I can easily imagine serious abuses.

A house divided

People like to think class doesn't matter in the U.S. and that with enough pluck you can change your status of living.
Bullshit.
If I've said it once,I've said it a thousand times, THEY constantly pump the American Dream™ to keep people struggling for their Disneyland family and home. It is at the core of modern American Society. The struggle keeps our frail consumer driven economy going. Those that do very little but are in a position to profit from the system, skim from the top as the money wheel turns.
Talk like that will label me a Communist, but I'm not. I believe forces bigger than man are now in control. The systems consciousness comes from the millions of little share holders that keep needling the entity for more profit faster. Never is there a clause "unless it is evil."
With that I find this quite interesting...

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
Danah Boyd
June 24, 2007
The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. Teens who are really into music or in a band are on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

Blue/green or green blue?

I still can't decide which, fascist dystopia or dystopian fascism.

"I think what is chilling now, however, is how often 'national security' and 'terrorist threats' are used as an excuse for illegal harassment and abuse. The most disturbing trend I see is when people are asked to present identification when they are not breaking any laws." (Photography Banned in Downtown Silver Spring, Maryland)

And this from Wired via Schneier...

Congress asked Homeland Security's chief information officer, Scott Charbo, who has a Masters in plant science, to account for more than 800 self-reported vulnerabilities over the last two years and for recently uncovered systemic security problems in US-VISIT, the massive computer network intended to screen and collect the fingerprints and photos of visitors to the United States. (DHS Security Chief Dismisses Congress's Hacking Questions)

Corporate evil

Yahoo shareholders have rejected plans for the company to adopt a policy that opposes censorship on the internet.

"They are likely to be risk-averse, stifled by fears which are more phobic than real."

Very Ballardian article brought to my attention by Schneier

Childhood Risks: Perception vs. Reality

Great article on percieved vs actual risks to children:

The risk of abduction remains tiny. In Britain, there are now half as many children killed every year in road accidents as there were in 1922 -- despite a more than 25-fold increase in traffic.

Today the figure is under 9%. Escorting children is now the norm -- often in the back of a 4x4.

We are rearing our children in captivity -- their habitat shrinking almost daily.

See Ballard's Running Wild.

Link

Maybe I mentioned this site before, but I'll link to it again. Right or wrong, it's great for expanding one's Reality Tunnel.
Conspiracy Planet
THE ALTERNATIVE NEWS & HISTORY NETWORK
"Your Antidote to Media Cartel Propaganda"


Read and decide.

Theater of the absurd

Continuing from Nothing Oils the Gears Like "Sex Offender"

Actually, what it is is an erosion of the Fourth Amendment.

MySpace Reportedly Labels Innocent Woman as Sex Offender (Threat Level)

I don't have a particular desire to protect sex offenders. It's a creepy and usually cowardly crime on the surface. It's a crime of power. However, technically speaking, in some states if you get caught in something other than missionary position, it's a sex crime. No, it's that some states want databases available to them without a crime necessarily being committed. This is what they call a lack of probable cause.
Sex crimes are also some of our own doing, as a society, with the tolerance for the sexualization of children, the infantilization of women, and the promotion of sex as power throughout the commercial world.
I've also heard the argument from parents to the effect that in this case it's ok to be irrational because it has to do with kids. Particularly their kids. No it's not ok! We are a society that teaches our kids to do the right thing, not the knee jerk emotional thing. We teach children that we are a nation of laws, not a nation of reactionary behavior. People who tolerate reactionary behavior implicitly condone others who use terror as a weapon and people who use sex as a weapon.
Part two of this absurdity is that because some AG's want to grandstand and make a name for themselves at the expense of hard won Liberty and centuries of tradition, names of folks are being purged from a database based on some other database which may or may not be accurate. A large enough database and the accuracy drops. A little inconvenience for some, but just one more accepted violation of the Bill of Rights.
Technically not a violation because the government only leaned on a private entity.
The third bit of theater, from two folks swept up the purge:

• "Davis told ABC News that she supports MySpace's efforts, but is worried that the database it built with Sentinel Tech Holding Corp. will start circulating with her information in it."
• "In a sense I can understand why they do that ... But why not (also) do it for identity theft convictions, drug dealing conviction, murder convictions? Because criminals use MySpace for these things as well." (article)
  

Because we are a nation of "innocent until proven guilty" and that the state does the punishing. Does nobody stand up for anything higher than their instant sense of gratification? Scarlet letter anyone?
Lastly, most of these services only require a valid email address, which one can get from Yahoo or Goggle without actually being verified as to who you are. So what happens. Criminals hide their identity, even the stupid ones. At least if you let them operate above ground, the idiot criminals will surface.
Every time some do-gooder wants to prove to the world how great s/he is by chest thumping and sloganeering, investigations get a little harder by driving the bad guys a little deeper into the shadows.
Any half decent investigator knows this, so why does it keep happening when only the regular citizen is impacted in the long run? Aside from the grandstanding, why is their such a promotion of bad detective practices, when only innocent people will end up being investigated...

Oh!

At the end of the day the colors of the flag are a little more faded

.

Echo

Biong Boing echo

Spying on the Home Front: PBS domestic surveillance doc

Anonymous Digital Rights Crusader says,

Last night, PBS Frontline aired Spying on the Home Front (Link), devoted to all the ways our government is spying on us outside of normal lawful processes. With extras not included in the televised version, the episode is available in either Quicktime or Windows Media (Video Link).

President Bush described his anti-terrorist measures as narrow and targeted, but a FRONTLINE investigation has found that the National Security Agency (NSA) has engaged in wiretapping and sifting Internet communications of millions of Americans; the FBI conducted a data sweep on 250,000 Las Vegas vacationers, and along with more than 50 other agencies, they are mining commercial-sector data banks to an unprecedented degree.

More scary shit

And number 2
You have the right to food money
Providing of course you
Dont mind a little
Investigation...
Humiliation...
And if you cross your fingers...
Rehabilitation!

Know your rights
These are your rights

-Know Your Rights
The Clash

From the Boston Globe

Taunton schools this spring could become the first in Massachusetts to have students pay for lunch by scanning their fingerprints, a plan that is triggering an uproar among parents and ACLU officials worried about privacy and possible identity theft.

No shit (or know shit), it's causing an uproar. But it's only a matter of time when some jerk-off thinks this is a good idea before it's implemented. And once your data's in the system , then it's easily accessible by other government agencies.
THEY've ID'd you before you even get a chance to run.

Malvern, Pa.-based identiMetrics, a leading vendor, said hundreds of schools nationwide use its system, including nearly a third of the school districts in West Virginia and a private enrichment center for children in Wellesley. (More...)

And Wellesley...that fucking fru-fru, uppity, ineffectual...Ah!...don't get me started. They've even banned out-of-towners from picking through their dump. What the fuck is a private enrichment center. That's one spooky sounding program It reminds me of Pangbourne Village in Ballard's Running Wild.

Why not photo ID cards, with unique ID numbers?

OK...back to my meditations.

Further evidence...

From Sex Workers to Restaurant Workers, the Global Slave Trade Is Growing
By David Batsone, Sojourners. Posted March 15, 2007

Twenty-seven million slaves exist in our world today. Girls and boys, women and men of all ages are forced to toil in the rug loom sheds of Nepal, sell their bodies in the brothels of Rome, break rocks in the quarries of Pakistan, and fight wars in the jungles of Africa. (More at Alternet: Rights and Liberties...)

If anyone has any leads for a Private Investigator/Research/Intel Analyst position to help stem human rights violations, particularly the slave trade, let me know.

Further evidence...

...of the epic culture shift.

How corporations are like cold war superpowers.
Spy v. Spy
by Ilana Ozernoy
In an effort to ferret out the source of a leak of embarrassing company memos, a Wal-Mart employee apparently intercepted text messages and telephone calls of other employees. (More at The New Republic)