techyum ::

Above: Keith Olbermann covers the Occupy Wall Street media blackout in the U.S.

I’m the law-and-order candidate among my liberal, anti-corporate friends. I believe in policing and I support police in many incidences where others of my political leanings are quick to judge them. I believe passionately that a world without police would be a world where guys like me, and probably like you, are subject to the brutal law of the jungle from asshats far less forgiving than Anthony Bologna.

I am pro-law, pro-order, pro-cop.

But I can’t brook the media response, or lack of response, or garbled response, to the Occupy Wall Street protests. This shit is out of control.

Picking on the Daily Mail  is like shooting fish in a barrel, but that’s where the clearest malfeasance has occurred. The Daily Mail should be ashamed for many things. But this takes the cake.

I’m referring to its use of the term the term “Viral Witch Hunt” in a headline for an article that is ALMOST ENTIRELY about protesters being abused. There is, as far as I can tell NO CREDIBLE THREAT AGAINST THE OFFICER IN QUESTION — not from the left, at least…though I can point The Daily Mail toward a hundred right-wing gun blogs where crazed white guys claim when the Obama minions come to take their guns, they’re going to kill as many cops as they can take with them. But hey…those guys are on the right, and they’re white, and they’re gun owners. It’s so much easier to pick on protesters on the left, demanding justice for those — among whom I count myself — who’ve had their lives just about ruined by Wall Street.

Remember, a headline is not an expression of opinion independent from the article it tops. It’s supposedly a title. Remember “titles”? They describe the work that follows, not some other body of knowledge. We must therefore judge what the Daily Mail put in their headline not on whether there is a viral witch hunt, but on whether they have established in their article. And not only haven’t they — they don’t even really address it. Bologna’s story is a tiny part of the article.

Here’s what these useless dung-eating right-wing tools of Satan said:

Viral witch hunt begins for cops accused of beating Wall Street protesters

An on-line witch hunt has begun to identify police officers after dozens of videos showing the NYPD acting aggressively during last week’s Wall Street protests appeared on Youtube.

The videos show officers punching, pepper spraying and tackling protesters from last week’s ‘Occupy Wall Street’ demonstrations in downtown Manhattan.

The news comes as a second video emerged of senior officer Anthony Bologna – identified along with his family by hacker group Anonymous – using pepper spray on a protester during last Sunday’s demonstration march.

[Link.]

Please note, in the above, that “Viral Witch Hunt” is NOT placed in single quotes, as would be typical in headlines, were it pulled from a quote given by an authority, a witness, or a commentator. The term “Viral Witch Hunt” MUST, therefore, be attributed to The Daily Mail. That term is the newspaper’s assertion, not a witness’s or commentators. But the article is almost entirely about protesters being fucked with. Bologna’s case figures only briefly at the beginning.

The URL for this article? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2043118/Im-Press-arrest-Journalist-tells-harrowing-treatment-police-documenting-Wall-Street-protest.html — which translates as “I’m Press: Arrested Journalist Tells of Harrowing Treatment by Police While Documenting Wall Street Protest.” But then the headline becomes some imagined “Witch Hunt” against a police officer? What the fuck, people? The entire article is about the abuse of protesters by the cops; there is barely any coverage of Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna.

Gee, is it possible the right-of-center Daily Mail is trying to divert attention from how protesters are being mishandled and create the illusion that crazed left wingers have a plot to track down Deputy Inspector Bologna and hurt his family? This possibility is imagined; until it is established as a credible possibility it is bullshit — a red herring. It exists for the sole purposes of painting the protesters in a bad light.

The moment any protester does that shit, they should be held responsible for what they do. But don’t make it up and then tell me it’s real as a way of distracting me from what already happened — that protesters were maced and beaten. That’s the news, people.

Needless to say, I believe any vigilante action against an officer accused of anything is as bad as, if not far worse than, the initial accused malfeasance on the officer’s part. I have absolutely no objection to Bologna and his family receiving protection, if they feel there is a credible threat. Better safe than sorry. But pretending the threat is more credible than it is — well, that’s quite simply all too familiar. It’s a page from Milton Friedman.

Anyone who tries to take vigilante action against cops in the United States is and always will be my sworn enemy. This includes, incidentally, the enormous number of right-wingers who post on gun forums about how they want to be armed for when “Obama’s minions” come to confiscate their guns. Those people are scum, and they are endemic among online gun enthusiasts. They thrive on believing themselves to be persecuted by the “liberal” majority, and they act like they fucking can’t wait for “The Government” to come and get their guns so they can fight back on behalf of liberty, forgetting that the very people they think they’re going to be fighting back against are the other posters on gun boards — many of whom work or worked for law enforcement or the military. This is classic Tea Party rhetoric, essentially White Nationalist doctrine adapted for milktoast namby-pamby nutless wonders. But these threats to police are not coming from the left, and the people occupying Wall Street are not — AS PRESENTED BY THE DAILY MAIL!!!! — threatening Anthony Bologna.

Let’s take a page from history here. In right-wing junta takeovers that involve mass slaughter, arrest, or just political disenfranchisement, throughout history, all over the world, as a matter of theory and a matter of practice, you know what the right-wing, corporatist elements do to silence opposition and shut protest down?

They accuse the party protesting the status quo of having been planning to take violent action.

In Indonesia in 1948, the right-wing Muslim military and other right-wing elements claimed that Communists were planning a mass slaughter. Their solution? Slaughter the Communists. It worked, too — at least until 17 years later, in 1965, when the Communists threatened to take power again. The right-wing’s response? Slaughter the Communists….again. The toll, in 1965? At least 200,000 to 300,000 Communists slaughtered by right-wing forces, the military, cops, and militias. All because the Communists were “planning” to take violent action. Where else has that happened? Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Argentina, the list goes on and on — all places where the American right wing helped the local right wing shove its Milton Friedman pro-privatization, pro-corporate tentacles far enough up the ass of the middle class, working class and poor to steal their gold fillings. And, to be fair, authoritarian states like the Soviet Union, Liberia, Sierra Leone, for which you can’t blame the American right.

The right-wing tool of preemptive accusation of planned violence reached its most chilling recent peak in Rwanda, where the Hutu-dominated government responded to the assassination of the President by a rebel group by claiming the Tutsis overall were planning a violent nationwide slaughter. The result? At least 800,000 dead Tutsis, Hutu “Tutsi sympathizers,” and Hutus who were insufficiently enthusiastic about killing Tutsis with machetes.

But if you’re willing to go a bit further back, you can rack the death toll well into the millions — many millions — when you look at the burning of the Reichstag in Germany. The culprit? Left-wingers, Communists, Jews. Their accuser? A gent named Adolf Hitler.

Did the Reds really burn the Reichstag? What the fuck do you think, Sherlock?

And do left-wingers really plan to attack Officer Anthony Bologna’s family? I sure as fuck hope not. Anyone who even thinks about that shit is my sworn enemy, no matter what Bologna did or didn’t do.

But, while were at it, did Anthony Bologna inappropriately mace a protester? Well…he’s “accused” of it. That seems a hell of a lot more credible than some phantom anti-Bologna plot that’s confined to the first few paragraphs of a story about protesters being abused!

Is the accusation against Bologna a credible accusation? That’s for a civilian review board and a court (actually two or more of them, potentially — civil and criminal, plus appeals), NOT The Daily Mail or the claimed operatives of Anonymous, – or me or you, just because we watched it on YouTube — to decide.

But the Daily Mail don’t have any problem deciding that sympathizers to the protesters “might” commit violence against Bologna…and putting that in the headline.

Is that a double-standard in your grotesque, rotting-from-the-head collapsed empire of lies and brutal repression, or are you just glad to see me?

But what does this have to do with the States?

Because the corporate media continues to ignore Day 11 of the Occupy Wall Street, and the British press is where it’s being covered. Claiming a “Viral Witch Hunt” in the headline and having a different title on the URL implies an extreme form of rhetoric that is being pushed by one or several loose cannons in the newsroom.

I’m speculating here, but: Maybe the person who wrote the story wanted a headline that represented WHAT IS ACTUALLY ON THE PAGE IF YOU READ THE STORY — the tale of on-the-scene journalists silenced, protesters attacked, dissent forcibly squelched on behalf of corporate sponsors. Then some other douchebag waltzes in and, knowing most people won’t read a word of the story, or won’t remember it — but will remember the headline — decides this story would be better if it had a little more PUNCH.

“Hey, there’s no actual lies in it…we just need to put the emphasis where it belongs…on this poor, poor upstanding cop who has not been credibly threatened but MIGHT be threatened — rather than on those scruffy protesters who have already been maced, beaten and improperly detained. Hey, what’s important is that those protesters might be pissed off enough to ‘go after’ the family of a cop!”

The result is that in a story about the harrowing experiences of protesters, the headline tells you that the protesters are behaving badly and might pursue a violent vendetta. But the Daily Mail has not supported this assertion. It’s hot air…but it ends up in the headline, just as it would have in Chile, Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, the Soviet Union…

Why? Because most people don’t read the text. They just see the headline. The corporate enforcers of the status quo count on your ignorance, and your unwillingness to be pulled away from that dopamine squirt you’re getting from watching torrented copies of Two and a Half Men, to give a fuck whether the newspaper is telling you what it’s telling you, or if it’s telling you something else entirely.

You know better, don’t you?

Of course. You read Techyum. Welcome to Culture 2.0, where the Reichstag’s still burning. And the protesters didn’t set the fire.

In the haunted lands of Maine, there’s a bigger footprint in the works. Gadling tips me off to the fact that Loren Coleman’s International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, is moving to a new and much bigger site:

The International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland will be moving from its current home in the back of the Green Hand Bookshop at 661 Congress St over to 11 Avon Street, where it will have much more room to show off its collection of Bigfoot print casts, monster photos, movie props, and thousands of other strange items. The move, according to the Portland Daily Sun, is to give the museum a more visible location and attract more visitors.

[Link to Gadling story.]

[Link to the International Cryptozoology Museum.]

If you were, say, a paranoid, anti-globalist writer of cyberpunk science fiction, you couldn’t come up with a creepier corporate name than World Surveillance Group. The Florida-based corporation has just tested its lighter-than-air UAV, the Argus One, designed for domestic and military security applications, and has posted a video of the test flight here. Embedding is disabled at the company’s website, and it’s not available on YouTube. Coincidence? I think not.

Want to know what’s interesting about the Argus One? Glad you asked. It’s got a “variable rigidity” design, which makes it easier to transport, making it ideal for operating in remote environments, even mountainous ones or rugged terrain (or presumably at sea). It’s adapted, therefore, for use in the coming century’s wars — places like Afghanistan, the rainforest, that sort of thing…where resources can be taken by force, oh wait, I’m sorry, liberated from insurgent groups. The variable rigidity makes it, as far as I can tell, technically a blimp, but with the longer, thinner configuration of a zeppelin or other semi-rigid design. Basically, it’s ultra-portable for deployment in the field with minimum setup and maximum intelligence payoff, as described at the company’s website:

The Argus One has a flexible, non-rigid envelope which allows for easy storage and transport to remote locations. There is no need for large hangars or airport infrastructure, as the Argus One can be assembled and tactically launched in hours from virtually anywhere, including remote, mountainous territory. The Argus One is designed to have a several day endurance capability and can stay on station with its module designed body, propulsion system and its sensor operated rigidity stabilization system, even in rough weather. The Argus One has a low radar footprint making it virtual stealth since the payload bay located on the forward module of the airship is the only radar reflecting material on the airship. Combined with the fact that the Argus One has significantly lower acquisition, maintenance and operation costs as a result of the above characteristics when compared especially to manned airships and fixed-wing UAVs, we believe the Argus One provides government and commercial customers a significantly different alternative for their UAV needs.

[Link.]

Perhaps more importantly, its swell-and-shrink design makes it resemble that other oblong device of “variable rigidity” even more than does its big brother the zeppelin. Phallic airships are one thing, sure…you can bitch and moan all you want about how the New World Order is made up of a bunch of Cigarette Smoking Men whose childhood trauma makes them seek world domination instead of pursuing their dreams of being the world’s most awful pulp writer and shagging Marilyn Monroe.

But when your airship actually responds to stimulation the way the Argus One does, so that your “Group” can more effectively “Surveil” the “World”? Paging Doctor Freud!

Here’s more on the Argus One:

WSGI has developed a new mid-altitude (10,000 to 20,000 foot) LTA UAV, the Argus One, which represents a new airship design and is equipped with our newly developed stabilization system that autonomously controls the level of rigidity of the airship in flight and an integrated payload bay capable of initially carrying up to approximately 30 pounds of high technology sensors, cameras or electronics packages. Argus One is an unmanned autonomous airship with automated control for individual body modules for improved flight stability and aerodynamic control. The design features the ability to control the rigidity between each module and the ability to pivot. The modules are operated by microcontrollers based on aerodynamic requirements. The airship’s altitude, overall response and handling characteristics and flight control utilizes a system of ballonets contained within each individual module, thereby creating a dynamically adjustable airship. The design of the Argus One differs significantly from many of the LTA rigid platforms that have been in operation for over a century.

The Argus One, named after the Greek god Argus who was the all seeing god with one hundred eyes, is designed to be a customer’s “eyes in the sky” even in remote locations.

[Link.]

“The all seeing god with one hundred eyes.” I’m sorry…is it just me, or did anyone else just get chills?

I’m currently involved in an orgy of Irish comedians. Here, Dara O’Briain talks video games. In particular, he hits an amazing riff on Metal Gear Solid that is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. Anyone who’s ever puzzled over a first-person shooter will have the pleasure of reliving what it’s like to jump-and-touch, jump-and-touch, jump-touch-crouch…

That’s right, Erik Prince, founder of the Blackwater family of private military companies, has entered the video game market with a first-person shooter named after the company that made “war on the Pentagon” a highly profitable business.

Now, I’ve never been big on the console games, so when CNN informs me the game is “designed exclusively for Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360,” I have almost no idea what they’re talking about. But when I hear that it was developed by Zombie Studios in concert with Prince, “a former Navy SEAL,” I do not squee so much as roll my eyes.

Once again we are subjected to the mythology of “Erk Prince, former Navy SEAL.” Prince was in the Navy for three years total, from 1992 until he left service after his father’s death in 1995. Some sources say he was a SEAL until 1996, but I believe that’s only technically correct, since I believe he asked for compassionate discharge after his father’s untimely passing. During that time, he “deployed with SEAL Team 8 to Haiti, the Middle East, and the Balkans,” so yes, he’s been in combat zones. But he’s not Audie Murphy.

He is, however, a grizzled war-weary veteran highly-paid junkets wherein he forms private armies for the likes of the UAE.

My point? Once a SEAL, always a SEAL, sure. But I was a burger-flipper when I was 15 years old. If I wrote a hamburger cookbook, would CNN suck my dick about it?

One thing’s for sure: if you want an experienced military bad-ass, just look at Tom Clancy. He never seems to have wanted to write books to begin with, and as soon as he could manage it, he turned that shit over to a team of lawyers. Similarly, his involvement with the video game industry is downright hostile to the very idea of individual creativity.

Now that Prince has joined Clancy in the point-and-shoot world, will Erik Prince, like Clancy, license his name to create fourth-rate knockoffs of his principle product — in Clancy’s case, military thrillers, in Prince’s case, soul-sucking mercenary outfits? Only time will tell.

Please don’t read my open contempt for Prince as generalized anti-military sentiment, which I do not hold. On the contrary, I believe that groups like Prince’s sap both the dignity and the funds of the realsoldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines — who, if you’ll recall, are public employees, something Prince’s chief patron Donald Rumsfeld openly despises. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney’s philosophy of “hollow government” — a government that has no infrastructure of its own, but jobs everything out to private companies, including military actions — was the chief policy allowing Prince to obtain the valuable government contracts that grew Blackwater from a bunch of Bubbas into a well-equipped force of overpaid war dogs,. Prince, like his cronies in the Bush administration, sought to manipulate and warp public opinion in order to dismantle the federal government for the sole purpose of siphoning off taxpayer funds into private coffers and turning the United States from a democracy into a plutocracy. Hooray for America!

Is it just me, or does this look suspiciously like a rooftop in Fallujah?

But I digress! Bitching now about CNN getting on the “Erik Prince, Former Navy Seal^TM bandwagon, which they and everyone have been on since Blackwater first hit the headlines, is like complaining about Prince’s Wikipedia page having been obviously revised, re-revised and re-re-re-revised by his butt-tonguing acolytes until it reads like a fan bio of Ricky Martin. (“Prince enjoyed his time as a SEAL.” How nice for him.)

Anyway…Prince, like the U.S. military, has turned his propaganda engine to modern matters, providing up-to-the-minute zombie-slaying for the anti-Islamic counter-Jihad that the self-described “Libertarian” entrepreneur and his apocalypticist cronies seem so intent on pursuing:

The shooter is set in a fictional North African town overrun by warlords and opposing militia forces. Players enter the fray as team members of Blackwater, the mercenaries-for-hire company that Prince founded in 1997.

Featuring licensed real-world weapons, the game can be played with a traditional controller. But it has been crafted to take advantage of Kinect’s motion controls. Gamers will be able to aim, crouch, and interact with the on-screen action using only body gestures and moves to take out enemies through a series of action-packed missions.

The game has already courted controversy, since Blackwater employees were linked to the deaths of numerous noncombatants and civilians in the Middle East while employed by the U.S. government.

Critics have complained about the game because Blackwater employees take on missions for money, while U.S. soldiers, the focal point of games like “Modern Warfare 3″ and “Battlefield 3,” fight for their country.

[Link.]

Nonetheless, you’ve just gotta love whoever managed to slip this ringer in:

Although the game was created with the aid of former Blackwater employees, the gameplay does not put players in situations where civilians or noncombatants are targets.

Prince’s interview with CNN is filled with the sucking sounds of Erik (or, more likely, his private cadre of well-armed publicists) kissing his own ass and everyone else’s, like so:

My father was a brilliant inventor and businessman. He taught me to appreciate the opportunities that America offers to innovators. Working with the brilliant creators in this industry was a logical progression for me…

…The popularity of simulation military shooters today is really no different from the popularity of playing soldier or cops-and-robbers when we were kids. Take timeless themes of courage, good vs. evil and war, and add today’s technology and you get a very popular genre…

Training for any difficult job is essential. Combat being the most difficult, it’s the same reason the Navy started the Top Gun program during Vietnam, because they were losing way too many new pilots during air combat. Top Gun, by giving pilots realistic experiences simulating combat, drastically improved their performance and survivability. With video game simulations, DOD is providing many of the same sights/sounds and system overloading experiences to soldiers before they encounter a real firefight so they are prepared to make good decisions in the middle of all that stress.

[Link.]

Even more interesting to me is the fact that with increasing frequency, First World wars are fought by remote-controlled robots, not by humans getting up close and personal. The more of the wetwork that drones do, the more important videogames like Prince’s are going to be in training the next generation of American (and British, and French, and NATO, and Brazilian, and Israeli, and Russian) combatants. By all accounts, flying a combat drone is very much like playing a video game — albeit, one of the more-technical, less-exciting ones. But, of course, even the most exciting video game doesn’t carry Hellfire missiles.

Interestingly, I am given to understand that drones aren’t just remote control; they have a certain amount of onboard AI determining their actions, because the transit time for signals is too long to trust a drone pilot’s reflexes to compensate for every eventuality. I’m not implying weapons use falls to AIs — but how long can it be?

Right now, it’s mostly close-in air missions that rely on remotely-operated vehicles like drones. But defusing bombs and mines are often turned over to robots. It can’t be all that long before the kind of “training opportunities” the likes of Erik Prince and Tom Clancy see in video games are pretty much all there is to combat, most of the time…if you’re on the “right” side. For the “insurgents,” aka “freedom fighters,” aka “rebels,” aka “terrorists,” aka “civilians” — what group any given person falls into depends on who’s talking, and who they’re talking to — it will still be, and will always remain, another story entirely.