Addendumb to “Birther” Wingnuts Bid, etc.: Georgia judge orders Obama to appear in court for hearing

By Associated Press, Published: January 20

ATLANTA — A judge has ordered President Barack Obama to appear in court in Atlanta for a hearing on a complaint that says Obama isn’t a natural-born citizen and can’t be president.

Orly Taitz, the California attorney who brought the legal challenge to Obama’s name on the March Georgia presidential primary ballot, says this is what she has been working for over the last three years.

Taitz has led the “Birther” movement that insists Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen. She is also familiar to Georgia courts.

Taitz represented two soldiers in U.S. District Court in Columbus who sought to avoid deployment by arguing Obama wasn’t the commander-in-chief because he wasn’t eligible to be president.

Federal Judge Clay Land warned Taitz against filing a frivolous suit, then fined her $20,000 after he denied the second claim.

This is one of many such lawsuits that have been filed across the country, so far without success.

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2012/01/22/1874104/birther-movement-georgia-judge.html#storylink=cpy

Disinformation Campaign Proves Effective as Anti-SOPA Strike-Breaker

Two or three days ago, announcements were broadcast on various Media Outlets stating that two bills in the Congress and the Senate, SOPA and PROTECT-IP were effectively “Dead-in-the-Water,” resulting in the cancellation (or extreme reduction) of what would have been an extremely disruptive– and therefore highly dramatic– strike/protest by Major Internet Companies against the proposed legislation.

The fact that no sources were actually named, as well as the coordinated nature of this spurious disinformation campaign, indicates that this legislation, involving a precipitous curtailment of the Civil Liberties in the United States, indicates a scope of political interests far beyond those of the Entertainment Industry.

History shows us that a curtailment of Civil Liberties is never instituted without an eye to a further attack on those same liberties at a later date.

This debate is not over. Expect to hear opponents to these bills caricatured as disgruntled pirates of popular entertainment, 20-somethings living in their mothers’ basements, who want to continue downloading music and movies without having to pay for the privilege.

Expect to read further, and ever more disturbing, developments in the coming months.

View A Legal Analysis of S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act [PDF] from the Congressional Research Service

“Birther” Wingnuts Bid to Remove President Obama from Georgia ballot in 2012

It’s like Election 2000 all over again!

In a desperate attempt at a political power grab is afoot in Georgia, wingnut “Birthers” have sued to have President Obama removed from the State ballot in November. The case(s) are being brought before Georgia Administrative Law Judge Michael M. Malihi. The case(s) are being brought by Orly Taitz and a sitting state lawmaker, Republican Mark Hatfield (Waycross).

On Jan. 3, 2012, Malihi, who consolidated several cases challenging Barack Obama’s eligibility to be placed on the primary ballot in Georgia, issued an order denying Obama’s motion to dismiss those challenges. He stated, “Because defendant’s motion to dismiss is denied, in the interest of efficiency, the court finds it unnecessary to wait for plaintiffs’ responses before denying the motion.”

A court hearing is scheduled to begin on January 26 in Fulton County, to determine if President Obama is eligible to appear on the ballot. The judge must make a ruling in the case by March 6th, which is the date of the Georgia Primary.

The judge will only be making a recommendation– Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who is Supervisor of Elections, will be making the final decision as to whether or not The President will appear on the Georgia Ballot!

You can view the Gory Details here:

Bid to Remove President Obama from 2012 Georgia ballot

And in a related story:

Texas redistricting case hits U.S. Supreme Court on Monday

Wall Street Declares War on America (Yes, this constitutes Conspiracy!)

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan Admits Cities Coordinated Crackdown on Occupy Movement

Embattled Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, speaking in an interview with the BBC (excerpted on The Takeaway radio program–audio of Quan starts at the 5:30 mark), casually mentioned that she was on a conference call with leaders of 18 US cities shortly before a wave of raids broke up Occupy Wall Street encampments across the country. “I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation. . . .”

Mayor Quan then rambles about how she “spoke with protestors in my city” who professed an interest in “separating from anarchists,” implying that her police action was helping this somehow.

Interestingly, Quan then essentially advocates that occupiers move to private spaces, and specifically cites Zuccotti Park as an example:

In New York City, it’s interesting that the Wall Street movement is actually on a private park, so they’re not, again, in the public domain, and they’re not infringing on the public’s right to use a public park.

Many witnesses to the wave of government crackdowns on numerous #occupy encampments have been wondering aloud if the rapid succession was more than a coincidence; Jean Quan’s casual remark seems to clearly imply that it was.

Might it also be more than a coincidence that this succession of police raids started after President Obama left the US for an extended tour of the Pacific Rim?

Occupy Oakland

Apparently, Wall Street doesn’t believe in the First Amendment right to Freedom of Association:

In a side note: apparently the police tried to claim that it was protesters throwing tear gas grenades. They’re not even good liars.

Also, my nephew went there to observe the event. Good thing he went at the wrong time.

Information flow can reveal malicious intent

Analysis of Enron e-mails reveals structure of corrupt networks

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Political thrillers that portray a “web of corruption” get it all wrong, at least according to an analysis of e-mails between Enron employees. The flow of the famously corrupt corporation’s electronic missives suggests that dirty dealings tend to transpire through a sparse, hub-and-spoke network rather than a highly connected web.

Employees who were engaged in both legitimate and shady projects at the company conveyed information much differently when their dealings were illicit, organizational theorist Brandy Aven of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh reported June 1 at an MIT workshop on social networks. The distinction is visible in the network of e-mails among employees, which takes the shape of a central hub and isolated spokes when content is corrupt, rather than a highly connected net of exchanges.

While today Enron is associated with corporate fraud, for years the energy and commodities company was a Wall Street darling. Fortune magazine named Enron America’s most innovative company for six consecutive years ending in 2000. But by the next year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating the firm’s dealings.

“They were not only innovative technologically and administratively, but also in their accounting practices,” said Aven.

Aven’s analysis compared communications regarding three legitimate innovative projects and three corrupt ones that went by the names JEDI, Chewco and Talon. Communications regarding the shady deals took on a hub-and-spoke shape, a setup that maximizes secrecy and control. A small, relatively informed clique occupies the hub at the center, communicating with protruding spokes that don’t share ties with each other. The hub gets information from the spokes, which in their isolation are less likely to whistle-blow and can be played off each other.

Recognizing that content alters flow is crucial, said Ramakrishna Akella, an expert in information management from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Much of network modeling relies on statistics and algorithms that too often ignore content, he said. “Mining content is very insightful,” said Akella. The sudden appearance of new words or acronyms, for example, can signal the emergence of innovations.

That the sneaky behavior employed to cover the corrupt “innovations” at Enron might have been revealed just by diagramming who is e-mailing whom suggests that the structures of social networks might be a good diagnostic tool. Probing the shapes of social networks might help investigators identify electronic dens of intrigue, such as people communicating within a terrorist network, said Aven.

And the work suggests that networks aren’t just static conduits for information.

“It’s intriguing,” said Aven. “We’ve treated social networks as contained plumbing systems directing the flow of information, but we should think about them as water that carves river beds of social relations.”

Aven’s analysis revealed that, on average, employees sent roughly five e-mails about legitimate projects for every one about those that were corrupt. Transitivity — the tendency of two people who know the same person to also know each other — also dropped markedly in the network of corrupt communications. And reciprocity — back-and-forth rather than one-way communication — plummeted.

Read full story at Science News

IP Address Hijacking

A couple of years ago, I was watching some streaming video (I forget what it was exactly, probably something like the Daily Show or a music video). Suddenly, the connection slowed to a complete crawl. I looked out my window at the street, and saw a guy sitting there in his car, typing on a laptop. The wireless connection belonged to my roommate, and he either didn’t know how, or was to lazy to set any security on the connection. The guy was obviously poaching off our wireless connection, and since I was paying for my share of the wireless, and this guy was obviously affecting my download, I went out to his car and approached him. At first, he took offense, claiming the airwaves were free. But I mentioned that I was, in fact, paying for the connection, so it obviously wasn’t free. And then I started muttering darkly about theft of signal (something about which I still don’t know the first thing about), and told him I was on my way to discuss this matter with the local gendarmes. He took off.

(Having poached many such connections I felt like such a hypocrite, but I was trying to stream some video, and he was fucking up my signal. Oh well…)

I didn’t think about it at the time, but there was a larger issue involved that I didn’t even realize until I read this:

Laws on proving identities online remain murky

James Temple
Sunday, July 24, 2011

This column recently explored the predicament of Jane, the local grandmother who says a law firm is pressuring her to pay $3,400 to settle accusations that she illegally downloaded pornography.

Her case and at least tens of thousands of others instigated by adult and mainstream media companies are all based on what an Internet protocol [IP] address, the string of numbers an Internet service provider assigns an account, is purportedly seen doing online. Meanwhile, major ISPs recently agreed to scold and even penalize customers when media companies say their account was spotted accessing unauthorized content, a policy that could affect far more Internet users.

All of which raises an important question of the digital age: Are you your IP address? Are you culpable for anything and everything that those numbers are witnessed doing online?

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/23/BUKQ1KDU1K.DTL#ixzz1T3qDBfVk

When terrorists aren’t Jihadists: The Media Reaction

From Atlantic

Yesterday’s first reports on the massacre in Norway suggested that there was a link between the horrific attacks, which left 92 dead at latest reports, and Muslim extremists. Only later was the news released that the suspect taken by police, Anders Behring Breivik, was apparently a conservative, right-wing Christian with strong anti-Muslim and anti-immigration beliefs. Many in the media were left reeling over the fact that others were so quick to report and comment that Muslims were involved, before there was clear evidence. Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper The Sun had as a headline on the front page, “Al Qaeda Massacre: Norway’s 9/11.” The Wall Street Journal posted an editorial on the bombings that begins with references to Islam. It starts:

When cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad appeared in a Danish newspaper in the fall of 2005 and sparked a full-blown jihadist campaign against Denmark, then-Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen responded with a telling remark. “We Danes feel like we have been placed in a scene in the wrong movie,” he told the German newsweekly Der Spiegel.”

Joe Weisenthal, deputy editor of Business Insider, tweeted: “It is pretty bewildering that the first 3 paragraphs of this WSJ editorial on Norway are about Al-Qaeda/Islam.”

The most controversial piece, however, seems to be an editorial at The Washington Post by “Right Turn” columnist Jennifer Rubin, who quoted the Weekly Standard that:

We don’t know if al Qaeda was directly responsible for today’s events, but in all likelihood the attack was launched by part of the jihadist hydra. Prominent jihadists have already claimed online that the attack is payback for Norway’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan.

The editorial remains up on the Post, “sixteen hours after its claims were shown to be false and hysterical, it’s still there, with no correction or apology,” according to James Fallows at The Atlantic. Fallows responded to Rubin’s piece, in a blog post titled, “The Washington Post Owes the World an Apology for this Item,” writing that:

No, this is a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too tedious to reserve judgment about horrifying events rather than instantly turning them into talking points for pre-conceived views. On a per capita basis, Norway lost twice as many people today as the U.S. did on 9/11.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

Al Qaeda is always to blame, even when it isn’t, even when it’s allegedly the work of a Nordic, Muslim-hating, right-wing European nationalist… we’ve seen repeatedly: that Terrorism has no objective meaning and, at least in American political discourse, has come functionally to mean: violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes, no matter the cause or the target. Indeed, in many (though not all) media circles, discussion of the Oslo attack quickly morphed from this is Terrorism (when it was believed Muslims did it) to no, this isn’t Terrorism, just extremism (once it became likely that Muslims didn’t).

Ibrahim Hewitt writes an editoral at Al-Jazeera, where he observes that once media outlets noted that the suspect was not Muslim, they disassociated connections between the suspect’s beliefs and his alleged violent actions.

…the perpetrator was a “blond, blue-eyed Norwegian” with “political traits towards the right, and anti-Muslim views.” Not surprisingly, the man’s intentions were neither linked to these “traits,” nor to his postings on “websites with Christian fundamentalist tendencies.” Any influence “remains to be seen”; echoes of Oklahoma 1995. Interestingly, this criminal is described by one unnamed Norwegian official as a “madman.”

…Anyone who claims therefore, that the perpetrator’s “right-wing traits” and “anti-Muslim views,” or even links with “Christian fundamentalist” websites are irrelevant is trying to draw a veil over the unacceptable truths of such “traits” and expecting us to believe that right-wing ideology is incapable of prompting someone towards such criminality.

The right-wing, anti-government mindset attributed to the Norwegian rampage suspect has observers recalling US extremist Timothy McVeigh – behind the devastating Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 people, including 19 children, and injured more than 800.

McVeigh, then just 26, blew up a van he had packed with explosives and parked outside a large federal building in the Oklahoman state capital, on April 19, 1995.

The blast was the deadliest ever domestic attack in US history, and brought into sharp focus the threat of homegrown terrorism.

Arrested shortly afterwards, McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran, was found to have been a figure in neo-Nazi groups and even claimed to have acted for the “common good” of Americans, as he railed against what he thought was the dictatorship of the federal government. (sound like tea party rhetoric?)

Pseudomenos [Greek: liar].

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle” — George Orwell

The magnetic power which ideologies exert over human beings, while they have become entirely threadbare, is to be explained beyond psychology, in the objectively determined decay of logical evidence as such. It has come to the point that lies sound like truth, and truth like lies. Every statement, every news report, every thought is preformed by the centers of the culture-industry. What does not bear the trusted mark of such preformation lacks credibility in advance, all the more so that the institutions of public opinion garnish what they send out with a thousand factual proofs and all the power of conviction which the total [corporate] apparatus can bring to bear. The truth which would like to do something against this, bears not merely the character of something improbable, but is moreover too poor to break through in direct competition with the highly concentrated apparatus of dissemination. The German extreme sheds light on the entire mechanism. When the Nazis began to torture, they did not merely terrorize people both inside and outside the country, but were at the same time the more secure against exposure, the more savage the atrocities became. Its sheer unbelievability made it easy to disbelieve what, for the sake of peace, no-one wanted to believe, while simultaneously capitulating before it. Those who trembled in fear told themselves that things were much exaggerated: well into the war, the details of the concentration camps were unwelcome in the English press. Every horror in the enlightened world turns necessarily into a horror story [Greuelmärchen]. For the untruth of the truth has a kernel, to which the unconscious eagerly [begierig anspricht] turns. It does not only wish for horror. Rather Fascism is in fact less “ideological”, to the extent it immediately proclaimed the principle of domination, which was elsewhere hidden.

Whatever humane principles the democracies marshaled to oppose it, were effortlessly rebutted by pointing out that these do not concern all of humanity, but merely its false image, which Fascism is man enough to divest itself of. So desperate however have human beings become in their culture, that they are ready to cast off the frail signs of a better state of affairs, if only the world does their worse side the favor of confessing how evil it is. The political forces of opposition however are compelled to make use of the lie, if they do not wish to be completely extinguished as completely destructive. The deeper their difference from the existent, which nevertheless grants them shelter from a still worse future, the easier it is for the Fascists to nail them down as untruths. Only the absolute lie still has the freedom to say anything of the truth. The confusion of truth with lies, which makes it nearly impossible to maintain the difference between the two, and which makes holding on to the simplest cognition a labor of Sisyphus, announces the victory of the principle in logical organization, even though its military basis has been crushed. Lies have long legs: they are ahead of their time. The reconfiguration of all
questions of truth into those of power, which truth itself cannot evade, if it does not wish to be annihilated by power, does not merely suppress the truth, as in earlier despotisms, but has reached into the innermost core of the disjunction of true and false, whose abolition the hired mercenaries of logic are anyway feverishly working towards. Thus Hitler, who no-one can say if he died or escaped, lives on.

—Minima Moralia, Theodore Adorno

Click to enlarge:

It May Be a ‘Budget Battle,’ Skirmishes Have Little to Do With Money

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Published: April 7, 2011

This is what happens when you put ideological fanatics in charge of ANYTHING!

WASHINGTON — There are fights about money and fights about ideas, and the battle over a spending plan to keep the government open is increasingly centered on the latter.

The frenetic negotiations to avert a government shutdown seem largely focused not on dollars and cents, where the two sides are not all that far apart, but on policy issues, primarily abortion and environmental regulations, that defy easy compromise.

“We’ve been close on the cuts for days,” Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader, said Thursday, adding, “The only things — I repeat, the only things — holding up an agreement are two of their so-called social issues: women’s health and clean air.”

more grisly details at New York Times