Article 43
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Bad Moon Rising Part 15 - Space Arms Race
The militarization of space has long been debated. With one blown-up old weather satellite, China has made the prospect of a new arms race far more likely. It showed the world that it is willing to go toe-to-toe up in the FINAL FRONTIER.
By Carl Hoffman
Popular Mechanics
July 2007
At 5:28 PM EST on Jan. 11, 2007, a satellite arced over southern China. It was small just 6 ft. long - a tiny object in the heavens, steadily bleeping its location to ground stations below, just as it had every day for the past seven years. And then IT WAS GONE, transformed into a cloud of debris hurtling at nearly 16,000 mph along the main thoroughfare used by orbiting spacecraft.
It was not the start of the world’s first war in space, but it could have been. It was just a test: The satellite was a defunct Chinese weather spacecraft. And the country that destroyed it was China. According to reports, a mobile launcher at the Songlin test facility near Xichang, in Sichuan province, lofted a multistage solid-fuel missile topped with a kinetic kill vehicle. Traveling nearly 18,000 mph, the kill vehicle intercepted the sat and boom - obliterated it. “It was almost just a dead-reckoning flight with little control over the intercept path,” says Phillip S. Clark, an independent British authority who has written widely on the Chinese and Russian space programs.
For China, a nation that has already sent humans into space and developed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), the technology involved in the test was hardly remarkable. But as a demonstration of a rising military posture, it was a surprisingly aggressive act, especially since China has long pushed for an international treaty banning space weapons. “The move was a dangerous step toward the abyss of weaponizing space,” says Theresa Hitchens, director of the Center for Defense Information, an independent defense research group in Washington, D.C. “China held the moral high ground about space, and that test re-energized the China hawks in Congress. If we’re not careful, space could become the new Wild West. You don’t just go and blow things up there.” In fact, after the Chinese test, India publicly stepped up its development of antisatellite technology. And some Israeli officials have argued that, given China’s record of selling missile technology to Iran, Israel should develop its own program.
INTERNATIONAL THREAT
For many countries, the most disturbing aspect of the test was not the potentially destabilizing sat kill, but the resulting debris, which poses a serious threat to every satellite in orbit, as well as to the International Space Station. “Space debris is a huge problem,” says Laura Grego, staff scientist in the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “A 1-centimeter object is very hard to track but can do considerable damage if it collides with any spacecraft at a high rate of speed.” Think of a shotgun pellet traveling at 10 times the speed of a bullet, smashing into a device built to be as light as possible. And then consider that China’s antisatellite (ASAT) test produced as many as 35,000 of these pellets, or pieces of debris, in the 1-cm range. Nearly 1500 pieces were 10 cm and larger.
Although the United States knew that China was planning to test ASAT technology, administration officials - reluctant to disclose the level of U.S. surveillance chose to say nothing. China failed two or three times before successfully launching the missile in January. All the attempts were observed by the U.S. Air Force satellite system known as the Defense Support Program. Infrared telescopes on these 33-ft.-high defense satellites can spot the plumes from rockets launched anywhere on Earth.
AMERICA’S OWN SAT KILLS
Every industrialized country relies on satellites every day, for everything from computer networking technology to telecommunications, navigation, weather prediction, television and radio. This makes satellites especially vulnerable targets. Imagine the U.S. military suddenly without guidance for its soldiers and weapons systems, and its civilians without storm warnings or telephones.
Some satellites, however, are at greater risk than others. Most spacecraft ח including spy sats are in low Earth orbit, which stretches 1240 miles into space. As the Chinese test proved, such targets could be hit with medium-range missiles tipped with crude kill devices. GPS satellites are far higher, orbiting at about 12,600 miles. Many communications sats are in the 22,000-mile range. Destroying them requires a much more powerful and sophisticated long-range ballistic missile - yet it can be done. “You’d need a sky-sweeping capability to comprehensively negate a space support system that is scattered all over,” says John Pike, a space analyst at GlobalSecurity.org. “You’d need ICBM-size boosters hundreds of them.”
Such an all-out satellite war would render space useless for decades to come. “There’d be so much debris up there,” Clark says, “that it wouldn’t be safe to put anything up in space.”
The United States and Russia, the two countries with proven ASAT capabilities, have long steered clear of satellites as military targets. Even during the Cold War spy sats were hands-off; the consequences of destroying them were greater than those of unwelcome surveillance. “The consensus,” Clark says, “was that anybody could look at anybody else.”
Nevertheless, the U.S. military has spent decades designing weapons capable of killing other countries’ satellites. The crudest American ASAT test, code-named Starfish Prime, took place in 1962, when the U.S. Air Force detonated a 1.4-megaton nuclear weapon at an altitude of 250 miles. The explosion, which occurred about 800 miles west of Hawaii, disabled at least six U.S. and foreign satellites - roughly a third of the world’s low Earth orbit total. The resulting electromagnetic pulse knocked out 300 streetlights in Oahu. Clearly, nukes worked as ASAT weapons, but far too indiscriminately.
To develop a more surgical capability, the Air Force launched Project Mudflap, which was designed to destroy individual Soviet satellites with missiles. But inaccurate space-guidance systems plagued early tests. Then, on May 23, 1963, the Air Force pulled off a successful intercept with a modified Nike-Zeus ballistic missile launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. It took out a rendezvous and docking target for NASA’s Gemini missions at an altitude of 150 miles.
Over the next several decades the Air Force graduated to more sophisticated air-launched missiles that could hit targets with far better accuracy. In 1985 the United States destroyed an American solar observation satellite using a three-stage, heat-seeking miniature vehicle fired from an F-15 fighter jet. That test, like the Chinese one earlier this year, used a kinetic kill vehicle that spewed debris into space. Funding for the program was cancelled before the air-launched system could be perfected.
That same year, at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the Air Force began operating the powerful Mid-Infrared Chemical Laser. In 1997, it was used to temporarily blind sensors on an Air Force missile-launch and tracking satellite. The sat remained intact; no debris was created. And no laser tests have been conducted since. However, the current federal budget includes funding for a laser to be fired at a low Earth orbit sat from the Starfire Optical Range at Kirtland Air Force Base, in New Mexico, later this year.
Some $400 million has been spent in recent years to develop another sophisticated kill vehicle a three-stage missile that smacks an enemy’s craft with a sheet of Mylar plastic, disabling it without producing any debris. It has yet to be fully tested, and would only work on satellites in low Earth orbit; communication and GPS sats are too high.
Destroying an adversary’s satellites has far-reaching implications. Do you take out only military sats or so-called civilian ones, too? Nearly every satellite has dual uses: A civilian weather satellite used for tracking hurricanes also could watch military movements. Many satellites are used by multiple nations. And once a nation disables an adversary’s satellites, it puts its own in peril. As Charles Vick, a senior analyst at GlobalSecurity says, “It’s an act of war.”
SENDING A MESSAGE
So why did China risk provoking international hostility? The country’s government has been opaque. “The experiment is not targeted at any other country,” said a foreign ministry spokeswoman in Beijing.
Some experts think at least part of China’s motivation lies in an unclassified 2006 U.S. REPORT on the future of military activities in space. The documentreaffirms that “The United States considers space capabilities ... vital to its national interests. Consistent with this policy, the United States will: preserve its rights, capabilities, and freedom of action in space; dissuade or deter others from either impeding those rights or developing capabilities intended to do so ... and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national interests.”
The United States “basically said it has the right to restrict the use of space to only its allies,” Clark says. Adds Jeffrey G. Lewis, an arms control expert at the New America Foundation: “Much of the world was appalled at the tone of the policy. One British newspaper columnist basically said it made space the 51st state.”
In that context, some experts say, the Chinese test was an effort to force the issue, to show the United States the potential consequences of refusing to negotiate a favorable treaty on the military use of space. “The U.S. was restricting all these arms treaties,” says Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in security studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “For the Chinese, [the test] was an effort to deal from a position of strength.”
Pike believes China may have another rationale for flexing its space muscle: Taiwan. China has long yearned to reabsorb the breakaway island state, which the United States has pledged to defend. In the short term, Pike says, China has only two strategies that could lead to a Taiwan takeover. It could bluff the U.S. in a nuclear confrontation, or it could try something altogether different: Fire medium-range missiles from mobile launchers, just as it did in the January test, and take out America’s low-flying imaging satellites. Doing so might blind U.S. military planners long enough for Chinese military forces to gain a foothold on the island.
“The Chinese stage these big amphibious exercises off Taiwan all the time. One day, maybe it’ll be real,” Pike says. “Either the U.S. will get there quickly enough to stop them or the Chinese will win the race and there won’t be the American political resolve to kick them out. All the Chinese would need is time.” A half-dozen sats, Pike says that’s all it would take. “Those satellites are low-hanging fruit. It’s a no-brainer.”
In that scenario, the ASAT test was not really about China showing the United States its capability. It was about China confirming that its own war plan is feasible.
AMERICA’S TRUMP CARD
The long-term ramifications of the test will take years to play out, but, for now, few observers think China scored any gains. “It was a mistake,” O’Hanlon says. It fueled American hard-liners who want to restrict American technological cooperation with China. And, “It doesn’t help China’s case saying it isn’t a threatening military power,” Vick says. “It is a threat, and the test showed that.” Whether the United States suddenly accelerates its ASAT capability beyond the testing phase remains to be seen. The country is in the midst of a war; budgets are already tight. Russia is not perceived as a threat and China has only 60 satellites - few of these are worth shooting down.
America’s most robust ASAT weapons were not designed for destroying satellites at all they are missiles developed and operated by the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), formerly known as the Strategic Defense Initiative. All U.S. ballistic missiles are actually dual-use, and while their ability to shoot down incoming rockets has been proven only in tests, it would be easy to direct them against any low Earth orbit satellite. Twenty-four MDA missiles are operational in Alaska and California, far more than would be needed, Pike says, to handle any immediate ASAT needs. There is, he says, “just nothing to shoot at.”
For now, that is. The militarization of space has long been debated. With one blown-up old weather satellite, China has made the prospect of a new arms race far more likely. It showed the world that it is willing to go toe-to-toe up in the final frontier.
Bad Moon Rising
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5
Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10
Part 11 - Part 12 - Part 13 - Part 14 - Part 15
Part 16 - Part 17 - Part 18 - Part 19 - Part 20
Part 21 - Part 22 - Part 23 - Part 24 - Part 25
Part 26 - Part 27 - Part 28 - Part 29 - Part 30
Part 31 - Part 32 - Part 33 - Part 34 - Part 35
Part 36 - Part 37 - Part 38 - Part 39 - Part 40
Part 41 - Part 42 - Part 43 - Part 44 - Part 45
Part 46 - Part 47 - Part 48 - Part 49 - Part 50
Part 51 - Part 52 - Part 53 - Part 54
Section Bad Moon Rising •
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Wednesday, June 27, 2007
FBI Whistleblower Describes Government Muscle Tactics
By Luke O’Brien
Wired Blogs
June 26, 2007
A whistleblower who lost her job and was gagged by the Bush administration after revealing careerism, corruption and widespread incompetence at the FBI detailed her difficult search for justice to an audience on Monday at the American Library Association’s annual conference. Sibel Edmonds, hired by the FBI as a translator shortly after 9/11, was fired in 2002 after reporting a range of problems at the bureau, including:
--slothful, unqualified employees
--family members of diplomats suspected of spying who translated the wiretaps of their relatives
--ignored or overlooked intelligence warning of Al-Qaeda’s plans to hijack planes and attack major cities
--evidence of a Turkish bribery ring that, according to some accounts, was connected to then-Speaker of the House Denny Hastert (R-Illinois)
After Edmonds’ aired the dirty laundry, her higher-ups cut her loose. Then John Ashcroft, the U.S. attorney general at the time, invoked the “state secrets privilege,” a little-used Draconian national security measure that stopped Edmonds from discussing what she knew. Even information about her birthday and the schools she had attended became classified, a so-called matter of national security too dangerous to disclose. Of course, the information was already public. A google search turns it up instantly. For a time, information about Edmonds’ case was even up on the FBI website.
“It is funny and so very sad at the same time,” Edmonds told the librarians yesterday. “The next time I’m pulled over by a cop for speeding or at a red light, and they say ma’am can you give me your driver’s license, I’m going to say: ‘I’m sorry, officer. I can’t give it to you. It’s classified.’”
But the unusual situation Edmonds finds herself in—one that she describes as “Kafkaesque”—is also quite unnerving. Even though Congress and the Justice Department’s own inspector general determined that several of Edmond’s complaints about abuse and incompetence had merit, she lost a lawsuit against the FBI. When she appealed, this strange scene took place:
“My attorney stood up and argued the case about the state secret’s privilege. Then the court asked [us] to step out of the court...while the government argued its side. Can they do this? This is the United States of America. The guards escorted us out and they locked the doors. We don’t know what [the FBI attorneys] told the judges. My attorneys could never know what they argued. As far as we know, they could have made the most outrageous lies. There was no one there to challenge them. We assume that they did because a few weeks later the court upheld the lower court’s ruling.”
Edmonds tried to get the U.S Supreme Court to hear the case. The court declined. In May 2004, the Justice Department issued a retroactive gag order on Congress, classifying the briefings Edmonds had given Congress, all FBI briefings, and forcing members of Congress with information about the case on their web sites to remove it (which spurred a separate lawsuit).
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Anderson V. Atlantic
Tanya Andersen Sues RIAA and SafeNet
Groklaw
June 25, 2007
You probably want to read this complaint just posted on Recording Industry vs. the People, ANDERSON V, ATLANTIC ET AL. I think we may be watching history being made before our eyes. The worm is turning.
Tanya Andersen, the plaintiff here, is the single mother in Oregon that the RIAA prosecuted for the last couple of years and then “on the eve of summary judgment” dropped the lawsuit with prejudice. Her counterclaims remain and are restated here and supplemented. It will soon be joined into a single case. So, what started as Atlantic v. Andersen has now turned around, and it is now Andersen v. Atlantic and the defendants are the music companies making up the RIAA—Atlantic, Priority Records, Capitol Records, UMG and BMG—the RIAA itself, the Settlement Support Center, and SafeNet, formerly known as MediaSentry. She is asserting claims under the COMPUTER FRAUD AND ABUSE ACT and the RICO Act, the RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS ACT.
Update: So many of you asked about copyright misuse, and what the consequences can be, I found a paper for you to read, COMPETITION LAW AND COPYRIGHT MISUSE by John Cross and Peter Yu. Here’s the paragraph I think you are looking for:
The independent doctrine of copyright misuse ... focuses on whether the owner attempts to avoid some limit imposed by copyright law.... Rather than criminal penalties or treble damages under U.S. antitrust law, the sole penalty for copyright misuse is the inability to sue the affected party for infringement. That penalty applies only with respect to the particular licensee bound by the provision, and exists only for so long as the misuse continues.
Her complaint states the following, in part:
1.2 On August 26, 2005, while Tanya Andersen and her 8 year-old daughter were sitting down to dinner a legal process server knocked on her door. When she answered the door, she was served with a lawsuit filed by RIAA-controlled music distribution companies in a federal court. Ms. Andersen was shocked, afraid, and very distressed. The lawsuit falsely claimed that she owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to these companies as penalties for copyright infringement. Ms. Andersen knew that she was completely innocent of the charges against her. She answered the false claims and asserted counterclaims seeking damages. During discovery, Ms. Andersen learned that the lawsuit filed against her was based solely upon an illegal, flawed and negligent investigation. Almost two years later, on the even of summary judgment, the lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice. Ms. Andersen’s counterclaims continue in that case. Those counterclaims are restated here as direct claims. New claims are also set forth here against the former plaintiffs in that action and against new additional parties....
2.1 Tanya Andersen pursues this action to recover compensation for the significant damages these defendants directly caused her. She also seeks punitive damages, statutory penalties, litigation fees and expenses, and declaratory relief....
5.2 Defendant MediaSentry is in the business of conducting PERSONALLY INVASIVE private investigations of private citizens in many states in the U.S. for the RIAA and its controlled member companies. ...
5.3 Pursuant to a secret agreement, the RIAA, its controlled member companies and MediaSentry conspired to DEVELOP a massive threat and litigation enterprise TARGETING private citizens across the United States....
That’s just up to page 5 of the 34 pages. When the defendants answer, I’ll post that as well, so you can hear both sides. But I knew you would be interested, because when the SCO saga began, SCO executives pointed to the RIAA as a model they felt worthy of imitation, IIRC. Why yes, yes they did. Here’s one example, Darl McBride at the SCO 1Q conference call on March 3, 2004, the day SCO announced it was going after Linux end users like the RIAA was going after P2P downloaders. The analogy was not apt, but it’s what he chose, because he saw similarities, he said:
Use of copyrighted material without permission is prohibited under copyright law and can carry significant monetary damages. I reference these actions as elements of SCO’s enforcement initiatives and to underscore SCO’s commitment to vigorously protect and enforce our intellectual property, our System V code, our contract rights, and our copyrights. With representation of Boies, Schiller & Flexner and their associated firms, we have now taken the significant next step in the process of enforcing our contract rights and copyrights through legal action against end users.
We believe that there are important similarities between our recently legal actions against end users and those actions that have taken place in the recording industry. It wasn’t until RIAA ultimately launched a series of lawsuits against end user copyright violators that the community-at-large became fully educated regarding the liabilities associated with using copyrighted materials without providing remuneration to the copyright owner. We believe that the legal actions we have taken and will continue to take will have a similar impact on end users of UNIX and Linux. We anticipate that there are many end users who have not considered the ramifications of the unlicensed use of SCO copyrighted technology and that an increasing number of companies will now take appropriate action to license SCO’s intellectual property.
His prediction didn’t come true, of course. His mean dream either. And recently, SCO told the court in the Novell case that even if they win against Novell as to copyright ownership, SCOsource is dead. One difference between SCO and the RIAA is that the RIAA at least really owns the copyrights.
The thing about litigation is this: both sides need to “consider the ramifications” before they leap off the diving board into the pool. I never support copyright infringement, as you know. But as it turned out in the case of SCO, there wasn’t any that I’ve seen on the horizon for as far as the eye can see, and I climbed as high up the main mast as I could get for the very best view. I see nothing. I never will say you should go against the law or violate anyone’s copyright. But the copyright owners have laws to obey as well, and now we will see how that side of the coin looks in a court of law.
Section Privacy And Rights •
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Monday, June 25, 2007
Cognitive Dissonance
Then I saw in heaven another sign, great and awe-inspiring: seven angels with the seven last plagues, for through them God’s fury is accomplished.
- Revelations 15:1-2
Cognitive Dissonance - Recipe For Totalitarianism
By Don Harkins
Idaho Observer
1999
Entry level college psychology classes introduce the balance theory and the concept of COGNITIVE DISSONANCE. While most of us take Psychology 101 to satify a science requirement en route to earning a college degree and forget what we learned after being awarded credit for passing the class, advertisers, the news and entertainment industry and governments use such behavioral theories to influence people’s behavior.
According to the balance theory identified by Psychologist F. Heider in 1958, people are motivated to maintain harmony with their perceptions, beliefs and attitudes. If, for instance, we share the same attitudes with people we trust and respect, all is well and balanced. If we disagree with people we trust and respect we become concerned because the disagreement leaves us in a state of nonbalance.
Conversely, if we disagree with the position of somebody that we do not like, we are able to maintain balance and we may feel nonbalanced if we agree with the position of a person whom we do not like.
People who intend to control our behavior understand that we strive to be balanced. Governments, advertisers and the news and entertainment industries design elaborate programs around the knowledge that we do not like to think that our attitudes are inconsistent with our behavior.
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE theory, published by Psychologist Leon Festinger in 1957, is the awareness that two or more beliefs (cognitions) that we hold are contradictory. ”Awareness that two COGNITIONS ARE DISSONANT, or that our cognitions and our behavior are contradictory, is sufficient to motivate us to reduce the discrepency,” wrote Spencer Rathaus in Psychology, Fourth Edition.
Cognitive dissonance is an unpleasant state that is accompanied by heightened arousal. Thus, one motive for eliminating cognitive dissonance may be to reduce our arousal to a more optimal level, wrote psychologists Croyle and Cooper in 1983.
Governments in particular, with the aid of the dominant news media, intend to control public perceptions and behaviors by incessantly employing scenarios which create cognitive dissonance among the masses. This is the the recipe for totalitarianism. According to the work of Festinger and others, if you present people with a concept that contains properties that are in conflict with one another, in order to restore balance, people have a tendency ignore the discrepency--sweep it under the rug.
An excellent example of how cognitive dissonance works in contemporary society is the issue of vaccines as a method of disease prevention. For people who believe in the Bible, there is no doubt that God places tremendous importance on blood. The First Testamant in particular labors the importance of blood and blood purity and that the corruption of blood is against the wishes of God.
Vaccines when injected into the body are a direct corruption of blood. Vaccines, according to vaccine manufacturers, contain live and dead virus from any number of animals (pigs, monkeys, cows, sheep), foreign RNA and DNA (from animals but the vaccine manufacturer is not even certain from which animal the RNA and DNA came from),ԓ aluminum, formaldehyde, mercury and other substances that are toxic to people.
On one hand we have God commanding that we maintain the purity of our blood or be subject to his wrath. On the other hand we have the government forcing us, by law, to accept vaccinations as being good for us and good for public health.
Rather than obey the wishes of God or disobey the mandates of government, people simply stand in line for their vaccines and would rather not discuss the issue in an introspective fashion that would cause them to be unbalanced and cognitively dissonant.
The power to control people in this manner was discovered much earlier than 1957. Protocol No. 5 (regardless of what you may think about the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, 1905, it reads as if it were the blueprint for the enslavement of the people of the world) states that,
“In order to put public opinion into our hands we must bring it into a state of bewilderment by giving expression from all sides to so many contradictory opinions and for such length of time as will suffice to make the (manipulated) lose their heads in the labyrinth and come to see that the best thing is to have no opinion of any kind in matters political, which it is not given to understand, because they are understood only by him who guides the public. This is the first secret.”
We only have to go back in history a couple of months to the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment process to see how the first secret works. By the time the Senate decided to keep Clinton in office, the American public was so confused and disgusted that it was happy to move onto being confused and disgusted over the bombing of Iraq.
For many of us who have been frustrated in our attempts to awaken the American public as to our collective peril, now we can understand why most people refuse to awaken--they have been purposefully fed a full menu of contradictory concepts so that their only unconscious recourse, in an attempt to maintain balance (sanity) is to bypass the contradictions and continue living their lives with intended ignorance.
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Cognitive Dissonance - Purposeful Deterioration
By Al Cronkrite
Etherzone
march 5, 2002
Minister Louis Farakhan, the American Black Muslim leader, was on C-Span recently. He highlighted the oil issue in regard to our military action in Afghanistan. He mentioned our shadow government and emphasized the duty of ministers of the gospel to confront “power with truth”, saying those that dont should leave the pulpit.
This bit of unmentionable veracity riveted my attention on minister Farakhan. I wanted to endorse his bravery and support his cause. I was cognizant of the precious nature of unspoken truth - but there was a lurking dissonance. Louis Farakhan supports Socialists like Maxine Waters. He is a speaker at Sun Yung MoonԒs conferences on the coming one world religion. From one side of his mouth he supports Christianity, from the other Islam. He is, or has been, a bigot and guilty of sicking blacks on whites.
At this writing, President Bush II is in China talking softly and placating effectively. He has condemned North Korea as a member of the “Axis of Evil” but seems content with similar tyranny in China. All this might be pleasant enough except that the Jiang Zemin regime is in the process of buying weaponry with the proceeds realized from the 80 billion plus trade deficit with our Nation. They have threatened us with nuclear weapons, and pose a growing continued threat in the future.
The liberal Marxist agenda of the Frankfurt School has been fostered and has grown in our Universities. These institutions of higher learning, which are supposedly governed by reason, are populated by individuals whose ability to think logically has been destroyed by their own nihilism. Pointing out that Marxism in practice has been disastrous in every instance is useless. Trying to gain attention to the disastrous statistical record Socialism has compiled in America will be ignored. Nihilism is not rational and will not respond to rational impetus.
Have you ever wondered why contemporary America always seems plagued by things that seem to make no sense? Consider the following litany:
* The murder of babies is supported while capital punishment for heinous crimes is resisted.
* Our government supports policies which are detrimental to American workers and result in the domestic demise of entire industries.
* At this writing, America is on its fifth bogus alertfor possible terrorist activity. No one seems to know what action an alertrequires.
* Though over 80 men, women, and children were needlessly incinerated at Waco, no one has been held accountable.
* The Bush II Administration, supposedly noted for the Republican mantra of smaller government, has created in our airports a federal army of intimidating proletariats whose shenanigans are similar to the Brown Shirts of Hitlers Germany.
* The Homeland Defense concept which was birthed following the 9/11 disaster had been rattling around in the minds of the New World Order crowd for a considerable time before the attack.
* Janet RenoҒs theft of little Elian from his Miami rescuers was surreal and hard to comprehend.
* Representatives elected by the people who take an oath to uphold the Constitution and preserve our freedoms are passing unconstitutional legislation which places us under the authority of foreign entities.
* In a dangerous world, our government debilitates and shrinks our armed forces.
* The Bush II Administration; elected under the aegis of Christian moral principles and smaller, less intrusive government; dallies with homosexuals and brings about the largest increase of government power in history.
* The generals of our army and an extensive array of epicene leaders have accepted women as physically equal to men and conduct their affairs as if this obvious fable is really true.
* Illegal activity such as gambling, for which individuals are arrested, is legal if the government is the perpetrator.
* College professors have embarked on a program of politically correct masochism that in spite of all evidence to the contrary continues to be accepted by Liberals and their students.
* Jews who lost relatives in the Nazi regime and who should be particularly concerned about impending imperialism are strangely silent.
* Black leaders manage to keep their followers constantly inflamed with hate for abuses that no longer exist resulting in a retardation of progress for black citizens.
* Slobodan Milosevic is on trial for “war crimes” at The Hague in the Netherlands. His first defense is that the tribunal itself is illegal.
The preceding list is long but not nearly inclusive, there are hundreds more, we are being inundated with nonsensical happenings.
In 1957, a Stanford Professor named Leon Festinger developed the theory of Cognitive Dissonance. It is a term used by social engineers to describe the experience of individuals when presented with evidence contrary to their worldview or situations in which they must behave contrary to their worldview.
Don Harkins writing in the Idaho Observer says, “Governments in particular, with the aid of the dominant news media, intend to control public perceptions and behaviors by incessantly employing scenarios which create cognitive dissonance among the masses. This is the recipe for totalitarianism. According to the work of Festinger and others, if you present people with a concept that contains properties that are in conflict with one another, in order to restore balance, people have a tendency to ignore the discrepancy--sweep it under the rug.”
Mr. Harkins goes on to say, “Rather than obey the wishes of God or disobey the mandates of government, people simply ҒŅ would rather not discuss the issue in an introspective fashion that would cause them to be unbalanced and cognitively dissonant.”
Pat Buchanan in “Death of The West” quotes the intentions of the Cultural Marxists as, “essentially destructive criticism of all the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention, and conservatism”.
There are fifteen targets listed in the preceding paragraph. This is a short list. The destabilization of the American culture is a multifaceted endeavor. Each of the targets are anchors to a peaceful and orderly society.
Creating Cognitive Dissonance provides a litany of obvious insanity for people to point out, writeand complain about. When the next election comes around, the individuals responsible for fomenting these absurdities are provided with major needed alterations and are able to provide solutions that will make matters worse. This procedure has been 100% successful with our educational system and is progressing satisfactorily in most of the rest of our society.
The axis of evil is particularly effective in the current political climate. President Bush II feigns correction of a scant few of the plethora of egregious dissonance that afflicts us. These few often bogus corrections give his supporters a positive base on which to reconcile their support for his administration. Their support allows the implementation of a host of injurious programs with minimum complaint.
Millions of words are spoken and written denouncing the overwhelming ills that afflict us. Letters are written to our congressmen, attempts are made to elect honest individuals to powerful positions but all of this fails to bring redemption.
Fighting a nihilistic, Machiavellian, cabal whose agenda is purposefully irrational with common sense and reason is a losing proposition. It is time to discern the battle plan of the enemy and devise an effective response.
Section Revelations •
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Sunday, June 24, 2007
Apalling Recall Practices Of AT&T And The CWA Continue
The CWA just announced AT&T’s RECALLING more outsourced JOBS. GOOD FOR THEM, BAD FOR ME and my spirited former colleagues who were LAYED OFF THREE YEARS AGO with NO CHANCE of reemployment, from the DEMORALIZING and UNETHICAL practices of both the CWA and AT&T that involuntarily separatated some of AT&T’s best, brightest and OLDER techs in August 2004.
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AT&T to Return 650 More Outsourced Jobs
June 21, 2007
AT&T announced this week that it will be bringing back from overseas nearly 650 Tier I DSL technical support jobs and locating them in Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada, later this year. The jobs are coming back to the United States as part of the agreement CWA reached with AT&T last fall to return the tech support work that had been contracted overseas.
It was the third announcement this year of the return of AT&T Tier I customer support jobs. In El Paso, Texas, a new center is now up and running with more than 400 CWA-represented workers, and another 400 are expected to be on the job at a new call center scheduled to open in Indianapolis, Indiana, this July.
Overall, more than 2,000 new jobs are expected to be created as a result of CWA’S 2005 NATIONAL INTERNET AGREEMENT WITH AT&T, reported Executive Vice President Jeff Rechenbach, who heads the Telecom Office.
Section Telecom Underclass •
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