CAPITALIST TENTACLES & FRONTS

This week saw yet more U.S. intelligence claims of Russian malign interference in American politics (as well as alleged interference from China and Iran). The claims are characteristically hollow and tedious. But this irrational obsession long predates the Trump era. We can go back to the Red Scare years of the Cold War in the 1950s. And even beyond that.

Yasha Levine examines how and why the internet was created, primarily as a military, global capitalist defensive tool, and how it now affects American lives and contributes to gut constitutional liberties. The idea of the Internet was to create a gigantic system of surveillance to be used as a “database radar” to spot political threats before they could grow enough to threaten the status quo. In sum, the Internet from its origins as the “Arpanet”, was set up to operate as a weapon for social control.

ERIC ZUESSE—And, this imperialism-accepting view of morality is profoundly contrary to the morality of today’s Russia, China, and their allies, all of which believe, instead, that imperialism by any nation is evil, because each nation’s Government is sovereign over only its own land, and because national sovereignty consists in the right of each nation’s Government to rule over all of the internal matters within its own land-area. No national government, or alliance of national governments, should be able to dictate anything of the internal affairs in any other country.

ERIC SCHECHTER—A 26-minute video explaining feedback loops, exponential growth, etc. in nontechnical terms. Transcript (and links) at author’s main blog A 26-minute video explaining feedback loops, exponential growth, etc. in nontechnical terms. Transcript (and links) at http://leftymathprof.wordpress.com/

ED CURTIN—Maybe a hawk killed the bluejay, but if so, it didn’t gloat over its body.  It would have been operating under the laws of necessity, where as far as we know, compassion has no place. Not true for Che’s killers. Here they are posing for the camera, guns still aimed at the dead man, as if he still posed a great danger to them.  They were right, at least in the long term.