Climate Change Denial and Crimes Against Humanity

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At what point does global climate change denialism become a crime against humanity?

Furthermore, does a "crime against humanity" actually have any real legal meaning or is it more precious, politically correct bullshit from organizations such as the United Nations and therefore have no merit whatsoever  (see for example the "Zionism == Racism" or the Temple Mount has nothing whatsoever to do with Judaism bullshit)?

At what point is it recognized that the last election was invalid because of the intervention of a foreign intelligence operation? Does failure to acknowledge and address this issue make the so-called democratic process in this country a transparent fraud?

Many Americans, all of whom are wealthy and powerful, I notice, seem to believe that they can accept any corruption, and obvious criminal act, and still expect to have the American people support their corrupt system as if it was democratically elected.  What if that ceases to be the case?

Is Austria Overtaxing Its Sausage Stands?

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Any right thinking American, upon reading the baseless Austrian complaint against those pillars of American Industry, Starbucks and Amazon, must wonder if Austria is not indeed demanding too much taxes from its sausage stands.

You may read their horrible accusation here in Reuters.

In America, we know to never tax our corporations, from which everything good in our society originates, but instead we put the burden on the worthless people, even those who do not work. These are the scum that should pay taxes. And if they do not work, then they should pay *more* taxes, not less, it seems to me, to make up for their indolence.

Indeed, we know that when the corporation takes out its most virtuous Sausage it will bring forth blessings and goodness that will “trickle down” onto the heads of all of us, both politicians and citizens. To tax the corporation is a sin, because it restricts this flow of corporate goodness.

All politicians in America know this, and so they wait anxiously by the trough of the corporations, yapping like newborn birds for their nourishment directly from this All-Beneficent Sausage. We call this most healthy flow “the political donation” but which might better be called the “Food of the Gods”, the very life-blood of our political system and the American Way..

Therefore let Austria learn from us, and learn the wisdom of freeing the corporation from this pernicious burden, these so-called taxes, which if left unchecked might affect shareholder value.

Entertaining Report on Cybercrime in Brasil

Have you noticed how boring and unreadable most official reports on cyber crime seem to be? They come in various styles of boring from a Russian style that is at least readable to the US Govt style which is in extreme bureaucratic gibberish. Or you have the weird semi-anarchic cyber community with their quasi-rebellious bullshit and psycho-pathological narcissism.

But now at last we have a report that brings some of the excitement and romance of cyber crime in a readable style that is not laden with pseudo-philosophy. It seems to be one of several reports on regional cyber crime by a company called www.trendmicro.com.

In this particular report we have a discussion of cybercrime in Brasil which I encourage you to read on your own at this location.

But here are a few tidbits I picked up that I thought were interesting.

1. Cyber criminals in Brasil make very little use of the "dark web", such as Tor for example,  but operate in the open on the "surface web".  This is expected to change in the future as the criminals get more sophisticated and in response to greater law enforcement.

2. Cyber criminals come in two varieties: Developers and Operators. Developers develop the tools and sell or lease them to Operators.  Operators use these tools to attack their targets.

3. There are numerous tutorials and online classes for those who wish to become a cyber criminal in Brasil.  These classes sound very reasonable and one could imagine that they might be helpful even for those who are learning to thwart cyber crime.

4. There also seems to be a robust and healthy infrastructure for the provision of apparatus to help in crime. These include such things as "credit card" skimmers for companies which extracts the information on the card when processing an apparently legitimate credit card transaction.

5. Although there are numerous classes of targets in Brasil, this report does give the impression that the banking industry of Brasil has become very vulnerable.  

6. Many of the Developers are or were computer science students.  Some of them are literally Computer Science students and take time off to study for exams and so forth.  We know this because they post letters of apologies in the forums apologizing to their clients for being unavailable for a certain period. 

7. Both Developers and Operators hold Brasilian law enforcement in contempt.  Apparently the penalties for cyber crime are considered to be very weak and the law enforcement particularly inept.  Presumably this will change in the near future as both are corrected as crime increases.

8. The disastrous Brasilian economy is the prime motivator here.  There is extraordinary poverty and an economy that has stagnated with no obvious way to improve one's standing.  In this, Brasil seems to be very similar to the USA of the last decade.  Thus, the real problem here is not crime but poverty and, apparently, corruption.   Again, very similar to the USA.

9. Finally the report gives the impression that part of the cause of the substantial increase in crime is the result of the failure of the mythology that the rich are people who have earned and deserve to keep their wealth. The impression seems to be that the rich are merely more successful criminals, corrupt politicians or the children or relatives of the former. Again there is a striking similarity to beliefs in the USA.

I would recommend anyone who is unemployed and interested in a new career to read this report.

The following image is not from the report on Brasil, but is an illustration I found on the web of how a credit card skimmer scammer works:

Countermeasures Once You Have Been Spoofed

Several months ago, my friend Ken Cope reported that my name was being used on Facebook to sell some horrible weight reduction product. That was weird but I did nothing about it. I now think I know how it happened and I am writing it up so that you can possibly avoid these things.

For a variety of reasons, I run Windows on one of my laptops. This is the device I use to read books in bed and on the train so it needs to have a Kindle reader which means it can not be Linux/Unix but must be Windows or Mac OS. It came installed with Windows 8 which is, IMHO, a disaster but I installed classic menu and tried using some apps from the Microsoft store including a world clock. Well, one of these apps had a virus.

Or possibly the virus came with a plugin for Google Chrome.

In any case, Google Chrome started behaving obnoxiously bring up billions of advertisements, so I reverted to Firefox and the problems mostly went away.

But then all of a sudden when I tried to edit my Kindle parameters, it brought up a window to Amazon but unbeknownst to me it was really a hacked non-Amazon window with a questionnaire. I foolishly filled it out and it contained no information of value. I have no idea what the point of that was. But it was clear to me that somehow my browser had been hacked and that it had whatever my browser knew, which included passwords.

I brainwiped the computer and went and changed all sites that had passwords that the browser on the computer knew. You must never use these passwords again because it now has it in its database and it will make use of them on another account of yours should you reuse it.

Probably you should not have your browser ever remember a password. Once a program is infected, delete it. Once a password is compromised, never use it again. Never load applications from the Microsoft store.

Dangerous Toys Beneficial For the Education of Youth

I want to bring to your attention a threat that is inherent in the emphasis on “safe toys for children” and in the related campaign against so-called violent computer games. I contend that not only do these games provide useful real and simulated experience of the world as it is, but other countries may be way ahead of us in educating their children with dangerous toys thus leading to a threatening and ever-widening "dangerous toys" gap.

What a child learns when they are young stays with them for the rest of their lives. Therefore it is up to us, as mature and experienced parents of these innocent biped mammals to see to it that their education contains the elements that they will need for a healthy and rewarding life, if you call this living.

What are these elements of a proper education? Well certainly there is learning to read and write, learning certain social skills such as not spitting in public, learning to keep themselves relatively clean and tidy, not to chew with their mouth open, that sort of thing. Some would include in this some pillars of a basic education such as the classics of western civilization (Homer, Isaac Newton, Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky) and the basics of managing hedge funds and real estate development. Perhaps not all classes of society really need the latter skills and education should be tailored for the different classes. For example, the rich may have to learn how to manage hedge funds but the poor how to avoid getting bitten by rats or how to find discarded but not completely decayed food to eat so that they do not starve to death, etc.

But all of us, rich or poor, can certainly benefit from knowing that the world is, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it, “a dangerous place”. It is a world filled with things that can drop on you and smash you flat, or people who will shoot you for a dollar, or people who think that they are entitled to distort the political system to get their way, or people who have beliefs that are dangerous to our beliefs. All of these things and more are true. So what benefit is it to educate our children to think that they do not exist? What is the point of waiting until they are adults, or nearly so, to let them in on the secret that they can easily kill themselves and others with that car or that gun? Or to keep from them the knowledge that there are rich and poor in America and that the poor have very little chance of having a decent life or receiving justice? Why keep from them the knowledge that as screwed up as this country is, they should have a look around with their own eyes and see how other countries are doing, some much better and many far worse. Or that people and nations and political groups lie every day both to the public and to themselves, often with tragic or disastrous results.

And that is what the campaign to eliminate dangerous and disturbing toys has set out to do. To hide these brutal facts from our young children out of the misguided notion that being sheltered helps them. Sure it may avoid a few hundred or thousand injuries or deaths, but at what cost? The cost is that our children do not have the first hand experience that they need to understand the world as it is.

Look at how far ahead of us the children of Afghanistan and Iraq are.  In America, misguided parents are horrified that “war toys” are produced and sold. But in Afghanistan, pretty much every boy gets their hands on an AK-47 by the time they are 10 years old and they are not toys. In America, our children do not know what an ammo dump looks like, let alone how to behave around one. But every kid in Afghanistan does. And how many American's have a relative or neighbor who is an internationally wanted terrorist? Precious few, I think.  By the time a boy turns 15 in Afghanistan, he has probably had many years experience smuggling opium over the border and killed at least one enemy of his tribe.   This experience so early in life is priceless.   

We shoot our selves in the foot, so to speak, to think that this pretense of a safe world that we construct for our children helps them or us. It just leads to shock and dismay when our privileged and self-entitled narcissist child has to face the real world. The shock may lead to total collapse and psychological disintegration. That is where this ill-considered policy leads.

But by no means does that mean that we have to start selling war toys to our children. There are other ways to get the ideas across that are more in the areas of industry and manufacturing than in warfare. My favorite is a toy my older brother had and which I loved. It was made in the very early 1960s by Mattel and it was called VAC-U-FORM.

VAC-U-FORM gave a child the ability to create vacuum molded plastic parts at will. It consisted of a very hot heating element, a vacuum pump, a contraption to press things together, sheets of thin plastic as material, and various molds to use as templates. Think of it as a 3D printer ahead of its time.

The smell of the melting plastic issuing obviously dangerous and probably cancer-causing chemicals was the joy of every teenage boy. One could easily damage oneself on the hot heating element, or on the melted plastic before it cooled. Or with exacto blades to chop out the manufactured parts. There were so many ways that a child could get themselves sent to the hospital with an irate and hysterical parent accompanying them.

Now that is the kind of toy that won the cold war. That is the kind of toy that bred tough and realistic Americans who were capable of manufacturing and surviving in this dangerous world. Its a toy that would send parents of today screaming in rage at the borderline-insane cavalier attitude of the toy designers towards safety or the lack thereof, not realizing that these toy designers were just trying to make America that much stronger.

I hope that America will come to its senses and return to these educational toys before it is too late. I could imagine a line of toy drones being used to find and disarm neighborhood land mines, for example. Or toy drones used to find insurgents hiding in the neighborhood during a play guerrilla attack. What fun that would be!

The future has so much promise if we just embrace it.

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Here is a video from the 1960s showing the VAC-U-FORM at work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCvgvWiZNe8

The Wikipedia page on the VAC-U-FORM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vac-u-form

The Nigerian Concept of "Cake"

What is odd about the debate around the concept of “cultural diversity” is that our culture here in America is a melange of bits and pieces of other cultures, mostly but not entirely European, in which we seem to have picked one from column A and two from column B and then declare that we invented it. Regional cuisine, Southern music, the tradition of the Christmas tree, our notions of a fair and just war, and so forth are mash ups of other people's cultures made our own with a few misunderstood regional historical events and a little stuffing for the poor oppressed turkey or great turnip replacement, the pumpkin.

Today I want to advocate that we borrow another cultural concept that I think is very appealing and has a lot of applicability to this great country of ours and which I propose we make our own. This is the Nigerian concept of “cake”.

What a healthy looking birthday cake with depth of field!

Like many countries in the world and in sub-Saharan Africa in particular, there are great extremes in wealth with the vast majority being dirt poor and a very few who are quite rich. But Nigeria is also blessed (or cursed as may be) with great natural resources, such as oil. The wealth generated by this oil is vast and yet most Nigerians are still extremely poor, with no improvement in their lives, no new schools, hospitals, and so forth. So where does all the money go?

Well Nigerians have noticed that nearly all the money goes either to the foreign oil companies or to the offshore personal bank accounts of senior government officials and some of their aides. Very few people in Nigeria benefit from the oil outside the government. There is some employment of local workers, but not much, and they are not paid well. Most of the engineers and managers who work for the oil companies come from outside Nigeria and return to their homes in other countries when their assignment is done.

Not only do the people of Nigeria not see any of this money, in general the Government does not see it either. These offshore bank accounts for Nigerians may have tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, but those are the personal accounts of their government or military officials. Apparently, only a small amount of this money actually goes back to the country in the form of tax or other revenues that might be used on public works projects.

An industrious Nigerian with some cake

The Nigerians calls this vast wealth from oil “cake” as in chocolate cake, or a birthday cake. They are not looking for justice, or a government who is not corrupt and provides real services for their people, or any of those worthy concepts. They may desire those things, but they realize that there is very little chance of ever getting them in Nigeria. At least not the way things have been going for the last few centuries. What they would like is a small part of the cake that is being pumped out of the country.

Being forthright and straightforward people, the Nigerians have come up with a variety of ways to get small pieces of the cake which they figure is at least as much theirs as it is the people who are profiting by it. One way to do this is to get some friends together, rent a rusted-out old ship of some sort, a few hundred empty barrels, punch a hole in one of the pipelines that run alongside the rivers, and voila we have a recipe for instant cake. The oil companies come by in a day or two and patch the hole, leaving the spilled oil where it lies.  Of course the government and the oil companies complain bitterly about oil theft but just who is stealing from whom, I wonder.   In this, energetic and productive fashion, Nigerians are able to make a much better living than digging in the mud with a stick or swatting flies as their government would like them to, and so benefit from the Globalization we hear so much about.

This shows initiative and a positive attitude on the part of the Nigerians.  A true demonstration of the entrepreneurial ideal.  Rather than waiting for someone to come along and "give them a job", they get off their rear ends and collect a little crude oil on their own.   

Now in our country, our government officials also profit on managing the natural resources and economy for the benefit of their rich masters but their fees are much less. In America, the corruption is more discreet as well and are usually channeled through reelection campaign funds and so forth.  The rest of us work for slave wages and although there is a larger middle class than in Nigeria, it doesn't add up to much. And besides, our government is working to reduce the middle class and being quite successful at it. When the Dow average goes up, it is the tiny wealthy elite in this country that benefits. The idea that it is the “retirement funds” that benefit as well is very much an obvious lie from the last century.

This fine concept of cake would have to be adapted to our American way of life of course.  The carved turnip from Africa must become a carved giant gourd here in America, metaphorically speaking.  We all want a piece of cake, but just punching holes in oil pipelines may be appropriate for the colorful native peoples of Africa but would not do for those in the west with our sophistication and finely honed environmental sensibilities.  But I am sure Americans can run with this idea and suitably modify it in a way that does not compromise other values and allows us to deceive ourselves into thinking that we invented the idea.

I hope that Americans will not let foolish pride stand in the way of adopting interesting ideas from other cultures.  If the world can adopt "blue jeans" and "jazz" from America, surely we can benefit from their concept of "cake" and thank the Nigerians for showing the way to a more just and fair world.

An Experiment in Intellectual Property Theft

Warning: the following contains spoilers for Edge of Tomorrow (2014) although they are not terribly revealing ones and nothing that you could not guess from watching any trailer for the film.

The bold, new Internet paradigm has done an amazing thing. It has lifted millions and millions of people above the squalor and poverty of their lives and enabled them to achieve their hearts's desire. To achieve something they always wanted to do, but circumstances held them back. Now, with the power of the Internet they can achieve these lofty goals and become a petty thief, or a scam artist, or a subcontractor to organized crime, or a sexual exploiter of children or a pornographer.

I have often heard it said by leading figures of the glamourous motion picture industry that the Internet is the very center of the crime of intellectual property theft. It is said that no sooner than they release a film but it shows up on the Internet for downloading from Pirate Bay or similar organizations.

So I decided to run a test and see for myself.

The test was as follows. I would pick a specific film in recent release. It had to have been in the theatres for only a few weeks and not in Academy Award season so that there would be no screener DVDs around to make digital copying easier. The film had to be big enough to have normal precautions taken against theft, but would not be so large a hit as to be an incentive for thieves. Finally, it had to be a film I was willing to go see in the theatre so that I could in good conscience see a bootlegged version, comfortable in the knowledge that I would also go to the theatre and give the studios some money.

Although watchable, the bootlegged copy was obviously not as good as a 720P from DVD for example

The film I chose was Edge of Tomorrow (2014), starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt and directed by Doug Liman. This film was released just a few weeks ago and was not doing well by the standard of expectations that this would be the summer blockbuster movie. On the other hand, it sounded unexpectedly entertaining to me, and I loved the trailer.

NB: In the following narrative, I mention some technical details, but I hope I am not encouraging anyone to violate the law and I do not approve in general of violating copyright.

Because you see, to my surprise, it was trivial to get this film. The copy I got was not too great, but it was watchable, and it was easy.

1. I installed a torrent program on my designated victim Windows 7 machine. I expected this machine to possibly be the victim of malware, so if you are following along with me, be sure to make backups and possibly get anything of value off your computer.  The torrent client I chose was “uTorrent” as least likely to have malware installed.

2. I did a Google search for “Edge of Tomorrow Download” and it did not surprise me that I immediately got lots of possible hits.   This did not surprise me because I knew from experience that there is a lot of "cant cheat an honest man" malware sites ready to advantage of the wouldbe thief.  However, one of them seemed plausible to me.   About the fourth or fifth result was one from thepiratebay.se. It had a 1 GB 720p version and it even listed the source (from an Italian version) and the technical characteristics, e.g. CODEC, format profile, color space, stream size, color primaries and so forth.

3. I pointed uTorrent at the “magnet” link on Pirate Bay, and permitted the browser to invoke uTorrent.

4. The transfer began and said it would take about 2.5 hours.

5. I went and did something else and came back in two hours and it was done.

6. I copied the 1 GB file to a Linux computer so that any malware lurking in the mpg would not do much damage.

7. I watched the movie

Although this was very easy and rather convenient to do, to my amazement, there was one downside that was obvious and ultimately bodes well for the studio. The quality was not very good. It reminded me of an Avid workprint. Although the nominal resolution was 720P, in fact the actual information that was presented was far less. And the color had been quantized. I have included some screengrabs courtesy of VLC and you can see for yourself.

Ironically, the deficiencies of the copy were most prevalent in scenes with lots of fast motion and which were dark.  Now it turns out that in this movie, some of the most interesting scenes, or at least climactic scenes, have fast action and a dark palette.   So the result was that this copy acted like a very long trailer for me.  On the one hand, I now know what will happen, but on the other hand I am genuinely motivated to go see a good version of the film in the theatre.  So the studios should not completely despair: there may be some sort of silver lining to this cloud.

One thing became very clear to me.   Emily Blunt doing pushups is the new sex icon as far as I am concerned.   With a great ethnic name for her character, Rita Vrataski, which is some sort of faux-Polish made up word, and a sexist nom-de-guerre of "Full Metal Bitch", there was genuine character development as the Cruise character fell in love with her after fighting the aliens with her and dying hundreds if not thousands of times.  Watching her die, bravely and heroically, each time.  Always to wake up in the morning and have to introduce himself to her while she is training for the next-day airborne assault.  Her first words are not very friendly because of course due to the time loop she does not know who he is. By the end of the film we realize that the Cruise character, a nebbish advertising guy in uniform, is relieved to be assaulted by her in the morning because it means she is still alive, in a time-loop sort of way.

So now I am a little perplexed.  How can the Pirate Bay site continue to exist?   How can these web sites just publicly say that they have this film and actually do?  I would be less surprised if they hid their activities a little better, e.g. maybe you had to know that Edge of Tomorrow had to be spelled EgDe fo TmOrOrw or something, but no.  Its just right there hanging and waiting to be harvested.

Emily doing her pushup / yoga mashup and displaying (a bird watching term)

I have become very fond of Emily Blunt because of this movie.

So in conclusion, however it is that people are able to make bad copies so early in release (I can guess but it is sheer speculation on my part), it is true at least in this case that a copy was available for download within a few weeks of release.   So the studios are not wrong in saying that there is an issue here.

Edge of Tomorrow on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1631867/

Russians Discover Chinese Home Appliances Designed for Crime

We are told to accept Globalization as inevitable and beneficial. Just trust us, says Congress, as they pass free trade act after free trade act, and pass exemptions to polluting transport companies to lower costs for container ships. It may be that most Americans are impoverished in the short run, says Congress, perhaps for the first 50 or 100 years, and are thrown out in the street giving up all hope of having a home or family, but ultimately no doubt Globalization will benefit all Americans and not just the rich, they promise. Really.  One day.

But what if all those cheap devices that flood our shores contain Trojan Horses that are secretly working for our destruction? Sound far fetched? Maybe not.

We believe that Americans are in denial about the extent of cybercrime and cyber-espionage that is going on in the world. Russia in particular seems to be the home of cybercrime whereas China seems to be home of cyber-espionage, although all countries dabble in all the black arts, perhaps.

Many Americans have come to rely upon their home appliances.  What could be more trustworthy than a coffee maker that helps us wake up in the morning?  Or a blow dryer that dries our hair?  What about a blender or food processor?   We rely on these instruments of modern convenience and it is inconceivable that these items could be turned against us.   They are as American as Apple Pie even if they are no longer made in America in order to increase the profits of the wealthy.

Now something has happened that may yet wake Americans out of their complacency, and it comes, ironically from the Russians. They have been discovering for some time covert cyber penetration devices in home appliances manufactured by that supposedly "friend of cheap manufacturing", the People's Republic of China, and they have gone public with this shocking news just recently.

Home appliances of all types including irons, blenders and even the beloved toaster oven have been found kitted out with the most devious of devices, including and especially WIFI hardware designed to penetrate any unsecured WIFI within 600 feet or so of the appliance. Once such a WIFI is found, the innocent-looking home appliance transforms itself into a network-based spy (or "Snowden" as they are known these days) and tries to penetrate any computer it can find on the local network in order to insert viruses (virii?) into the defenseless computers. Of course these home appliances phone home to their masters in Beijing as well.

Are these innocent looking home appliances in fact criminal devices from the East?

The Russians believe that the primary purpose of these devices is to find and make robot slaves for Spam delivery, but we don't buy that. The Chinese are guilty of the largest espionage program in history in their attacks against the United States and have totally raped this country of both military and industrial intellectual property. The theft is vast, persistent and hostile and we are just now starting to calculate the costs, billions of dollars, of changing various military-related apparatus (e.g. electronic warfare) based on the knowledge of this theft. I propose that countries only do this level of espionage if they believe that they are going to war.

Now on top of the previous attacks, we learn of the Russians under attack by home electric appliances. Are Americans also under attack in the same manner? How can we tell? I call on the President and Congress to pass a Homeland Appliance Defense Act and investigate this potential threat to our freedom at once.

For one article on this emerging crisis, see here.

Sexual Perversity in Blog Posts or What I Have Learned from Blog Statistics

One of the reasons for writing GlobalWahrman is to get first hand experience about what is involved in writing a blog. As part of that I am writing various meta-posts, posts about the writing of the blog, from time to time.

This blog meta-post discusses some of what I have learned about who reads my blog and what that says about the blogging process, at least in my case. There are some surprises here for me, but mostly what I have discovered is both encouraging and even somewhat positive.

I know its hard to believe, coming from me, but its true, a lot of what I say below is along the lines of "hard work is rewarded".

1. The more energy I put into the blog, the more the readership increases. In other words, I can increase readership, in both the short and medium term, by putting more energy into the blog on a regular basis. The half life of any improvement is several weeks, perhaps.  (For this discussion, short term changes in readership is measured in days, medium term in weeks, and long term in months).

2. Inversely, when I am not contributing actively to the blog, this is clearly reflected in the statistics particularly in short term hits, but also in the medium and long terms but more slowly.

3. There is also a fine art in increasing readership on top of the above "hard work is rewarded" meme, and that involves how one structures posts to be found by search engines and the extent to which I promote some of the posts in social media. If the goal of this blog was to demonstrate a large readership, there is a vast number of details and things that one can do to help people find the blog that are ethical. There are also unethical ones, which lots of people use but I find obnoxious.

4. Some posts become perennial favorites and generate a large percentage of the total usage. It is interesting and surprising to see which ones these are. Some may be by accident (e.g. "Bin Laden" in the title getting a hit on a search engine) but some are not. Some of my favorite posts are completely ignored.

5. The theory that a blog has to reach a critical mass of content before it finds its stable readership is not contradicted by the data. I figure I am roughly two years at least from basic critical mass. I think that there is some luck involved here as well.  In other words, a post may have to go viral in order to introduce the blog to a larger group of people, some of whom may become regular or occasional readers.   I also suspect that critical mass will require paying serious attention to the issues discussed in point 3 above.   Global Wahrman is intended to be eclectic, whatever its long term readership may be, it is unlikely to be a mass market blog.

6. Understanding the statistics requires work. They are not well documented and there are default options that need to be changed to get rational numbers. Basically all defaults are set to generate the largest possible numbers, e.g. counting your own page hits on your website and counting someone reading 10 pages as 10 different users.  One must penetrate the incredibly badly documented blogspot/blogger infrastructure and change the settings or the numbers will just be inflated or wrong.

7. Underlying all statistics is a constant murmer of fraud and crime from Eastern Europe, Russia, China and India. Occassionally also Brazil. In other words, the BRIC countries. There is some theory in the blog forums that what the criminals are doing is getting paid for every page hit that they stimulate on certain web sites. Why anyone would pay them for that I do not know, but that is the theory.

8. The post about "repressed lust of CIA analysts" generated the most traffic on a single day in the history of Global Wahrman.  In other words, "sex sells" just as we have been told.

The Uses of Snowden: The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights

When Ed Snowden, our pissy and so self-righteous Defender of the Faith and of All Truth, who Sees the Higher Path and knows What is Right when none of his thousands of colleagues do, who knows what MUST be done to save America when all around him everyone else is Corrupted by Mammon or one of the other Seven Princes of Hell, when this icon of moral and ethical perfection had his passport pulled by the State Department (surprise!!) he complained that the USA was violating a clause of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and inhibiting his right to travel internationally and to seek asylum.

Now that is interesting, I thought to myself. One more time, Snowden may have brought to our attention some topic of merit that is, apparently, separate from the national security ones on which his reputation ultimately depends.

What is the "UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights" anyway, where did it come from, and what does it all mean?

It was written right after WW II and at the very dawn of the United Nations.  The head of the committee that wrote it was none other than Eleanor Roosevelt, former first lady of the United States.  You can read all about it at the link I provide below.   The key to understanding this Declaration is to understand, somehow, that WW II was much worse than you think it was and that people, some people at least, were idealistic about a new beginning when the war ended.  And so, this international committee of idealists and intellectuals put together a short list of things that "would be nice".

Wouldn't it be nice if everyone could be educated?  Yes.  Wouldn't it be nice if there could be freedom of religion?  Sure.   Wouldn't it be nice if people could express their beliefs freely, and travel wherever they wanted, and made a living that allowed them to realize their potential and not be thrown in jail without due cause?  Absolutely!  And so forth, and so on.  

Here is what it says:

Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

My goodness, that is nice.  Constantly in mind!  Shall Strive by Teaching!  Progressive Measures!

Forgive me for being a little cynical here but we are talking about 1948 or so: Stalin is wiping out entire minority groups, people are being thrown out of windows in Czechoslovakia, Mao is demonstrating what he meant by "all power comes out of the barrel of a gun", the colonial empires of various western empires are meeting the post-WW 2 anti-colonial movements of S.E. Asia and Africa, and these fluffy liberals are making Universal Declarations of Human Rights.

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is about 2.5 typewritten pages long, and is very easy to read. It is at: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

Now that you have read it, ask yourself how many of these have been violated by this country, the United States of America, in letter or in spirit, at least occasionally?

Just off the top of my head I can make arguments that we are or have been in violation of Articles 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11.1, 12, 13.1 and 13.2, 14.1, 15.2, 16.1, 17.2, 21.1, 21.2 and 21.3, 23.1, 23.2, 23.3 and 23.4, 25.1, 26.1, 26.3 and I can make a case for a few of the others as well.

I doubt that there is a country on earth that could live up to these standards if they are interpreted as they are probably meant to be interpreted. So what is this anyway? Is it treaty? Is it law? Is it international law? It is none of these things.  In the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, Chairperson of the UN Commission on Human Rights, when the declaration was being drafted and when it was introduced to the General Assembly to be adopted:

In giving our approval to the declaration today, it is of primary importance that we keep clearly in mind the basic character of the document. It is not a treaty; it is not an international agreement. It is not and does not purport to be a statement of law or of legal obligation. It is a declaration of basic principles of human rights and freedoms, to be stamped with the approval of the General Assembly by formal vote of its members, and to serve as a common standard of achievement for all peoples of all nations.

In fact, the impact of the Declaration and its legal status many years later makes more interesting reading than the declaration itself. Its a complicated tangle but it can be said that the Declaration has in fact had some influence, presumably positive influence, in many situations internationally over the years. Whether this influence has affected peoples' lives or whether it is in words and paper only, I couldn't tell you.

But I can tell you, that no country on this planet would believe that this Declaration prevented them from trying to bring into custody someone they considered a criminal, and that therefore Snowden accusing the US of being in violation of this Declaration is somewhere between naive and comical.

Which is how I think history will judge Snowden overall.

Naive, very naive.

The Uses of Snowden: Passports are Given and Passports are Taken Away

[revised 8/27/2013]

One commonly held theory is that Snowden is useful for stimulating dialog and discussion in America on a variety of topics, and that this process of discussion is valuable independent of whether or not Snowden is actually the traitor that he wants to be or is merely guilty of narcissistic self-delusion.

For a quick review of Narcissistic Personality Disorder see here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder

But whether actual traitor or merely a self-proclaimed martyr, his public travel dysfunction has stirred up at least three notable topics, none of them particularly to do with national security or surveillance. The topics are

1. What is a Passport and when can it be revoked ?

2. How does the rest of the world see our death penalty and use of torture ?

3. What is the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and what does it mean?

We will take this one piece at a time. First, the Passport.

1. The Passport

When Snowden's passport was revoked, righteous indignation spewed from the usual sources accusing the US Government of doing something illegal or immoral. So what is a passport and do you have a right to one? A passport is three things, two of them formal and one of them implied.   It is first identity paperwork and second a request that courtesy be shown the holder of the passport when travelling in another country.    By convention and by treaty it has accrued a third meaning, which is the de facto right to travel internationally at all.  The passport has a long history but as we know it in its modern incarnation it came into existence during WWI in order to control the passage of people of various nationalities across borders in Europe.  This specific need for border control evolved into the right to travel internationally in general.  No passport or diplomatic papers of some sort meant no international travel, for the most part.

The most famous fictional "letter of transit" for Victor Laszlo travelling through Casablanca

As it is currently conceived of, a passport is issued by a country's foreign service, in this case our Department of State, at their discretion and it may be revoked at their discretion. In our country, failure to pay child support is cause to revoke someone's passport, even if that passport is required for them to make a living, or to exercise any of their other interests or rights to travel. It can be pulled without recourse to law and is so pulled every day of the week in this country. So why shouldn't they pull the passport of someone who claims to be violating American law and releasing classified information ?

Furthermore, not having a passport is not a barrier to travel if another country wishes you to visit them.  Those countries can issue one of several types of diplomatic documents (usually temporary) that will enable someone without a passport to travel to them. They do it all the time, when they want to. In the case of Snowden, I guess they didn't want to.  (Of course a little pressure on them by our Government might have been applied behind the scenes, do you suppose?)

If Americans wish to change the process by which a passport can be revoked and the rules involving who can have a passport and what their rights are, I am all for it. But that would be a major change and would probably require the cooperation of congress and the courts.

But maybe a better question is why a "government" is necessary to have a passport at all?   How many people who are alive today chose the government they live under?   Is it perhaps 1% of the people?   I certainly did not choose this oppressive government that protects the rich and humiliates the poor. Why should governments have such control over international travel at all beyond what they permit at their own borders?

Recall, a passport is identity and a request for courtesy, combined with an implied third meaning: which is the right to travel internationally.   Why not have another, presumably international, body, certify the identity of a person and negotiate by treaty (1) the right to travel?  Maybe the UN could do this and actually be good for something beyond getting their diplomats immunity from traffic tickets in NYC. 

In parts II and III we will go over how the world sees our death penalty and how that affects the Snowden matter and then review the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Snowden has accused the US of being in violation of. He is right, by the way, we are. They all are. All countries are.

Just wait until you read this thing.

______________________________________________

1. So far as I know treaties are made by sovereign countries and their descendants (e.g. when Soviet Russia picked up the treaties of Imperial Russia).   So is the UN allowed to make treaties of this type? What is funny about this question is that I do not have a clue what the answer is, but I suspect the answer is "its complicated".

Designing a Latin Motto for Your New Crime Organization

Most American's have realized by now that if they are on the outside of the vast wealth in this country, that the only way to change that situation is through the time-honored American tradition of crime.  All great fortunes in this country started with a crime or crimes, and people are not being metaphorical when they say that. (3)

But if you are going to have a criminal organization, particularly an international criminal organization, then you are going to have to have a motto to inspire your members, and that motto has to be in Latin.  There are strict rules about such things: from Annuit Coeptus to Semper Fidelis to In Hoc Signo Vinces, (1)  our mottos in the West are required to be in Latin even for criminals.

Since our educational system has for years fallen into decadence and shame and failed to teach everyone how to read and write Latin, it is permissible, under the circumstances to use certain Internet-based crutches, such as the recent Google Tranlate English->Latin and Latin->English service.

You may find this useful capability here:  http://translate.google.com/#en/la/

We all know that the United States has mottos designed by Freemasons under the control of the Illuminati, hence the mottos Annuit Coeptus and Novus Ordo Seclorum.   Its fun to have people deny that there was Freemason influence in the creation of this country and show them the Great Seal of the United States.

One interpretation of the "Eye in the Pyramid" is that the Egyptians built the Pyramids with sacred knowledge, but that knowledge came directly from Satan.   

Some of our most notable mottos / slogans are in fact fictional, including my favorite from Edgar Allen Poe's A Cask of Amontillado.  In this short story our hero, Montresor, lures his enemy into a dungeon, secures him with chains, and imprisons him up behind a wall of bricks to leave him to die of starvation.  The motto of the Montresor family is Neme Me Impune Lacessit or "none may attack me with impunity".    (2)

So now what would constitute a good Latin motto for a crime organization, whether international or local?   Presumably the motto would indicate either a lofty goal, or an act of revenge, or in some way indicate what made our criminal group a center of excellence, e.g. the very best bank robbers, the very best despoilers of virgins, the best at repressing justice hand-in-hand with the politicians, that sort of thing.   In the case of organizations rising up from oppression, one could imagine an oddly paranoid phrase as a contender, and I included one below.

To inspire complete and efficient vengeance, perhaps

     Debent Omnes Morimur  -- They Must All Die

     Occidite Eos Celeriter  --  Kill Them Quickly


To inspire discipline and accuracy among our members, we might have

    Stultus Est Errare  --  To Err is Stupid    

   
To remind us what our goals are, consider

    Pecunia et Potentia  --  Money and Power

    Carpe Pecuniam  --  Seize the Money

    Nisi Mentis Inops, Pauper Est  --  Only an Idiot is Poor

    Furantur a Divitibus  --  Steal From the Rich


Finally, my favorite, for those of us with low self-esteem

    Omnes Me Oderunt  --  They All Hate Me


Here are a few thoughts on the technicalities of using Google English / Latin / English translator. Remember that Latin is an inflected language (defined in a moment) and English has lost most of its inflections.   By inflected, linguists mean that the form of the word changes depending on its use in a sentence, and specifically, the end(ing) of the word changes.  In English, I may call someone stupid, and stupid bacially has one form.  But in Latin, it may have six forms, depending on its uses.   I am fucked, he is fucked, you are fucked, we are fucked and so forth, has one ending in English but would have six in Latin.  Why should you care?

Because in using the English to Latin translator, giving it a few words, a short phrase, is much better than giving it a single word, e.g. a verb.  "They are stupid and must die" is much better than "Stupid. Die" because of how the languages work.

I hope that this has inspired you to design a motto for your new career in crime and I look forward to reading some of your efforts in this area.

____________________________________

Notes:

1. They mean "he knows and approves", "always faithful" and "by this sign you shall conquer" respectively.

2. You can find this story here on the Internet, below.  "For the love of God, Montresor! Yes, for the love of God."

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/POE/cask.html

3. Real honest to gosh crime is meant here.   You know, guys with guns, that sort of thing.  But with good politicians and friends in high places to make it all look good and cover it up later.  You know, like the Railroads, or the Trusts or the slave labor (Chinese and Irish) use to build the railroads and so forth.

The Taste of Oil is in the Drinking

This is a comment to a news article from a Nigerian newspaper.   It is a wonderful, sarcastic, well written short story about oil corruption in Nigeria.    

The story may be written by someone named Darlington Ehondor.  It says it is.  I have no idea if this is a known person in Nigeria, a known writer, or an anonymous critic, or what.   He does not name names below when he accuses everyone of corruption, so maybe this is not so dangerous to do.

I particularly like the idiom of the "Nigerian Cake", that Nigeria is seen by its people as a big cake that everyone can and should take a slice of.  

The original is a comment at the bottom of this article:
http://www.vanguardngr.com/2012/07/only-three-million-barrels-stolen/


Darlington_Ehondor • 10 months ago THE TASTE OF OIL IS IN THE DRINKING

A lot of people wonder why the oil sector is so pathologically notorious for sweet-toothed scams and mouth-watering scandals. I used to wonder myself, and my wife wouldn’t stop gawking at the TV each time a new kettle of rotten oil bubbled over and covered our television screen in blinding mist. But when the Nollywoodesque Lawan-Otedola circus show exploded into a national pastime, I decided to find out exactly what made oil tick. What I discovered will make you drool and dry with desire.

“Can I taste some oil?” I asked Jack Rider, managing director of Rivers Of Oil In Nigeria (or ROOIN), a foreign oil prospecting company, which specializes in drilling and draining crude somewhere in Bayelsa State.

He said, “I should be glad to give you a glass or two of Bonny Light. It’s the best blend there is – better than anything the Saudis and the Venezuelans have on the market. Senators and their SUVs drink that a lot.”

I was excited at the prospect.

So he flew me on his company’s helicopter to its off-shore oil rig off the Atlantic Ocean. As soon as we touched down on the helipad, I was instantly overwhelmed by the strong, enveloping smell of raw oil, which made me feel groggy, a near feeling of drunkenness. In my mind, I reasoned that, if the smell of oil could muster such an inebriating high, then the taste of it must be in the drinking, awesomely over-powering.

Amid the deafening hums and hollering of machines and clock-working engines and sea breeze, I yelled out to Rider, “I am feeling like I just stepped out of a beer parlour! Why is that?!!”

“It’s the smell of oil! No one comes here without tipping over with the kind of psychoactive reaction you are experiencing at the moment, as a result of stepping on this rig. But wait until you taste the taste of oil.”

Before I knew it, Rider was handing me a huge transparent mug, and I stared with amazement at its thick black content. The strong aroma hit me so hard my legs wobbled a few seconds.

“Drink,” Rider said.

I took a sip and waited for it to take effect on my taste buds. Its smoothness on my tongue felt like velvet. When Rider looked away at a particularly noisy machine, I pretended to swallow.

I said, “It tastes like Wall’s ice cream. Now I know why they call it ‘sweet crude’.”

“It’s the same reason politicians and business people are losing their minds and pointing accusing fingers at each other over it. I tell you something, my friend, oil is an addictive drug. Once you taste it, you never want to leave it. People go into public service in your country because it is about the only place you can taste oil to your heart’s content. For them, it’s a contagious disease with serial infestations. You won’t believe how much they thirst for oil.”

I asked Rider, “How many politicians have come here to taste your brand of oil?”

“They don’t just taste, they cart it off in barrels and ship-loads and give some to their friends.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“If you don’t believe me, then who will you believe – the guys at the NNPC, who are the chief poisoners in the oil-drinking business?”

I interjected with disgust, “The guys at the NNPC are supposed to protect Nigerian oil from those plundering and pillaging it.”

“Well, they are up to their eyes in the plundering and pillaging business themselves. Of course, they work hand and foot with the political fat cats. ”

I said, “I don’t expect you to name names, but would that include legislators and people in the executive arm of government?”

“The people in the hallowed dome and those on the Rock. They troop in here regularly like termites and we have to fill their orders, which they write off by sneaking them into the national budget.”

Rider suddenly and instinctively motioned me over to a corner of the rig and I was sub-consciously amazed to find a stack of barrels with my name written on them in Bodoni bold. I asked him, “Whose are those?”

“As you can see, they are yours, Sir – my personal gift to you. Those barrels are your share of the proverbial national cake, your once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to strike it rich. Or don’t you want them? You might not get another chance. There is a room-full of legislators lining up to load them off.”

“Are you bribing me?”

“Hell, no! I am giving you oil to whet your soil so you don’t write any of what you’ve seen and heard here, or the politicians are going to confiscate our license and turn it over to our rivals over there in Prominent Petroleum, who have been working hard to match us bribe-barrel-for-bribe-barrel in the competition for the hearts and minds of politicians in hallowed places.”

“I can’t take that home! My wife has petro-phobia, a convulsive fear of petroleum. She can only stand the smell of cooking oil. Thanks, but no, thanks.”

He said, “Politicians don’t take their oil home – only the spoils of oil, the cold hard cash. For their wives, it is life’s elixir. Or why else do you think Patience Jonathan goes to Dubai every day?”

But I wanted to know something else, so I asked the managing director, “What if a politician doesn’t know where to sell the bribe oil you give him and he threatens to fry your butt in a deep fat fryer?”

“We convert his oil to cash, and we’re talking tons and oodles and gazillions of dollars, pounds, yens, and even yuans, as the Chinese have begun to swim in these oily waters increasingly. It’s our way of thanking the politicians for their magnanimity.”

“How do the politicians thank you for thanking them?”

“They double the price of petroleum products and blame it all on the global economic recession. That way, we are shielded behind a formidable wall of officialdom.”

“You mean you are helping to ruin the Nigerian economy?”

Rider was furious. He blared ferociously, “Just because my company’s acronym is ROOIN doesn’t mean that we are the ones tumbling your economy into the gutters.”

I said, “You are not worried about the environmental damage then. Look at these waters, no one can fish or swim in them anymore. The oil in the soil eats up our toil, and everywhere is the reek of sleek. What do you say about that?”

The oil company owner put in a defence. He said, “Never mind the cliché, but who ever made an omelette without cracking a few eggs? Environmental costs come with the crude business. Without it, we wouldn’t be in business. We would roll over and evaporate.”

“You are being insensitive to those whose livelihoods depend on these waters.”

“Who says we aren’t sensitive to their plight? The politicians just won’t let us do something about it because the money will come out of their bribes, and nobody wants to go home with chicken change. And, by the way, it’s not like we are the only ones damaging the environment.”

“Who else is?”

Rider said, “The pipeline raiders, who puncture holes in oil pipes in the bushes of the Niger-Delta and cart off crude in buckets and wheelbarrows. They are the ones you should be honey-punching with your jibes, not us who do honest work by drilling legally and legitimately.”

I said, “The pipeline raiders work for the politicians.”

“How did you know that?”

“I heard it from Zainab, who is a girlfriend to Senator Homeward Bound, who she says let it slip out during a particularly talkative orgasmic frenzy in a seedy motel the other night.”

Crime and Punishment: Nigerian Oil Theft

We are proud to initiate a new topic here on Global Wahrman: Criminal Activities. We hope to be a vital stop on your internet review of crime opportunities and showcase both new opportunities for crime, as well as older approaches revitalized by new technologies, and many other related topics associated with the fast moving worlds of crime.

In today's modern world, with so many people disenfranchised and impoverished by our Government's policies, designed as they are to enrich the few at the expense of the many, we believe that crime is a growth industry and that it embodies the spirit of entrepreneurial activity that America stands for.   Many of our most famous Americans have been criminals, from Carnegie to Morgan, from Astor to Mellon.  Its as American as apple pie.   The trick is to be successful enough to buy your way out of whatever trouble your entrepreneurial activities have gotten you into.

Art fraud, oil theft, poker games, money laundering, cybercrime and government bailouts, all these crimes and more will be covered in future posts.

Today we begin our series with an article on Phys.Org about Nigerian Oil Theft. Nigeria has the unusual advantage of both vast mineral wealth, in this case oil, with an incredibly poor population, combined with a government which is considered one of the most corrupt and incompetent in the world. The government and the military of Nigeria have enriched themselves at the people's expense, which is what all government's do, but Nigeria's has been extraordinarily good at it. This particular problem started when vast oil reserves were proven to exist in Nigerian territory. Could this opportunity be used to both destroy the environment, further corruption, and yet completely fail to improve the life of the people of Nigeria? The Government of Nigeria stepped up to the challenge, and worked with Shell Oil to see to it that the oil was exploited in a way that helped only a few.

An oil thief caught in the very act of committing a crime! 

The problem comes from those plucky little people, trying to find a way to make a living, who, by stealing tiny amounts of this oil, also cause environmental problems. "Its all the poor people's fault," said Shell Oil executive Rancid "Randy" Smerlow. "We have worked very hard to steal the oil and make a lot of money which we use to destroy the environment globally and corrupt local officials, but its these damn poor people who are stealing oil, they cause all the environmental damage! Blame them!"

Of course this brings up the much larger issues of "big crime" vs "little crime". In America, there is no issue. We always favor big crime. But this is less clear in other parts of the world and we will explore this cultural diversity in depth in future articles on Global Wahrman.

Read the article on "Nigeria Oil Theft Soars to Feed Underground Industry" below and be sure to click on the links at the bottom of the article.

http://phys.org/news/2013-04-nigerian-oil-theft-soars-underground.html

or see:

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/50466485/ns/us_news-environment/t/nigerias-oil-thieves-say-government-leaves-them-no-choice/#.UXSW-qLZ4W4

or

http://www.english.rfi.fr/africa/20121120-nigeria-struggles-stop-billion-dollar-oil-theft