Secret Cables of the Comintern

Those of you who aspire to be a faithful student of the cold war will be pleased to hear about a fabulous online resource, the Journal of Intelligence and Security, apparently published by Taylor Francis. The archive is online and I think that by jumping through hoops one can get a certain number of articles for free.

But even if you do not read the journal articles themselves, they make available their book reviews of the current literature and I have found that very useful as a guide or index into subjects.

In particular they review a new book that has resulted from the brief period when certain archives of the Comintern of the former USSR were public. One result of that openness is a collection of secret cables from this organization, the Communist International, sometimes also known as the Third International, which was the organization that worked for Communist revolution in the world.

Our reviewer has something amusing to say about revisionist history in the 1970s and 1980s when it was discovered to the horror of many in this country that the accusation of Soviet control of the American Communist Party and the work of various people such as Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs was not merely right wing paranoid conspiracy theories but were based in fact.

Here is an excerpt from that review.

You can read the full review here:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02684527.2014.952933

A Sympathy App

What I need is an app that gives me sympathy when I am sick with the flu. My friends can not be counted on for that.  They are too busy managing their trust funds and flying to Europe or China first class.  They think that just because I was not tortured in the Congo that I should be grateful. Its good to know who your friends are.

I can feel sorry for myself better than anyone else I know.

When I get my new smartphone I plan to write an app that gives me (and others) sympathy. We all need a little sympathy now and then, even if we have not been tortured in Kinhasa.

Secret Intelligence Appreciation Day Part 1

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Please join me in calling on our Government to declare “Secret Intelligence Appreciation Day”, a day on which we pay homage to our selfless public servants sneaking around on our behalf. On this special day we also work to educate our woefully ignorant masses about the nuances and aesthetics of secret intelligence.

More than any time since the late, lamented Cold War passed away, ordinary people are discussing a seemingly endless stream of revelations about secret intelligence, secret missions, and special operations. It has become a topic of hipster parties and a test of faith among people who are sensitive to the shifting trends of what opinions are required in polite society. “Did you hear?” they say, “Did you hear that America actually *spied* on someone and then they used drones! Oh my God!”

I listen and read these discussions and shake my head with dismay at the primitive and je jeune aesthetics and misinformation with which the self-appointed elite respond to the latest breathless disclosures whether by a would-be whistle blower, or a superannuated Vietnam era counterrevolutionary, by Anonymous or someone pretending to be Anonymous, by Wikileaks or yes by everyone's favorite, Ed Snowden, the little spy who couldnt stop.

Instead of complaining they should be happy and feel blessed to live in an era where we are privileged to know such things because historically this is quite rare. And I have wondered if whether the expressions of outrage comes in part from a lack of aesthetic training in this area. People have to study to understand Mahler, perhaps they should have to expect to study to understand the Berlin Tunnel.

So here at Global Wahrman, I propose to lead a modest seminar from time to time in “special intelligence appreciation” so that you the reader can heighten your knowledge of these arcane matters and appreciate them for what they are and what they are not.

Unless of course you know all this stuff already, which many of you do.

First a note on sources and controversies. Many of you know that I hold rather eclectic opinions on some matters; opinions that are outside the mainstream. To the best of my knowledge that will not be the case here. The intent here is to go over some very uncontroversial general principles, that I hope, and with sincere good faith, are pretty much just true. There is always nuance of course, and “all generalizations are wrong” and we will try to point these out as we go along. On the other hand, when I say something like “in my humble opinion” or “it is my speculation” feel free to laugh because that is just me guessing.

I am no great scholar to know these things, I am just a layman who has an interest and who reads a lot. And if you are interested in these matters then you can know this stuff as well.

First we go over the boring principles, then we get to the more fun ones.

In the following, IC stands for Intelligence Community which is a blanket term used to refer to the 17 different independent agencies of the US Government responsible for intelligence matters. POTUS stands for President of the United States.  CONUS stands for Continental United States, which means the 48 states not including Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, etc. 

1. Is it legal for the US Government to keep secrets from the American people?

2. Is it legal for the US Government to keep secrets from the US Congress?

3. Is it legal for the IC to break the law?

4. Why do we have so many different agencies?

5. Are all of these agencies a part of the Department of Defense / Pentagon?

6. Does the CIA / NSA go around killing people?

7. Why do we spy on our allies?

8. Why do we do spend all this money and do these sort of things? What about love?

9. How do we know about any of these things at all?

(and now a little more fun)

10. I hear that George Bush was warned about 911 and did nothing. 

11. What happens when a secret intelligence project is leaked.

12. I read that so and so is moving to Germany so that the NSA cant spy on them. 

13. When such-and-such project was leaked, the learker said it was illegal, was it?

14. Why is the government so intent on prosecuting Ed Snowden? 

15. Is it true that drones kill civilians?

(and even more)

16. How can I believe anything they say. How do I know the POTUS isnt lying about something?

17. Why dont the various agencies of the IC work together better?

18. Arent they really hiding a secret plot to kill Americans just like I see in the movies.

19.  Why doesnt Congress do something to stop these horrible activities?

(and finally, my opinions about ... )

20. Seymore Hirsch.

21. Glenn Greenwalt, Laura Poitras, Wikileaks.

So, here we go!

Continued in Part 2....

The Congo, The War in Africa, the Criminality of Corporations

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With this post we are beginning a new feature on Global Wahrman, a multi-topic reading list of books that represent some deep background for my readers in areas that I think are at the very least interesting, and in a few cases maybe even important as a modern citizen of our crumbling civilization to know.

We start with the great title of Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Stearns

http://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Glory-Monsters-Collapse-Africa/dp/1610391071

If you are like me, you are dimly aware that there is a country called the Congo in Africa and that bad things have happened there in the past as well as the present. But if you are like me, you know very little about what the current situation is and whether it is better, worse, indifferent, what the prospects for them are, how we can help, whether or not we should help and a host of other issues.

Jason Stearns lived in Congo for many years and interviewed many of the protagonists or antagonists of his book and so describes the history of from about 1996 on in a very engaging way. I simply was not aware of this war and its relationship to the genocide in Rwanda, not to mention the role of other countries in Africa, humanitarian organizations, rebel groups, ethnic groups, and history of all sorts.

It also brings up a very interesting problem which I was aware existed but not to the extent. Contrary to what many people believe, the problems in Congo do not come from Western lust for their great mineral wealth, says Stearns. But what is true is that the various wars are financed in large part by various countries and groups occupying a part of former Congo-infrastructure and making deals with Western companies to get the minerals out to the market. Thus Rwanda occupied a part of Congo with certain types of mines and made deals for the minerals there. In the process of occupying that part of Congo and arranging this financial deal, the Rwanda Army was guilty of various massacres in retribution for resistance activity in the area. We are talking about a thousand people murdered in cold blood and other incidents.

The point of mentioning this tiny detail on a much larger tragedy is that in general we have no sanctions against companies that make deals of this type and thus end up financing groups that are committing atrocities or grossly violated the human rights of their workers, e.g. when that labor is nothing more than abused slave labor. The point is that it is up to us to change the law so that companies are held liable in both criminal and civil courts for their support of groups that commit these crimes. I think it is OK for us to spend a little extra for our copper or our capacitors in return for not using slave labor.

Have I over simplified the situation? Yes, no doubt I have. So I encourage you to read this book which goes into the context of a small number of these situations and then go on from there to study the issue in more detail than Stearns can go into.

One thing I am sure of, none of these companies are innocent. They are very aware the circumstances under which these minerals are produced and, like so many other companies of our modern Globalized society, are perfectly happy to see people be slaughtered in cold blood and killed in labor gangs if it makes them a fast buck.

By failing to criminalize this behavior we tacitly support it and thus are also, in part, responsible.

Computer Sciences Corporation Makes A Fast Buck by Betraying Country

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This story today about greed and stupidity features CSC, the Computer Sciences Corporation, a very well known and very large government contractor on important security projects. What you need to know going in is that there is zero possibility that CSC was unaware of what a gross violation not only of law but of trust that the government has, or had, in them by doing what they did.  What did they do?

CSC and another company was hired to engineer an important secure communications system at the Pentagon. A whistleblower revealed that the two companies had subcontracted out a significant part of that project to Russian programmers in Moscow which is not only a direct violation of the letter and spirit of their contract but incredibly stupid as well.

Of course they did this for the best reason that all companies, from Volkswagon to Exxon, violate the law: to make a fast buck at the expense of the people they claim to be working for.

And furthermore, the top executives will probably use the "Volkswagon Defense":, that is, if anyone asks them why they did it, they will no doubt say that they didn't know, and that "engineers" had done it.  That is why we pay these executives 10s of millions a year in salary, bonuses and termination packages, to come up with stupid shit like that.

In this case, it is known that there have been security breaches because of this immense stupidity, at least one virus inserted by the Russians, and who knows how many more, but are the companies punished?

Not really.

The two companies have not admitted to their flagrant violation of law, they have paid a trivial penalty that would not cover even a few pennies of the real costs, and it is now up to the craven and weak Department of Justice to file criminal charges if they dare. But the DOJ never files criminal charges against major US Companies, that would violate every principle that the DOJ stands for which is to protect and exalt the rich.

So one more time we have an example where the so-called free market, e.g. naked greed, violates any and every principle or morality that they claim to uphold.

Good going CSC.

This story is not being covered by the mainstream press as it uses too many big words and probably would not sell as many newspapers, or web clicks, but you can read about it here:

http://intelnews.org/2015/11/12/01-1809/

The US Government should immediately cancel all contracts with CSC and investigate to see in what other ways this criminal organization has violated the trust we had in them.

The Computer Sciences Corporation can be found here.  Their web page gives no indication of to what extent they are a defense contractor.  

http://www.csc.com/

Never Mind the Whining

One side effect of the cavalier medical system available to the citizen with ADHD is that he or she will be required to go without medication for an unknown period of time on an irregular schedule. For those of you who know better and know that it must be the fault of the patient, you are very sincerely advised to get this problem and try to solve it without money. You are invited. I have been managing this for about 30 years and I assure you what I tell you is true. You will be expected to go without medication.

And when that happens, there will be or rather, there may be, a variety of transitory mood states.

I inflicted one of these states on my friends on Facebook and my blog in the last few days.  I am very sorry and I hope you will accept my apology.

When I go off medication, then various anxiety disorders that I normally manage (e.g. suppress) work there way out to the world.

I wish I could promise you that it will not happen in the future but I cant. I know that I will have to go without medication and I know that this will bring out the anxiety disorders. From there it is hit and miss whether I will bother my friends with it.

The alternative, of course, is what you already know, which is that I become a recluse in order to avoid bothering anyone.

I hope that my readers are filled with patience and understanding.

Thank you.

Relentless Universe, Immersive VR, This Sat and Sunday, Audri Phillips Performing

On Saturday and Sunday there will be a performance of Relentless Universe, a VR immersive event starring among other Audri Philips, whose blog is featured on Global Wahrman.

Read all about it here.

There must be something the matter with this blog that this is the first use of the tags "live performance" or "immersive VR".

Something must be done!

Go see Audri and make this genre of artform happen.

Relationship Between Sugar - Based Nutrition and Superhero Movies in America

As we all know, there have been recent, well-publicized attacks on American core values, on our culture and our civilization. These attacks strike at the very center of what it is to be an American and is nothing less than an attempt to destroy America from within.

I am of course referring to the disingenuous attempts to get Americans to stop eating sugar.

Americans instinctively know what is good for them and foods made out of high fructose corn syrup is as good for you as a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns and grits. America was built by strong hands that were made strong through breakfasts of this type. Not to mention coffee with a lot of sugar. Maybe a muffin or two.

Lets look at the types of foods that these pretentious intellectuals would have us remove from our diet. Coffee with several heaping tea spoons of sugar, glazed donuts, ice cream sodas, waffles with syrup, Sugar Frosted Flakes, chocolate cake with ice cream, candy of all sorts.

The American diet is a healthy diet.

If America which is surely in its decline were to abandon its values and turn its back on the traditions that made this country great, were it to fall into this decadence and sin, then those that lead this attack against righteousness can be expected to attack another pillar of American strength, movies about comic-book superheroes.

They will say, these scum will accuse, these movies of being as empty of nutrition and cultural content as a box of Skittles or chocolate-covered raisins. These self-appointed keepers of nutrition and elite culture will try to tell us that we do not need another movie about the X People or the Avengers or even Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The food of the God's encoded in chemical form ?

They are wrong, of course.  Not merely wrong, but anti-American.

Just as these wanna-be arbiters of our diet would point to a donut and claim it is nothing more than dough fried in grease with a lot of sugar, so they would point to another great movie about superheroes, for example, Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) and claim that this movie has no worthwhile plot, characters, motivations, while it is filled with violence and stupid helicopter-like aircraft carriers.  Yes it is true that a donut is made of fried dough with sugar and, on the surface, A:AOU is empty of even the flimsiest justification for its fulsome budget, in reality it speaks to the greatness of the American filmmaking tradition just as the donut speaks to our fine and healthy American traditional cuisine.  This does not even need to be defended.  Even the most craven of anti-American sentiment can see this is true.

Besides look out in the world.  What else would we do with the money, the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on such fine films?  Feed the starving in Sudan?  Please be serious.  Educate our poor and disenfranchised people? Why bother? They are poor and they deserve to be poor. Everyone knows that.

There is a link between the great nutrition inherent in sugar frosted flakes and the cultural content of another Bat movie. These are the elements that have made America strong.

Yet that is what the so-called experts are saying we should do. Turn our backs on this bountiful harvest that we have grown with our own two hands. This very nectar of the Gods. The calories, vitamins, minerals, proteins, steroids, and most of all, the sugar that has powered Americans through the abolition of slavery, war and oppression and enabled us to make superlative superhero movie after superhero movie.

Faithless people! To turn your back on the great cuisine of America, brought to this shores by the huddled masses yearning to be free, free to drink Coca Cola, get an ice cream soda after the drive-in movie, or to start the day with a dozen or so glazed donuts and coffee, waffles with butter, and breakfast food cereals.

I think that subconsciously Americans realize that this is wrong, and feeling guilt, yearn for a simpler time. A time when we ate chocolate cake with pride, and not disgusting boiled kale with sesame seeds. A time when a real man would smoke unfiltered Marlboros and get up on his horse and go punch cattle.

Stand firm, America! Do not let these so-called nutritionists badger you to abandon the foods and movies that have made America the land of the free and the home of the breakfast food cereal marketing a superhero movie. Stay true to your values. This too will pass.

As American as a slice of hot Apple Pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. 

Health Threat of Sugar is Vastly Underestimated Study Claims

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/27/sugar-health-threat-underestimated-obesity-study-claims

Ultron's Lament

When society looks back to this period of filmmaking, will they see great work? Will they perceive the depth of character, talent and genius that informed the works of Ibsen, Checkov, Pushkin, Moliere, de la Barca, Jan deBont and Michael Bey? Or will they see a noble artform brought to its knees and destroyed by waves of computer animated visual effects full of sound and fury and signifying very little.

Only time will tell but let us not forget that it took decades before critics saw even masterpieces like The Mummy (1933) with clear eyes and recognized its genius.

So it may be with the current crop of endless X-People, Fantastic 4, Avengers, Bat People and so forth. There may be substance behind their otherwise superficial facade waiting to be discovered.

I think that there is such depth and I propose to you as an example an otherwise overlooked scene in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). When I first saw this film I did not understand why it was made. It seemed not shallow, but paper thin shallow, without an idea in its head beyond the mere empty greed of the studio executive and his or her insatiable desire to exploit children for every penny they were worth.

But sometimes great work needs time and space to flower and demonstrate its greatness and I had occasion to watch this film several times in pursuit of another idea, one that demonstrates a linkage between the campaign against sugar in the American diet with a similar conspiracy against films about superheroes, when I noticed a scene of great pathos and feeling hiding among the explosions and pointless plot elements.

The scene involved the Scarlett Johannsen character as a foil for the attention of the uber - robot and AI intelligence, Ultron, the nominal villain. In this scene, he plays the part of the villain who feels the need to explain his evil plan for world domination or destruction to our hero, or in this case, our heroine.

Our token woman or lust object, one of three women with a speaking role in the entire film, lies unconscious on the floor after a battle. She groans, not realizing where she is, Ultron's laboratory, and Ultron notices she is awake and begins his great soliloquy.

We are at approximately 1:29:17 into the film.

                                                             ULTRON

                              I wasn't sure you would awaken. I hoped you

                              would, I wanted to show you.

                              I know, I haven't anyone else.

                              I read a lot about the meteor, the purity of them.

                              Boom! The end. Start again.

                              The world made clean for the new man to rebuild.

                              I was meant to be new.

                              I was meant to be beautiful.

                              The world would have looked to the sky and seen hope.

                              Seen mercy.

                              But instead they will look up in horror, because of you.

                              You've wounded me. I give you full marks for that.

                              But like the man said ... what doesn't actually kill you ...

METAL EXOSKELETON EXPLODES TO REVEAL THE NEW ULTRON

                              just makes me stronger.

CLOSES PRISON DOOR

Admittedly this scene ends in a noisy way not entirely compatible with the early monologue, but this is by far the most human and interesting acting in the entire film with the possible exception of when Ultron has his heart ripped from his chest, by the other woman superhero, near the end of the film.

Ultron is just a fool for women, it would seem.

Why do they make these movies?  

Station Eleven and the Fate of the English Major When Society Collapses

Warning, this post contains very modest spoilers associated with the novel Station Eleven by Emily Mandel. They are not much of a spoiler, but you are warned.

One artifact of science fiction becoming mainstream is that one has to deal with reviewers and even readers who have not had the benefit of knowing the genre, those who have not submitted to the discipline required to truly understand faster than light travel, telepathy, multi dimensional time portals and a host of other topics.  These mainstream critics may thus not be qualified to understand the field and its conventions. It can lead to some unfortunate encounters such as when a fellow undergraduate at college once said "You should read Pynchon, he writes science fiction that is actually good" and I thought to myself, I will probably hate Pynchon.  Well, I did not hate Pynchon, nor do I hate Station Eleven by Mandel, but it is not great science fiction despite what the reviews say.   But Station Eleven did have an unexpected benefit.  Although it was not intentional on the part of the author it alerted me to a terrible danger facing this nation as it awaits the inevitable collapse of civilization.

Station 11 is the highly acclaimed fourth novel by Emily Mandel about the world after a pandemic. It has its moments. I might give it a sold B- or so, but never, ever the acclaim that it is getting. The point of this post is not to review the novel per se, but to report to you an unexpected weakness that could inhibit our recovery from the type of disaster the novel describes.

You see, one of the unintended subtexts of the novel is to reveal just how powerless and incompetent a bunch of liberal arts majors are without their internet. This was not an intentional theme of the author, rather it is an accident that is revealed by the author's (and the reviewer's) ignorance of what would be possible technologically even in the absence of electrical power, the internet, and high octane gasoline. This is apparently a disaster novel written by an English major. Very good at crafting paragraphs but not too bright when it comes to technology about which she clearly knows almost nothing.

So now two light spoilers although the first one isnlt much of a spoiler since you probably can not get through the first two pages without figuring it out.

Spoiler number one: Station 11 is set in a near future where 99.9 percent of humanity has died of a particularly infectious and fatal form of the flu. You can be infected by being around someone who already has it, no direct contact is necessary, and anyone who gets it is dead within a few days which is presumed to be long enough to infect everyone else. The end result is that within about a month pretty much everyone is dead. The people who do survive have to go out to the country to find food and create the setting for the rest of the novel.

In our second spoiler, we reveal that people are reduced to bows and arrows and it is a major plot point that some unknown people have actually recreated a small electricity grid. Technology you see has completely gone away and we are back to perhaps Late Antiquity or so. In other words, people know about horses, wheels, and plows, but can only dream of having a refrigerator or an electric light.

This is what comes of a deficient education system. This is what comes of having children raised on the Internet and reality television.

You see, seeing as how this is set in the near future, Toronto and the state of Illinois, where our plot mostly takes place, has something called a library. Probably every small town has one. And in this library are books. And down the street, now abandoned, are machine shops. And yes, while the rotary tools might very well be powered by electricity that is not immediately available, there are other ways to use those tools even without electrical power.

First, build one of these and use it to distill alcohol... 

Then go to your local abandoned hardware store and pick up one of these....

On top of that, it is not so hard to build a steam engine out of all the spare parts left around after everybody dies. One could easily build water driven devices and steam engines even without electricity or gasoline. A handy stream and some wood will do. And they can be rigged to drive a magnet with wire (which is lying around after the apocalypse in every building) and you have an electrical generator.

If you want to repurpose any of those millions of abandoned automobiles, where, you might wonder, would the gasoline come from since the story has established that gasoline went away through evaporation in a few years?

Well, not all engines run well on alcohol, but many can be tuned to run acceptably well.   Many engines such as one finds in things like portable power generators, available and in stock at your local hardware store, are made to run on a variety of fuels.  Even more useful, but more specialized and less immediately available, are belt driven generators which can use a variety of motive forces.  This is something that could be easily interfaced to a water wheel or wind mill.

Here is an article on converting your car to run on alcohol and how to distill your own by Mr. Keat Drane. See http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/ethanol_drane.html.  This article is filled with interesting information about the history of fuels to power engines, and how to distill your own fuel.

The great American philosopher, Clint Eastwood, said that “A man has got to know his limitations” (1) and very clearly Ms. Mandel does not know what she does not know.

But Mandel has done us a favor and just in the nick of time. She has alerted us to the complete ignorance so many of our citizens have about how the basic things in their life work.  We can not choose who will survive the inevitable destruction of civilization, and if they are all English majors then we would have a second disaster on our hands. 

I hope you will join me in petitioning our public servants to create remedial education programs, programs which must be made mandatory for all English majors, to correct this dangerous knowledge gap before it is too late.

Station Eleven by Emily Mandel on Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Station-Eleven-Emily-John-Mandel/dp/0804172447

_________________________________________

1. This is from Magnum Force, and Mr. Eastwood was being sarcastic.