"Ideally, the prospective employee should be warned in print and verify with a signature, as is done with credit and other background checks, that their name will be googled as part of the application process."
Googling someone's name doesn't limit the results to those about the particular "john smith" who has applied for the job. Doing it without asking the question suggested by the parent post can be trouble. I speak from personal experience, because if you google my street name, you'll read about a terror suspect. If you were the hiring manager, would you look further, or save yourself the trouble?
P. Orin Zack --- I write pointed political and business short stories at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/ If you like what you read, spread the word
Narrowing the possible scope of legislation makes a lot more sense than a line-item veto. The provisions of a bill are what was hammered out through negotiation, which means that the votes it gets to pass are based on the combination of features. Congresscritters agree to vote for it because of those provisions, so then allowing the President to strike portions defeats the intent of the negotiated agreement. Worse, it is no different from using a signing statement to declare which provisions will be adhered to and which will be ignored.
A far better solution is to restrict the nature of what may be added to a bill. Simple bills are the legislative equivalent of modular design in code. What we have now is worse than spaghetti code, because nobody debugs the things, or even points out the lack of else conditions to cover all situations.
--- I write pointed political and business short stories at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/ If you find something you like, pass the word...
The way I heard it was that the mathematician glanced out into the hallway, sees the fire extinguisher, exclaims "There is a solution!", and goes back to bed.
--- I write pointed political and business short stories at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/ If you read something you like, spread the word.
This would make it a different sort of game, but how about...
The game-world contains inhabitable NPCs. When you log in, you take over the behavior of the nominal NPC your account is associated with. So, while you're not there, it reverts to whatever mundane existence that you or the game requires of it. Someone else nearby could be ignoring it or interacting with it just as any other NPC, when it suddenly 'comes to life'. Of course, you could play possum and behave like an NPC to lure others into ignoring you for whatever reason. Could be kind of spooky. Doesn't anything like that exist?
Call me an old fart, but at my first IT job -- in the early 70s -- we got a new hire, a programmer who had previously worked at a regional brewery. He told a story about a formal visit they'd gotten from a larger brewery that was astounded by the small size of his company's IT budget, and wanted to know how they did it. Our new hire had been their entire programming staff.
"I don't like what Rove has done, but Democrats have also redefined, overloaded, words."
Thank you, Falcon. My comment was not about who is or is not an elite, but rather about what the word means to those who say and hear it.
Now let's change the focus of the discussion _from_ what politicians appear to be saying _to_ how those who have or want power are using language to manipulate the public debate. What other words and phrases have had their meanings twisted, by whom, and to what end?
For example... do people proclaiming the virtue of being 'pro-life' value to lives of those they also support killing in a war or occupation?
If the two sides to an argument are not using the same words to mean the same things, they cannot have a discussion or debate.
Unfortunately, the puppet masters have woven a bit of ambiguity into the word 'elite'. While the masses might assume that it means the rich minority who are in power, when those in power and those they influence say it, the word refers to intelligent people. That means us. When the slime machine called Obama elite, we're meant to think it means he's one of the powerful rich, but they're actually sliming the fact that he is intelligent and can express himself coherently, as compared to the drivel that his opponent spouts when he's not on script.
Words have power, and people such as Rove have been using our own words against us by redefining -- overloading -- what they mean. That is how they can have a candidate make a speech that means different things to different people. So pay close attention to what they say and how they say it. Think of it as code to be debugged. Note the ambiguities and work out the implied meanings before you accept whatv was said at face value.
P. Orin Zack
--- I write pointed political and business short stories at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/ [wordpress.com] If you find something you like, pass the word
Thanks. It was instigated by a report at BoingBoing about the TSA at LAX stopping a hallway full of people for a half hour with no explanation, and hollering at them if anyone moved. It seemed like a bad place for an accident. Anyway, if you enjoy my stories -- and there's about 70 of them so far -- please spread the word.
If, as we surmise, the TSA's brand of 'security theater' is intended to keep the flying public frightened and to 'stay in line', as it were, (because acting out a metaphor is more powerful than most people realize,) then weakening it's effects in this way may simply induce the TSA and its puppetmasters to change their tactics. Another tactic has already been practiced and reported on, as it happens, and I wrote a short story about what might happen if it got out of hand. The story is called "Incident on Concourse B", and it starts like this...
+ + +
Lendon Forrester, clattering bags of jumbled canned goods, ran up the steps and opened the door. "Did I miss it?"
"No," Frannie Jurdens called from the kitchen. "They're still in a holding pattern." She capped the jug she'd been filling, and placed it beside the others on the counter.
Len glanced at the reporter on the living room TV in passing. "...the ticket counter behind me, air travel in our city has ground to a halt. This same 'ghost-town' scenario is being played out at airports across the country, in the wake of this morning's thwarted terrorist attack in Cincinnati."
Frannie looked up as he entered. "I don't know, Len. The media's crawling with rumors."
Using Google for a cheap and easy way to do a background check will pull up information on anyone with the same name as the person you're looking up. In some cases, that just means a huge pile of irrelevant trivia. In others, you can find yourself staring at convincing proof that your quarry is a suspected terrorist. I know this from personal experience, since my namesake was caught taking anthrax out of Ft. Detrick about ten years before the postal event the government tried to tie him to.
Video wasn't proof of anything on 9/11/01 either. Eyewitnesses on the scene, even those speaking to anchors in the studio, were overridden when they questioned the reality of the imagery seen by the anchors of aircraft striking the WTC. If we can think about video fakery here, then lets apply the same standards to the impossibilities that were portrayed then. I wrote a story called "The Halo Effect" about some techies attempting to bring the question of video fakery into public discussion. It starts like this...
+ + +
Derek shook his head doubtfully at the duct-taped video camera I'd showed him. "Tell me something, Jake. How do you expect me to be inconspicuous carrying that monstrosity around?"
Now, granted, it was a bit on the clunky side, but there wasn't any elegant way to fasten a 3D mouse, cigarette-pack PC and a GPS to it. "Give me a break," I said, nestling the contraption beside my chicken satay on the small food-court table. "It's just a prototype. Early versions of the military's field disinfo kits were probably just as ugly."
The lunchtime crowd threading past our spot near the pizza franchise were too preoccupied to notice the bundle of tech we were arguing over. They also made getting a glimpse of the thing, either in person or with the mall's badly hidden security cams, problematic. We may have overplayed the geek theme a bit to make ourselves part of the visual noise by wearing old, faded convention shirts, but one thing we didn't exude was how risky this meeting really was.
Derek lowered his shake, peered at my handiwork, and tapped one of the puttied-in connectors. "You're sure it'll work?"
Beyond Orwell's 'Memory Hole' in 1984 and the attempted removal of Akhenaten from the ancient Egyptian record, there are some more immediate instances of intentional alteration of what we think we remember. A skilled manipulator can alter what an eyewitness thinks they remember simply by introducing ambiguity into the memory, and more intense work can insert false memories wholesale. But it can also be done in the present, as we've just seen in the CG-augmented opening ceremonies of the Olympics in China, and in sports on network TV.
But it doesn't take prohibitively expensive gear to pull that sort of stunt off anymore, as I explored in a story called "The Halo Effect", which starts like this:
+ + +
Derek shook his head doubtfully at the duct-taped video camera I'd showed him. "Tell me something, Jake. How do you expect me to be inconspicuous carrying that monstrosity around?"
Now, granted, it was a bit on the clunky side, but there wasn't any elegant way to fasten a 3D mouse, cigarette-pack PC and a GPS to it. "Give me a break," I said, nestling the contraption beside my chicken satay on the small food-court table. "It's just a prototype. Early versions of the military's field disinfo kits were probably just as ugly."
The lunchtime crowd threading past our spot near the pizza franchise were too preoccupied to notice the bundle of tech we were arguing over. They also made getting a glimpse of the thing, either in person or with the mall's badly hidden security cams, problematic. We may have overplayed the geek theme a bit to make ourselves part of the visual noise by wearing old, faded convention shirts, but one thing we didn't exude was how risky this meeting really was.
Derek lowered his shake, peered at my handiwork, and tapped one of the puttied-in connectors. "You're sure it'll work?"
I rotated the pairs of adjusted faces so they were left to right (and the faces were on their sides), and defocused my eyes as if I was looking at a 3D stereo pair of pictures to see what would happen. The slight differences made the portraits appear to me as if they had been photographed in 3D. The places that had been changed were subtly evident as a misalignment -- in the eyes of some, for example. I realize this is a fudged 3D effect, but might there be some use for it?
As you say, the wage for someone coming into the country to fill a job for which there is a shortage of workers ought to be high. However, that is not the case here. The deal is getting people into the country under an arrangement that induces them to take a lower wage, in order to depress the wages of the workers who are already in the country. The situation can be understood in more than one way, and those in a position to dominate the workers are counting on us not recognizing what is actually happening. A lot of money is spent placing certain thoughts into the public mind because doing so makes it possible to manipulate people in this way.
The 'rule of law' is supposedly that it treats all those under its jurisdiction the same. The US Constitution and the Supreme Court used to say something on this as well. Underlying that sentiment is the idea that human relations ought to be organized on the principle of collaboration or partnership with others. This idea is at odds with the driving principle beneath the mindset of those who refer to themselves as conservative, which is that humanity ought to be organized by obedience to authority. This principle is the one that says a family must be controlled by a strong 'father figure', and that the nation must be ruled by a 'unitary executive' with the responsibility for protecting the citizens rather than for empowering them. Judicial decisions such as this one are consistent with this 'dominator' philosophy in that they place power in the hands of the corporation, which is another flavor of 'father figure' to its employees. We tech workers are therefore treated as children, and expected to obey whatever whim of those in power choose to levy on us, at the risk of punishment -- in this case economic punishment.
In order to gain access to your Bank of America account over the phone, they ask some security questions to try to confirm that it's you. One of these questions is which branch you opened your account at. Unfortunately, when B of A bought the bank I opened my account at, they changed the record of where it was opened. So now, they expect me to provide a false answer to answer their question 'correctly'. I pointed out to them that if they expect me to lie to them here, there's no reason to expect me to tell the truth anywhere else. Nobody there seems to understand that the precedent it sets would destroy their trust relationship with customers, and I spoke to everyone up to the office of the President.
Now that everyone has become aware of the ability of broadcasters to insert fake content into a supposedly live event, we should turn our attention to an event several years ago that was also faked: 'hijacked aircraft flying into the World Trade Center'. There's a convenient video course about what was done and how, called "September Clues" You can find the first installment here:
P. Orin Zack === I write pointed political short stories at my blog, http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/ First at Google on a search for political short stories.
Even if there was a really, really serious law that could be brought to bear against the company, it would still be a meaningless gesture. For all that corporations have wanted the full rights of citizenship -- beyond equating money with speech -- they can't be punished in any meaningful way. If you pin the crime on the managers, or the employees, the company will still go on doing the same thing. But what if you could execute a company for committing murder, or incarcerate it for crimes like this? How would you go about implementing that incarceration? I took a stab at that in a serious of short stories. The first story in the series was about the first corporate execution. Faced with an unknown future, the head of the second company to be tried tried to head the case off before it began. The second story, "Full Circle", starts like this:
Edward Reese, 62 and a tad too well-fed, wrinkled his nose at the smell of the badly cleaned kitchenette in the motel room he'd just checked into. He didn't even want to think about what might be living in the mattresses. "Well," he grumbled, "at least I won't have to sleep in this dump."
He glanced at the ancient clock-radio on the night stand. Five-thirteen. About right for a five o'clock meeting, except that there had been nobody to walk in on. Re-aiming the bulky remote laying on the room's small table, he switched on the TV news, and sat down to wait. He hated waiting for anyone, especially people he considered beneath his station.
"...in the pending grand theft case against lodging and food-services conglomerate, Fremont-Wayfarer. The Honorable Wilfred Clary, who had presided over the murder trial of the now-defunct Consolidated Communications Corporation, has been assigned to the case. According to our legal analyst, the precedent set in the Supreme Court's SandHill Realty decision, which granted..."
There was a knock at the door. Reese turned off the news.
You're in a quiet little backwater of Slashdot. Shhhh. If someone realizes we're back here, they might want to start a discussion or something.
[It's not just the social contract but the focus on rights. Conservatives tend to focus on negative freedoms, or 'freedom from' something while Liberals tend to focus on positive freedoms, or 'freedom to' do something. A conservative will say, "I want freedom from your taxation," while a liberal might say, "we want freedom to have health care covered."]
Good point. And that shines an interesting light on what 'compromise' means between the two camps. They're not even speaking the same language, and the media reports only on the surface effects of the negotiation. So if they are not basing their respective stances on any legitimate common ground, how can the two mindsets coexist?
I suspect the conflict we're watching between the camps is not productive at all. One side contends that one side must win and the other lose; the other looks for a way to co-exist without the need for one side to lose. It's a mismatch at a very deep level.
"...there is a HUGE difference between the two parties."
The difference, though, is not what most people think it is. Both parties are beholden to corporate sponsors, but those sponsors are different as well. At heart, the distinction is based on the way the two sides see the social contract. Republicans tend to see society in a hierarchal fashion, with one group dominating another for whatever reasons are presented, while the Democrats see a kind of partnership arrangement among people as the way things 'should be'. George Lakoff goes into some depth about the deep frames that define the two sides in his book, "The Political Mind".
In a strange reflection of that, I'm also reading an old book called "The Chalice and the Blade" which views all of history as a continuing clash between these same to ways of seeing the social contract. The author of that book made up some terms for them. The hierarchal perspective is called Androcratic, since it is typically rule by alpha males, and the partnership perspective is called Gylanic, which is a kit-bashed thing referring to the properties often associated with the female half of humanity.
"If you put the guys in jail you pay to put someone who isn't a threat to society, and pay to keep him there."
After all, the law doesn't treat corporations the same way it treats people, regardless of how much they may want the rights of personhood. They got their money equated with speech so that they could 'speak' louder than anyone with a heartbeat. But what would it be like if corporations were treated the same as people when they committed crimes? What would happen to corporations that steal money, bribe government officials, fix elections and even cause people's deaths? I was curious myself, so I wrote a few stories about a world like that. The first one is called "Logical Conclusion". You can read it at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/08/30/short-story-logical-conclusion/
Corporations (in the guise of the people controlling them) have lusted after the rights of citizenship since the middle of the 19th Century. I say give them what they want, but not exactly the way they wanted it -- being a corporate 'citizen' could mean being subject to all of the risks that we flesh-and-blood citizens take when exercise our rights, and being subject to the punishments as well. I've written a sequence of about two dozen short stories about one such company. The execs stole from the employee insurance fund, and arranged things so that the company took the fall. Unfortunately for them, the Supreme Court had already granted full rights to companies, so things don't go exactly as planned. The story of Fremont-Wayfarer's incarceration starts like this, in a story called "Full Circle"...
Edward Reese, 62 and a tad too well-fed, wrinkled his nose at the smell of the badly cleaned kitchenette in the motel room he'd just checked into. He didn't even want to think about what might be living in the mattresses. "Well," he grumbled, "at least I won't have to sleep in this dump."
He glanced at the ancient clock-radio on the night stand. Five-thirteen. About right for a five o'clock meeting, except that there had been nobody to walk in on. Re-aiming the bulky remote laying on the room's small table, he switched on the TV news, and sat down to wait. He hated waiting for anyone, especially people he considered beneath his station.
"...in the pending grand theft case against lodging and food-services conglomerate, Fremont-Wayfarer. The Honorable Wilfred Clary, who had presided over the murder trial of the now-defunct Consolidated Communications Corporation, has been assigned to the case. According to our legal analyst, the precedent set in the Supreme Court's SandHill Realty decision, which granted..."
There was a knock at the door. Reese turned off the news.
"Sorry I'm late," the rumpled 30-something said as the door swung open. "Small-town traffic jam."
"The FDIC has to "insure" deposits because of the fraudulent fractional reserve banking system. What we need is full reserve banking, with private regulatory audits, and greater knowledge that the money you put in isn't loaned 8X more than the bank has on your deposit record."
The tallysheet bankers' Ponzi scheme is so fragile they have to send in covert assistance -- Plunge Protection Teams-- to prop up the securities markets by purchasing depressed stocks, bonds and derivatives to avert a free-fall, using money created from nothing to make the buys. Goldseek.com has a piece on the PPTs, and Ellen Brown discusses fractional reserve banking in her book, "Web of Debt", and in the associated blog.
I wondered what might happen if the whole scheme fell apart, so I've started a series of short stories exploring the world after the collapse of the banking system. The first one, "As Is", starts like this...
* * * Ryan Svorlin stood in front of the big house, gaping. The keys hung loosely in his shaking hand, clattering against one another in rhythmic reflection of the waves of shock coursing through his troubled mind. "It... it's... mine," he stammered, unable to comprehend what had just happened.
"Well, sure," the real estate lady told him. "You did sign the papers, didn't you?"
He slowly turned to look at her. Paper-thin skin stretched across unnaturally prominent cheekbones. Overdone make-up. Probably over seventy, he guessed. "Of course. But I never expected to --."
"To be selected? Well, someone had to be. They couldn't afford to let these places go vacant, after all."
Less than a year had passed since the first cannonade in the financial meltdown destroyed the façade of normalcy masquerading as prosperity in the United States. Some faceless blogger had instigated a mortgage strike, an incautious response to the revelation that the reason the government was so determined to protect the masses from being dispossessed in their forced insolvency was the dirtiest little secret at the heart of the country's high-flying economy - that nobody really owned all those high-risk loans, and therefore the houses could not be foreclosed. No one could have predicted what happened next. * * *
Amusingly, the addition of new bases for terrestrial DNA could be used to defend our home world in a case brought against mankind by aliens who met our first expedition to Mars in a short story I wrote called "Site License". It starts like this...
* * * "Yes sir, Mr. Nagle," I told the debriefing officer, "that's what they said when they handed us the papers."
The five of us had just returned from what was supposed to have been the first stage of a long-delayed Mars colonization project. Had everything gone as planned, we were to have stayed for five years, helping groups of volunteer colonists set up their habitats and showing them how to use all of the special equipment. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way. * * *
Because I write short stories (klurgsheld.wordpress.com) suggested by the news, I know that thinking though a tinfoil hat is one way to extract the potentially covert narrative in an issue like this. So when I look at it, I see two viable story-lines, either or both of which might have played a part in this effort.
The first is familiar: yet another minor rule that people are expected to comply with. Nothing really interesting there, and there are easier ways to go about it. The second is more intriguing, and also brings with it a load of historical baggage: information control. Discouraging people from being able to know from first-hand testing what might be in their immediate environment plays into the meme of government as protective parent. We'll tell you everything you need to know; don't go looking for yourself, don't read those books we think are dangerous for you to have read. But that still begs the question of timing... is there a reason this is being done now? Perhaps. Someone might be nervous that the suggestion that mini-nukes were planted in the basement of the WTC to shatter the 27 steel spines of the towers has started to gain traction, and that people might go look for themselves. If we can't get a detector, we can't prove the rumor, but then we can't discount it either. As I said, tinfoil hats can instigate compelling stories. What they can't do is tell you if those stories are true.
Back in the Cold War, there used to be something called 'Civil Defense". We citizens were encouraged to learn how to operate a geiger counter. My wife was certified as a Radiological Monitor while in the Civil Air Patrol, at the age of 15. So the idea of restricting detector ownership in an age where suitcase nukes do exist doesn't fly too high in our personal skies.
Slashdot Mirror
"Ideally, the prospective employee should be warned in print and verify with a signature, as is done with credit and other background checks, that their name will be googled as part of the application process."
Googling someone's name doesn't limit the results to those about the particular "john smith" who has applied for the job. Doing it without asking the question suggested by the parent post can be trouble. I speak from personal experience, because if you google my street name, you'll read about a terror suspect. If you were the hiring manager, would you look further, or save yourself the trouble?
P. Orin Zack
---
I write pointed political and business short stories at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/
If you like what you read, spread the word
Narrowing the possible scope of legislation makes a lot more sense than a line-item veto. The provisions of a bill are what was hammered out through negotiation, which means that the votes it gets to pass are based on the combination of features. Congresscritters agree to vote for it because of those provisions, so then allowing the President to strike portions defeats the intent of the negotiated agreement. Worse, it is no different from using a signing statement to declare which provisions will be adhered to and which will be ignored.
A far better solution is to restrict the nature of what may be added to a bill. Simple bills are the legislative equivalent of modular design in code. What we have now is worse than spaghetti code, because nobody debugs the things, or even points out the lack of else conditions to cover all situations.
---
I write pointed political and business short stories at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/
If you find something you like, pass the word...
The way I heard it was that the mathematician glanced out into the hallway, sees the fire extinguisher, exclaims "There is a solution!", and goes back to bed.
---
I write pointed political and business short stories at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/
If you read something you like, spread the word.
This would make it a different sort of game, but how about...
The game-world contains inhabitable NPCs. When you log in, you take over the behavior of the nominal NPC your account is associated with. So, while you're not there, it reverts to whatever mundane existence that you or the game requires of it. Someone else nearby could be ignoring it or interacting with it just as any other NPC, when it suddenly 'comes to life'. Of course, you could play possum and behave like an NPC to lure others into ignoring you for whatever reason. Could be kind of spooky. Doesn't anything like that exist?
Call me an old fart, but at my first IT job -- in the early 70s -- we got a new hire, a programmer who had previously worked at a regional brewery. He told a story about a formal visit they'd gotten from a larger brewery that was astounded by the small size of his company's IT budget, and wanted to know how they did it. Our new hire had been their entire programming staff.
"I don't like what Rove has done, but Democrats have also redefined, overloaded, words."
Thank you, Falcon. My comment was not about who is or is not an elite, but rather about what the word means to those who say and hear it.
Now let's change the focus of the discussion _from_ what politicians appear to be saying _to_ how those who have or want power are using language to manipulate the public debate. What other words and phrases have had their meanings twisted, by whom, and to what end?
For example... do people proclaiming the virtue of being 'pro-life' value to lives of those they also support killing in a war or occupation?
If the two sides to an argument are not using the same words to mean the same things, they cannot have a discussion or debate.
"Shut the economy down and let the elites twist."
Unfortunately, the puppet masters have woven a bit of ambiguity into the word 'elite'. While the masses might assume that it means the rich minority who are in power, when those in power and those they influence say it, the word refers to intelligent people. That means us. When the slime machine called Obama elite, we're meant to think it means he's one of the powerful rich, but they're actually sliming the fact that he is intelligent and can express himself coherently, as compared to the drivel that his opponent spouts when he's not on script.
Words have power, and people such as Rove have been using our own words against us by redefining -- overloading -- what they mean. That is how they can have a candidate make a speech that means different things to different people. So pay close attention to what they say and how they say it. Think of it as code to be debugged. Note the ambiguities and work out the implied meanings before you accept whatv was said at face value.
P. Orin Zack
---
I write pointed political and business short stories at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/ [wordpress.com]
If you find something you like, pass the word
Thanks. It was instigated by a report at BoingBoing about the TSA at LAX stopping a hallway full of people for a half hour with no explanation, and hollering at them if anyone moved. It seemed like a bad place for an accident. Anyway, if you enjoy my stories -- and there's about 70 of them so far -- please spread the word.
P. Orin Zack
If, as we surmise, the TSA's brand of 'security theater' is intended to keep the flying public frightened and to 'stay in line', as it were, (because acting out a metaphor is more powerful than most people realize,) then weakening it's effects in this way may simply induce the TSA and its puppetmasters to change their tactics. Another tactic has already been practiced and reported on, as it happens, and I wrote a short story about what might happen if it got out of hand. The story is called "Incident on Concourse B", and it starts like this...
+ + +
Lendon Forrester, clattering bags of jumbled canned goods, ran up the steps and opened the door. "Did I miss it?"
"No," Frannie Jurdens called from the kitchen. "They're still in a holding pattern." She capped the jug she'd been filling, and placed it beside the others on the counter.
Len glanced at the reporter on the living room TV in passing. "...the ticket counter behind me, air travel in our city has ground to a halt. This same 'ghost-town' scenario is being played out at airports across the country, in the wake of this morning's thwarted terrorist attack in Cincinnati."
Frannie looked up as he entered. "I don't know, Len. The media's crawling with rumors."
+ + +
You can read the whole story here: http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/09/05/short-story-incident-on-concourse-b/
P. Orin Zack
Using Google for a cheap and easy way to do a background check will pull up information on anyone with the same name as the person you're looking up. In some cases, that just means a huge pile of irrelevant trivia. In others, you can find yourself staring at convincing proof that your quarry is a suspected terrorist. I know this from personal experience, since my namesake was caught taking anthrax out of Ft. Detrick about ten years before the postal event the government tried to tie him to.
P. Orin Zack
---
I write pointed political and business short stories at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/
Video wasn't proof of anything on 9/11/01 either. Eyewitnesses on the scene, even those speaking to anchors in the studio, were overridden when they questioned the reality of the imagery seen by the anchors of aircraft striking the WTC. If we can think about video fakery here, then lets apply the same standards to the impossibilities that were portrayed then. I wrote a story called "The Halo Effect" about some techies attempting to bring the question of video fakery into public discussion. It starts like this...
+ + +
Derek shook his head doubtfully at the duct-taped video camera I'd showed him. "Tell me something, Jake. How do you expect me to be inconspicuous carrying that monstrosity around?"
Now, granted, it was a bit on the clunky side, but there wasn't any elegant way to fasten a 3D mouse, cigarette-pack PC and a GPS to it. "Give me a break," I said, nestling the contraption beside my chicken satay on the small food-court table. "It's just a prototype. Early versions of the military's field disinfo kits were probably just as ugly."
The lunchtime crowd threading past our spot near the pizza franchise were too preoccupied to notice the bundle of tech we were arguing over. They also made getting a glimpse of the thing, either in person or with the mall's badly hidden security cams, problematic. We may have overplayed the geek theme a bit to make ourselves part of the visual noise by wearing old, faded convention shirts, but one thing we didn't exude was how risky this meeting really was.
Derek lowered his shake, peered at my handiwork, and tapped one of the puttied-in connectors. "You're sure it'll work?"
+ + +
Read the whole story here: http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/short-story-the-halo-effect/
P. Orin Zack
Beyond Orwell's 'Memory Hole' in 1984 and the attempted removal of Akhenaten from the ancient Egyptian record, there are some more immediate instances of intentional alteration of what we think we remember. A skilled manipulator can alter what an eyewitness thinks they remember simply by introducing ambiguity into the memory, and more intense work can insert false memories wholesale. But it can also be done in the present, as we've just seen in the CG-augmented opening ceremonies of the Olympics in China, and in sports on network TV.
But it doesn't take prohibitively expensive gear to pull that sort of stunt off anymore, as I explored in a story called "The Halo Effect", which starts like this:
+ + +
Derek shook his head doubtfully at the duct-taped video camera I'd showed him. "Tell me something, Jake. How do you expect me to be inconspicuous carrying that monstrosity around?"
Now, granted, it was a bit on the clunky side, but there wasn't any elegant way to fasten a 3D mouse, cigarette-pack PC and a GPS to it. "Give me a break," I said, nestling the contraption beside my chicken satay on the small food-court table. "It's just a prototype. Early versions of the military's field disinfo kits were probably just as ugly."
The lunchtime crowd threading past our spot near the pizza franchise were too preoccupied to notice the bundle of tech we were arguing over. They also made getting a glimpse of the thing, either in person or with the mall's badly hidden security cams, problematic. We may have overplayed the geek theme a bit to make ourselves part of the visual noise by wearing old, faded convention shirts, but one thing we didn't exude was how risky this meeting really was.
Derek lowered his shake, peered at my handiwork, and tapped one of the puttied-in connectors. "You're sure it'll work?"
+ + + ...You can read the whole thing at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/short-story-the-halo-effect/
P. Orin Zack
I rotated the pairs of adjusted faces so they were left to right (and the faces were on their sides), and defocused my eyes as if I was looking at a 3D stereo pair of pictures to see what would happen. The slight differences made the portraits appear to me as if they had been photographed in 3D. The places that had been changed were subtly evident as a misalignment -- in the eyes of some, for example. I realize this is a fudged 3D effect, but might there be some use for it?
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I write pointed political and business short stories at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/
As you say, the wage for someone coming into the country to fill a job for which there is a shortage of workers ought to be high. However, that is not the case here. The deal is getting people into the country under an arrangement that induces them to take a lower wage, in order to depress the wages of the workers who are already in the country. The situation can be understood in more than one way, and those in a position to dominate the workers are counting on us not recognizing what is actually happening. A lot of money is spent placing certain thoughts into the public mind because doing so makes it possible to manipulate people in this way.
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I write pointed political and business short stories at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/
The 'rule of law' is supposedly that it treats all those under its jurisdiction the same. The US Constitution and the Supreme Court used to say something on this as well. Underlying that sentiment is the idea that human relations ought to be organized on the principle of collaboration or partnership with others. This idea is at odds with the driving principle beneath the mindset of those who refer to themselves as conservative, which is that humanity ought to be organized by obedience to authority. This principle is the one that says a family must be controlled by a strong 'father figure', and that the nation must be ruled by a 'unitary executive' with the responsibility for protecting the citizens rather than for empowering them. Judicial decisions such as this one are consistent with this 'dominator' philosophy in that they place power in the hands of the corporation, which is another flavor of 'father figure' to its employees. We tech workers are therefore treated as children, and expected to obey whatever whim of those in power choose to levy on us, at the risk of punishment -- in this case economic punishment.
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I write pointed short political and business stories at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/
In order to gain access to your Bank of America account over the phone, they ask some security questions to try to confirm that it's you. One of these questions is which branch you opened your account at. Unfortunately, when B of A bought the bank I opened my account at, they changed the record of where it was opened. So now, they expect me to provide a false answer to answer their question 'correctly'. I pointed out to them that if they expect me to lie to them here, there's no reason to expect me to tell the truth anywhere else. Nobody there seems to understand that the precedent it sets would destroy their trust relationship with customers, and I spoke to everyone up to the office of the President.
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I write political short stories at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/
Now that everyone has become aware of the ability of broadcasters to insert fake content into a supposedly live event, we should turn our attention to an event several years ago that was also faked: 'hijacked aircraft flying into the World Trade Center'. There's a convenient video course about what was done and how, called "September Clues" You can find the first installment here:
http://www.livevideo.com/video/embedLink/6F393F4DE41C4CF798CBB438E6378129/228144/september-clues-part1.aspx
P. Orin Zack
===
I write pointed political short stories at my blog, http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/
First at Google on a search for political short stories.
Even if there was a really, really serious law that could be brought to bear against the company, it would still be a meaningless gesture. For all that corporations have wanted the full rights of citizenship -- beyond equating money with speech -- they can't be punished in any meaningful way. If you pin the crime on the managers, or the employees, the company will still go on doing the same thing. But what if you could execute a company for committing murder, or incarcerate it for crimes like this? How would you go about implementing that incarceration? I took a stab at that in a serious of short stories. The first story in the series was about the first corporate execution. Faced with an unknown future, the head of the second company to be tried tried to head the case off before it began. The second story, "Full Circle", starts like this:
Edward Reese, 62 and a tad too well-fed, wrinkled his nose at the smell of the badly cleaned kitchenette in the motel room he'd just checked into. He didn't even want to think about what might be living in the mattresses. "Well," he grumbled, "at least I won't have to sleep in this dump."
He glanced at the ancient clock-radio on the night stand. Five-thirteen. About right for a five o'clock meeting, except that there had been nobody to walk in on. Re-aiming the bulky remote laying on the room's small table, he switched on the TV news, and sat down to wait. He hated waiting for anyone, especially people he considered beneath his station.
"...in the pending grand theft case against lodging and food-services conglomerate, Fremont-Wayfarer. The Honorable Wilfred Clary, who had presided over the murder trial of the now-defunct Consolidated Communications Corporation, has been assigned to the case. According to our legal analyst, the precedent set in the Supreme Court's SandHill Realty decision, which granted..."
There was a knock at the door. Reese turned off the news.
The whole story, and the rest of the series, is here: ...and that's just a taste of what's there.
http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/09/01/short-story-full-circle/
P. Orin Zack
[Good lord. An intelligent reply. Where am I?"]
You're in a quiet little backwater of Slashdot. Shhhh. If someone realizes we're back here, they might want to start a discussion or something.
[It's not just the social contract but the focus on rights. Conservatives tend to focus on negative freedoms, or 'freedom from' something while Liberals tend to focus on positive freedoms, or 'freedom to' do something. A conservative will say, "I want freedom from your taxation," while a liberal might say, "we want freedom to have health care covered."]
Good point. And that shines an interesting light on what 'compromise' means between the two camps. They're not even speaking the same language, and the media reports only on the surface effects of the negotiation. So if they are not basing their respective stances on any legitimate common ground, how can the two mindsets coexist?
I suspect the conflict we're watching between the camps is not productive at all. One side contends that one side must win and the other lose; the other looks for a way to co-exist without the need for one side to lose. It's a mismatch at a very deep level.
"...there is a HUGE difference between the two parties."
The difference, though, is not what most people think it is. Both parties are beholden to corporate sponsors, but those sponsors are different as well. At heart, the distinction is based on the way the two sides see the social contract. Republicans tend to see society in a hierarchal fashion, with one group dominating another for whatever reasons are presented, while the Democrats see a kind of partnership arrangement among people as the way things 'should be'. George Lakoff goes into some depth about the deep frames that define the two sides in his book, "The Political Mind".
In a strange reflection of that, I'm also reading an old book called "The Chalice and the Blade" which views all of history as a continuing clash between these same to ways of seeing the social contract. The author of that book made up some terms for them. The hierarchal perspective is called Androcratic, since it is typically rule by alpha males, and the partnership perspective is called Gylanic, which is a kit-bashed thing referring to the properties often associated with the female half of humanity.
P. Orin Zack
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I write short stories at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/
"If you put the guys in jail you pay to put someone who isn't a threat to society, and pay to keep him there."
After all, the law doesn't treat corporations the same way it treats people, regardless of how much they may want the rights of personhood. They got their money equated with speech so that they could 'speak' louder than anyone with a heartbeat. But what would it be like if corporations were treated the same as people when they committed crimes? What would happen to corporations that steal money, bribe government officials, fix elections and even cause people's deaths? I was curious myself, so I wrote a few stories about a world like that. The first one is called "Logical Conclusion". You can read it at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/08/30/short-story-logical-conclusion/
P. Orin Zack
Corporations (in the guise of the people controlling them) have lusted after the rights of citizenship since the middle of the 19th Century. I say give them what they want, but not exactly the way they wanted it -- being a corporate 'citizen' could mean being subject to all of the risks that we flesh-and-blood citizens take when exercise our rights, and being subject to the punishments as well. I've written a sequence of about two dozen short stories about one such company. The execs stole from the employee insurance fund, and arranged things so that the company took the fall. Unfortunately for them, the Supreme Court had already granted full rights to companies, so things don't go exactly as planned. The story of Fremont-Wayfarer's incarceration starts like this, in a story called "Full Circle"...
Edward Reese, 62 and a tad too well-fed, wrinkled his nose at the smell of the badly cleaned kitchenette in the motel room he'd just checked into. He didn't even want to think about what might be living in the mattresses. "Well," he grumbled, "at least I won't have to sleep in this dump."
He glanced at the ancient clock-radio on the night stand. Five-thirteen. About right for a five o'clock meeting, except that there had been nobody to walk in on. Re-aiming the bulky remote laying on the room's small table, he switched on the TV news, and sat down to wait. He hated waiting for anyone, especially people he considered beneath his station.
"...in the pending grand theft case against lodging and food-services conglomerate, Fremont-Wayfarer. The Honorable Wilfred Clary, who had presided over the murder trial of the now-defunct Consolidated Communications Corporation, has been assigned to the case. According to our legal analyst, the precedent set in the Supreme Court's SandHill Realty decision, which granted..."
There was a knock at the door. Reese turned off the news.
"Sorry I'm late," the rumpled 30-something said as the door swung open. "Small-town traffic jam."
You can read the rest here:
http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/09/01/short-story-full-circle/
P. Orin Zack
"The FDIC has to "insure" deposits because of the fraudulent fractional reserve banking system. What we need is full reserve banking, with private regulatory audits, and greater knowledge that the money you put in isn't loaned 8X more than the bank has on your deposit record."
The tallysheet bankers' Ponzi scheme is so fragile they have to send in covert assistance -- Plunge Protection Teams-- to prop up the securities markets by purchasing depressed stocks, bonds and derivatives to avert a free-fall, using money created from nothing to make the buys. Goldseek.com has a piece on the PPTs, and Ellen Brown discusses fractional reserve banking in her book, "Web of Debt", and in the associated blog.
I wondered what might happen if the whole scheme fell apart, so I've started a series of short stories exploring the world after the collapse of the banking system. The first one, "As Is", starts like this...
* * *
Ryan Svorlin stood in front of the big house, gaping. The keys hung loosely in his shaking hand, clattering against one another in rhythmic reflection of the waves of shock coursing through his troubled mind. "It... it's... mine," he stammered, unable to comprehend what had just happened.
"Well, sure," the real estate lady told him. "You did sign the papers, didn't you?"
He slowly turned to look at her. Paper-thin skin stretched across unnaturally prominent cheekbones. Overdone make-up. Probably over seventy, he guessed. "Of course. But I never expected to --."
"To be selected? Well, someone had to be. They couldn't afford to let these places go vacant, after all."
Less than a year had passed since the first cannonade in the financial meltdown destroyed the façade of normalcy masquerading as prosperity in the United States. Some faceless blogger had instigated a mortgage strike, an incautious response to the revelation that the reason the government was so determined to protect the masses from being dispossessed in their forced insolvency was the dirtiest little secret at the heart of the country's high-flying economy - that nobody really owned all those high-risk loans, and therefore the houses could not be foreclosed. No one could have predicted what happened next.
* * *
You can read the whole story at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/12/18/short-story-as-is/ then click on to read "Full Value" and "LA Scrip".
P. Orin Zack
Amusingly, the addition of new bases for terrestrial DNA could be used to defend our home world in a case brought against mankind by aliens who met our first expedition to Mars in a short story I wrote called "Site License". It starts like this...
* * *
"Yes sir, Mr. Nagle," I told the debriefing officer, "that's what they said when they handed us the papers."
The five of us had just returned from what was supposed to have been the first stage of a long-delayed Mars colonization project. Had everything gone as planned, we were to have stayed for five years, helping groups of volunteer colonists set up their habitats and showing them how to use all of the special equipment. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way.
* * *
You can read the whole story at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/site-license/
P. Orin Zack
Because I write short stories (klurgsheld.wordpress.com) suggested by the news, I know that thinking though a tinfoil hat is one way to extract the potentially covert narrative in an issue like this. So when I look at it, I see two viable story-lines, either or both of which might have played a part in this effort.
The first is familiar: yet another minor rule that people are expected to comply with. Nothing really interesting there, and there are easier ways to go about it. The second is more intriguing, and also brings with it a load of historical baggage: information control. Discouraging people from being able to know from first-hand testing what might be in their immediate environment plays into the meme of government as protective parent. We'll tell you everything you need to know; don't go looking for yourself, don't read those books we think are dangerous for you to have read. But that still begs the question of timing... is there a reason this is being done now? Perhaps. Someone might be nervous that the suggestion that mini-nukes were planted in the basement of the WTC to shatter the 27 steel spines of the towers has started to gain traction, and that people might go look for themselves. If we can't get a detector, we can't prove the rumor, but then we can't discount it either. As I said, tinfoil hats can instigate compelling stories. What they can't do is tell you if those stories are true.
Back in the Cold War, there used to be something called 'Civil Defense". We citizens were encouraged to learn how to operate a geiger counter. My wife was certified as a Radiological Monitor while in the Civil Air Patrol, at the age of 15. So the idea of restricting detector ownership in an age where suitcase nukes do exist doesn't fly too high in our personal skies.