Smedley Butler From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search
Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 - June 21, 1940), nicknamed "the fighting Quaker" and "Old Gimlet Eye," was a Major General in the U.S. Marine Corps and, at the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. Butler was awarded the Medal of Honor twice during his career, one of only 19 people to be so decorated. He was noted for his outspoken left-wing views and his book War is a Racket, one of the first works describing the military-industrial complex. After retiring from service, Butler became a popular speaker at meetings organized by veterans, communists, pacifists and church groups in the 1930s. Butler came forward to the U.S. Congress in 1934 to report that a proposed coup had been plotted by wealthy industrialists to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows. ----
War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.
There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.
It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with ever
A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks. Bloggers beware.
As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer.
From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.
The declassified document is called "Information Operations Roadmap". It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.
Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.
The "roadmap" calls for a far-reaching overhaul of the military's ability to conduct information operations and electronic warfare. And, in some detail, it makes recommendations for how the US armed forces should think about this new, virtual warfare.
The document says that information is "critical to military success". Computer and telecommunications networks are of vital operational importance.
Propaganda
The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.
All these are engaged in information operations. Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.
"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads. "Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.
The document's authors acknowledge that American news media should not unwittingly broadcast military propaganda. "Specific boundaries should be established," they write. But they don't seem to explain how.
"In this day and age it is impossible to prevent stories that are fed abroad as part of psychological operations propaganda from blowing back into the United States - even though they were directed abroad," says Kristin Adair of the National Security Archive.
Credibility problem
Public awareness of the US military's information operations is low, but it's growing - thanks to some operational clumsiness.
"When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone. It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system"
Late last year, it emerged that the Pentagon had paid a private company, the Lincoln Group, to plant hundreds of stories in Iraqi newspapers. The stories - all supportive of US policy - were written by military personnel and then placed in Iraqi publications.
And websites that appeared to be information sites on the politics of Africa and the Balkans were found to be run by the Pentagon.
But the true extent of the Pentagon's information operations, how they work, who they're aimed at, and at what point they turn from informing the public to influencing populations, is far from clear.
The roadmap, however, gives a flavour of what the US military is up to - and the grand scale on which it's thinking.
It reveals that Psyops personnel "support" the American government's international broadcasting. It singles out TV Marti - a station whi
Oh I agree! I think that a lot of the inefficiencies - WRT Quartz - are because of XML. Apple has alpha compostiting, trasparency, 3D - etc. They had it first. If you look at the block diagrams of teh rendering systems, it's clear where Aero Glass came from - at least X.org copies and says so.
The world wants to know, Why can Apple run Quartz on a 500 MHz PPC with an ATI Rage128?
Even your 2 GHz Centrino or 1.6 GHz Mobile Pentium won't be crippled by Vista - as long as you have 2 Gb RAM!
The demanding requirements of Vista come from the Quartz-clone, Aero Glass. This is like Apple's quartz, only pure XML instead of Adobe PDF based (an XML/Forth hybrid/melange).
In doing so, it is between 500% to 1000% less efficient, requiring the highest end GPUs, with minimums of 128 MB VRAM.
In the end, it accomplishes little more than Quartz - with the exception of easire X-Style remote window invocation. This is a possible direction, as yet undeveloped.
And the "puritans" were not, by and large, escaping religious persecution - anymore than the Taliban are, by fleeing into Pakistan. These were a nasty, repressive rapacious and intolerant lot of religious manics - who stoned women and children to death, for immodesty in dress. That included the wearing of colors.
Look into teh English Civil war, and the Parliamentary terror of England that was birthed in the midlands. Mullah Omar should have had such a run.
These people were ejected for their inability to live withtheir neighbors, or fled accountability after the return of the Monarchy.
This is a gross simplification - but roughly the shape of things. They were egalitarian enough - were you a member of their class, race and creed.
Funny, so few Americans are actually descended from these people that, as children, they are trained to regard as their forebears. Most of the blacks in America can claim a longer association with the country's history than most whites or asians.
I'm not really playing that game - just sparking the discussion. It is one of the two, genocidal crimes that the Americas are built on. Every dollar and peso in every pocket is manufactured from the blood of African slaves and murdered first nations.
And it is considered commonplace, or of principally historical interest.
Stalin? The Nazis and Khmer Rouge? Small potatoes to these horrors, which continued for almost two-hundred years. The Arab and interneccine slavery of Africans was unjust - but seldom so relentlessly brutal, with human beings reduced to a level of treatment beneath that of animals.
There is a fundamental disconnect when organizations that behave dictatorially are given status as virtual persons under the laws of ostensible democracies.
Which reminds me. If Democracy is supposed to be such a good thing - and any government defying its principles is deficient, if not questionably moral - then why does the same not hold true for corporations? Why are they run by charismatic autocrats, backed by semi-secretive cabals?
CEOs are just little Maoist dictators at heart. They share more with the reality of the Chinese rulers than they do with you, me or Thomas Paine.
Slashdot Mirror
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 - June 21, 1940), nicknamed "the fighting Quaker" and "Old Gimlet Eye," was a Major General in the U.S. Marine Corps and, at the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. Butler was awarded the Medal of Honor twice during his career, one of only 19 people to be so decorated. He was noted for his outspoken left-wing views and his book War is a Racket, one of the first works describing the military-industrial complex. After retiring from service, Butler became a popular speaker at meetings organized by veterans, communists, pacifists and church groups in the 1930s. Butler came forward to the U.S. Congress in 1934 to report that a proposed coup had been plotted by wealthy industrialists to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Check out the rest of my stuff. The NSA already has!
By Adam Brookes
BBC Pentagon correspondent
A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.
Bloggers beware.
As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer.
From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.
The declassified document is called "Information Operations Roadmap". It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.
Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.
The "roadmap" calls for a far-reaching overhaul of the military's ability to conduct information operations and electronic warfare. And, in some detail, it makes recommendations for how the US armed forces should think about this new, virtual warfare.
The document says that information is "critical to military success". Computer and telecommunications networks are of vital operational importance.
Propaganda
The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.
All these are engaged in information operations.
Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.
"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.
"Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.
The document's authors acknowledge that American news media should not unwittingly broadcast military propaganda. "Specific boundaries should be established," they write. But they don't seem to explain how.
"In this day and age it is impossible to prevent stories that are fed abroad as part of psychological operations propaganda from blowing back into the United States - even though they were directed abroad," says Kristin Adair of the National Security Archive.
Credibility problem
Public awareness of the US military's information operations is low, but it's growing - thanks to some operational clumsiness.
Late last year, it emerged that the Pentagon had paid a private company, the Lincoln Group, to plant hundreds of stories in Iraqi newspapers. The stories - all supportive of US policy - were written by military personnel and then placed in Iraqi publications.
And websites that appeared to be information sites on the politics of Africa and the Balkans were found to be run by the Pentagon.
But the true extent of the Pentagon's information operations, how they work, who they're aimed at, and at what point they turn from informing the public to influencing populations, is far from clear.
The roadmap, however, gives a flavour of what the US military is up to - and the grand scale on which it's thinking.
It reveals that Psyops personnel "support" the American government's international broadcasting. It singles out TV Marti - a station whi
rigorousintuition "403"s still.
I could get "Cheese Sandwich" and "Windows Mobile" blogs - but about 12-15 poli blogs I frequent were all down...
Make sure his name is something like "Bjarne" or "Knuth".
Alert!
"Progressive" and "Radical" Blogs on Blogger seem to be completely unavailable for over 10 hours.
I am trying to get responses here, and come to a consensus. Are these being deleted?
The following ".blogspot.com" sites are unavailable as of Saturday, Feb. 4, 4PM EST.
http://gorillaintheroom.blogspot.com/
http://xymphora.blogspot.com/
http://spacetimecurves.blogspot.com/
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/
http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/
And many more.
A casual use of the search function on the Blogger/Blogspot front page returns the sites in question.
Conservative political sites also seem to still be "killed".
Plenty of sites promoting cheese in salads , or announcing the purchase of new home electronics , seem to be available.
Are we experiencing a crackdown? Is this a "service outage" anomaly?
Alert!
"Progressive" and "Radical" Blogs on Blogger seem to be completely unavailable for over 10 hours.
I am trying to get responses here, and come to a consensus. Are these being deleted?
The following ".blogspot.com" sites are unavailable as of Saturday, Feb. 4, 4PM EST.
http://gorillaintheroom.blogspot.com/
http://xymphora.blogspot.com/
http://spacetimecurves.blogspot.com/
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/
http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/
And many more.
A casual use of the search function on the Blogger/Blogspot front page returns the sites in question.
Conservative political sites also seem to still be "killed".
Plenty of sites promoting cheese in salads , or announcing the purchase of new home electronics , seem to be available.
Are we experiencing a crackdown? Is this a "service outage" anomaly?
Alert!
"Progressive" and "Radical" Blogs on Blogger seem to be completely unavailable for over 10 hours.
I am trying to get responses here, and come to a consensus. Are these being deleted?
The following ".blogspot.com" sites are unavailable as of Saturday, Feb. 4, 4PM EST.
http://gorillaintheroom.blogspot.com/
http://xymphora.blogspot.com/
http://spacetimecurves.blogspot.com/
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/
http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/
And many more.
A casual use of the search function on the Blogger/Blogspot front page returns the sites in question.
Conservative political sites also seem to still be "killed".
Plenty of sites promoting cheese in salads , or announcing the purchase of new home electronics , seem to be available.
Are we experiencing a crackdown? Is this a "service outage" anomaly?
But Alias/Maya! That is OpenGL - which Quartz doesn't composite, etc. But it is GPU taxing.
Yeah. Macs are used not for games - but heavily for commercial video and animation, with Alias and whatnot.
Oh I agree! I think that a lot of the inefficiencies - WRT Quartz - are because of XML.
Apple has alpha compostiting, trasparency, 3D - etc. They had it first. If you look at the block diagrams of teh rendering systems, it's clear where Aero Glass came from - at least X.org copies and says so.
The world wants to know, Why can Apple run Quartz on a 500 MHz PPC with an ATI Rage128?
Even your 2 GHz Centrino or 1.6 GHz Mobile Pentium won't be crippled by Vista - as long as you have 2 Gb RAM!
The demanding requirements of Vista come from the Quartz-clone, Aero Glass. This is like Apple's quartz, only pure XML instead of Adobe PDF based (an XML/Forth hybrid/melange).
In doing so, it is between 500% to 1000% less efficient, requiring the highest end GPUs, with minimums of 128 MB VRAM.
In the end, it accomplishes little more than Quartz - with the exception of easire X-Style remote window invocation. This is a possible direction, as yet undeveloped.
A way to use Linux, for the really important things in this world, like KILLING PEOPLE!
I think that was one of the milestones in Doc's Cluetrain Manifesto.
And the "puritans" were not, by and large, escaping religious persecution - anymore than the Taliban are, by fleeing into Pakistan. These were a nasty, repressive rapacious and intolerant lot of religious manics - who stoned women and children to death, for immodesty in dress. That included the wearing of colors.
Look into teh English Civil war, and the Parliamentary terror of England that was birthed in the midlands. Mullah Omar should have had such a run.
These people were ejected for their inability to live withtheir neighbors, or fled accountability after the return of the Monarchy.
This is a gross simplification - but roughly the shape of things. They were egalitarian enough - were you a member of their class, race and creed.
Funny, so few Americans are actually descended from these people that, as children, they are trained to regard as their forebears. Most of the blacks in America can claim a longer association with the country's history than most whites or asians.
I'm not really playing that game - just sparking the discussion. It is one of the two, genocidal crimes that the Americas are built on. Every dollar and peso in every pocket is manufactured from the blood of African slaves and murdered first nations.
And it is considered commonplace, or of principally historical interest.
It took the "middle passage" and other horrors to really turn large-scale African slavery into the worst atrocity of the past two-thousand years.
Stalin? The Nazis and Khmer Rouge? Small potatoes to these horrors, which continued for almost two-hundred years. The Arab and interneccine slavery of Africans was unjust - but seldom so relentlessly brutal, with human beings reduced to a level of treatment beneath that of animals.
Chorus:
Don\'t call me nigger, whitey!
Don\'t call me whitey, nigger!
Don\'t call me nigger, whitey!
Don\'t call me whitey, nigger!
Well I went down across the country,
and I heard some voices rang.
They was talkin' softly to each other
and not a word could change a thing.
Don\'t call me nigger, whitey!
Don\'t call me whitey, nigger!
Don\'t call me nigger, whitey!
Don\'t call me whitey, nigger!
Don\'t call me nigger, whitey!
Don\'t call me whitey, nigger!
Don\'t call me nigger, whitey!
Don\'t call me whitey, nigger!
Don\'t call me nigger, whitey!
Don\'t call me whitey, nigger!
Don\'t call me nigger, whitey!
Don\'t call me whitey, nigger!
Shareholders aren't in my equation. Employees are. You know, us Morlocks.
I'm asking why it is not better.
There is a fundamental disconnect when organizations that behave dictatorially are given status as virtual persons under the laws of ostensible democracies.
Which reminds me. If Democracy is supposed to be such a good thing - and any government defying its principles is deficient, if not questionably moral - then why does the same not hold true for corporations? Why are they run by charismatic autocrats, backed by semi-secretive cabals?
CEOs are just little Maoist dictators at heart. They share more with the reality of the Chinese rulers than they do with you, me or Thomas Paine.
Privacy rights are a part of established constitutional law and principle. See "Roe v. Wade".
It could have been a JE
HMS Itanic.
Don't be Human.
One "election" at a time.