My childhood, in Birmingham, bestowed the knowledge: do not underestimate the danger of ignorant, angry people in large groups.Cross-posted at no friends no followers no bullshit.The feelings of drift of contemporary life in the US: its media empires -- with content as weightless in meaning and resonance as the electrons that transport the images, and the Internet’s pixel fiefdoms, in combination with the ad hoc, fast-buck-driven architecture of suburban nothingvilles gives present day life in the US a flimsy, provisional quality.
President Obama’s aura of weightlessness, his quality of emotional remoteness, only exacerbates the nebulous sense of unease on the irrational right who think with their guts not their minds. Conversely, guns feel real to these adrift denizens of the nation’s spleenland. The weapon’s weight in their hands wards off their unfocused sense of dread; its heft, momentarily, mitigates the unease inherent in feelings of being helplessly unmoored . . . Looking down the precise beauty of its barrel distills hazy hatreds into identifiable targets. Momentarily, the ground feels solid beneath their feet. Hence, guns must be stockpiled; massive amounts of ammunition stored for ballast. The mystifying events of the era . . . so muffled by the white noise of uncertainty, must yield to something as clear and decisive as the crack of a rifle shot.
Human beings will never transcend being capable of dwelling in madness on a collective level. David Hare quotes Rebecca West, in the introduction to his play, The Secret Rapture: “Only half of us is sane: only part of us loves . . . [desires] happiness, wants to die in peace . . . in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable . . . and wants to die in a catastrophe . . . and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”
The actuality of revolution means that one cannot perpetually defer a decision, action, or judgment; it means that one undertakes it, fully exposed to one's lack of coverage in history or even in the revolutionary moment. It means that one has to trust that the revolutionary process will bring about new constellations, arrangements, skills, convictions, that through it we will make something else, something we aren't imagining now.Perhaps this seems less surprising, less far-fetched, now that, for a decade, many of us have been making something else together. We've been linking and connecting, doing more than forwarding kitten photos. We've been building alliances and awareness, sharing knowledge of crimes, inequalities, violence, exploitation. We've been hearing the right claiming their revolution and we've been swept up in the reality of their counter-revolution. We've heard the neoliberals and financial despots claim that they are entitled to 90 percent of the wealth and we know, and now because we are connected know that we know, that they are wrong.
It could be that now is when ideas that have become abstract and hard to comprehend, ideas like the proletariart as the subject-object of history, may start to make more sense. To me, now, the idea of the subject-object of history indexes feedback loops, self-organized networks, emergent formations where we are bringing ourselves into being as something new; we are the objects of ourselves. We are already making our setting. The point is to make it differently and to take back what is being taken away--products of our work, opportunities to share, spaces to live, healthy food and environments.
The actuality of revolution is the press/pressure that we feel, that we can't put off but must redirect.
Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor and former Air Force lecturer, will present findings on Capitol Hill Tuesday that argue that the majority of suicide terrorism around the world since 1980 has had a common cause: military occupation.
Pape and his team of researchers draw on data produced by a six-year study of suicide terrorist attacks around the world that was partially funded by the Defense Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency. They have compiled the terrorism statistics in a publicly available database comprised of some 10,000 records on some 2,200 suicide terrorism attacks, dating back to the first suicide terrorism attack of modern times - the 1983 truck bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 241 U.S. Marines.
"We have lots of evidence now that when you put the foreign military presence in, it triggers suicide terrorism campaigns, ... and that when the foreign forces leave, it takes away almost 100% of the terrorist campaign," Pape said in an interview last week on his findings.
An internet voting system designed to allow District of Columbia residents to cast absentee ballots has been put on hold after computer scientists exploited vulnerabilities that would have allowed them to rig elections and view secret data.Professor Halderman writes:
The system, which was paid for in part by a $300,000 federal grant, was hijacked just 36 hours after Washington DC elections officials began testing it ahead of live elections scheduled for next month. Scientists from the University of Michigan pulled off the hack to demonstrate the inherent insecurity of net-based voting.
“None of this will come as a surprise to internet security experts, who are familiar with the many kinds of attacks that major websites suffer from on a daily basis,” one of the scientists, J. Alex Halderman, wrote on Tuesday on the Freedom to Tinker blog. “It may someday be possible to build a secure method for submitting ballots over the internet, but in the meantime, such systems should be presumed to be vulnerable based on the limitations of today's security technology.”
The pilot system, which was built on open-source software, was deployed a week ago Tuesday, and just 36 hours later, the team was able to take full control of it. Even though their attack caused computers that were used to cast votes to play their alma mater's fight song, it took elections officials until Friday to suspend the site.
What this means for Internet voting
The specific vulnerability that we exploited is simple to fix, but it will be vastly more difficult to make the system secure. We've found a number of other problems in the system, and everything we've seen suggests that the design is brittle: one small mistake can completely compromise its security. I described above how a small error in file-extension handling left the system open to exploitation. If this particular problem had not existed, I'm confident that we would have found another way to attack the system.
None of this will come as a surprise to Internet security experts, who are familiar with the many kinds of attacks that major web sites suffer from on a daily basis. It may someday be possible to build a secure method for submitting ballots over the Internet, but in the meantime, such systems should be presumed to be vulnerable based on the limitations of today's security technology.
We plan to write more about the problems we found and their implications for Internet voting in a forthcoming paper.
The nation is on the edge of anarchy with reports of homes being literally stolen, bank employees breaking into occupied dwellings to change the locks on houses they had not yet foreclosed on, multiple sales of the same property, improper foreclosures on houses where there was no mortgage at all, service of process that never happened and was attested to, literal forgery of court documents (e.g. process service filed that pre-dated the lawsuit itself) and other outrages.
If this is not stopped immediately there is every reason to believe that the people of this nation will come to the conclusion that the bedrock of society - private property ownership - has been intentionally destroyed by a band of brigands with the explicit cooperation and permission of the government. Should that conclusion be reached - that our government has conspired with private parties to expropriate the homes of the citizens - history says that the outcome is likely to be extremely unpleasant and irreversible.
We are running out of time to do the right thing.
Witches will always greet themselves with words like: Blessed Be or Mary Me. In addition to that you will find the tone of conversation to be very open about life, about not judging others, about helping animals, about healing, interest in crystals and their properties. And if any of these comments of qualities can fit within your life you may have some witch within you too. So when you meet people and you wonder could they be a witch, could they not be a witch? Use some of these clues to tell. And thank you for watching with Sandra Cheryl Richardson on how to tell if someone is a witch.Open? Not judging? Helping? Healing? It doesn't sound like O'Donnell is a witch!
