The New York Reach-Around

People who watch the surveillance state have known about this stuff since the early 1980s. My personal theory is that spooks talk to each other (as spooks do) and eventually word starts to leak; it’s too clever a scam to miss. Then, when a program becomes huge enough, there are tens of thousands of people using the data from it; it’s pretty easy to figure out where the data is coming from. I first encountered the international reach-around when I was at a conference and wound up talking to an interesting fellow who turned out to be a journalist that had been investigating the surveillance state for a very long time.

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Oh, This Old Thing?

Spook stuff fascinates me, because it’s the unwritten side of history; things that happen covertly can have huge impact, but are never publicly known. For someone like me, who is fascinated – maybe obsessed – with causality, spook stuff is a great cause of many things that we generally never know. Which means, our ability to understand the world around us is permanently compromised.

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Sunday Sermon: The Republic Goes to War

One of the responsibilities of a state, under the international system, is to provide protection for its citizens. That’s particularly important for a nation like Badgeria, which has unconventional economics and politics – historically nations trapped in aggressive forms of capitalism or fascism attempt to destabilize and conquer nations attempting to offer a more humane alternative. It is an unfortunate reality, but it’s a reality and Badgerians are, above all, realistic.

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Remember The Days When the US Used Nuclear Weapons Against Americans?

Depending on how you want to count it, the US Government killed about a half million Americans using nuclear weapons. That’s a half a million more than the North Koreans, or anyone else, have.

That’s also not counting all the American lives that were shortened by working with radioactive material at Hanford and Oak Ridge, or Idaho Falls, Los Alamos, and other places. These are US citizens who were on the receiving end of nuclear weapons.

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A Lovely Bit of Thinking

This is a piece I stumbled across a few years ago; it’s interesting, especially considering when it was written: 1949. The author was looking back at Europe’s successive troubles and accurately saw the disturbance as an effect of the economics of the industrial revolution. The analysis seems pretty simple to me: imperialism was waning and the vast changes in the European powers’ economies brought on by new industrial processes (in particular, weaponry) created a perfect storm of events that – for a time – discredited capitalism. The Russian revolution was through the process of turning into Stalin’s dictatorship – discrediting communism in turn. Aristocracy, in the form of the family of elite pinheads who destroyed Europe, didn’t look particularly good, either.

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