Tag: corpocracy

The extent of Facebook spying

Or, at least, this is what they’re willing to admit to for the present:

For the six months ending December 31, 2012, the total number of
user-data requests Facebook received from any and all government
entities in the U.S. (including local, state, and federal, and including
criminal and national security-related requests) – was between 9,000
and 10,000. These requests run the gamut – from things like a local
sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a
fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national
security official investigating a terrorist threat. The total number of
Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the
entirety of those 9-10 thousand requests was between 18,000 and 19,000
accounts.

And, of course, the fact that they’re handing over about 40,000 accounts per year doesn’t eliminate the NSA’s widely rumored backdoor access.

Better there than the US “justice” system

Edward Snowdon makes it clear that he doesn’t trust the U.S. courts.  Nor should he.  Nor, for that matter, should you:

Edward Snowden says he wants to ask the people of Hong Kong to decide his fate after choosing the city because of his faith in its rule of law. The 29-year-old former CIA employee behind what might be the biggest intelligence leak in US history revealed his identity to the world in Hong Kong on Sunday. His decision to use a city under Chinese sovereignty as his haven has been widely questioned – including by some rights activists in Hong Kong.

Snowden said last night that he had no doubts about his choice of Hong Kong.

“People who think I made a mistake in picking Hong Kong as a location misunderstand my intentions. I am not here to hide from justice; I am here to reveal criminality,” Snowden said in an exclusive interview with the South China Morning Post.

“I have had many opportunities to flee HK, but I would rather stay and fight the United States government in the courts, because I have faith in Hong Kong’s rule of law,” he added.

His decision makes a tremendous amount of sense in light of the various travesties committed on a regular basis by the US courts.  Moreover, China is one of the very few countries that are not inclined to be cowed by US threats.

A hero of human liberty

Edward Snowden made the brave, self-sacrificing choice that hundreds of thousands of servants of the machine could make, but do not, every single day.  He informed the American people, and the people of the world, what the US government is doing to them.  I think it is entirely possible that he will one day come to be considered an American Solzhenitsyn:

 The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he said….

He does not fear the consequences of going public, he said, only that
doing so will distract attention from the issues raised by his
disclosures. “I know the media likes to personalise political debates,
and I know the government will demonise me.”

Despite these fears,
he remained hopeful his outing will not divert attention from the
substance of his disclosures. “I really want the focus to be on these
documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens
around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in.” He added:
“My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in
their name and that which is done against them.”

He has had “a
very comfortable life” that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a
girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a
family he loves. “I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t
in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with
this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

I know it is very difficult for most Americans to grasp this, but the US government are not the good guys here.  They are even worse than the bad guys from whom they claim to be protecting you.  Before you condemn Snowden as a traitor, remember, George Washington, Samuel Adams, and Thomas Jefferson were, from the perspective of the British crown, traitors too.

NSA and the absence of law

I’ve been saying this for a while now, so it’s interesting to see others openly observing it in the mainstream media.  The US government does not respect the Constitution or any law, it is not the Constitutional entity everyone assumes it to be, and the US justice system is one giant game of make-believe:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Friday that the US justice
system was suffering from a “calamitous collapse in the rule of law”, as
Washington reeled from the sensational exposure of vast spy agency
surveillance programmes. Speaking in an interview with AFP at Ecuador’s London embassy, where
he has been holed up for almost a year, the founder of the
whistleblowing website accused the US government of trying to “launder”
its activities with regard to the far-reaching electronic spying effort
revealed on Thursday.

Assange doesn’t know the half of it, but he knew enough to try to stay out of the clutches of a Big Brother machine that kidnaps people around the world, kills others with drones, and spies on everyone with Internet access.  It is somewhat astonishing, to the average person who grew up amidst the Manichean struggle of the forces of freedom and light versus the evil empire of the Soviet Union, to gradually realize that the evil empire of the USA is more insidious and pernicious, with a greater global reach, than the Soviet version.

Tyler Durden observes that the administration has been caught lying in all of its responses to news of the NSA scandal:

There’s one reason why the administration, James Clapper and the NSA should just keep their mouths shut as the PRISM-gate fallout escalates: with every incremental attempt to refute some previously unknown facet of the US Big Brother state, a new piece of previously unleaked information from the same intelligence organization now scrambling for damage control, emerges and exposes the brand new narrative as yet another lie, forcing even more lies, more retribution against sources, more journalist persecution and so on.

The latest piece of news once again comes from the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald who this time exposes the NSA’s datamining tool “Boundless Informant” which according to leaked documents collected 97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide in March 2013 alone, and “3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period.”

This is summarized in the chart below which shows that only the middle east has more active NSA-espionage than the US. Also, Obama may not want to show Xi the activity heatmap for China, or else the whole “China is hacking us” script may promptly fall apart.

As usual, the government is hiding behind the fact that it is hiring contractors to do what it is prohibited by that ever-so-effectual “law” from doing itself.  The government is entirely lawless; to the last two presidential administrations, “law” is simply another weapon in its war on the American people.

The Gatekeepers know the gates are crumbling

One of the chief beneficiaries of the crumbling system, James Patterson, makes a ludicrous pitch for a bailout of the publishing industry that is quite rightly ripped apart by Kenton Kilgore:

Recently, mega-author James Patterson took out an ad in the New York Times Book Review asking for the government to bail out libraries and the book publishing/selling industry….  In his ad, Patterson asks, “If there are no bookstores, no libraries, no serious publishers with passionate, dedicated, idealistic editors, what will happen to our literature?  Who will discover and mentor new writers?  Who will publish our important books?”

So, the three-headed serpent that is Big Authors + Big Publishing + Big Distributors–the same serpent that made Patterson and his partners rich by cranking out about 10 of his books every year–is eating itself.  Well, we can’t have that!  What would be our society be without the ”important books” that Patterson lists in his ad–as well as his splatterfests named after lines from nursery rhymes (Along Came a Spider, Kiss the Girls, Pop Goes the Weasel)?  And what about Twilight?  And the collected masterpieces of Danielle Steel?

It’s more than a little amusing to me that while a brilliant businessman – if shameless literary hack – like Patterson can see what is taking place in the publishing world, the idiot parasites who have taken over the SFWA remain totally clueless about those changes and are more concerned about chainmail bikinis and the fact that Mike Resnick and Barry Malzburg referred to a woman they knew forty years ago as a “lady” rather than as an editor in the SFWA Bulletin. 

(Believe it or not, that is the urgent DEFCON 1 situation to which Rapey McRaperson was referring and pledging his name, fame, and fortune to address this weekend.  That’s right; the SFWA is going to deal with its “problem” of the old guard by silencing them and ensuring that no new dissenting voices are permitted to arise.  You will RESPECT fat old women writing dreadful books about warrior women and necrobestial love triangles or you will be SILENT!)

It is going to be so much fun to watch these awful people shriek and scream as the cold equations of the publishing business gradually penetrate their thick, empty skulls.  I’ve been asked, on occasion, why I remain a member of the SFWA considering that only about ten percent of the active membership appears to share my perspective on the ongoing developments and the majority of the membership can’t stand me or the intellectual liberty for which I stand.  To which I can only respond: “Give up my front row seat to the auto-bonfire of the witches?  Are you mad?”

Simply reading the litany of sob stories and complaints that make up the greater part of the SFWA Forum makes for a pure and unadulterated pleasure for anyone with a sense of either justice or humor. And it is only going to get more entertaining as the economy implodes and the more publishers go the way of Night Shade Books. It will be a delight to see proud editor/authors forced to resort to the very independent publishing they once scorned as being intrinsically inferior… and then watch them flounder and fail as they belatedly discover that their “popularity” was artificial and mostly the result of superior access to the chief distribution channel.

As one who was briefly permitted entry by the gatekeepers through a side entrance, I perhaps have a more accurate perspective on the situation than most who are either purely insiders or outsiders.  I still have access to a number of executives at several major publishers, although, as it happens, none at the genre publishers.  And I can testify that the mainstream executives understand very well that their conventional business appears to be terminal, as increasing ebook sales at steadily falling prices are not be able to make up for the combination of a) declining print sales, b) vanishing print outlets, c) competition from independents.  It should get very interesting indeed when Barnes & Noble either files for bankruptcy or is acquired by Amazon.

The Gatekeepers are desperate because they are standing on walls that are turning to sand beneath their feet.  But do not miss the confession that is implicit in Patterson’s corrupt appeal; without their structural advantages, “serious publishers with passionate, dedicated, idealistic editors” cannot compete on a level playing field with independents writing books of which they do not approve.

Note, in particular, the adjectives “dedicated” and “idealistic”.  Dedicated to what ideals?  Patterson’s plea is an implicit admission of the very bias that Standout Authors such as Sarah Hoyt and Larry Correia have been describing, and which those who have benefited from it have so staunchly denied.

US military unilaterally overturns Posse Comitatus.

“In essence, this policy change seeks to supersede Posse Comitatus,
the 1878 law which forbids the military from being involved in domestic
law enforcement “except in cases and under circumstances expressly
authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.” Under the Insurrection Act of 1807,
the President may deploy armed forces domestically under extreme
circumstances but Congress has to review the action every 14 days.


Under the War Powers Resolution of 1973,
the President cannot commit troops to an armed conflict for a period
longer than 60 days without an authorization from Congress of the use of
military force or a declaration of war.


Under no circumstances in current US law is it legal for
the military to deploy itself domestically without authorization from
either the President, Congress or both.”
 It looks as if the U.S. military are actively expecting some sort of trouble in which authorization for the military’s use by the command-in-chief isn’t possible.  I wonder why they are anticipating that?  Especially when the organization most capable of arranging a situation where that authorization isn’t possible is the U.S. military.
The Ciceronian historical cycle anticipates the development of an aristocracy at this point.  It’s interesting to consider from what that aristocracy might develop, as the areas of corporate and military power appear to be the two aspects of society that are increasingly immune to government regulation.  If the Ciceronian model is still relevant, the aristocracy would likely develop out of that corporate-military intersection.

A whistle, blown

A certain corporation has been actively avoiding British taxes:

A FORMER Google executive has blown the whistle on a massive and “immoral” tax avoidance scheme that has “cheated” British taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of pounds over the past decade.

Barney Jones, 34, who worked for the internet search giant between 2002 and 2006, has lifted the lid on an elaborate structure which diverts British profits through Ireland to the Bermuda tax haven.

Although Google’s London sales staff would negotiate and sign contracts with British customers, and cash was paid into a UK bank account, deals were technically booked through its Dublin office to minimise its liabilities here. Jones, a devout Christian and father of four, is ready to hand over a cache of more than 100,000 emails and documents to HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), detailing the “concocted scheme”. 

My father was sentenced for twelve years of prison for a similar
avoidance scheme that amounted to $2 million.  Granted, that was in the USA and not the UK, but I tend to doubt that Google only used this sort of scheme to divert British profits. I wonder how much prison
time the influential and politically connected Google executives will
see?  About as much as John Corzine saw for failing to return hundreds of millions of dollars on deposit with MF Global to its depositors, I expect. 

Some versions of this sort of structure are perfectly legal, of course.  If the sales staff had been in Dublin and the cash paid into Ireland, there wouldn’t be an issue; the business would be legitimately Irish.  But the more influential corporations become, the more they expect to be permitted to not have to bother with petty matters such as sovereign nations and national law when it doesn’t suit them to do so.

This should suffice to demonstrate that corporatism is manifestly not capitalism, and moreover, that it is intrinsically hostile to national interests.  Never forget that corporations are artificial creations of the State.

Why big corporations welcome regulation

Karl Denninger explains the rationale underlying the unholy alliance between big business and big government in explaining why Amazon is welcoming online sales taxes:

Amazon, for its part, has engaged in this sort of screwball deal with its distribution centers in various states, arguing that this doesn’t give them nexus and thus they don’t need to collect tax.  When threatened they reply with the threat to close the center and fire the employees (who are residents of the subject state) or sue, which effectively stalls the clock.  This set of tactics has “worked”, because Amazon (and similar firms) are huge corporations with internal legal staffing that can fight these things and, at worst, delay the outcome driving up the costs for the states and there is virtually no chance that the company or its officers will be indicted by the states in question for tax evasion, as is the case for a small business.  The problem is that as these cases have gone on over the years it has become increasingly apparent that Amazon and these other retailers will eventually lose and be forced to both pay and collect the taxes and might be exposed to penalties, interest and retroactive tax billing for willful evasive activity.

So what Amazon appears to have decided to do is play screw the other guy by forcing them into having a “virtual” nexus that otherwise would not exist!  This is then sold to people as “fairness.”

It is nothing of the sort.

Amazon could choose to have distribution centers only in no-sales-tax states.  It could then tell the rest of the states to “pound sand.”  There is a long-standing US Supreme Court decision (“Quill”) that they can stand behind if they take this approach and are without question in the clear in doing so.  But by doing so Amazon would have a serious problem because transit time and cost become a big problem, and since everyone wants everything right now, shipping cost is a huge expense and getting larger, and Amazon sees both cutting that cost and increasing speed of delivery as a competitive advantage (it is) they want to open distribution centers close to the people who shop.

But that leaves them with a problem because to do that they create nexus, and with nexus comes compliance costs.  Since they’ve become increasingly unable to avoid this and meet their business goals they now seek to use the jackboot of government to shove it down their competitors’ throats!

Obviously, Amazon would prefer no sales taxes.  But if they’re going to have to pay them anyhow, then it is much better for Amazon if everyone, including their competitors, is forced to deal with the compliance costs that Amazon is much better suited to pay given its size.  Large corporations can more easily afford to comply with regulations, as the employees required to do so make up a much smaller percentage of their total workforce.

This is a relatively harmless example, but it should suffice to demonstrate the absurdity of pretending that big business is the enemy of big government.

The decline of entrepreneurialism

Glenn Reynolds observes the current lack of startups with appropriate concern:

[T]he latest data indicate that start-ups are becoming rarer, not more common. A new report from JPMorgan economist Mike Feroli indicates that employment in start-ups is plunging. New jobs in the economy tend to come from new businesses, but we’re getting fewer new businesses. That doesn’t bode well.

In fact, it is yet another sign of a United States that is looking more like Europe: A society in which big businesses have cozy relationships with big government, while unemployment remains comparatively high. If you’re fortunate enough to have a job at one of those government-connected businesses, GE, for example, your situation is pretty good. If you’re a recent college graduate looking for work, your situation is not so great. If you’re a low-skilled worker, your situation is dreadful.

So what’s to blame for this change? A lot of things, probably. One reason, I suspect, for a job market that looks more like Europe is a regulatory and legal environment that looks more like Europe’s. High regulatory loads — the product of ObamaCare and numerous other laws — systematically harm small businesses, which can’t afford the personnel needed for compliance, to the benefit of large corporations, which can.

Likewise, higher taxes reduce the rewards for success, making people less likely to invest their money (or time) into new businesses. And local regulatory bodies, too, make starting new businesses harder.

But I wonder if the biggest problem isn’t cultural.

Reynolds is right to be concerned.  Entrepreneurialism is the engine of economic growth, technological advancement, and scientific progress. I suspect he is not only right, but that the cultural problem can be narrowed down considerably and connected to another recent phenomenon.  And, to be honest, I’m a little surprised that Reynolds didn’t make the connection, because that phenomenon is one of his primary bugaboos: the education bubble.

I started my first company when I was 23. It did rather well. But I would probably have been much more successful if I had followed the lead of Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and others and dropped out of school midway through my sophomore year.  With the considerable help of one of my father’s engineers, I’d designed an Ad Lib-compatible, stereo, CD-quality 16-bit, 16-channel sound board at a time when Ad Lib reigned supreme in the game’s industry with its MIDI card and Creative Labs had just introduced its first 8-bit, mono, 22 KHz Soundblaster.

We got two of the cards working over Christmas break, then I went back to school like a good little upper middle class worker bee and the project languished in a corporate bureaucracy that had no interest in game-related hardware until it died completely when the engineer who had worked on it left for another company before the summer.  Four and a half years later, Media Vision introduced its hugely successful Pro Audio Spectrum, which was almost exactly the same card we had built in the lab.

I’m not blaming anyone else for my failure to follow through on my ideas. It was my fault, no one else’s.  Let’s face it, if there is a theme to my life, that is it: once I have something working to my satisfaction, I tend to lose at least an amount of interest in it. But far from being encouraged to take advantage of the window of opportunity, I was actively discouraged from even the thought of dropping out of college.  I’d tentatively mentioned the possibility once we got the card working and it was greeted with what can only be described as unmitigated horror.  The idea that an intelligent individual from a good family would not be “educated” was simply not to be countenanced, and besides, I could always pursue the opportunity after I finished my degree in another two and a half years.

That seemed to make sense to me.  And indeed, it would have even been possible considering the timeline.  But opportunity doesn’t follow a nice orderly schedule, and as it happened, I never even looked at that sound card again.

The cult of the college degree is now even more widespread than it was back in the late 1980s, more people than ever are attending college, they are attending longer, and they are going into significant debt to do so.  This means that not only are more young men putting off their entrepreneurial activity for four to eight years during the most risk-friendly and most creative period of their lives, but they are far less able to afford to take risks once they graduate.

As a result, what we have now is young lawyers and MBAs in debt instead of young CEOs running their own startups.  Fortunately, the feminization of the university is beginning to cause young men to question the value of a college degree, so there may be a silver lining in the devolution of the academy.

The taxes and regulations aren’t helping either, of course. My father, for example, started three companies that employed hundreds of people and paid tens of millions in taxes.  He has spent the last six years living off the public dime, and in addition to the huge opportunity cost of locking him up, (which amounts to millions of dollars and scores of jobs), the actual cost of keeping him locked up in a Federal minimum-security prison amounts to about one-third of the amount he was charged with failing to pay.  Even if one is convinced he is the worst, most evil criminal of all time, from the macrosocietal perspective this is observably a case of society shooting itself in the foot.

So why should potential entrepreneurs bother?  It’s too much work combined with too much risk… and success only comes with even more risk. (My father’s imprisonment was the culmination of a battle with the IRS over an Irish subsidiary that began in 1992.) The younger versions of the best and brightest who once started companies are the most likely to see that it is now a better-paying, lower-risk option to get a glamor degree, join the parasitical class, and work up the hierarchy until reaching a position where one is able to use someone else’s organization to direct someone else’s money to one’s own pocket.  Why be an entrepreneur spending the next 10 years building a company when in the same amount of time you can expect to be an executive, or better yet, a consultant?

Why build when you can more easily and safely leech?

Death of the Republican blogosphere

Instapundit, John Hawkins, and a number of right-wing bloggers consider why some consider the right-wing blogosphere to be on the decline:

[A] funny thing happened in 2002-2003 — the left side of the
blogosphere took off and eclipsed the Right side of the blogosphere.
Liberals ferociously loathed George W. Bush, just as conservatives had
detested Clinton, and they went online to congregate and get the
information they needed to fight back. Soon, the liberal blogs were
considerably bigger than the conservative blogs….although, and this is
an often overlooked caveat, there were still a number of significant
conservative websites, with large audiences, that many people don’t
consider to be “blogs:” Lucianne, The American Spectator, WorldnetDaily, Newsmax, etc.

So, since that was the case, when Barack Obama got into power, you’d
have expected that traffic on the Right side of the blogosphere would
have surged just as it did on the Left side of the blogosphere in the
early Bush years.

That didn’t happen.

Sure, there were a few outliers that took off: Hot Air, Redstate, and the Breitbart empire
for example, but most conservative blogs have either grown
insignificantly, stayed the same size, or even shrank. Most bloggers on
the right side of the blogosphere haven’t increased their traffic
significantly in years. Moreover, the right side of the blogosphere as a
whole is definitely shrinking in numbers as bloggers that have had
trouble getting traction are quitting and fewer and fewer bloggers are
starting up new blogs.

And Legal Insurrection laments the link-stinginess of the corporate blogs that have largely taken over both Left and Right alike.

I wish the reality weren’t so true that the days of collaboration and mutual support are waning. It’s nearly impossible to get a link out of the new big names in
conservative media.  It’s not even a conservative blogosphere anymore,
it’s for-profit and non-profit corporate media which are protective of
eyeballs.

I think there are several problems.  The first is the increased amount of corporatization among the blogosphere. Pajamas Media is the primary culprit here, but Gawker Media is also to blame. Once Nick Denton and Roger Simon showed that it was possible to monetize a blog or ten, pecuniary interests rapidly came to the fore. Suddenly everything had a price tag, links were worth money, and everyone’s behavior naturally became just a bit more self-centered and mercenary.  The H/T soon went the way of the dodo.

And everyone became increasingly afraid of offending the bigger dogs and getting cut off from the all-important link flow. For example, I used to be a regular guest on the Northern Alliance Radio Show. That stopped not long after I criticized Michelle Malkin for her shoddy research failure and thereby offended the Powerline guys, even though I remained on good terms with the Fraters Libertas.  I suspect this desire to curry favor is why the outliers that took off in terms of popularity have so little chili; they’re basically the blogosphere equivalent of the mainstream media whores.  Face it, Dana Loesch isn’t any smarter now that she’s a Breitbart bimbo than she was when she called herself Mamalogues(TM) and I was kicking her around in response to her various lunacies.

An even more important factor is the sapping of right-wing energy by thirteen straight years of relentless betrayal of conservative principles by the Republican Party. Libertarian realists like me are still going strong, since we never expected any better, but how much enthusiasm can conservatives expect to muster in support of nominal leaders like George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney?  The political enthusiasm simply isn’t there anymore.  It’s not so much the right-wing blogosphere that is dying as the Republican one.

It may be worth noting that the Right also tends to fear controversy and mainstream criticism far more than the Left, not always without cause.  I’m a bit more controversial than the average blogger, and as a result, have an unusually small number of incoming links in relation to the readership.  Consider this fact: McRapey’s Whatever has between 30 to 40 percent less traffic than VP+AG these days, but Alexa shows 4,713 incoming links there, nearly 3,500 more than VP’s 941 and AG’s 315.  I’m not complaining. I’m  clear that readers will find their way here whether they are encouraged by others to do so or not. But the difference is noticeable.

Being an aggregator, Instapundit is one of the few bloggers who still links religiously to others. I’ve attempted to follow his example and I never cite any information from any blog without linking directly to it. But I don’t really bother with a blogroll per se anymore, because I have neither the time nor the interest to keep track of them as they spring up, post for a few months, or even a few weeks, and then fade away. 

These days, if someone sends me an email enthusiastically informing me that they have just launched a new blog and would love to exchange links, I don’t even bother to reply anymore.  I’ve seen far too many new blogs begin with a few enthusiastic posts, followed soon after by an apology for not having the time to post but promising that will change real soon now, then a last hurrah, after which comes the void. Blogging isn’t for everyone, but it usually requires trying it in order to learn whether it suits you or not… but I would recommend not requesting links from anyone until you’ve proven that you can do it for at least one year.

I think the corporatization of blogs makes independent that much more important, even if it is less common and less popular than it once was.  Otherwise, we might as all sit around and watch the three television stations permitted to us by our masters in the media.