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[ by Charles Cameron — 2012, apocalyptic, AntiSec, impact of decent graphic design ]
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1.

The artwork above is taken from an AntiSec / Anonymous proclamation. It’s the A in “AntiSec”, and I think it’s quite striking, has a bit of a Cirque du Soleil effect, or Kokopelli maybe. As regular readers know, I’m a sucker for decent graphics no matter where they came from, so this particular logo (I’ve only shown you the first letter, the whole thing is huge) caught my eye, and was enough to set me scanning the rest of the 421-page document.

The document itself was provided to me and many others a little over a week ago by way of a link in an email purporting to come from george.friedman@stratfor.com – i.e. George Friedman, the founder of STRATFOR, the “global intelligence company”. The email was headed “Rate Stratfor’s Incident Response” and told its readers (presumably people whose email addresses had been found in a Stratfor address book, which was downloaded in the “intrusion” in question):

We would like to hear from our loyal client base as to our handling of the recent intrusion by those deranged, sexually deviant criminal hacker terrorist masterminds.

The rhetoric here is interesting – “loyal client base” is phrasing I could easily imagine a bureaucrat using in a public document, while “deranged, sexually deviant criminal hacker terrorist masterminds” is way more fun but just a tad less, how shall I put it, official-sounding.

And with a come-on like that, I could hardly resist digging a little deeper…

So I clicked on through, and found myself looking at the long, long piece which opens with the striking graphic above. Okay, there was a lot of code, and I don’t read that — but the graphic at the head of the whole thing was neat, and in among the extended passages of code I found various paragraphs of English prose with enough lulz to keep me skipping and skimming, and…

Lo, I am rewarded. Because…

2.

There’s a reference to 2012, and indeed specifically to 21 December 2012. I love those – they’re apocalyptic!

Apocalyptic movements are a major interest of mine, not least because they provide the many varieties of human with an immensely rich playground for our hopes and fears — our sense of an unjust and imperfect world in which we live and the utopia it might and by rights “should” be – that bridges mundane reality with heightened imagination. And they’re found, as Richard Landes shows in his masterful recent book, Heaven on Earth: the Varieties of the Millennial Experience, scattered across the centuries and continents.

21 December 2012, as you may have heard, is when the Mayan calendar allegedly runs out — or rolls over, and a “new age” begins. And the 2012 Mayan Calendar prediction has spawned a popular apocalyptic movement with enough leeway in it to attract survivalists, sorcerers’ apprentices, and those who are deeply skeptical about organized religion alike…

Just my kind of thing, eh?

3.

This Mayan calendar / 2012 business looks to be a “bigger” apocalyptic event than last year’s two Harold Camping predictions combined, even though those spawned $100 million in billboard and other advertising worldwide, and had an impact as far afield as the Hmong montagnards of Vietnam, some 7,000 of whom are said to have gathered on a mountain to await the Rapture, and some of whom may have been “massacred” by security forces – the official response to these accusations apparently being that a group of secessionists were arrested.

Camping’s predictions were made in the face of a widespread (and Biblical) understanding that “of that day and hour knoweth no man” (Matthew 24.36) and agreement that “date-setting” of the Camping kind is therefore, in strictly theological terms, indefensible – not to mention that failed predictions of this sort tend to bring disrepute on religious narratives in general.

The Mayan Calendar “prediction” for 2012, on the other hand, appeals to a wide range of people who might identify as “spiritual, not religious” – there’s no scripture they’d all agree on available to disconfirm it in advance in the way that Matt. 24.36 disconfirms predictions like those of Rev. Camping – and it can be “read” as a date certain for the end of the world, of history, of “the world as we know it” — or simply as a convenient peg for a “turning point” not unlike the Harmonic Convergence which preceded it, the tipping point after which humanity comes to its senses, finally recognizes the futility of war, the need for global justice and ecological renewal, and all good things…

4.

So it is interesting that certain persons Anonymous have picked that wave to ride… and are aiming to add a touch of their own mayhem – their word, not mine – into the mix.

They announce this upcoming “Project Mayhem” — in the particular AntiSec / Anonymous zine we’re discussing — by way of publishing an excerpt from an unclassified (but “For Official Use Only”) Homeland Security document, claiming with some mix of irony and joy:

THEY R HIP 2 OUR MASTER PLAN…

Here are two of the relevant paragraphs:

• (U) “Project Mayhem,” (PM) was announced by Anonymous in August 2011, and according to their public website projectmayhem2012[dot]org, is set to culminate on 21 December 2012. The PM website ahs several links to YT videos, which appear to have been randomly selected and have no direct tie to PM or past / current / future Anonymous malicious activity. Furthermore, there is no dialogue or hints as to specific tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) that Anonymous plans on employing on or prior to 21 December 2012. There are also several seemingly related internet wiki-style portals and web forums, operating under the PM name, devoted to random malicious acts – some involving physical disruption and some involving targeting information systems – but no direct discussion of attack scenarios.

[ … ]

DHS/NCCIC’S PM ASSESSMENT: While Anonymous’ PM will not likely be as spectacular as the activities it was named after in the movie Fight Club, little is known about their plans for this event. We anticipate several more YT videos and public statements via Twitter leading up to the culmination date of 21 December 2012. Based on previous incidents involvin Anonymous, we can expect DDOS, web defacement, SQL injection, and potentially in-person protests targeting worldwide government institutions and private corporations. Though the characters in the movie Fight Club who carried out their version of PM utilized deadly force and terrorist tactics, Anonymous is not likely to use violent force in their operations.

5.

When Y2K rolled along, there was concern that what seemed on its surface to be a technical problem (a glitch in the ways in which un-remediated computers handled dates) might also prove an opportunistic moment for people with millenarian beliefs to take disruptive action.

So the conjunction of millennialism and disruption is not a new one.

In the event Ahmed Ressam, acting on behalf of Al-Qaida, tried to take advantage of the rollover between the second and third millennia to detonate a sizeable explosive at LAX on December 31st 1999 – a time when many other problems might be expected to be tying the hands of the authorities — and would likely have managed it had he not been intercepted and his bomb-making materials confiscated at the Canadian-US border on December 14th of that year.

This time around, it’s the ancient Mayans who have (allegedly) been doing the date-setting, and this time it’s techno-savvy black-hat hackers who may take symbiotic advantage of the predictions to make their own brand of mayhem…

6.

Okay, as usual, the religious rhetoric angle is what intrigues me, so here’s some of their prose text.

In an act of loving egalitarian criminality, we used company credit cards to make donations to dozens of charities and revolutionary organizations, including the Bradley Manning Support Organization, the EFF, the ACLU, CARE, American Red Cross, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, some commies, some prisoners, various occupations, and many more unnamed homies. It took weeks of hard work, but it paid off: to the tune of over $500,000 dollars liberated in total.

That’s pure Robin Hood, isn’t it? Take from the rich and give to the poor? With some political analysis thrown in, and a touch of overturning the money-tables?

Note that phrase, “loving egalitarian criminality”!

I’m reminded of the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem‘s book, The Movement of the Free Spirit, of Robert Lerner‘s Heresy of the Free Spirit, and Norman Cohn‘s great The Pursuit of the Millennium which first introduced me to that most interesting of medieval heresies — and the antinomianism that runs like a thread through so many apocalyptic movements and moments.

Fascinating stuff, medieval heresy…

7.

I’m guessing from the way the writers of the email from pseudo-Friedman described themselves that they enjoy the rhetoric that is deployed against them – as I said above, they seem to feature a heady mix of irony and joy, and clearly took some pleasure in being called “PUNKS and CANNIBALS!!!” by one of their detractors. Which brings me to their motto:

WE ARE ANONYMOUS. WE DO NOT FORGIVE. WE DO NOT FORGET. WE ARE LEGION. EXPECT US!

I’m betting whoever came up with that phrasing was aware that in the New Testament (Luke 8.30), Jesus asked a man possessed by demons what his name was…

And he said, “Legion,” because many demons had entered him.

So that word “legion” is an interesting a little trip-wire that would pass unnoticed by most people, but would be liable to excite the wrath of those who see the world we live in through the lens of scripture — another hint of the significance of apocalyptic rhetoric in times of social discord…

8.

I started with a stunning graphic, I’ve been on about apocalyptic rhetoric all along, and I’ll end with two more apocalyptic graphics -– there are so many to choose from! — these ones come from a video on an extensive Christian site that’s set up to debunk 2012 theories in favor of the personal form of “end of the world” situation — cancer, heart attack, you know the story.

All of which might happen in 2012 – but then again, maybe not.

So there we go… whoosh!!

[ by Charles Cameron — Mexico, Zetas, Argentina, art ]
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Back in May of last year, I posted one of my DoubleQuotes comparing one of the Inspire crews’ fantasies — the “ultimate mowing machine” — with the Zeta cartel’s actual “Monster 2010”.

Since then, I’ve developed a variant on the DoubleQuotes format I call Specs, which allows me to juxtapose larger images than before, so here’s a sort of follow-up to that earlier post on “Trucking: AQAP and the Zetas”.

This time, both images come from below the (US) border in the Americas. The top one is the same image of the Zeta-mobile I used last time, while the one below it shows a “bookmobile” which goes by the name of The Weapon of Mass Instruction [link goes to the New Yorker], and which is the work of the Argentinean artist Raul Lemesoff [link goes to YouTube].

Guns or butter — which can also be known henceforth as bullets or books, perhaps?

Heard from John Robb on twitter that author Daniel Suarez, creator of the Daemon sci-fi series that he has a new book coming out.

In Daemon,  a renegade Ai program, “the Daemon” orchestrates and serves a darknet of human agents partly through the medium of augmented reality technology. Glasses were the most typical augmented reality interface with the darknet in the novel and they were just slightly ahead of their time.

Lumus is marketing a similar consumer device, which appears to be reaching the early adapter level with the movement towards stylish, sunglasses, design (as opposed to walking around with giant goggles attached by a plethora of wires to a spaghetti collander-like helmet). The crossover from uber-nerdom to cool kidz demographic is a key milestone.

A short and cranky diatribe.

Adam Elkus and his amigo Dan Trombly of Slouching Towards Colombia have been busy  poking holes into the ill-considered and/or poorly reasoned strategic conceptions of victory-free but credible influence. Dan gets very close to something important, something worth contemplating for the welfare of our Republic:

…..Rather than a world where normal victory and political decision through force of arms give way to a world of credible influence, I see this concept ushering in a world where America’s objectives remain expansive – seeking to create social and political change – but where “twentieth century” warfare continues as usual, obscured by multilateral efforts and prosecuted as much as possible by local forces. Because the objectives are essentially unchanged – overthrow of criminal regimes, integration of societies into a dynamic liberal international order, protection of civilians – one of my real fears about the Defense Strategic Guidance is that, confronted with conflicts and challenges to our interests, and with a paradigm of military aims just as expansive as before, we will slouch inevitably towards unsustainable ways of war. Already, the new objectives of civilian protection are blurring into the old objectives of democracy promotion and liberalization – just look at the title of the new State Department Office of Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights.

When a statesman selects Ends that have no rational relationship to available Ways and Means we might take that as a sign of possible incompetence as a strategist.

While that’s not good it is at least normal – most politicians in a democratic society are on average, poor strategists but pretty good intuitive tacticians. After all, acquiring and keeping political power for long periods of time requires more than luck and a large checkbook. While there are always some buffoons decorating the halls of Congress, as individuals, Members of Congress are usually pretty shrewd and a minority are exceptional people.

If the Ends selected are fantastically broad open-ended, undefined or, worse, undefinable, convoluted and insensible in their context, we are left with two even less savory conclusions:

First, that the statesman has a fundamental political immaturity and narcissism the leads them to articulate their emotively generated whims as policy objectives without regard to empirical reality. Sort of a wishcraft of state that substitutes rhetorical expressions and sloganeering for thought and analysis. We see this effect on a much larger scale in the ideological atmosphere of totalitarian regimes where 2+2= 5 and only Right-deviationist mathematician, counterrevolutionary wreckers would dare suggest the answer is 4. Geopolitical goals that are created by political fantasists – like the creation of a modern, liberal democratic state in Afghanistan in a few years time – can be appended with “And a Pony!” and still be just as likely to come to pass.

American statesmen seem to be particularly predisposed to this condition in foreign affairs (and arguably, in fiscal affairs as well). Perhaps this is an intellectual legacy of Wilsonian excess but the problem was not acute until the past decade and a half, which indicates that the driving force may be, in part, generational. Men and women born into a time of record-breaking standards of living have reached the apex of power and they are no more inclined to act with restraint, responsibility or realism now than they did in ’68.

The second conclusion is that the Ends are purposefully incoherent and recklessly broad because the real strategic objective is not in our relations with country X, but for the statesman to wrest for their faction as large a grant of unaccountable power as possible.

Adam Elkus –There Is No Substitute For Victory & There Is No Substitute, Part 2.

Mixed results in Iraq and Afghanistan are not proof that victory itself should not be a goal of American military efforts. They are only proof that the policies and strategies that animated American forces were faulty. If Slaughter and Bacevich are arguing that we should adopt more realistic and limited policies and strategies in war, I wholeheartedly agree. Nearly a decade of state-building later, we have ultimately little to show for our efforts. But that is not what is what is being said. Rather, there is a straightforward argument that we cannot “win” wars anymore….

Adam wages battle against unclear and poorly reasoned thinking in national security affairs.

Fabius Maximus – About the escalating conflict with Iran (not *yet* open war),  Have Iran’s leaders vowed to destroy Israel? , What do we know about Iran’s nuclear ambitions? and What does the IAEA know about Iran’s nuclear program?

FM is running a series on the political lobbying for war with Iran, or at least US sanction for an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities and research sites.

Summary:  What do we know about Iran’s program to build atomic weapons?  For decades Americans have been subjected to saturation bombing by misinformation and outright lies about Iran.  The information from our intelligence agencies has painted a more accurate picture, if we choose to see it.  Sixth in a series; at the end are links to the other chapters.

Steven Pressfield-Work Over Your Head 

Writers of fiction learn early that they can write characters who are smarter than they are…..

KC Johnson – Groupthink & Political Analysis

A central component of the groupthink academy is the law of group polarization–that in environments (such as most humanities and social sciences departments) in which people basically think alike, more extreme versions of the common assumption will emerge. Within the academy, that condition has had the effect of producing more extreme new faculty hires and less pedagogical diversity. Outside the academy, the prevalence of groupthink has had the unintended consequence of making the views of “mainstream” academics of little use even for their seeming political allies.

Hat tip to Bruce Kesler.

Slouching Toward Columbia –Drone panic: New weapon, old anxieties

Poor drones and drone-operators: as the latest generation of weaponry on the battlefield, it’s now their turn to be subject to that great generational scrutiny of moral and ethical suspicion. Poor thinking public: we get treated to these arguments as if they were all original or unique to drones.

This piece from the Atlantic, addresses (among many other things) many of these themes. Unfortunately, it perpetuates a number of very tired tropes about military technology and tactics.

The first overused and under-scrutinized argument is the fear that drones make war “easier to wage” because “we can safely strike from longer distances.” Well, we’ve had that ability since the birth of air power and missile power, it just makes it a lot easier to hit certain kinds of targets at acertain tempo. After all, it’s only the pilots who are “far away,” the drones themselves still operate from bases with real, flesh-and-blood people who are potentially exposed to retaliation, and those bases are not necessarily any further away than bases for manned aircraft (in most cases they service both)…..

The subtext to some of the anti-drone angst is that it is an effective use of American power against some of the worst bastards on Earth, hence the hurry to tangle up in investigations, regulations and lawfare, something that is morally indistinguishable from an artillery shell or infantryman’s bullet.

Ribbonfarm –Extroverts, Introverts, Aspies and Codies

 The reason I’ve been thinking a lot about the E/I spectrum is that a lot of my recent ruminations have been about how the rapid changes in social psychology going on around us might be caused by the drastic changes in how E/I dispositions manifest themselves in the new (online+offline) sociological environment.  Here are just a few of the ideas I’ve been mulling:

• As more relationships are catalyzed online than offline, a great sorting is taking place: mixed E/I groups are separating into purer groups dominated by one type
• Each trait is getting exaggerated as a result
• The emphasis on collaborative creativity, creative capital and teams is disturbing the balance between E-creativity and I-creativity
• Lifestyle design works out very differently for E’s and I’s
• The extreme mental conditions (dubiously) associated with each type in the popular imagination, such as Asperger’s syndrome or co-dependency, are exhibiting new social phenomenology 

An old post by Venkat I stumbled across.

Gary Rubinstein–The ‘three great teacher’ study — finally laid to rest 

Rubinstein deconstructs a study that undergirds a central tenet of corporate Ed Reform:

….When you look at this graph, the first thing that might seem unusual is that the high group is not the 555 group, but the 455 group.  Why is that?  Well, because the 555 group had a different starting point than the 111 group, so it would not be a valid comparison.  None of the twenty graphs have both the 111 and the 555 groups since those groups never had a close enough starting point.  They explain in the paper that this is because:

So they admit that the assignment to these teachers was done with bias which, it seems to me, invalidates the entire study.  But I learned that even with this bias, the authors of the report had to further distort their results.  When you see those three bars it seems that those were the only three groups that began with a starting score of around 56%.

Metamodern – Moscow Report (II): Russians embrace a radical vision of nanotechnology 

Shlok Vaidya-FICTION: PLACEIQ 

Kings of War-Persian Risk: Analyzing “The Problem of Iran”