Pages

Saturday, June 8, 2013

A Tale of Coup Cities - 4

Welcome to Stalingrad, DC Comrade
In the last post of this series we looked at the difference between a "coup" and a "coup d'état", noting that the distinguishing dynamic is merely a matter of degree in most cases.

In other words, one of the effects we observe when we consider the notion of whether or not either a coup or a coup d'état has taken place is revealed by first making a relevant comparison of before and after characteristics.

If it has taken place, then the government will be much different than it was prior to the coup event.

While reading the book The Cuckoo's Egg, I noticed some characteristics of the U.S. government that have drastically changed from what the author of that true story experienced while on the trail of a hacker at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories.

This was illustrated, as the book points out, when scientist Cliff Stoll called the NSA for help:
"Cliff, I'd like to take over, but our charter prevents it. NSA can't engage in domestic monitoring, even if we're asked. That's prison term stuff." He took this seriously.
(The Cuckoo's Egg, by Clifford Stoll, page 87 PDF, emphasis added). The NSA agent told him, circa 1986-87, that if an NSA agent did monitoring of U.S. citizens in the U.S. they would be violating criminal laws and would go to prison for it.

A recent post on a popular blog backs up the notion that things have changed during the two decades since then:
The security policy of the U.S. government from Cheney to Obama has passed from secret surveillance of communications abroad to secret surveillance of all communications at home. In what stages did it happen? Some day the history will be written; for now, it is instructive to rehearse the facts.
(Huffington Post, by David Bromwich, emphasis added). The coup is exposed, it is real, but note that it will take some research to find all of the footprints of each and every stage of the coup:
Five years ago, Barack Obama was a candidate for president who pledged to filibuster a congressional bill awarding amnesty to telecoms that illegally gave information on American customers to the government. When Obama backed down from that promise, he pledged, if elected, to have his attorney general investigate the surveillance of Americans and bring the NSA and the justice department back within the limits of the fourth amendment. As it turned out, he made Eric Holder his attorney general, and the security policy of the Obama administration came to be defined, most of all, by its harsh prosecution of whistleblowers who brought to light illegal searches and seizures by the government.

Yesterday in the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald offered a startling glimpse of the program of systemic surveillance Dick Cheney innovated and Obama has refined. A FISA court order, obtained by Greenwald and linked in the article, compels the Verizon Business Network to furnish for the NSA "on an ongoing daily basis for the duration of this order. . .all call detail records. . .created for Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls." This command is sweeping. It makes Verizon hand over to the FBI all "From" and "To" information about all phone calls made by all customers using Verizon. The order is dated April 25, 2013. It expires on July 19, 2013. It is classified "Top Secret," and due to be declassified on 12 April 2038. It is one of the approximately seven million documents which the Obama administration hides from most Americans every year.

This revelation is only the latest indication of the modus operandi of the Holder justice department.
(ibid, Huffington Post-Bromwich). Other major events in the coup which has changed the nature of the U.S. government was also articulated by a well known General:
"What happened in 9/11 is we didn't have a strategy. We didn't have bipartisan agreement. We didn't have American understanding of it. And we had instead a policy coup in this country, a coup, a policy coup.

Some hard nosed people took over American policy and they never bothered to inform the rest of us."
(A Tale of Coup Cities - 3, quoting Gen. Wesley Clark). A former cabinet member noticed changes too:
I fear that at least since 2010 we’ve been witnessing a quiet, slow-motion coup d’etat whose purpose is to repeal every bit of progressive legislation since the New Deal and entrench the privileged positions of the wealthy and powerful — who haven’t been as wealthy or as powerful since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.
(ibid, A Tale of Coup Cities - 3, quoting Dr. Robert Reich). One thing is for sure, the NSA has gone from no domestic spying on pain of prison to capturing the private records of all Americans:
By what right are the addressed envelopes of the spoken communications of 280 million citizens plucked from the air by government and filed away? Supported by whose oath and what affirmation? There is a simple force to the words of the fourth amendment after all. It says: we do not live by secret laws, and we will not abide by general warrants. And to the comfort offered by senators Chambliss, Graham, and Feinstein, who ask us to sleep well and sleep long, there is a simple reply. In what country do they think they are living, and under what constitution?
(ibid, Huffington Post-Bromwich, emphasis added). Regular readers know that we recently asked the same questions (The Queens of Stalingrad) while using the same metaphor indicating "this is not the same country anymore."

What naive people do not realize is that this has been ongoing for a long time, as revealed by "60 Minutes" on February 27, 2000:
If you made a phone call today or sent an e-mail to a friend, there's a good chance what you said or wrote was captured and screened by the country's largest intelligence agency. The top-secret Global Surveillance Network is called Echelon, and it's run by the National Security Agency and four English-speaking allies: Canada, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

The mission is to eavesdrop on enemies of the state: foreign countries, terrorist groups and drug cartels. But in the process, Echelon's computers capture virtually every electronic conversation around the world.

How does it work, and what happens to all the information that's gathered? A lot of people have begun to ask that question, and some suspect that the information is being used for more than just catching bad guys.

(Footage of satellite; person talking on cell phone; fax machine; ATM being used; telephone pole and wires; radio towers)

KROFT: (Voiceover) We can't see them, but the air around us is filled with invisible electronic signals, everything from cell phone conversations to fax transmissions to ATM transfers. What most people don't realize is that virtually every signal radiated across the electromagnetic spectrum is being collected and analyzed.

How much of the world is covered by them?

Mr. MIKE FROST (Former Spy): The entire world, the whole planet--covers everything. Echelon covers everything that's radiated worldwide at any given instant.

KROFT: Every square inch is covered.

Mr. FROST: Every square inch is covered.
(60 Minutes Transcript, emphasis added; see also Echelon). What "60 Minutes" (Season 32, Episode 24, "Echelon") shows is that the coup took place incrementally over a couple of decades.

It gained a foothold through corruption and decay in certain segments of the government, then through metastasis it eventually spread far and wide (The Germ Theory of Government; cf Democracy Inc.).

A congressman has been quoted as saying:
The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.
(CNET). The congressman walked some of that back, but what he said before they corrected his memory is not unlike the Echelon whistleblower's revelations some 13 years earlier.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

Friday, June 7, 2013

The Queens of Stalingrad

Queen Finestain of Stalingrad
"The people of the United States need to be watched" exclaimed one of the Queens of Stalingrad, Queen Finestain.

"Every phone call, every email, every letter, every credit card transaction, every check written, and every place they go needs to be written down in government files", she went on to say.

That is how the Queens of Stalingrad see things (BTW, "D.C". has been renamed secretly).

"You just can't trust Americans to do the right thing, so we keep a close eye on them", she emphatically declared as Malcom Eirie of the Pogo News Empire listened intently --as she looked over her shoulder then back to Malcom to continue her royal discourse, adding: "these Americans have enemies you know, and we have to find out who those enemies are because three people have been killed in bombings since 911 and well, they want to take all that freedom away from Americans you know", quipped the Queen, finishing the interview.
Stalingrad's Queen Har D Har Har

She said this in an interview with a reporter from the main newspaper of Stalingrad, The Pogo, which uses the motto "We have met the enemy and it is us."

Next in line to put out the new Stalingrad Spin, a hit on the doublespeak circuit, Queen Har D Har Har, who is having multiple affairs with the Keystone Kops down in Louisville, spoke up to say "it does not matter that lightning kills more Americans than terrorists do", while sipping a glass of T-Bag wine.

"We have to tap somebody's phone, read somebody's email, open somebody's post office envelopes, seize somebody's financial records ... otherwise Mr. Eirie, how do you think we will be able to justify the spy centers we use to watch people in das Homeland?", she mused.

Queen Har D Har Har was speaking of:
* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.
Stalingrad's Queen Jane t Approximately

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
(The Keystone Complex To The Rescue - 3). And yesterday Dredd Blog noted that these queens are talking about records of your cell phone and other phones:
"... all call detail records or "telephony metadata" created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls. This Order does not require Verizon to produce telephony metadata for communications wholly originating and terminating in foreign countries. Telephony metadata includes comprehensive communications routing information, including but not limited to session identifying information (e.g., originating and terminating telephone number, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, International Mobile station Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, etc.), trunk identifier, telephone calling card numbers, and time and duration of call."
(Obama Administration Rides Into The W Sunset). But these queens are quick to point out that the similarities to authoritarian regimes is just an accident:
Authoritarianism is a form of government ... characterized by four qualities: (1) ... constraints on political institutions and groups (such as [the press,] legislatures, political parties, and interest groups), (2) a basis for legitimacy based on emotion, especially the identification of the regime as a necessary evil to combat "easily recognizable societal problems" such as underdevelopment or insurgency ["home grown terrorists"]; (3) neither "intensive nor extensive political mobilization" and constraints on the mass public (such as repressive tactics against opponents and a prohibition of antiregime activity) and (4) "formally ill-defined" executive power, often shifting or vague.
(Wikipedia, "Authoritarianism", emphasis added). In the United States the Queens of Stalingrad are now required to violate their oath of office after they swear to defend and uphold the U.S. Constitution.

The Constitution which reads in relevant part:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
(Wikipedia, "Fourth Amendment", emphasis added). There is no way that individual suspicion was articulated or even mentioned in the FISA court order to "get all of everyone's phone call records."

The Queen's Spin the issue arguing that it is sanctified because there is probable cause to believe these millions of people affected by privacy invasion do not like fascist authoritarians who ignore the supreme law.

"So, these Stalinist practices must continue until morale improves", they added.

Queen Jane Approximately


When your mother sends back all your invitations
And your father to your sister he explains
That you’re tired of yourself and all of your creations
Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?
Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?

Now when all of the flower ladies want back what they have lent you
And the smell of their roses does not remain
And all of your children start to resent you
Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?
Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?
...




The next post in this series is here.

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Obama Administration Rides Into The W Sunset

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog is not all "who is worse or the worst" politician, president, congress member, or judge, when it comes to condemning them for un-American activity.

No, regular readers know that Dredd Blog is a "I don't care what political party any public servant thinks they belong to, nor how cool any member of any party thinks any politician, president, congress member, or judge is".

The concern on this blog is whether or not they have violated the principles of America as expressed in the Constitution and laws subservient to that Constitution.

If they have Dredd Blog condemns them to the extent they have violated the public trust.

No party or department of government is sacrosanct here on this blog, rather, they all get it when they deserve it (the "it" is condemnation or praise, which depends on their behavior in office).

And no, we are not talking about adult consensual sexual behavior in their bedrooms.

We are talking about the common good, the public good, as intended by our Constitution and laws all these years (The Common Good).

Some examples of prior Dredd Blog posts in this regard, as they relate to today's post, are as follows:

The W Direction = The Perilous Path

Whiney White House Does Another W

Obama: The Republican Candidate in 2012? - 2

The W Direction Revisited - 2

The Circle W Cowboys - 3

The Circle W Cowboys

Obama Et Alia Losing The W Compass?

A Tale of Coup Cities

Everybody's Got A Holder Heart - 2


The point is that the despicable, un-American policies initiated during Bush II are now being continued and expanded under Obama I.

Glenn Greenwald is risking the wrath of neoKhans (Obama / Bushies) by publishing a secret order of the FISA (Fascist Invaders Simulating Americans) court that ordered Verizon to provide all of its records to the NSA (Ne'er-do-well Simulating Americans):
UNITED STATES
FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE COURT
WASHINGTON, D.C.

IN RE APPLICATION OF THE
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

FOR AN ORDER REQUIRING THE                         Docket #: BR13-80
PRODUCTION OF TANGIBLE THINGS
FROM VERIZON BUSINESS NETWORK SERVICES,
INC. ON BEHALF OF MCI COMMUNICATION
SERVICES, INC. D/B/A VERIZON
BUSINESS SERVICES.

SECONDARY ORDER

This Court having found that the Application of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for an Order requiring the production of tangible things from Verizon Business Network Services, Inc. on behalf of MCI Communication Services Inc., d/b/a Verizon Business Services (individually and collectively "Verizon") satisfies the requirements of 50 U.S.C. § 1861,

IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that, the Custodian of Records shall produce to the National Security Agency (NSA) upon service of this Order, and continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this Order, unless otherwise ordered by the Court, an all call detail records or "telephony metadata" created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls. This Order does not require Verizon to produce telephony metadata for communications wholly originating and terminating in foreign countries. Telephony metadata includes
The Keystone Kops Pipeline
comprehensive communications routing information, including but not limited to session identifying information (e.g., originating and terminating telephone number, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, International Mobile station Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, etc.), trunk identifier, telephone calling card numbers, and time and duration of call. Telephony metadata does not include the substantive content of any communication, as defined by 18 U.S.C. § 2510(8), or the name, address, or financial information of a subscriber or customer. electronic copy of the following tangible things:

IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that no person shall disclose to any other person that the FBI or NSA has sought or obtained tangible things under this Order, other than to: (a) those persons to whom disclosure is necessary to comply with such Order; (b) an attorney to obtain legal advice or assistance with respect to the
Weed my Wips
production of things in response to the Order; or (c) other persons as permitted by the Director of the FBI or the Director's designee. A person to whom disclosure is made pursuant to (a), (b), or (c) shall be subject to the nondisclosure requirements applicable to a person to whom an Order is directed in the same manner as such person. Anyone who discloses to a person described in (a), (b), or (c) that the FBI or NSA has sought or obtained tangible things pursuant to this Order shall notify such person of the nondisclosure requirements of this Order. At the request of the Director of the FBI or the designee of the Director, any person making or intending to make a disclosure under (a) or (c) above shall identify to the Director or such designee the person to whom such disclosure will be made or to whom such disclosure was made prior to the request.

IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that service of this Order shall be by a method agreed upon by the Custodian of Records of Verizon and the FBI, and if no agreement is reached, service shall be personal.

This authorization requiring the production of certain call detail records or "telephony metadata" created by Verizon expires on the [4th] day of July, [1776], at 5:00 p.m., Eastern Time.

Signed Judge Roger Vinson
Date [34th of Nevervember]

I, Beverly C. Queen, Chief Deputy Clerk, FISC, certify that this document is a true and correct copy of the original.
(NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans, Order). So, Americans are most likely "terrorists" who have to be watched, according to these fascist, W Jerks.

Obama is a Pontius Pilot like The High Priest In Chief was.


Wednesday, June 5, 2013

On The Origin of Tornadoes - 3

In search of the mythical first tornado
Isn't it interesting that a record setting tornado (widest ever) as well as a new record of two EF5 tornadoes in one short time frame (Weather Channel) happened during this Dredd Blog series?

The El Reno, Oklahoma area was the scene for a 2.6 mile wide EF5 which killed some famous storm chasers.

Then practically right on its heals another EF5 tornado happened within 11 days of that first one, which was evidently the first time two EF5 tornadoes have happened within such a short span of time.

In this post I had wanted to take a look at some tornado statistics, along with the global warming figures and CO2 content in the atmosphere.

Then I was hoping to apply Moore's Law to those data sets for a projection back in time to focus on a span of time when tornado events were likely impacted by our damaged Global Climate System.

I am not of the opinion any longer that Moore's Law is a proper application because of the criticism about using it in areas that it was not designed for (see New Hypothesis Says Life Began Before The Earth) where a paper uses it to some degree to calculate back to a time when biological life began.

So, I will find another, better technique.

But let's look at the numbers from the data of tornadoes from the graph in the previous post of this series, presented again below.

The data (number of tornadoes each year per decade):

1950-1959: 206, 261, 246, 443, 570, 606, 518, 868, 576, 614
1960-1969: 619, 721, 667, 476, 719, 918, 593, 939, 668, 617
1970-1979: 671, 904, 747, 1115, 974, 924, 848, 861, 802, 865
1980-1989: 876, 786, 1066, 939, 925, 704, 779, 662, 704, 872
1990-1999: 1151, 1144, 1312, 1186, 1094, 1253, 1181, 1154, 1440, 1364
2000-2009: 1079, 1232, 957, 1415, 1842, 1267, 1142, 1117, 1739, 1182
2010-2012: 1315, 1777, 957

The averages for each decade above total to:

1950-1959: 491
1960-1969: 694
1970-1979: 871
1980-1989: 831
1990-1999: 1228
2000-2009: 1297
2010-2012: 1350

(Source: NOAA database). The total tornadoes recorded in the NOAA tornado database is 58,169 during 1950-2012, and when divided by 62 years (1950-2012) it calculates out to an annual average of 938 tornadoes per year during that span of time.

The take away from these numbers is that tornadoes are on the increase in a similar upward slope, when compared to global temperature increases, and atmospheric carbon dioxide PPM increases.

A 7% bell-curve formulation of the foggy past, fused with the unfoggy abundant scientific observation year 1950, indicates:
206 (1950), 192 (1940), 179 (1930), 167 (1920), 156 (1910)
146 (1900), 136 (1890), 118 (1880), 110 (1870), 103 (1860)
96 (1850), 90 (1840), 84 (1830), 79 (1820), 74 (1810), 69 (1800)
65 (1790), 61 (1780), 57 (1770), 54 (1760), 51 (1750)

(Bell Curve projection [first half] back to 1750). This ~7% regression from 1950 back to 1750 indicates that the origin of tornado impact caused by global climate system damage would be circa 1700 A.D.

That era was when the first flickers of the first Industrial Revolution began, fueled at first by coal:
It was, however, the development of the Industrial Revolution that led to the large-scale use of coal, as the steam engine took over from the water wheel. In 1700, five-sixths of the world's coal was mined in Britain.
(Wikipedia, "Coal", emphasis added). Then there was a war-based, Oil-Qaeda based, conversion to petroleum (The Universal Smedley - 2).

I think this data shows that the criticism of Climate Central in the previous posts of this series is proving to be quite valid.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

Knocking on Heaven's Door ... "That long black cloud is coming down":



Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Occupy Turkey

"Save The Trees"
I was surprised by the way the demonstrations in Turkey are being described by some well informed journalists here in the U.S.eh?

One might think, at first blush if they were as uninformed about the protests in Turkey as I was, that it was some vague "Islamic thing", whatever that might be.

But it is a thing about natural rights common to us all, yes, the common good of our planet, which is more of a big thing to them than we give them credit for (What Kind of Intelligence Is Prescience? - 2).

Interestingly, the youth of Turkey are trying to occupy Oil-Qaeda in some important ways that do not come to mind at first when Westerners consider Islamic youth.

That is probably because of the propagandasphere here in one of the strongholds of Oil-Qaeda.

The protests in Turkey have to do with green ideology:
Nominally, the protests were sparked by a government plan to replace Istanbul's leafy Taksim Gezi Park with a touristy shopping mall—what the country's leading historian, Edhem Eldem, sardonically derides as a "Las Vegas of Ottoman splendor." Trees are especially precious in Istanbul, where only 1.5 percent of land is green space (compared to 17 percent in New York).
(Mother Jones, emphasis added). But like the jackboot response to the Occupy movement in the U.S.eh? the wannabe Ottoman Empire Turks came down hard on the youth, which gave those youth more things to protest about:
But the protests quickly became symbolic of much broader concerns about Erdogan's autocratic and socially conservative style of government.

Istanbul's secularists chafe at the way he has rammed through development projects in this cosmopolitan cultural crossroads with little regard for the European and non-Muslim aspects of its history; a 19th-century Russian Orthodox Church may be destroyed as part of an overhaul of a port. What's more, Erdogan has placed new restrictions on the sale of alcohol and availability of birth control. And he has jailed political opponents and members of the media.
...
Since Friday, there have been demonstrations in 67 of Turkey's 80 provinces, according to Turkey's semi-official Andalou News Agency.

At least 1700 people have been arrested.
(ibid, emphasis added). "Why does this sound so Homeland Security ish?" you may be wondering, and that is a good question with a big brother answer:
Is Erdogan just another Islamist dictator? Not according to Washington, which holds up Turkey as a shining model for democracy in the Islamic world. Since coming to power in 2002, Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) has twice returned to office with large pluralities of the vote. In recent years, Erdogan has kept up the pace of democratic reforms in Turkey by enshrining individual rights in its laws and placing the military under civilian control. "Yet even as the AKP was winning elections at home and plaudits from abroad," writes Foreign Policy's Steven Cook, "an authoritarian turn was underway…"
In 2007, the party seized upon a plot in which elements of Turkey's so-called deep state—military officers, intelligence operatives, and criminal underworld—sought to overthrow the government and used it to silence its critics. Since then, Turkey has become a country where journalists are routinely jailed on questionable grounds, the machinery of the state has been used against private business concerns because their owners disagree with the government, and freedom of expression in all its forms is under pressure.
How bad is the crackdown on the press? Pretty bad. At the same time CNN International was broadcasting live from Taksim Square on Friday, CNN Turk, the network's Turkish-language affiliate, was showing a cooking show and a documentary about penguins.
(ibid, emphasis added). This sounds familiar because we have been going through it forever here in the original homeland of Oil-Qaeda since MOMCOM decided to "manage our oil" that somehow got misplaced under the soils of the people of the Middle East:
Long before politicians mewled helplessly about the power of “Big Oil”, carbon-based fuels were shaping our very political, legal, intellectual, and physical structures.
...
For instance, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a pivotal moment in America’s strategic outlook. America, a global hegemon whose empire was weakening, seized the second largest oil deposits in the world as a way of preventing its economic and political decline.
...
The last declining global hegemon, Great Britain, also engaged in a brutal and highly controversial British occupation of Iraq, in the 1920s, pressed aggressively by the well-known British conservative, Winston Churchill.
...
It was the Royal Navy which was the impetus for the development of the oil industry in Britain. The problem was supply and the security of that supply. Initially, the British government purchased shares in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, subsequently, British Petroleum.
...
Then, to prevent further disruptions, Britain enmeshed itself ever more deeply in the Middle East, working to install new shahs in Iran and carve Iraq out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire.

Churchill fired the starting gun, but all of the Western powers joined the race to control Middle Eastern oil.
(The Universal Smedley - 2). We just had to come to their aid and bring some clear-thinking democracy to them:
The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims, while incidentally capturing their markets; to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples, while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.
(The Peak Of The Oil Wars - 7, see also He Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken). And so it has gone on since about the turning of the 18th into the 19th Century.

One could say "it is so yesterday and so boring" except for the fact that Russia is supplying Syria with missiles (Time) as the U.S. begins to supply Jordan with missiles (CNN).

Recent stories inform us that the current U.S. president was unaware of IRS, Bengazi, and DOJ activity, so we may be aligning to repeat what RFK papers recently released inform us was "the most dangerous moment in human history".

It too was caused in part by JFK's presidential unawareness (The Most Dangerous Moment in Recorded History, Humanity Imperiled).

Stay focused.

Monday, June 3, 2013

On The Origin of Tornadoes - 2

In the first post of this series Dredd Blog pointed out how publicly unsure the chief climatologist at Climate Central was about what could be determined about tornadoes in the context of "climate change."

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog prefers the description "a damaged Global Climate System" to what they call "climate change".

It was also pointed out in the first post that Dredd Blog considers the pabulum spoken by the chief climatologist at Climate Central to have been more the politics of tornadoes than it is the science of tornadoes.

In today's post, we will begin to take a look at some history of tornadoes, with a purpose of discovering when they originated.

When looking back into the historical era of the Industrial Revolution, which began circa 1750, then looking further back beyond that into the historical past, the data concerning tornadoes soon becomes utterly bereft of anything that could be called scientific.

It becomes more or less a form of folklore.

Yet, that chief climatologist we mentioned in the first post, at Climate Central, was eager to say "We live in a country that has always seen extreme weather."

A term that is utterly meaningless because "extreme" simply means the worst and the best in a list of conditions.

So yes, we have always had our worst weather and our best weather (the extremes), but we do not need a scientist to hold our hand like we are scared kids when we talk about "boogie man weather."

For example, the country with the best climate on Earth will have its worst weather and its best weather, which are the extreme weather events of that climate --no matter how much like paradise those "extreme" events are.

It says absolutely nothing of the catastrophic weather events of recent months and years, even though it was dishonestly brought up in that context.

Thus, the Dredd Blog labeling of it as "political", which is the first phase of propaganda (All Weather is Local - 4), is as kind as we can be at the moment.

That is because it leads in a wrong direction, and that is not a scientific way of proceeding on anything (see graphs).

To underline this scenario, let's look at what is said to be one List of Worst Tornadoes:
As tragic as it is to lose lives from natural disasters like tornadoes, these are the worst tornadoes in history, each claiming hundreds of lives in a matter of minutes. From the most recent, current cyclones to those of the past, sadly, this list has them all. With death tolls reaching tragic proportions, these are not only the worst cyclones environmentally, they're also the deadliest.
...
Oklahoma Tornado (2013)
2  The Daulatpur-Salturia Tornado (1989)
3  East Pakistan Tornado (1969)
4  Madarganj to Mrizapur Tornado (1996)
The Tri-State Tornado (1925)
6  The Manikganj, Singair and Nawabganj Tornado 1973)
7  The Valetta, Malta, Tornado (1951)
8  The Sicily Tornado (1851) - "few details of what actually happened"
9  The Narail-Magura Tornado (1964) "details ... quite unclear"
10 The Comoro Tornado (1951)
11 The Madaripur-Shibchar Tornado (1977)
(List of Worst Tornadoes). Notice that only two of those on that list happened in the U.S., so those records are questionable in the sense that:
The reason the heart of the North American continent bears the brunt of these most powerful of twisters lies with its unique topography. Only in North America does a solid land mass stretch from the sub-tropics to the arctic with no mountain barriers to inhibit the mixture of air masses originating from these two regions.
(Wunderground, Weather Extremes, emphasis added). That site records a list of F-5 tornadoes going back to the year 1900, with the worst being the "Tri-State" tornado of 1925, which is also listed as number 5 in the "List of Worst Tornadoes" above.

But, as was pointed out in the first post of this series, the Industrial Revolution is the era which began the damage to the Global Climate System, so we can expect to encounter a beginning of the rise of tornadoes sometime after the Industrial Revolution began --because that "revolution" damaged and still damages the Global Climate System.

The damage that began to happen then was caused initially by burning fossil fuels to power industrial engines and machines, namely coal, which began about the mid 1700's.

Thus, a century of scientific record keeping is missing with tornado records in the sense that the oldest tornado in the two lists above is 1851.

The further back the records go, concerning tornadoes, the more that conflicting details will show up, and the more records begin to declare that there are "few details of what actually happened."

The record is better in the U.S. in terms of the late 1800's (Tornadoes In The Past), which we need to remember is within the time frame of the Industrial Revolution.

Let's note also that, with regard to tornado generation, it is true that "no mountain barriers to inhibit the mixture of air masses" exist in the central U.S., which is said to be why the central U.S. has the most tornadoes on Earth (see Wunderground, "Weather Extremes", quote above).

However, jet streams traditionally have tended to prevent the catastrophic mixing of air flows that tend to generate tornadoes.

Further, we can now say that as the polar icecaps melt, the jet streams are disrupted, and since there are no mountain ranges, the few jet stream protections can also vanish because such changes "to the course of the jet stream affect weather patterns for the entire planet" (Arctic Sea Ice Decline).

Thus, we can say that the documented increase in tornadoes is a function of a damaged Global Climate System which is further affected by the polar ice melt.

These observations and knowledge help us get closer to finding the origin of our current abundance of tornadoes.

A recent scientific paper used Moore's law to do a reverse calculation back into time, yes, back billions of years:
If we plot genome complexity of major phylogenetic lineages on a logarithmic scale against the time of origin, the points appear to fit well to a straight line (Sharov, 2006) (Fig. 1). This indicates that genome complexity increased exponentially and doubled about every 376 million years. Such a relationship reminds us of the exponential increase of computer complexity known as a "Moore’s law" (Moore, 1965; Lundstrom, 2003). But the doubling time in the evolution of computers (18 months) is much shorter than that in the evolution of life. What is most interesting in this relationship is that it can be extrapolated back to the origin of life. Genome complexity reaches zero, which corresponds to just one base pair, at time ca. 9.7 billion years ago (Fig. 1).
(Life Before Earth, PDF copy, page 3, emphasis added). No doubt calculating back in time 9.7 billion years using, among other things Moore's Law, is "exciting and courageous", and it can even pass peer review.

Therefore, using the same law and the same type of data ("logarithmic scale - straight line"), we can calculate the mean, then project backwards to a likely time that tornadoes originated in modern times.

We will try that application of the data in the next post of this series, using the data from the graph at the top of today's post, which covers scientifically and carefully recorded tornado data from 1950 through 2011.

My guess is that the origination we are looking for is sometime not too long after the Industrial Revolution began (the stories of being pushed off the edge of the Earth in the seaman's tall tales prior to that time will not be given much weight).

Check in next time for the math.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

Lyrics to Telegraph Road by Dire Straits is here.



Sunday, June 2, 2013

He Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken

'God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq'
There is little wonder why warmongering Israelis and neoCons get together on Highway 61 and whoop it up so often.

The warmongering Israelis long ago had a god "he whose name cannot be spoken" (HWNCBS).

Now, as that piety moves onward and upward, the neoCons have also created in their image one known as "he whose name cannot be spoken" (Bush II).
Shhhhh ...  Don't Say TWNCBS

One difference is that the latter day saints involved are a group known as "they whose names cannot be spoken" (TWNCBS), a group which Bill Maher addresses in the video below.

This group has been the subject of some scholarly works that have ended up in several books on the subject (On The Origin of Assholes).

I guess two of the doctrinal differences between HWNCBS and TWNCBS is where "those who glow in the dark" eventually end up and where they originate (NeoCon Planet: The Presidents of Kolob).

Bill Maher (click the Youtube button @ lower right):