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Suckers gonna suck.
We've got to get rid of them all.
From their final song last evening to a fantastic second night in Chicago.
Tears a-flowin' at any moment this evening.
Billy, Bobby, Mickey and Phil say this really is the last Dead show.
And they are SOLD OUT (forever).
It's hard to believe I will never dance around in a circle again with flowers in my hair among loving "strangers."
And that doesn't sound odd. It sounds glorious.
Great regrets and greater love for these guys are abounding in the country this weekend. A couple from Alaska were just interviewed on the Grateful Dead Sirius/XM station, which is running the concert and various older versions of songs all weekend long, who claimed to have used the Dead mail order for tickets for over 20 years and were ecstatic when describing how fabulous the concert was. (I just heard Bobby do a rocking version of that cowboy-type tune "Me and My Uncle," a tear-inducing "Tennessee, Jed" - poor pup! and poignant "Lost Sailor/Saint of Circumstance," an absolutely soul-stirring "Stella Blue," closing with a kick-ass "U.S. Blues" - the second night's show seems like Jerry's back to me - the energy and passion are just unbelievable - and Bobby! - What a touching "Stella Blue." That's why we love him. How will we go on?)
Enjoy one more night, you lucky ones!
And now back to reality. We're tracked and our activities traced to hell and back by the NSA-founded and -funded Googleized toys at all turns. "Do no evil" was their marketing strategy when we were ignorant of their all-encompassing "Total Information Awareness" plans (put on hold long ago after exposure of the associated Cheney-Rumsfeld-Weinberger-Mitchell-Hunt-Liddy-Magruder-Bush-Nixon (add your own favorite names here as it's hard to recall them all) cabal of Watergate traitors) for the USA! USA! USA! peons.
Google history, anyone? (I remember as a programmer in the 70's having technical designs for an improved search program, but being made to understand how expensive it would be to actually provide these tools to a nationwide audience, and then hearing the stories of how fairly non-technical students in college had come up with very simple ideas and could get money for a company presto-chango. Right, easy as pie - or so it was written by those in the know - for "beginners" with connections.) Funny how those of us working in the field at the start of the programming hoo-hah were so dumbfounded at the ease with which the noninvolved and generally non-onsite were able to solve the most difficult technical and business problems concerning the release of software products. Not really something that comes out of garages or dorm rooms usually (without a lot of outside help).
Julian Assange lowers the boom on where the money and talent really came from.
On a personal level, Schmidt and Cohen are perfectly likable people. But Google’s chairman is a classic “head of industry” player, with all of the ideological baggage that comes with that role. Schmidt fits exactly where he is: the point where the centrist, liberal and imperialist tendencies meet in American political life.
By all appearances, Google’s bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgment of the “benevolent superpower.” They will tell you that open-mindedness is a virtue, but all perspectives that challenge the exceptionalist drive at the heart of American foreign policy will remain invisible to them. This is the impenetrable banality of “don’t be evil.” They believe that they are doing good. And that is a problem.
. . . Caught red-handed last year making petabytes of personal data available to the U.S. intelligence community through the PRISM program, Google nevertheless continues to coast on the goodwill generated by its “don’t be evil” doublespeak. A few symbolic open letters to the White House later and it seems all is forgiven. Even anti-surveillance campaigners cannot help themselves, at once condemning government spying but trying to alter Google’s invasive surveillance practices using appeasement strategies.
Nobody wants to acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad. But it has. Schmidt’s tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the shadiest of U.S. power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive mega-corporation. But Google has always been comfortable with this proximity. Long before company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired Schmidt in 2001, their initial research upon which Google was based had been partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). And even as Schmidt’s Google developed an image as the overly friendly giant of global tech, it was building a close relationship with the intelligence community.
In 2003, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had already started systematically violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) under its director General Michael Hayden. These were the days of the “Total Information Awareness” program. Before PRISM was ever dreamed of, under orders from the Bush White House the NSA was already aiming to “collect it all, sniff it all, know it all, process it all, exploit it all.”
During the same period, Google — whose publicly declared corporate mission is to collect and “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — was accepting NSA money to the tune of $2 million to provide the agency with search tools for its rapidly accreting hoard of stolen knowledge.
In 2004, after taking over Keyhole, a mapping tech startup co-funded by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the CIA, Google developed the technology into Google Maps, an enterprise version of which it has since shopped to the Pentagon and associated federal and state agencies on multimillion-dollar contracts.
In 2008, Google helped launch an NGA spy satellite, the GeoEye-1, into space. Google shares the photographs from the satellite with the U.S. military and intelligence communities. In 2010, NGA awarded Google a $27 million contract for “geospatial visualization services.”
In 2010, after the Chinese government was accused of hacking Google, the company entered into a “formal information-sharing” relationship with the NSA, which was said to allow NSA analysts to “evaluate vulnerabilities” in Google’s hardware and software. Although the exact contours of the deal have never been disclosed, the NSA brought in other government agencies to help, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
Around the same time, Google was becoming involved in a program known as the “Enduring Security Framework” (ESF), which entailed the sharing of information between Silicon Valley tech companies and Pentagon-affiliated agencies “at network speed.” Emails obtained in 2014 under Freedom of Information requests show Schmidt and his fellow Googler Sergey Brin corresponding on first-name terms with NSA chief General Keith Alexander about ESF.
Reportage on the emails focused on the familiarity in the correspondence: “General Keith…so great to see you…!” Schmidt wrote. But most reports over-looked a crucial detail. “Your insights as a key member of the Defense Industrial Base,” Alexander wrote to Brin, “are valuable to ensure ESF’s efforts have measurable impact.”
The Department of Homeland Security defines the Defense Industrial Base as “the worldwide industrial complex that enables research and development, as well as design, production, delivery, and maintenance of military weapons systems, subsystems, and components or parts, to meet U.S. military requirements [emphasis added].” The Defense Industrial Base provides “products and services that are essential to mobilize, deploy, and sustain military operations.”Does it include regular commercial services purchased by the U.S. military? No. The definition specifically excludes the purchase of regular commercial services. Whatever makes Google a “key member of the Defense Industrial Base,” it is not recruitment campaigns pushed out through Google AdWords or soldiers checking their Gmail.
In 2012, Google arrived on the list of top-spending Washington, D.C., lobbyists — a list typically stalked exclusively by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, military contractors, and the petro-carbon leviathans. Google entered the rankings above military aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, with a total of $18.2 million spent in 2012 to Lockheed’s $15.3 million.
Boeing, the military contractor that absorbed McDonnell Douglas in 1997, also came below Google, at $15.6 million spent, as did Northrop Grumman at $17.5 million.
In autumn 2013 the Obama administration was trying to drum up support for U.S. airstrikes against Syria. Despite setbacks, the administration continued to press for military action well into September with speeches and public announcements by both President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. On September 10, Google lent its front page — the most popular on the Internet — to the war effort, inserting a line below the search box reading “Live! Secretary Kerry answers questions on Syria. Today via Hangout at 2pm ET.”
As the self-described radical centrist "New York Times" columnist Tom Friedman wrote in 1999, sometimes it is not enough to leave the global dominance of American tech corporations to something as mercurial as “the free market”:
If anything has changed since those words were written, it is that Silicon Valley has grown restless with that passive role, aspiring instead to adorn the hidden fist like a velvet glove.The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
Writing in 2013, Schmidt and Cohen stated,
What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.One way of looking at it is that it’s just business. For an American Internet services monopoly to ensure global market dominance, it cannot simply keep doing what it is doing and let politics take care of itself. American strategic and economic hegemony becomes a vital pillar of its market dominance. What’s a mega-corp to do? If it wants to straddle the world, it must become part of the original “don’t be evil” empire.
But part of the resilient image of Google as “more than just a company” comes from the perception that it does not act like a big, bad corporation. Its penchant for luring people into its services trap with gigabytes of “free storage” produces the perception that Google is giving it away for free, acting directly contrary to the corporate profit motive.
Google is perceived as an essentially philanthropic enterprise — a magical engine presided over by otherworldly visionaries — for creating a utopian future. The company has at times appeared anxious to cultivate this image, pouring funding into “corporate responsibility” initiatives to produce “social change” — exemplified by "Google Ideas."
But as "Google Ideas" shows, the company’s “philanthropic” efforts, too, bring it uncomfortably close to the imperial side of U.S. influence. If Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi was running a program like "Google Ideas," it would draw intense critical scrutiny. But somehow Google gets a free pass.
Whether it is being just a company or “more than just a company,” Google’s geopolitical aspirations are firmly enmeshed within the foreign-policy agenda of the world’s largest superpower. As Google’s search and Internet service monopoly grows, and as it enlarges its industrial surveillance cone to cover the majority of the world’s population, rapidly dominating the mobile phone market and racing to extend Internet access in the global south, Google is steadily becoming the Internet for many people. Its influence on the choices and behavior of the totality of individual human beings translates to real power to influence the course of history.
If the future of the Internet is to be Google, that should be of serious concern to people all over the world — in Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the former Soviet Union and even in Europe — for whom the Internet embodies the promise of an alternative to U.S. cultural, economic, and strategic hegemony.
A “don’t be evil” empire is still an empire.
(Extracted from When Google Met Wikileaks by Julian Assange published by OR Books.)
More evidence needed?
. . . independent web sites that cover war with small budgets and large traffic depend on ad revenue. So Google pulling ads on all of the "AdSense" customers who publish war photography amounts to a massive, debilitating boycott of independent online war journalism and anti-war activism.
Of course the war party in America would love nothing more. War photography is the bane of all war makers. Images like the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a naked Vietnamese child fleeing a napalm attack played a major role in turning American public opinion against the Vietnam War and against war in general. Frustrated warmongers likened the subsequent anti-war public sentiment to a mental disorder, calling it the “Vietnam Syndrome.”
By the time of the Gulf War, America’s first major war since Vietnam, the Federal government, having learned its lesson, was ready to tightly regulate the war imagery that reached the American public, both through Pentagon policy and through its sway over the media. As a result, the typical visuals of the Gulf War were constant CNN video loops of crosshairs-view “precision strikes” and night-time bombardments of Baghdad that looked like an Atari video game or a 4th of July fireworks show.
What was not televised was the carnage wreaked on the ground by those blips on the screen. It wasn’t deemed fit to print either. After photographer Kenneth Jarecke captured a gruesome shot of an Iraqi soldier who was burned alive while trying to escape over the dashboard of his truck, he could not find a single major outlet who would run the picture.
The Iraqi soldier died attempting to pull himself up over the dashboard of his truck. The flames engulfed his vehicle…www.theatlantic.com
After this sanitized coverage helped ensure the Gulf War’s popularity, President George H.W. Bush exulted in a speech, “And by God, we’ve kicked the "Vietnam Syndrome" once and for all!”
The US has also carefully regulated the imagery of the post-9/11 wars, especially through its embedded media program that lures journalists with access given in exchange for submission to censorship. Until 2009, the US even banned photographs of the flag-draped coffins holding the bodies of Americans being returned home for burial.
In spite of such measures, they could not stop all of the horrors of war from reaching the public through unembedded journalists and through leaks. Yet the biggest reality gut punch was delivered by images that depicted, not just the maiming of the bodies of foreign victims, but also the mutilation of American souls.
America saw its sons and daughters grinning for the camera while torturing and sexually humiliating Iraqis. It saw its young men urinating on corpses and holding a dead Afghani’s head up for the camera as though they were posing for a trophy picture with a prize buck.
Now, the war party is terrified that images such as these, combined with the abject failure of the wars, will give America an anti-interventionist “Iraq War Syndrome.” If leaks of such images can’t be stopped, at least their propagation must be slowed down.
Their problem is that media blackouts, like the one that occurred with the Gulf War torched corpse photo, have relatively little effect in an era in which anyone can post war photos to their blog and watch it go viral through social media. That is where a ubiquitous ad provider like Google can be of great service, by limiting the appearance of war photography on the millions of sites that depend on its ads.
Is that what Google is starting to do now? It is a troubling coincidence that Google’s sudden interest in the old Abu Ghraib photos happens to coincide with a Federal judge’s ruling that the government must release the remaining Abu Ghraib photos still under wraps.
Will Google give the new wave of photos the same treatment they are giving the old ones, thereby suppressing the sensation it will cause? Has Google in practice changed its motto from “Don’t Be Evil” to “Don’t See Evil?”
The US must release photographs showing abuse of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, a federal judge has ruled in a long…www.theguardian.com
Alt-Delete
After all, it isn’t just Antiwar.com that Google has leaned on. I have been informed that "The American Conservative" reluctantly decided to disable "AdSense" on all its article pages after Google objected to one of those troops-urinating-on-corpses photographs appearing in its article on the scandal.
And anti-war activist Mnar Muhawesh had to blur an Abu Ghraib photo and remove a Syrian Civil War photo on her "Mint Press News" site after she received similar objections from Google.
And the troubling incidents go beyond web site ads. Google’s YouTube recently targeted Luke Rudkowski’s anti-regime alternative media project "WeAreChange" by, without notice, disabling ads on most of its YouTube videos and clearly suppressing their rate of appearance for users.
This almost completely demonetized his account and obliterated his business model. After Rudkowski filed a complaint, Google gave absolutely no reason for demonetizing any but two of the videos. Those two, which covered the subject of ISIS, contain absolutely no gore, and yet were still deemed “not appropriate for advertising at this time” due to the “sensitive nature” of their content. Again, it must be asked of Google: exactly whose sensitivities are being protected here?
And Google even preemptively disabled ads for James Corbett’s anti-imperialist Corbett Report YouTube channel even though Corbett has never even used them.
In the last few days we noticed our YouTube numbers take a massive down turn while the majority of our new videos and…wearechange.org
As GooTube goes on an "AdSense" purge of alt media, we take a moment to remember that the entire "free and open" internet…www.corbettreport.com
“GooTube” also took down Ben Swann’s documentary short film “Origin of ISIS”, which features Antiwar.com’s Angela Keaton, and which attributes the rise of the terror group to US intervention in Iraq and Syria and the direct funding of US regional allies.
It has since been restored, but to reach its page on YouTube, one must first get past a page that advises “viewer discretion” because the video is “potentially offensive or graphic.” Swann’s video also contains no gore, yet still apparently did not pass the “any child in any region of the world” test. Wouldn’t want to scandalize any generous Qatari sheiks with kids, after all.
”ISIS has accepted funding from government or private sources in the oil-rich nations of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait — and a large network of private donors, including Persian Gulf royalty, businessmen and wealthy families”…www.newsweek.com
In the latest episode of "Truth in Media," Ben Swann investigates the origins of the militant group referred to as the…benswann.com
No Results for “US War Atrocity.” Did You Mean “US War Awesomeness”?
All this raises many questions.
If Google is already so heavy-handed against “inappropriate” voices and “sensitive content,” what can we expect from the government-connected search giant once its “trustworthiness” program is up and running, especially under the new “Net Neutrality” regulatory regime over the internet recently initiated by the FCC? A state-crony, semi-private internet Ministry of Truth? A return to the atmosphere of exclusively regime-friendly voices that characterized the era of crony print and broadcast media?
Dear Net Neutrality Proponents, You dear, sweet buffoons. I know you're quite impressed that the Federal Communications…www.theblaze.com
How true is the following assessment from Newsweek’s editorial preface for Assange’s telling of his meeting with Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt?
“They outlined radically opposing perspectives: for Assange, the liberating power of the Internet is based on its freedom and statelessness. For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with U.S. foreign policy objectives…”And how has that identification between the two influenced his decisions and guidance concerning company projects and policies?
How does Google’s cozy relationship with the national security state and its “key” membership in the Military Industrial Complex affect its approach toward internet content: particularly content that may clash with US foreign policy objectives?
Finally, if Google is bent on boycotting independent, alternative media, shouldn’t independent-minded individuals seriously consider boycotting them right back?
Given Google’s record, these questions are more than fair; they are pressing. And as may become the case for many other discomfiting and subversive questions in the future, their answers cannot be found by “just Googling it.”
Let Google know that, whatever its motives, you don’t appreciate its stifling of independent, alternative anti-war journalism and activism. Submit a complaint to Google by using the contact methods listed here.
Tweet the hashtags #DontSeeEvil, #DontExposeEvil, or #GoogleAltDelete, tagging @Google. If you have had a similar run-in with Google "AdSense" or YouTube, send a message about it to "Antiwar.com." If you are an artist, take part in the Google #DontExposeEvil pro-peace meme contest, launched by Bitcoin Not Bombs.
Just two days ago Google suspended "Antiwar.com's Adsense" account after citing a violation of its violence policy. The…www.bitcoinnotbombs.com
Here is an alternative to Google Search:
The search engine that doesn't track you. A superior search experience with smarter answers, less clutter and real…duckduckgo.com
More essays by Dan Sanchez:
The shoe store Doc Martens unveiled a storm-trooper-esque boot named the Assange Boot.
Go read some Sardonicky, will ya?
She's got the best reporting anywhere detailing the length and breadth of the latest public robberies.
And it looks like there will only be a brief break before they come for the rest of US.
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More Chicago un-Dead, anyone?
How about some Trey?
And for one more time:
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