The Air Force Is Up to Something

I work for a large media feed. Recently, I've noticed something. Not through the news articles, which rarely reveal anything beyond the obvious, but in the face of society's truest mirror: Advertising.

A few weeks ago, a division of the Air Force called Cyber Command bought up every single banner ad on three of the largest news websites in the country: WashingtonPost.com, Slate.com and Newsweek.com for a single day--Tuesday, February 26th. The ad itself showed a metroplex grid all lit up at night. The grid begins to go dark one ominous chunk at a time as words to effect of "What if a power failure was really an attack?" faded in. Clicking on the ad delivered the reader to a sub-page on the Air Force site that went into further detail on the danger of state-sponsored terrorists waging all out cyber-war on our national infrastructure. Remember how heinous it was when a sagging tree limb in Ohio caused a blackout in New York, much of the Northeast and even into Canada a few years back?

Frankly, I thought the ad was a pretty lame attempt at emotional manipulation. After seven years of government terror-spin (Get the duct-tape! We're all gonna' die!) most of us are somewhat hardened to that kind of thing. After a while, even machine gun fire starts to sound like a ticking clock. (Yes, I totally ripped that off from Metallica.) That is until later that day I caught a news story at the gym on CNN about a power plant in Florida going off-line for no apparent reason. The next day the Washington Post carried the following article:

Fla. Power Outage Affects Millions
Reach of Substation Glitch Baffles Officials

Excerpt:

"Florida Power and Light officials could not readily explain how the minor glitch could cause extensive outages as far away as Tampa and Daytona Beach. Safeguards built into the electrical system, they said, should have contained the trouble."

The article reports that the trouble all started at a small substation just outside of Miami when a minor fire caused a cascade of shutdowns throughout the grid. The damage was repaired and the power was back on-line late that same evening. A lot of people were inconvenienced and there was some "widespread panic" but nothing more.

There! Over in the corner! Shine the flashlight! Today's rat:

The Air Force is Covertly Attempting to Drum Up
Money and Recruits for the New
Cyberspace Command.

So, this brings up several questions.

1. Why those websites - WashingtonPost.com, Slate.com and Newsweek.com?

A few years back when Lockheed Martin and Boeing were competing for the coveted Joint Strike Fighter contract from the Defense Appropriations Committee, each company ran hundreds of thousand of dollars of full page ads in The Washington Post newspaper. (WashingtonPost.com existed at the time, but the paper was still the big media feed.) Lockheed's ads were much more eye-catching, dramatic and just plain niftier than Boeing's. They were also more frequent. Both Boeing and Lockheed secured JSF contracts, but Lockheed got the big one. (I still kick myself for not having bought stock.) It all comes down to a single advertising principle that states if you want to sell something, you have to advertise. The secret to advertising is simply this: Get your message in front of the right people, the right way. And in the case of the JSF contract, if you wanted to get the attention of the decision-makers and influencers in Washington, you ran big ads in the Post.

Now, we're seeing the same principal through a slightly different feed. The concept, however, is exactly the same. If you want to get DOD dollars, you run scary ads on the websites that are most likely to get the attention of the decision-makers and influencers on Capitol Hill.

2. Why that day, Tuesday, February 26th?

I'm going to go with a couple of Defense Appropriation Committee hearings within a week of the incident. Wednesday, February 27th was the hearing for the Army's 2009 budget. And one week after the blackout, on Tuesday, March 4th, was the hearing for Fiscal Year 2009 for the Department of Homeland Security. (See the Senate's committee hearing schedule on OpenCongress.org for details.)

3. Why Florida and those cities in particular?

It could be as simple as proximity to the training center for Cyber Command's "Cyber Warriors" which is...wait for it....Florida! Hulburt Air Force Base to be exact. It could be several other factor's as well, not the least of which would be the air conditioner defense. You get to claim all kinds of electrical gremlins when the ol' AC's up just too darn high. Another factor could be the relative low level of danger to the rest of the country caused by a short blackout in Florida. New York goes dark for a day and the stock market shuts down. We saw it in 2003. Miami? People sweat a little more. But, because of the high public awareness value of a state like Florida any kind of incident there makes a loud bang, even if it's an empty one. Think about it: if there was a big power outage in Boseman, Montana and the surrounding area no one would give a shit. But Daytona Beach? Miami? Hell, we're talking race cars and bad 1980's cop shows. Florida holds a high place in the zeitgeist, no question about it. Florida's a destination in the American mind. Set off a firecracker there and people turn around, but maybe nobody really gets hurt.

And, here's the big question...

4. Why does the Air Force need to fundraise so badly for Cyber Command?

You know, I'm not sure. But me and my rat-seeking flashlight have an idea. The Chinese are the new Soviet Union only waaaaaay more dangerous in the minds of those in power in the US of A. Okay, pretend you're a hyper-paranoid conservative warmongering dickhead (Cheney). China is like the Soviet Union except with a hell of a lot more people and not nearly as many of them shitfaced on vodka. Combine that with a wealth-and-resources assimilation appetite that would make The Borg look peckish and you'd be kind of worried.

Resistance is 徒勞。

So here's this big enemy and so far they've shown themselves to be pretty adept at hacking your most important computer systems (FCW.com article: Cyber Officials: Chinese Hackers Attack 'Anything and Everything') and even shooting down spy satellites (WashingtonPost.com article: China Criticized for Anti-Satellite Missile Test). You figure the bad guys are coming after you with their clever yellow computers and you've got to hit them back.

I suppose the big counter argument might be that the Air Force wouldn't dream of trying such an obvious ploy. Run a big campaign about blackouts on the same day as a blackout? C'mon, how brazen do you think we'd have to be? Oh, I don't know. Being super obvious as a means to draw suspicion away from yourself is one of the oldest cons in the book. Know why it's so old? Because it works.

It's such a simple, old, depressing formula: The guys in the cave down the block have a bunch of clubs and sharp sticks, so we gotta' get some bigger clubs and sharp sticks. Well, how do we go about getting the rest of our tribe to take time and resources to make those clubs and sharp sticks? Wait, I know! We'll tell some stories around the fire about how we saw some of those other guys messing around with their clubs and sharp sticks. Then we (quietly, quietly) beat someone with a club and then stab him or her to death with a sharp stick and--here's the beauty part--we leave the corpse in front of our cave. We don't gotta' say nothin'. Our tribe'll start whittling away the same day.

Shameless Self-Promotion or the Big Publishing Companies Won't Talk to Me Yet

I just self-published my novel on-line at a site called www.lulu.com. It's just like amazon.com. You search by title (Sins of the Fathers), author (Richmond), or both and they'll print and send you a copy. You could also check it out via this link: http://www.lulu.com/content/374940. You can look at a preview of the first chapter and check out the front and back covers, read reviews, etc.

For a long time I tried to get published the old fashion way, i.e. writing query letters to agents and publishers. The big publishers don't take unsolicited manuscripts or even query letters in most cases and neither do the agencies that sell to them. So, I tried the smaller publishing houses and agencies. While I had some success here (people actually asked to read my manuscript) I was turned down because the smaller houses don't publish my type of work for the most part. If you write horror, thriller, supernatural novels, you're going to have a hard time breaking in unless you know someone. I don't know anyone.

So, I self published. My plan is to sell a couple hundred books on my own steam and then attempt to get an agent again. It's my hope that once I've created some buzz about my work and myself that I'll have a better shot at getting the attention of the large publishing houses and/or the agents with whom they work. That model has worked for some "Ghetto Fiction" writers and I'm hoping it will work for me as well.

(I heard this great story on NRP a while back about a young unknown author who couldn't get the big publishers to pay attention to her, so she printed her novel and started selling it around the neighborhood out of the trunk of her car. Word got around and she got published.)

If you dig on my book, please spread the word and make some noise. That's my best shot. Thanks for your support if you give it.

Does Dr. Hwang Really Suk?

So a couple of months ago I was listening to NPR and I heard this story about a South Korean scientist who got busted for paying his female lab workers for their eggs, so he could use them in his stem cell research. I didn't care much about that. However, whenever I hear that some other country has the brains not to hyper-regulate something with as much potential as stem cell research, I get a woody. What really got my attention is that Dr. Hwang Woo Suk claimed to have successfully cloned human embryos. As is often the case, the smaller news story of this scientist paying his female lab workers for their ova grew in the larger one of his success in cloning human embryos. Shortly thereafter, it was then revealed that he faked all his research and his results couldn't be reproduced. Know what this reminded me of? Remember fusion in a jar? Remember how every time a lab was able to do it they'd publish their findings and then not be able to reproduce results a week later?

A Quick Primer for Those of Us
Who Don't Know Why Cloning Human Embryos is a Good Thing

First off, when we say embryos, we're not talking about the 3-5 month old shrimp that are beginning to look like people. We're talking about clumps of cells no more complicated than the dollop of gray matter you'd kill by having too much fun at a bar one night. Those clumps are made up almost entirely of stem cells. Stem cells are like factory blanks—you can use them for anything. Have to spend your life in a wheel chair because your spine's been severed in a freak croquet mishap? Inject a few stem cells into the damaged area and they become—holy shit!—brand spankin' new spinal cells. Lose your sight because of damage along your optic nerve? (First of all, stop staring directly at Pat Robertson when he's talking.) Lather on a few stem cells and marvel as the windshield of life is defrosted before you. Pretty neat, huh? Pretty life/world-changing? Pretty threatening if you make your living off of human biological woes, but we'll get to that in a minute.

There are two main hurtles to stem cells changing the world. The first is that stem cells don't grow on trees. Unless you're looking for arboreal stem cells...probably. It would seem like the only place to establish a reliable harvest of human stem cells is from humans. We can get that from a couple of different places, bone marrow for one, but it's not easy and the quality of the stem cells isn't as good as those harvested from embryos. The second major hurtle is rejection. If the stem cells don't come with your specific DNA signature, your body won’t dig them and they won't work. They might even be more poison than cure. Rejection just sucks, doesn't it? And you thought it was tough having that half-ugly girl at the dance look at you like you had bean sprouts growing out of your nose. I mean, what's with that? She was totally in your league, what with the harelip and that flat chest? Man, anyway, so you have to make sure the stem cells won't pull a Cynthia Stankoski on you. The way to solve both problems is to have a perfect copy of yourself, a clone. That way when you harvest stem cells from your own clone, it's like going back in time to when you were just a clump of embryo (not even a shrimp yet, remember) and taking stem cells from yourself. And you would never reject yourself, now would you?

A Quick Primer for Those of Us
Who Don't Know How Cloning Works

Okay, here's how you make a clone. You take a human egg, unfertilized, and then you jab it with a very small needle. You then suck out all the genetic info. that has come with the egg from the woman who minted it. You now have a blank ovum. Now, you take a cell from the subject to be cloned. Ideally, it'll be a cell that's got easily accessible genetic programming because you have to take another really small needle and suck that out too. You then transfer this genetic programming to the blank ovum. Finally, and I love this part because it's so Mary Shelley, you introduce an electric charge to the ovum to initiate cell division. The genetic info. in the ovum tells the egg to become an embryo, but an embryo that is an exact copy of the subject to be cloned. If you let the embryo develop into a full human and deliver the baby, you'll have a twin of the subject to be cloned. But for the purposes of using stem cells to cure what ails us, we would harvest the cells before the embryo ever developed that far. And thus far, fully developed and birthed clones (at least in the animal trials that have been carried out) don’t seem to live very long.

The above process, by the way, could also be the recipe for a really funny practical joke. Say you're an Asian male, South Korean, and you knock up your South Korean wife. Now, imagine your wife and her geneticist friend (say he's her favorite cousin and they love to play tricks on you) follow the above formula. Instead of getting a South Korean infant nine months down the road, you might see a wrinkly baby Pat Robertson and hilarity would, of course, ensue.

CFRWOWRE Fears & Loathes Doctor Hwang

So, now we know why stem cells are good to have and how we get them. It's the harvest of these cells from human cloned embryos that has caused such a furor in the past few years. (Actually, science types and clergy types have been arguing about this stuff since the sixties, but it's only really come to a head recently because we can actually do this stuff now.) Folks with horrible injuries and/or incurable diseases are interested in further stem cell research because they would like to be cured now, thank you. And who can blame them for not wanting to forget their own children's faces or being able to wipe their own asses? I have asthma and could really get behind not having to use a fast-acting inhaler every time I want to go to the gym or am around a cat for more than a minute. But there is a vocal and powerful contingent—just for fun we'll call them the Christian Fundamentalist Right Wing Oppressors Who Run Everything or CFRWOWRE for short—who are diametrically opposed to furthering stem cell research as long as it involves the cloning of human embryos. They like to site the similarity of abortion to the cloning/harvesting procedure and/or the whole not playing god argument. I'm not going to get into who's right and who's wrong (CFRWOWRE is wrong) here, I just want to establish that there are two sides to this argument and that one side would be happy to see stem cell research set back whenever possible.

There's another part of the CFRWOWRE that prefers to play it cool and quiet—the big companies, big pharmaceutical companies specifically. (By the by, big companies don't have a religious affiliations per se. They just glom on to whomever is currently pulling the strings. If it's a nice, mostly secular boy from Arkansas who's got a problem with food and turning down nice Jewish pussy, they'll glom onto him. If it's a former alcoholic/coke addict with the IQ of a tadpole, evangelical leanings and the morals of a...a Republican, well, you get the picture.) We're talking about an industry that makes more money than most other industries combined. That alone doesn't make them evil. I like to make money, too, and I'm not evil. Hell, I'm the Metatron of righteousness. What makes them evil is that they'll do almost anything to ensure steady streams of it, great gushing, pulsating bleeders of it. Nothing makes Big Pharma happier than when people have a headache. Successful stem cell research scares the shit out of them because no one would have to pay for aspirin anymore. So, here's the conspiracy theory...

Big Pharma Shut Down Dr. Hwang
Just Like
Big Oil Shut Down Cold Fusion

At RITB we concentrate not just on the conspiracy theory itself, but on the deeper motives behind those perpetrating it. So, if we accept that Big Pharma and their flunkies in CFRWOWRE shut down and covered up Dr. Hwang's ground-breaking results in human stem cell cloning because they don't want to lose money, we have to ask the following question:

Why are they so afraid to lose money?

I have been poor. I know that not having any money sucks, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about sums so large that it would change the nature of world economies if Big Pharma suddenly became somewhat irrelevant. It would also change the nature of power in the world as well. A great deal of the reason why the proletariat stays down is because a large portion of the proletariat has a cold. If the proletariat doesn't have to concentrate all its energy on dying of one plague or another, they might be able to concentrate of a making a few changes. But in all honesty, I don't think the big decision makers are thinking about this as much as they are thinking about their share holders. I truly believe that most of the people in charge aren't deep enough to see much farther past the cabbage. In order to do so would require a psychological sophistication that most humans don't have, let alone most of the people in charge. You don't get to be in charge by being wise about your true psychological drives and then having the strength to do something about that. The people who do have those abilities are not corporate CEOs or high-ranking members of the House or Senate. They are not George W. Bush. They are not even the Dalai Lama. They are the rare guy in Kentucky or Cambodia with who farms for a living and fucking loves it. Loves it. They are the monks and atheists who would like nothing more in life than to sit in a ray of sunshine and just be. These are the people who know that fear is useless and know enough to think about stuff like that. These are the people who do not fear.

So the answer to the question "Why are they so afraid to lose money?" is simply this: They fear. Fear is what motivates people like this. Fear is what drives them. If we want to make it so that they will cease their impediments to progress, we have to make them afraid. You know who's a perfect example of this? Nancy Reagan. The former first lady is a poster child for CFRWOWRE except when it comes to matters of stem cell research because her late husband, the Gipper, might not have turned into a piece of kale had he been able to take advantage of it. She was afraid and suddenly got the hell out of the way. Her son, Ron, atually stumped for the Dems in ’04 for christ’s sake. What we really need is such a huge health threat that Big Pharma is forced to not only get out of the way of human cloning and stem cell research, but actually transform itself into the leading proponent of it. Until then, they'll fear change, they'll fear loss, and they'll do anything in their power—like shutting down a nice South Korean research scientist—to keep things status quo.

Someone asked me on New Years Eve what I was hoping for in 2006. Know what I said?

Bird flu.

My Wife Is More Than An Articulate Raghead or Why the French Are Xenophobic

My wife and I just back from a twelve-day vacation in St. Maarten/St. Martin (I know, I know--try not to cry too hard for me). One fine evening we found ourselves at a bar on Orient Beach on the French side of the island. By the way, St. Martin is the smallest landmass on earth at thirty-seven square miles to have two separate countries. So, we're at a beach bar on the French side and once again I find myself lucky to have married a woman who speaks French on a conversational level.

She was born in Morocco to an Arab mother and an American father and learned French and Arabic before she learned English. As is often the case, her father's genes ended up being a little more showy than her mother's and so she is often mistaken for your basic Euro-mutt. It's hard to see the Arab in my baby unless you really know what to look for. Basically, she's lilly white.

The French bartender marveled at her Parisian-sounding accent and asked her if we were Canadian. She explained that she was Moroccan. He exclaimed that she was very fair for an Arab and extremely well-spoken. I, of course, had no idea what the fuck they were talking about and was just happy to learn that I was not being made fun of.

When we left the bar she shook her head and muttered, "Typical French racism." She explained the details of their transaction and at first I couldn't figure out why she was pissed until I made a comparison that is common in American culture. What the bartender said to her was pretty much equivalent to a white American person exclaiming upon meeting an African American who speaks in Midwestern American dialect, "Oh, and she was so articulate." That's insulting and racist, of course, because it implies that African Americans aren't usually articulate (read intelligent) enough to speak in mid-western American/Peter Jennings tinted dialect, and that an articulate African American is unusual enough to exclaim about. It's like expressing amazement that three-year old child can read or something.

Anyway, I asked my wife about her "typical" comment. Growing up in a former French colony, and working for an international non-profit, she's had a hell of a lot of experience with that particular country, its people and culture. She's not just some jerk from Indiana (me, hello) who has almost no experience with foreign peoples and hates them when they won't go to war with us (not me, hello); her opinion on the matter was worth something. She explained that the type of unconscious racism that allowed the bartender to make his insulting statement was rampant in the French culture because they don't see it.

The French have a completely inclusive cultural model. You move to their country from Morocco, Indiana, or Iran and you're French. You are not a French person of Moroccan, American or Iranian descent or cultural background, you are French. Full stop.

I think that's a wonderful ideal: We are all one people, undivided by questions of race or imagined differences in culture. In a world so full of division and the insecurity and inequity those divisions can cause, the idea of an all-inclusive society is practically utopian. Kudos to the French for subscribing to this model.

Thing is, it's bullshit in France or anywhere else.

Humans identify ourselves in the simplest, most primordial ways through visual imprinting. So first and foremost, people of a different skin color are just that to us, different. Now, let's talk for a second about the basest of human weakness: fear. How do we feel about things that are different from us? We fear them. We always have and, unless we do some serious evolving in the near term, always will until we are something more than what we now think of as human. There's really only one way to get around that kind of weakness. You have to acknowledge it. If you don't acknowledge your weaknesses they own you and some bad shit can go down before you know it. Like, say, huge socio-economic inequities and three weeks of riots in the suburbs outside of the City of Light. (By the way, the Watts, D.C. and L.A. riots fully qualify for this analysis as well.)

Let me tell you a little story about a terrified kid who was a huge unconscious racist and who beat it eventually...sort of.

(More to come.)

Standing at the shore, counting drops of water. Or, the Neo-cons will destroy the world over black goo.

Where to begin with a blog like this? In a world so full of shady dealings--where everything that happens seems to have an official explanation and a different, possibly darker, motive--I'm feeling a little overwhelmed. It's like planting my feet in the wet sand at the edge of the sea with the task of counting every last drop of water.

The war in Iraq's a pretty easy one, but where does that start? With the President using the entire US war machine to put a hit out on one guy as revenge for the same guy putting a hit out on his daddy? Or with the man who put George up to it? That's right, Dick Cheney. I don't think George is smart or prescient enough to understand the possible outcomes but Dick is. George plays checkers. Dick's into chess.

So, my first conspiracy theory is this:


Dick Cheney started the Iraq War because he wanted to make money.







Discussion/analysis to come.

(Bit Later)

Right, so I've been thinking about why this is different from the myriad other conspiracy theory blogs. First and foremost, Rats in the Basement is not a blog for the conspiracy theory set. Those folks would probably not dig my musings as they will not go heavily into data or "proof" per se. Moreover, these entries will attempt to dissect the unconscious motivations of those discussed in the theory itself.

For example, I'm not sure I really believe that Dick Cheney started the war in Iraq because he wanted to make more money on oil...consciously. I think his true motivations--as is the case with many of us--are hidden deep under a mantel of publicly stated intentions. Hell some of those intentions are even pretty good. After all, how can you blame a person for wanting to protect his homeland from a perceived evil? You can't. Problem here is Dick's only telling himself that his main reason for going to war was the preventative tactic of taking the big booms to the terrorists on their own turf. His real reasons are bubbling away under that crust of publicly acceptable bullshit like the liquid remains of long, long dead organic material. I think that Dick couldn't have gone as far as he has if he were really as evil as his actions proclaim. If a person is going to function at as high as level as Cheney does, that person must hide their severe dysfunction from themselves. Jesus, even Hitler thought he was a good guy.

So, I don't think Cheney's hanging out in the bunker, rubbing his hands together like Mr. Burns and chortling to himself every time a bomb goes off and oil futures gush into the stratosphere. Instead, he's telling himself that it's all a shame and that he was sure, just sure those damnable Iraqis had WMD under some dune or another. Well, we're in it now and we've got to stay the course n' all, and buy bonds and whatever.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's probably no one on earth--maybe even within the short span of human history--who's ever consciously been the villain. There's a great scene toward the end of the movie Falling Down. After a day-long violent rampage against what he perceives as the evils of the world, the Protagonist is confronted by a cop. The cop (Robert Duvall. Love that guy) tells the protagonist that he's got to stop what he's doing, give up, etc. when this totally perplexed look crosses his, the protagonist's, face. He says, "I'm the bad guy?"

Cheney, if he had the capacity, would make that face. He has no idea in his conscious mind that the evil he does is evil. It's tearing him apart, though. How many heart attacks has this guy had? Look at him. He's in pain.

I don’t mean to come off as an apologist for Cheney. While I do believe that Hitler, Stalin, my grade school bully, Lisa Sambataro, were all much more psychologically warped than they were agents of Satan, I also hold that they are responsible. Cheney should be stopped. His other lil' war buddies should also be stopped. I just wish someone would get their asses in to a really good, really gentle shrink. It would save a few lives.

Note to Treasurey Department employee interns:
When I say "stopped" I do not mean by any physical or coercive--certainly not violent--means. I just want the neo-con War Machine to play a little nicer. 'Kay? Don't come to my house.

Have a conspiracy theory you'd like to see in Rats in the Basement? Send it to: ratsinthebasement@hotmail.com