Wall St protest gaining strengh?

[dcarrigg]

Re: Wall St protest gaining strengh?

A city of 10 million people and they could only get 5k into Times Square on Saturday...

As it was, I happened to be down in NYC, and I went to take a look. There were a lot more than 5k people. Reuters put it at 50k. Other estimates put it at 35k. That's for a city of 7 million people.

It's still not a huge ratio, but it's bigger than you'd think given the numbers you put forth above. Where did you get the 5k number? It doesn't look like that's right:

Here's one from CBS that quotes "tens of thousands"



Here's a bigger pic from the AP:



The ratio of protesters to population is still not large, but the majority of Americans polled view them positively. We'll see if it goes anywhere from here. It has already altered the conversation in the MSM some.

If that's all it contributes, at least it's something.

[reggie]

Re: Wall St protest gaining strengh?

I find it utterly sad that that which one does not understand is either relegated to the Don't-touch-because-it's-crazy pile or to the I'm too lazy to understand pile. Why is it we all want our knowledge fed to us on a silver platter? Is there no joy in reading and learning material not fed to us by institutions? Lot's of great material can be pursued by doing a little looking into the tidbits dropped in this thread. Good luck to those who don't listen and choose to pursue.

Sorry, but you have not.

You've slapped up a pastiche which does not in any way connect OWS with anything Soros, US government, or whatever.

How about using lines?

OWS <-- OWS leader <-- intermediate organization <-- cutout NGO <-- bankster or US government

You have posted about The two right boxes, but nothing else.

And Socrates is irrelevant to this discussion.

The Socratic method is primarily to disguise the ignorance of the instructor.

Sourcewatch shows that Soros' OSI funded these guys. Further, understanding Karl Popper's influence on Soros makes this entire line of questioning moot and pointless, as the "revolutionaries' are completely in alignment with Soros' actual goals, which are obviously not understood here at all.

Further, Socrates is totally relevant here, and to not understand that demonstrates why my posts are viewed as they are. May I suggest reading "the Trial of Socrates" by Izzy Stone, as that will put Socrates (and to some extent, Plato) into the appropriate context here. Without understanding that, I don't really know how one would understand today's world. It's unfortunate that modern western texts have almost obliterated history here.

Lastly, seems only fair that since you demand that I answer your questions, you would at least show the curtosy of answering mine, I believe there are two outstanding in other threads, which you have ignored.

Your posts are just the typical conspiracist MO, dressed up with some flowery language. Instead of "Check out this video I got from infowars.com! Stunning Revelations!" its "these academics have many publications available on Amazon and for download online. Surely, someone would want to at least peruse the work of these men before casting judgement." Uses bigger words but it's still the same b.s. Rather than explaining in your own words why a video or article you've cut and pasted is important, or how it illustrates your larger point, you reply along these lines:

My time is valuable, I'm not going to spend it watching long-ass videos, reading lengthy cut n' paste articles, and whole books of obscure Marxist critical theorizing, just because I am prompted to do so by a poster on an internet forum who can't even succinctly explain his reasons for posting the material.

Even if you don't like the source, is this description of what you are getting at inaccurate?

I am not going to spend hours of time to studying something when a quick google of the Frankfurt School turns up discussions that all seem to repeat the same points, at sites that tend to be extreme right wing, anti-Semitic, LaRouche-y, and conspiracy oriented:

http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t357588/

http://theforbiddentruth.net/1623-frankfurt-school-conspiracy-corrupt.html

http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid...frankfurt.html

Like I said, your posts remind me of the typical conspiracist MO. Check out any thread on Randi.org to see the same thing. Here's a example about a completely unrelated (OR IS IT? Bwah ha ha ha) conspiracy - the Franklin child prostitution ring allegations.

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=64252&page=2

I would suggest reading the thread, perhaps you will gain some insight into how you come across in your posts. Notice how the complaints of the skeptical commenters as the thread progresses mirror those of the comments here:

I don't visit any of these sites that you reference, and know litttle about them. My knowledge comes from respected influential thinkers acclaimed in elite and intellectual circles. Not sure why none seems to be familar at all here.

And was it you that posted that "Conspiracy' reference to the Frankfurt school? If so, did that quote come from one of these websites you listed? Certainly, these are not credible sources and one would not be wise to base their opinion of the academics there based upon what some site-lie-that says.

Sutter Cane:

It appears that you are responding on the generous assumption that reggie is interested in communicating something to us. All evidence points to the exact opposite conclusion. If he wished to succinctly explain his logic, he could have done so without drowning it in numerous and lengthy pieces of "supporting evidence", and thereby consumed far less effort both on his part, and ours. Instead, it seems that his focus is on attracting and holding as much of our attention as he can, for as long as he can. This sad quest for attention is tragically common on the internet, and is best remedied by following the advice given previously in this discussion:

"Do not feed the Trolls"

As long as he gets a response from you, he is achieving his objective. Are you achieving yours?

If you don't understand or are unfamiliar with the material, how can you make any judgement at all as to its merits? That seems quite prresumptius of you.

Further, if we're going to throw labels around, would it appropriate for me to labler you as well? As it will not be very nice. So, let's not play that game, shall we?

Hmmm. I don't get that Reggie is just a troll. I really would like to see him clarify his point of view and not be so vague, because I think there is something there, but like others, I'm not willing to dig into his supporting evidence. Perhaps I'm naive though.

Yes, this is quite a challenge. Not only am I facing a hostile audience, but one that seems to have no familarity with any of the information I cite, further, said information is dismissed and not pursued. How does one attack these hurdles? Seems a dissertation would be required to address all the points and the substantiating background and history.

Reggie FWIW it strikes me that your method in general seems to be to read a lot of material on psy-ops for example and then look about the world to find historical incidents that appear to mirror the effects of such a "program" and then assume that the former is the cause of the latter.

There's a small missing step there no?

I seem to recall this ages ago with a case where you spun out some obscure military psy-ops concept to elaborate lengths that frankly just struck me as ridiculous. My thought at the time was I'm sure you can always find some article or theoretical paper that would seem to map onto what's going on but that's kind of falacy of "evidence fitting" no? There are no doubt thousands of such articles written every year. Where's the evidence that this paper or theory is actually being put into practice and causing the effect?

Frankly I haven't read the above, but thought it might help to give some feedback as to why I don't feel inclined to. Just my 2cents.

BTW what's so horrible about Karl Popper?

Popper proposes an Open Society. Sounds great, but an understanding of Complexity Theory, a narrow area of research within Cybernetics, will demonstrate that it is a system structure, and societal framework, that is highly controllable. If you want to study these areas, then I suggest academics such as Norbert Weiner, Ross Ashby and Stafford Beers. The science has been around in its modern form for around 100 years, but then again, Plato was advocating this as well.

Not coincidental that Soros' non-profit is called Open Society Institute.

Finally, the military documents that I read and refer to are NOT considered "obcure" by US Military Brass or think tanks. Sorry you're not familiar with them.

You guys still think it's gaining strength? If so, to what end?

A city of 10 million people and they could only get 5k into Times Square on Saturday...

The MSM cable networks stopped paying attention on Monday morning.

And now we have stories of infighting, disorganization, chaos:

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/10...e_organiz.html

"You're not a real protestor!"

In part, It's Maneuver Warfare , as described her by Franks discussing at that time the same concepts being used in Iraq:

"And that is the business of decision cycles, or inside the decision loop, as people say if, in fact, you can deceive him with respect to what you are going to do, to cause him further confusion and make him keep his force in place one day too long, then, in fact, you find yourself all the way to Baghdad. "

Gen Tommy Franks,
Commander, USCENTCOM
in Peter Boyer, The New War Machine,
The New Yorker, June 30, 2003

[Slimprofits]

Re: Wall St protest gaining strengh?

That 5k number came out of OWS last weekend, so I'll take your word on other estimates. It doesn't look like a hell of a lot of people to me in that aerial shot. Certainly not 50k.

.....

I am at a loss attempting to figure out the point of these protests, other than a party for the like minded to celebrate together. A outdoor echo chamber?

Look at the calendar for 'OccupyBoston'.

- yoga classes, random one-off marches, spirituality working group, Jeff MacKinnon Comedy hour

I understood what we were trying to do in 1999 and 2000. Shut down IMF and World Bank meetings. Disrupt them and attempt to get the message out as to why they needed to be disrupted. Other attempts were made to shut down political party gatherings - the DNC and RNC.

I have no clue whatsoever as to what these people think they are going to accomplish by camping out near the Fed and beating on drums.

Their flyers say to join with people who are tired of their voices being ignored.

No one accept for the tiny minority of mostly college kids that wish they were there are paying attention to the protests. Their voices are still being ignored.

There is nothing on the website that indicates any purpose, goals or ends whatsoever.

So that's it...it's a street party.

[seanm123]

Re: Wall St protest gaining strengh?

There is a link to Soros, but you really cannot believe they started this with Only 26k in the last few years? I think Twitter is providing umph to the movement more than any other one Person or Group. Viral marketing, and push information, it could very well be the result of a virtual campaign with the right message that Wall St is a Villian the ever man can hate. After all we always need a villain, and with Bin Laden now dead well there needs to be a replacement villain no?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...79D01Q20111014

[c1ue]

Re: Wall St protest gaining strengh?

There is a link to Soros, but you really cannot believe they started this with Only 26k in the last few years? I think Twitter is providing umph to the movement more than any other one Person or Group. Viral marketing, and push information, it could very well be the result of a virtual campaign with the right message that Wall St is a Villian the ever man can hate. After all we always need a villain, and with Bin Laden now dead well there needs to be a replacement villain no?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...79D01Q20111014

Thanks for the link. I'd say though, that it is pretty weak, given that Soros is alleged to have spent $42 million for Georgia's Rose Revolution, and 2 former executive directors of Soros' Open Society Initiative are now very high level members of the Georgian government.

$3.5 million to Tides, which in turn $185K over 10 years to Adbusters, which in turn is supposed to have started OWS - I guess Soros' capabilities in the US and Canada are so much stronger. /sarc

[oddlots]

Re: Wall St protest gaining strengh?

Hugh Charles Smith's thoughts on OWS:

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct11/...-OWS10-11.html

If you don't read him, I really appreciate his ability to synthesize criticicism what conventional thinking would hold in opposite sides of the brain: i.e., right-left. He helps me to see through my weakness for liberal cant (though I'm not sure anyone here would say the effects are evident )

Squinting hard, here's what I hope is emerging here:

- the thing I have found perplexing over the last ~ 10 years is the gaping disconnect between the political and economic rhetoric one hears through the bull-horn and then parroted by your average upper-middle class Anglo-American and what is actually going on...

- examples might be:

a) the real estate bubble and the chearing on of housing market gains (when I swear it should be obvious to anyone on it's face that we can't in aggregate get rich selling each other our houses)
b) the desperate, mantra like but somehow unspoken assumption that all profits are equally a product of virtuous hard work by definition
c) the way the West has basically sleep-walked into a police state via the war on terror
d) the way the titans of finance were on top of the world then literally bankrupt (think of Royal Bank of Scotland becoming the biggest company ever by assets and then, within weeks as far as I recall, the world's biggest bankruptcy case. (The non-linearity of this is perfectly emblamatic of our - past - gilded age. The "black swan" that was precisely not a black swan.)

We could all go on.

- I can both a) pinpoint to the month the moment when my unconscious unease about the world set off the "bullshit" alarm bells and sent me scrambling to figure out what was going on at least economically and b) name every writer that helped me figure out some piece of the puzzle (to the extent I have.) It's been a very educational ride.

- it's a long process trying to unravel the mess here even as an individual. How much has to do with the dollar standard? / central banking? / globalisation? / the FIRE economy? / the FIRE economy as a product of both the dollar standard and globalisation etc. I'm of at least two minds about all of it.

- but the most important moment is the one where one first starts to find an alternative, heterodox explanation that makes more sense than the standard blather that I swear is just repeated out of sheer inertia and is still out there screaming from the ether (for example, from a recent read, B of A's laughable presser where CEO Moynihan defended ridiculous, usurious fees to customers with a straight face as his obligation to preserve profitability... after presiding over the wholesale destruction of the company from the executive floor for years)

- my point really is that these things aren't linear: like that F Scott Fitzgerald line where someone is described as going bankrupt slowly at first, then "all at once," the scales fall from one's eyes...

- for this reason I think that much of the exasperation or contempt for OWS either misses the point (i.e., it's started, slowly or not) or is actually a kind of back-handed recognition of the potential danger of the movement to those who haven't been making any sense for years (and secretly or unconsciously know it.)

[reggie]

Re: Wall St protest gaining strengh?

Here's where one military thinker thinks it's headed.

John Robb, author of Brave New War, blogger at http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com and a former special operations USAF pilot.

The Coming Urban Terror
John Robb

http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_...terrorism.html

Systems disruption, networked gangs, and bioweapons

For the first time in history, announced researchers this May, a majority of the world’s population is living in urban environments. Cities—efficient hubs connecting international flows of people, energy, communications, and capital—are thriving in our global economy as never before. However, the same factors that make cities hubs of globalization also make them vulnerable to small-group terror and violence.

Over the last few years, small groups’ ability to conduct terrorism has shown radical improvements in productivity—their capacity to inflict economic, physical, and moral damage. These groups, motivated by everything from gang membership to religious extremism, have taken advantage of easy access to our global superinfrastructure, revenues from growing illicit commercial flows, and ubiquitously available new technologies to cross the threshold necessary to become terrible threats. September 11, 2001, marked their arrival at that threshold.

Unfortunately, the improvements in lethality that we have already seen are just the beginning. The arc of productivity growth that lets small groups terrorize at ever-higher levels of death and disruption stretches as far as the eye can see. Eventually, one man may even be able to wield the destructive power that only nation-states possess today. It is a perverse twist of history that this new threat arrives at the same moment that wars between states are receding into the past. Thanks to global interdependence, state-against-state warfare is far less likely than it used to be, and viable only against disconnected or powerless states. But the underlying processes of globalization have made us exceedingly vulnerable to nonstate enemies. The mechanisms of power and control that states once exerted will continue to weaken as global interconnectivity increases. Small groups of terrorists can already attack deep within any state, riding on the highways of interconnectivity, unconcerned about our porous borders and our nation-state militaries. These terrorists’ likeliest point of origin, and their likeliest destination, is the city.

Cities played a vital defensive role in the last major evolution of conventional state-versus-state warfare. Between the world wars, the refinement of technologies—particularly the combustion engine, when combined with armor—made it possible for armies to move at much higher speeds than in the past, so new methods of warfare emphasized armored motorized maneuver as a way to pierce the opposition’s solid defensive lines and range deep into soft, undefended rear areas. These incursions, the armored thrusts of blitzkrieg, turned an army’s size against itself: even the smallest armored vanguard could easily disrupt the supply of ammunition, fuel, and rations necessary to maintain the huge armies of the twentieth century in the field.

To defend against these thrusts, the theoretician J. F. C. Fuller wrote in the 1930s, cities could be used as anchor or pivot points to engage armored forces in attacks on static positions, bogging down the offensive. Tanks couldn’t move quickly through cities, and if they bypassed them and struck too deeply into enemy territory, their supply lines—in particular, of the gasoline they drank greedily—would become vulnerable. The city, Fuller anticipated, could serve as a vast fortress, requiring the fast new armor to revert to the ancient tactic of the siege. That’s exactly what happened in practice during World War II, when the defenses mounted in Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad played a major role in the Allied victory.

But in the current evolution of warfare, cities are no longer defensive anchors against armored thrusts ranging through the countryside. They have become the main targets of offensive action themselves. Just as the huge militaries of the early twentieth century were vulnerable to supply and communications disruption, cities are now so heavily dependent on a constant flow of services from various centralized systems that even the simplest attacks on those systems can cause massive disruption.

Most of the networks that we rely on for city life—communications, electricity, transportation, water—are overused, interdependent, and extremely complex. They developed organically as what scholars in the emerging field of network science call “scale-free networks,” which contain large hubs with a plethora of connections to smaller and more isolated local clusters. Such networks are economically efficient and resistant to random failure—but they are also extremely vulnerable to intentional disruptions, as Albert-Laszlo Barabasi shows in his important book Linked: The New Science of Networks. In practice, this means that a very small number of attacks on the critical hubs of a scale-free network can collapse the entire network. Such a collapse can occasionally happen by accident, when random failure hits a critical node; think of the huge Northeast blackout of 2003, which caused $6.4 billion in damage.

Further, the networks of our global superinfrastructure are tightly “coupled”—so tightly interconnected, that is, that any change in one has a nearly instantaneous effect on the others. Attacking one network is like knocking over the first domino in a series: it leads to cascades of failure through a variety of connected networks, faster than human managers can respond.

The ongoing attacks on the systems that support Baghdad’s 5 million people illustrate the vulnerability of modern networks. Over the last four years, guerrilla assaults on electrical systems have reduced Baghdad’s power to an average of four or five hours a day. And the insurgents have been busily finding new ways to cut power: no longer do they make simple attacks on single transmission towers. Instead, they destroy multiple towers in series and remove the copper wire for resale to fund the operation; they ambush repair crews in order to slow repairs radically; they attack the natural gas and water pipelines that feed the power plants. In September 2004, one attack on an oil pipeline that fed a power plant quickly led to a cascade of power failures that blacked out electricity throughout Iraq.

Lack of adequate power is a major reason why economic recovery has been nearly impossible in Iraq. No wonder that, in account after account, nearly the first criticism that any Iraqi citizen levels against the government is its inability to keep the lights on. Deprived of services, citizens are forced to turn to local groups—many of them at war with the government—for black-market alternatives. This money, in turn, fuels further violence, and the government loses legitimacy.

Insurgents have directed such disruptive attacks against nearly all the services necessary to get a city of 5 million through the day: water pipes, trucking, and distribution lines for gasoline and kerosene. And because of these networks’ complexity and interconnectivity, even small attacks, costing in the low thousands of dollars to carry out, can cause tens of millions and occasionally hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.

Iraq is a petri dish for modern conflict, the Spanish Civil War of our times. It’s the place where small groups are learning to fight modern militaries and modern societies and win. As a result, we can expect to see systems disruption used again and again in modern conflict—certainly against megacities in the developing world, and even against those in the developed West, as we have already seen in London, Madrid, and Moscow.

Another growing threat to our cities, commonest so far in the developing world, is gangs challenging government for control. For three sultry July days in 2006, a gang called PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital, “First Command of the Capital”) held hostage the 20 million inhabitants of the greater São Paulo area through a campaign of violence. Gang members razed police stations, attacked banks, rioted in prisons, and torched dozens of buses, shutting down a transportation system serving 2.9 million people a day.

The previous May, a similar series of attacks had terrified the city. “The attackers moved on foot, and by car and motorbike,” wrote William Langewiesche in Vanity Fair. “They were not rioters, revolutionaries, or the graduates of terrorist camps. They were anonymous young men and women, dressed in ordinary clothes, unidentifiable in advance, and indistinguishable afterward. Wielding pistols, automatic rifles, and firebombs, they emerged from within the city, struck fast, and vanished on the spot. Their acts were criminal, but the attackers did not loot, rob, or steal. They burned buses, banks, and public buildings, and went hard after the forces of order—gunning down the police in their neighborhood posts, in their homes, and on the streets.”

The violence hasn’t been limited to São Paulo. In December 2006, a copycat campaign by an urban gang called the Comando Vermelho (“Red Command”) shut down Rio de Janeiro, too. In both cases, the gangs fomenting the violence didn’t list demands or send ultimatums to the government. Rather, they were flexing their muscles, testing their ability to challenge the government monopoly on violence.

Both gangs had steadily accumulated power for a decade, helped in part by globalization, which simplifies making connections to the multitrillion-dollar global black-market economy. With these new connections, the gangs’ profit horizon became limitless, fueling rapid expansion. New communications technology, particularly cell phones, played a part, too, making it possible for the gangs to thrive as loose associations, and allowing a geographical and organizational dispersion that rendered them nearly invulnerable to attack. The PCC has been particularly successful, growing from a small prison gang in the mid-nineties to a group that today controls nearly half of São Paulo’s slums and its millions of inhabitants. An escalating confrontation between these gangs and the city governments appears inevitable.

The gangs’ rapid rise into challengers to urban authorities is something that we will see again elsewhere. This dynamic is already at work in American cities in the rise of MS-13, a rapidly expanding transnational gang with a loose organizational structure, a propensity for violence, and access to millions in illicit gains. It already has an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 members, dispersed over 31 U.S. states and several Latin American countries, and its proliferation continues unabated, despite close attention from law enforcement. Like the PCC, MS-13 or a similar American gang may eventually find that it has sufficient power to hold a city hostage through disruption.

The final threat that small groups pose to cities is weapons of mass destruction. Though most of the worry over WMDs has focused on nuclear weapons, those aren’t the real long-term problem. Not only is the vast manufacturing capability of a nation-state required to produce the basic nuclear materials, but those materials are difficult to manipulate, transport, and turn into weapons. Nor is it easy to assemble a nuke from parts bought on the black market; if it were, nation-states like Iran, which have far more resources at their disposal than terrorist groups do, would be doing just that instead of resorting to internal production.

It’s also unlikely that a state would give terrorists a nuclear weapon. Sovereignty and national prestige are tightly connected to the production of nukes. Sharing them with terrorists would grant immense power to a group outside the state’s control—the equivalent of giving Osama bin Laden the keys to the presidential palace. If that isn’t deterrent enough, the likelihood of retaliation is, since states, unlike terrorist groups, have targets that can be destroyed. The result of a nuclear explosion in Moscow or New York would very probably be the annihilation of the country that manufactured the bomb, once its identity was determined—as it surely would be, since no plot of that size can remain secret for long.

Even in the very unlikely case that a nuclear weapon did end up in terrorist hands, it would be a single horrible incident, rather than an ongoing threat. The same is true of dirty bombs, which disperse radioactive material through conventional explosives. No, the real long-term danger from small groups is the use of biotechnology to build weapons of mass destruction. In contrast with nuclear technology, biotech’s knowledge and tools are already widely dispersed—and their power is increasing exponentially.

The biotech field is in the middle of a massive improvement in productivity through advances in computing power. In fact, the curves of improvement that we see in biotechnology mirror the rates of improvement in computing dictated by Moore’s Law—the observation, borne out by decades of experience, that the ratio of performance to price of computing power doubles every 24 months. This means that incredible power will soon be in the hands of individuals. University of Washington engineer Robert Carlson observes that if current trends in the rate of improvement in DNA sequencing continue, “within a decade a single person at the lab bench could sequence or synthesize all the DNA describing all the people on the planet many times over in an eight-hour day.” And with ever tinier, cheaper, and more widely available tools, a large and decentralized industrial base that is hiring lab techs at a double-digit growth rate, and the active transfer of knowledge via the Internet (the blueprints of the entire smallpox virus now circulate on the Web), biotech is too widely available for us to contain it.

In less than a decade, then, biotechnology will be ripe for the widespread development of weapons of mass destruction, and it fits the requirements of small-group warfare perfectly. It is small, inexpensive, and easy to manufacture in secret. Also, since dangerous biotechnology is based primarily on the manipulation of information, it will make rapid progress through the same kind of amateur tinkering that currently produces new computer viruses. Terrorists also have a growing advantage in delivering bioweapons. The increasing porousness of national borders, size of global megacities, and volume of air travel all mean that the delivery and percolation of bioweapons will be fast-moving and widespread—potentially on several continents at once.

It is almost certain that we will see repeated, perhaps incessant, attempts to deploy bioweapons with new strains of viruses or bacteria. Picture a Russian biohacker who, a decade from now, designs a new, deadly form of the common flu virus and sells it on the Internet, just as computer viruses and worms get sold today. The terrorist group that buys the design sends it to a recently hired lab tech in Pakistan, who performs the required modifications with widely available tools. The product then ships by mail to London, to the awaiting “suicide vectors”—men who infect themselves and then board airplanes headed to world destinations, infecting passengers on the planes and in crowded terminals. The infection spreads quickly, going global in days—long before anyone detects it.

It’s very possible that many cities will fall in the face of such deadly threats. Megacities in the developing world—which often, because of their rapid growth, widespread corruption, and illegitimate governance, aren’t able to provide security or basic services for their citizens—are particularly vulnerable. However, cities in the developed world that properly appreciate the threats arrayed against them may devise startlingly innovative solutions.

In almost all cases, cities can defend themselves from their new enemies through effective decentralization. To counter systems disruption, decentralized services—the capability of smaller areas within cities to provide backup services, at least on a temporary basis—could radically diminish the harmful consequences of disconnection from the larger global grid. In New York, this would mean storage or limited production capability of backup electricity, water, and fuel, with easy connections to the delivery grid—at the borough level or even smaller. These backups would then provide a means of restoring central services rapidly after a failure.

Similarly, cities may combat networked gangs by decentralizing their own security. Cities have long maintained centralized police forces, but gangs can often overwhelm them. Many governments are responding with militarized police: China is building a million-man paramilitary force, for example; and even in the United States, the use of SWAT teams has increased from 3,000 deployments a year in the 1980s to 50,000 a year in 2006. But militarized police may too easily become an army of occupation, and, if corrupt, as they are in Brazil, they may become enemies of the state along with the gangs.

A better solution involves local security forces, either locally recruited or bought on the marketplace (such as Blackwater), which can be powerful bulwarks against small-group terrorism. Such forces may become a vital component in our defense against bioterrorism, too, since they can enforce local containment—and since large centralized services, like the ones we have today, might actually accelerate the propagation of bioweapons. Still, if improperly established, local forces can also become rogue criminal entities, like the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia and the militias in Rio de Janeiro. Governments need to regulate them carefully.

In the future, we probably won’t know exactly how we will be attacked until it happens. In highly uncertain situations like this, centralized solutions that emphasize uniform responses will often collapse. Heterogeneous systems, by contrast, are unlikely to fail catastrophically. Moreover, local innovation—supplemented by a marketplace in goods and services that improve security, detection, monitoring, and so on—is likely to develop responses to threats quickly and effectively. Other localities will copy those responses that prove successful.

In June 2007, the FBI and local law enforcement halted a plot to blow up the John F. Kennedy International Airport’s fuel tanks and feeder pipelines. This was another great example of how police forces, if used correctly, can defuse threats before they become a menace [see “On the Front Line in the War on Terrorism”]. However, our current level of safety will not last. The selection of the target demonstrated clearly that future attackers will take advantage of our systems’ vulnerability to disruption, which will sharply increase the number of potential targets. It also showed that these threats can emerge spontaneously from small groups unconnected to al-Qaida. More and more attempts will come, with higher and higher rates of success. Our choice is simple: we can rely exclusively on our current security systems to stop the threats—and suffer the consequences when they don’t—or we can take measures to mitigate the impact of these threats by exerting local control over essential services.

[reggie]

Re: Wall St protest gaining strengh?

Quote:

The Vatican called on Monday for the establishment of a “global public authority” and a “central world bank” to rule over financial institutions that have become outdated and often ineffective in dealing fairly with crises. The document from the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department should please the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrators and similar movements around the world who have protested against the economic downturn. “Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority,” was at times very specific, calling, for example, for taxation measures on financial transactions. “The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence,” it said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...45887020111024

[gwynedd1]

Re: Wall St protest gaining strengh?

They ought to be using a political body sympathetic to their cause. They should be at their state capitals as a friendly force. I am sure some state governments would be interested in gaining back state power. If those that print money care not who makes the laws, then the states need credit to win back their sovereignty which has been weakened by Federal grants. The answer is state chartered banks funding their own projects by referendum.