Remember SIR Allen Stanford, accused Ponzi schemer? ABC has printed a hilarious interview in which he "cried, denied wrongdoing and threatened to punch his questioner in the mouth."

"I'm the maverick rich Texan where they can put the moose head on the wall. And that's the only reason they went after me," Stanford said.

Y'know, that's the problem with our justice system. We're always mounting bogus cases against rich Texans.

"I would die and go to hell if it's a Ponzi scheme."

Agreed.

Stanford said the government action to seize his assets had left him with little money and few changes of clothing. He was forced to fly on a commercial plane for the first time in almost two decades after the government seized his fleet of six private jets.

Oddly, ABC did not ask Stanford about The Business Insider's suspicion that the CIA killed a previous SEC investigation into his dealings.

Here's a bit of Stanfordiana that you may not know about:

He told people his life had been changed by an encounter with a local Catholic priest with wounds in his hands and feet that Mr. Stanford believed to be the stigmata of Jesus Christ. He began carrying with him a vial of congealed fluids from the priest's foot.

That lucky priest's blood was workin' real well, right up until the indictment. Who, you ask, is this priest? The afore-linked article does not name him, but I believe that he must be Father Gerard Critch (unless there was another stigmatic priest in Antigua recently). Also see here and here:

Some parishioners claimed they were thrown to the floor when blessed by Critch (commonly called “slain in the spirit”) and had their injuries healed.

Did the power of Christ lambaste Sir Allen? Interesting thought. But can even Father Critch heal the unendurable indignity of being forced to fly commercial?

Speaking of flying: Father Critch is now in Florida, where he has become an aficionado of tandem skydiving. In the photo, he's the bottom guy. His wounds appear to be healed. I see nothing strange about this story. Permalink

Well, you probably already know by now that President Hopeful has blocked legal challenges to government wiretapping by invoking the mantra "state secrets." Sounds awfully Bushian, does it not?

I wondered how the die-hard Obama fan squad would rationalize this behavior. As I've often said, strained rationalization is my favorite form of humor.

Actually, if you visit Obotland, you'll find that most commenters do not engage in rationalization. Most progs seem pissed off. However, some O-fans valiantly try to maintain faith in the Lightbringer. Check out the action on D.U.:

I am just hoping he's doing this to have the court strike this use of secrecy Because I'd say there's a good chance the court will. 70-30 percent I'd say.

Obama needs to be able to tap the phones of right wing conspiracy nutjobs The Birthers, the anti-abortion militants, the "Tea Party" crowds and nutjobs who propound nonsense like that cop killer in Pittsburgh and last year's Knoxville church shooter. These people have shown themselves to be dangerous and unhinged.

He should use the wiretapping to investigate right-wing hate groups, skin-heads, and KKK folks. It would help his own safety.

I wonder if having this program declared illegal would jeopardize prosecutions in the works.

I just think I will let the President make some decisions without asking us first. I think he has his reasons and you make a point that some of us "non-lawyers" may not be aware of or even considered.

I want an explanation before I jump to conclusions

There is no right to privacy on a public line... You can still have secret private communication with others in private.

Obama has not beaten, tortured or killed anyone with wiretapping... The greatest threats are real but Obama wiretapping should not be a problem.

Give Obama a break... Just because he is wrong in one issue doesn't mean he is equal to Bush.

Personally i think he wants to get it into the supreme court... The only way to permanently shut this down after all would be for them to rule against this. And in all seriousness, what do people think would happen if Obama announced that he would be 'protecting' warrantless wiretaps for the purpose of having the supreme court close the door on him?

It's not the man, it's the damn machine they put the POTUS into

As noted earlier, most of the D.U.-ers are outraged at this "state secrets" tactic. But only one of the geniuses contributing to that thread has managed to dope out the real reason behind Obama's move.

The big secret -- which isn't all that secret, what with it being discussed in the New York Times and all -- has to do with the nature of the NSA's new technology:

Hard to do when you're tapping 120 million domestic phone calls, e-mails, and Internet surfs at any one moment.

Certainly, every international communication gets intercepted and stored. It all gets vacuumed up and fed through NSA computers that rank-order it for a number of criteria.

If there are any red-flags, the "hit" goes to secondary analysis, where somebody may actually read or listen to bits and pieces, and then move it along to another analyst. This is supposed to be done anonymously. If the NSA analyst (or contractor) determines the communication is among "persons of interest", then it will be forwarded to another agency, likely FBI or CIA, depending upon whether it's domestic or foreign. If a warrant is required, this only happens after three-four-five intermediate levels of review. Any intercepted data of any potential interest or value gets warehoused.

That's what they don't want you to know.

They're unlikely to close this thing down. Ever.

Maybe the person who wrote those words used to read Cannonfire.

In previous posts, we have discussed the case of Russell Tice, the only former NSA employee to discuss the NSA's mind-bending current capabilities. Here's what Tice told the NYT about what I have called the Mother of All Eavesdropping Programs:

I've thought about this for a while, and as I said, I can't tell you how things are done, but I can foresee it, especially with what we've seen now. We're finding out that NSA conducted surveillance on U.S. citizens. And FISA could have been used but wasn't, was sidestepped. No one even made the attempt to see if they had a problem they could have fixed through FISA.

That would lead one to ask the question: "Why did they omit the FISA court?"

I would think one reason that is possible is that perhaps a system already existed that you could do this with, and all you had to do is change the venue. And if that's the case, and this system was a broad brush system, a vacuum cleaner that just sucks things up, this huge systematic approach to monitoring these calls, processing them, and filtering them—then ultimately a machine does 98.8 percent of your work. What you come out with from a haystack is a shoebox full of straw. Once you have that, you have people that can look at it.

Now here's an interesting question: If this approach was used, and hundreds of thousands if not millions of communications were processed in that manner, and then if and when the truth ever came out, a lawyer—and I think lawyers are going to be arguing semantics in this case—the argument could be made, well, if a machine was doing the looking and the sucking in, it doesn't matter because that's not monitoring until a human looks at it.

And this was my response:

Now, when Tice talks about "foreseeing" something, he really means "I need to use a semantic dodge in order to stay out of trouble."

What we are talking about is, I believe, an already-existent system which sucks in everything: All landline phone calls, all cell phone calls (although many argue that VOIP is still secure), all email, all driver's license information, all transaction records, all credit histories. Everything. From everyone.

The MAEP scoops it all up. Data-mining techniques winnow it down.

That's the "state secret" Obama will not discuss in public. No, I'm not rationalizing his move: An explanation is not an excuse. We need to have candid public debate over the NSA's new capabilities. Permalink

At the height of the primary battle, when my anti-Obama stance led to vats of hate mail flavored with death threats, I joked that the time might come when the Kos kids would turn against their Messiah while I sprang to his defense.

The day of the Great Reversal has not yet, and may never, dawn. I remain suspicious of Obama's shady background, and I remain infuriated by memories of his appalling campaign. More than that: This President has chosen the wrong course.

We have seen no nationalization of insolvent banks, no investigation of loan fraud, no prosecution of the Bush/Cheney gangsters. Geithner intends to maintain the Bush-era fantasy that craptastic "assets" are "undervalued." Obama wants to keep Wall Street crooks in place and overpaid, while forcing auto workers into homelessness.

What a wretched way to begin a presidency!

The progblog worms keep turning. TPM, D.U., Atrios, Buzzflash -- they've all voiced disappointment. Not rage, not yet: That will come. But disappointment is definitely there.

If you want rage, head right.

I take this column by Chuck Norris seriously: In essence, he calls for a new civil war because the country is led by a president he does not like. Pat Boone wants the same thing. Of course, both rabble-rousers will, if pressed, lay claim to the "just kidding" defense, even though everyone knows that they mean every word of it. (The term, I believe, is "kidding on the sly.")

In Pittsburgh, a deranged gunman -- one of a recent series (and isn't it eerie how they all popped up at once?) -- claimed as his motive the conviction that Obama plans to institute the Great Gun Round-Up. Apparently, this man felt that a spasm of irrational violence could prevent that imagined round-up. Logical, no?

Ever since I was ten years old, right-wingers have screamed that the Great Gun Round-Up will occur within the next few months. The GGR-U is one of the top American myths, alongside Roswell, sewer-gators, and the post-quake submergence of California. Today, the myth has reached an impressive state of hysteria, despite the complete lack of evidence that Obama has any such plans. The Oath Keepers movement proves the point.

Even more ominous is the We Surround Them movement:

According to the group’s website the organizing principle is 9/12, i.e. after 9/11 all things changed. The organizers apparently consider the election of Barack Obama another 9/11: “We are faced with yet another attack on our freedoms. This one doesn't come in the form of airplanes, but is an assault on our core freedoms, principles and values. Our Constitution hangs by a thread, our economy has been sold, our rights trampled, our future compromised.” The site is run by “Debra” who prefers to remain anonymous. In the 9/12 vein Beck lists 9 principles and 12 values; only those who agree with 7 of the 9 are eligible for membership.

During the Clinton administration right wing militia groups sprang up, literally training members for battle to prepare for the overthrow of what they considered an illegitimate U.S. government. After the Oklahoma City bombing many believed the harsh rhetoric of right wing talk radio gave aid and comfort to dangerous groups willing to use violent means if necessary.

History repeats itself.

I felt lukewarm toward Bill Clinton initially, but the repellent nature of his right-wing opponents transformed me into a Clinton supporter. When Oklahoma City happened, I felt shock but not surprise. If enough people at the Macy's parade keep firing rifles into the air, eventually you'll hear a pop.

I've always considered conspiracy theorists significant. Not necessarily the theories: The theorists. Alex Jones is a clown, but he's also a far more important individual (potentially) than most pundits would ever allow themselves to believe. Any good history of Germany in the 1920s should explain the dangers.

Fascism -- yes, that's the right word -- becomes an option when economic collapse causes the populace to lose faith in conventional political parties. That's where we are now.

Don't make the mistake of marginalizing fringe beliefs. For a large number of your fellow citizens, bizarre political myths are more real than is reality itself. Roughly one third of the population is fundamentalist Christian, and most fundamentalists have been conditioned to accept inane conspiracy theories involving Satanists, the Illuminati, secular humanism, the United Nations and whatnot.

These absurdities also have a massive following among the non-pious.

Millions of Americans have read widely in the literature of "alternative history" -- yet they remain ignorant of conventional history, of genuine history. Millions of Americans know about Albert Pike and Adam Weishaupt and Jesse Marcel and Berenger Sauniere and all the other superstars of conspiracy literature -- but those same Americans cannot tell you who ran France during the Second Empire or who fought at the battle of Fredericksburg.

Those Americans are worse than ignorant: They think they know the score. It's easy to gull the faux-hip into thinking that the goosestep is the latest dance.

Americans love false dichotomies. We'll soon face a doozy: Either you're an Obama-lover or you'll support the fascist revolution.

Of course, the rebels won't use the word "fascist." "Populist," perhaps. Perhaps even "anti-Fascist."

Mark my words. Very soon, we may have only two choices: Support Obama's mis-rule or support the rabid beasts of political nescience. Support mad Caligula or support the barbarians on the borderlands.

When you come to the fork in the road, remember that both paths may lead to Hell. Permalink

Blue Lyon and MYIQ have good posts up. They both direct our attention to a paragraph from this Guardian story...

Bankers and hedge fund managers were furious yesterday at attempts by the G20 to cap their pay and regulate them for the first time, calling it a "witch hunt" by world leaders.

"Regulation is generally bad. You should let the market decide what the people will get paid," said Matthew Prest, managing director at Close Brothers investment bank. "Sometimes regulation has the opposite effect of what you want and I think bankers' salaries regulation would fall under that category. I don't hear anybody calling for Hollywood star salary caps. This is a trendy, fashionable thing to do, it will have bad consequences."

Actually, I think that the biggest Hollywood stars should be paid less. But the fact remains that neither the actors nor the studios have asked the taxpayers to fork over one dime in bailout cash, even though times are tough in the dream factory.

If strict laissez faire ruled the day, then TARP would not exist.

Laisez faire does rule Hollywood. Star salaries go down when their films do poorly and go up when their films do well. By contrast, the big bankers expect to be rewarded for trading in financial instruments based on crap mortgages.

One of my pet theories holds that the film Lawrence of Arabia contains a quote germane to any situation. At one point in the movie, Anthony Quinn (playing Auda Abu Tayi, a chieftain being paid off by the Turks) asks: "Does Auda serve?" To which Peter O'Toole (as Lawrence) answers:

"The servant is the one who takes the money."

That's the simple lesson which the big bankers must now understand: The servant is the one who takes the money. If you run Goldman and you want the bailout money, you are now a servant. Get used to the idea. The taxpayers are your funders and therefore your betters. If we want to flick cigar ash onto your tongue, then you must kneel, open wide and say "Ah." If pride forbids you from playing the servant's role -- fuck you. No cash for you.

It's that simple.

By the way: Have you noticed that the phrase "moral hazard" doesn't see much usage these days? Was that a Bush thing? Permalink

1. As you've no doubt read by now, Barack Obama recently sat at the head of a long mahogany table and told all the representatives of Big Finance that “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

From yesterday's WP:

The Obama administration is engineering its new bailout initiatives in a way that it believes will allow firms benefiting from the programs to avoid restrictions imposed by Congress, including limits on lavish executive pay, according to government officials.

Wow. That's an awfully short distance between "pitchfork protection" and "massive pay-offs."

2. Chrysler received about $6.8 billion worth of loans from various big banks, including J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley. Now, in order to stay alive, Chrysler wants to cut a deal with the banks, transforming a large chunk of that loan money into stocks.

The banks won't play ball. Let the workers starve. There's no place for sentimentality in business.

The J.P. Morgan position, said these people, is that concessions by Chrysler's creditors should be treated as they would be in a normal bankruptcy -- meaning the billions of dollars of government debt and the UAW retiree health-care obligation should be wiped out before the secured lenders lose anything on their $6.8 billion.

Here's the kicker: These are the same banks that received, are receiving, and will continue to receive untold billions of your taxpayer money. You will owe that money for the rest of your life and so will your kids.

But how can you pay if you don't have a job?

Marcy struggles to find the words:

There's a lot that needs to be said about this: that if Treasury can't get JP Morgan to cooperate here, then it must write off JP Morgan as a good faith partner going forward. That this just shot to the top of the list of most loathsome actions among the banksters.

But frankly, all I can summon at this point is a long string of profanities that I'll spare you.

3. Bill Moyers interviewed William K. Black, the former Savings and Loan regulator, on the current Big Bailout. Here's the video and here's the transcript:

BILL MOYERS: So you're suggesting, saying that CEOs of some of these banks and mortgage firms in order to increase their own personal income, deliberately set out to make bad loans?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: How do they get away with it? I mean, what about their own checks and balances in the company? What about their accounting divisions?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: All of those checks and balances report to the CEO, so if the CEO goes bad, all of the checks and balances are easily overcome.

The Bush Administration essentially got rid of regulation, so if nobody was looking, you were able to do this with impunity and that's exactly what happened. Where would you look? You'd look at the specialty lenders. The lenders that did almost all of their work in the sub-prime and what's called Alt-A, liars' loans... Liars' loans mean that we don't check. You tell us what your income is. You tell us what your job is. You tell us what your assets are, and we agree to believe you. We won't check on any of those things. And by the way, you get a better deal if you inflate your income and your job history and your assets.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: The FBI publicly warned, in September 2004 that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud, that if it was allowed to continue it would produce a crisis at least as large as the Savings and Loan debacle. And that they were going to make sure that they didn't let that happen. So what goes wrong? After 9/11, the attacks, the Justice Department transfers 500 white-collar specialists in the FBI to national terrorism. Well, we can all understand that. But then, the Bush administration refused to replace the missing 500 agents. So even today, again, as you say, this crisis is 1000 times worse, perhaps, certainly 100 times worse, than the Savings and Loan crisis. There are one-fifth as many FBI agents as worked the Savings and Loan crisis.

All of which brings us back to point one. When Obama says that he is protecting the bankers from pitchforks, he means that he won't use the FBI to investigate crime.

A refusal to investigate and prosecute constitutes complicity. In a small town, if Sheriff Sam Shady won't shut down the "miracle healing" tent show, you can be pretty sure that Reverend Quackenbilker has made the necessary pay-off. The same shit happens in D.C. and NY. Permalink

Let me be the first to ask the obvious question: Is this the provocation that Joe Biden predicted would occur early in the Obama presidency? And did Biden not say that Obama's response would be unpopular?

Now I'm worried. More worried.

Permalink

This revised campaign poster was created by Patrick Corrigan of The Toronto Star, which I found by way of TruthDig. I'm not sure if he means it to be taken as a pro-Obama or anti-Obama statement.

At least Corrigan has solid drawing chops. If Shepherd Fairey could say the same, he would have fewer legal troubles right now.

Speaking of Shep -- for me, his famed "HOPE" poster provided one of the first signs that Obama was the wrong choice. Should we not have been wary of a political candidate whose image was crafted by a graphic artist best known for copping visual riffs from totalitarian propagandists?

(He does so all in the name of irony, of course.)

Let's compare a recent Shep piece to one of the Soviet posters that inspired his work. To me, one factor stands out: Whoever did that wash painting of Lenin was a fine craftsman. (I wonder how the original was accomplished, technically. Was it gouache? Was the tower painted by hand?)

By contrast, Shep's Uncle Sam is poorly drawn. Don't get me wrong: It's a very nice design, overall. But the piece would have more punch if the draftsmanship did not convey amateurism. The face looks off, and the positioning of the hands is ludicrously wrong -- clear evidence of a swipe. (Hold out your hands as though cradling a pile of skulls. Now look down. Where are your thumbs? Now look again at Shep's poster.)

Please understand that I'm not talking (at this moment) about the poster's message. I'm talking about art, not literature. If you don't know the difference -- and most current art critics don't -- please don't comment on this post, because you'll only make me angry.

Of course, by this point you should all know my attitude toward the guys who say "I'm not going to bother to learn how to draw, but I'm still going to make millions in the art game." To be fair, Fairey has a great design sense. Most of his tricks -- the distressed look, the subtle patterns, the sunburst rays -- are pretty easy to do in Photoshop. If you have the program and a decent system, I would need only a couple of days to teach you how to turn out a Fairey. But let's give the guy credit -- his eye is good. If only he would spend a few hours each day doing figure sketching, the way Gil Kane used to do...

That sort of thing still matters to old schoolers like me. Permalink

I urge you to read Somerby's latest:

Here at THE HOWLER, we think Olbermann has become a total clown; we’re unimpressed, at this point, with Maddow’s performance. On the other hand, both hosts are good at dishing out comfort food. The other tribe is stupid and bad—and our tribe is smart and good. This is what they persistently say, night after night, on their programs.

Throughout history, we rubes have hungered for us-and-them stories. But aside from her skill with snark and comfort food, has Maddow’s work been all that good?

How solid is Maddow’s actual work? In fact, in the week we’ve been reviewing, her work was frequently flat-out bad, both on the merits and when it came to her over-the-top presentation. You might not mind her fumbling work on the budget so much—if she weren’t so deeply engaged in so much mugging and clowning and snark.

I had high hopes for"progressive" radio when Air America began. I wanted to see an emphasis on old-school investigative reporting. But what did we get? The left simply established a cheerleading squad, which offers a lot of rah rah in order to counter the Fox News rah rah. Permalink

As you know, Larry Summers is Director of the White House National Economic Council, where he has advocated tax cuts instead of spending on infrastructure. Obama trusts Summers to get us out of our current mess.

Not long ago, Summers was the President of Harvard, which once had a formidable $18 billion endowment. A lot of that money is gone now, because it was invested in derivatives. Way back in 2002, an analyst named Iris Mack -- then a member of the Harvard Management Company -- voiced concern to an aide to Summers about these investments, which struck her as far too risky.

She was fired. Permalink

Everyone's talking about the Conficker virus and the Ghostnet cyber-spying network, both of which are said to be of Chinese origin. The NYT offered these widely-reprinted words on Ghostnet:

In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

The researchers, who are based at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, had been asked by the office of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader whom China regularly denounces, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.

It's a little difficult to believe that private hackers would target the Dalai Lama. The choice of targets, more than the location of the servers, may give the best clue as to who is doing what to whom.

As this site notes:

Other GhostNet highlights include the ability to turn on webcams and microphones remotely, and a browser-based "dashboard" that the spies use to control their network of 1,295 computers. And yes, I mean a dashboard as in what you use to post those American Idol rants to your Wordpress blog. Researchers discovered the spynet using, of all things, a Google search.

A computer involuntarily joins the GhostNet family when a user opens an infected document sent as an email attahment, or when he goes to an infected web site. Here's an interesting factoid:

They found that three of the four control servers were in different provinces in China — Hainan, Guangdong and Sichuan — while the fourth was discovered to be at a Web-hosting company based in Southern California.

Which company? Forgive my curiosity, but I'd really like to know. Alas, no one is talking.

The name of the firm is, at present, impossible to discover. We have a bit of a mystery here, since the report (here) never mentions California, yet the NYT article based on that report (here) does. Where did the NYT get the info? And why won't they reveal the name of the company?

(Before you say it: Yes, I am aware that the company may not be a witting participant in any conspiratorial scheme.)

Apparently, the above-linked report was redacted "for security reasons." I wonder what that phrase means? Presumably, the NYT has the full report.

The Conficker worm, which was supposed to unload its payload on April 1, also comes from China, or so say these folks. The Chinese identification was made by the respected Vietnamese security firm BKIS. The alleged date of April 1 may in fact be mere rumor: The real D-Day could be tomorrow, or a month from tomorrow. As this site notes:

In the case of Conficker, we have another one of these super worms, following in the success of the Storm Worm, that is able to infect millions of windows machines and act on the bidding of it's mysterious owners. As the latest and greatest, Conficker employs a sophisticated p2p command and control system that uses military grade encryption to cover it's tracks.

Word has it that Conficker will affect your HOSTS file to assure that you cannot access web sites belonging to Microsoft or any other security firms who can get rid of the problem. The worm exploits a hole in Windows security; you can get the patch here. BKIS offers a free anti-virus which can catch the worm; I have yet to test it.

The obvious question: Is there a linkage between Conficker and GhostNet, aside from the presumed Chinese origin point?

A less obvious question: Could there be an Israeli connection to one or both of these cyber-attacks?

Don't presume that I am the sort of person who reflexively ascribes all of the world's ills to Israel. I don't. In this case, I ask the question because we have a few subtle, but intriguing, shards of evidence pointing toward that country.

Threat Chaos gives a fuller account of the origin of GhostNet than one finds elsewhere:

You will notice the similarity between the methodologies described and the techniques used by Private Investigators in Israel back in 2005. They sent emails to their targets, sometimes after engaging them in phone conversations first. They used a customized Trojan horse crafted by Michael Haephrati.

For background on the Haephrati incident, go here. For the upshot, go here:

To re-cap: Michael Haephrati, a software developer,s created a clever managed service whereby he would provide custom Trojan software to these private investigators who would then use social engineering techniques to get the targets to install the Trojan on internal systems. For a $2,000 fee Haephrati would host any stolen documents and key stroke logs on servers in Germany and the UK. The police discovered the scheme when Haephrati's first wife took her computer in to them under suspicion of it being infected. Sure enough, it was, and the Israeli police tracked down the hosting servers and discovered thousands of documents from dozens of Israeli companies stored there.

Eventually Haephrati and his current wife were extradited from England and supposedly sentenced to jail terms. But in a phone conversation I had with Michael several weeks after the sentencing he claimed that there was no jail time, and that he was completely free. As a matter of fact he was going to continue to offer his Trojan Horse service but this time he would only work with "law enforcement agencies".

Readers in the US will be perplexed by this case. Four PI's are now going to do jail time while the author of the illegal software goes free.

It is fair to posit that he avoided jail by providing service to the state. (Note the cute ploy: He was extradited because the Brits naively thought that Israel would put him in the pokey.)

A few years after Haephrati started working for his new bosses, the world discovered that a more sophisticated version of the same type of cyber-attack is being run out of China. A California firm, which the NYT will not name for "security" reasons, is also involved. Coincidence?

This Jerusalem Post report on GhostNet will reward a close reading:

"I have no information about it," a Foreign Ministry spokesman told The Jerusalem Post. "I'm not aware of it, and even if there had been some sort of breach, I'm not sure that anything would be released, because our relationship with China is so sensitive."

It was unclear on Sunday if Israel was one of the countries whose foreign ministry computers had been compromised.

It is clear that Iran and Pakistan were targeted.

The Chinese are, of course, quite capable of getting up to computerized mischief on their own. Over 300,000 scientists and engineers are graduated from Chinese universities each year. Still, as this site notes...

Israel, on the other hand, has the third highest number of patent filings per capita and, according to IMD's World Report, ranks third in the world in terms of the quality of basic research. Moreover, Israel ranks very high in terms of research 'productivity' (scientific publications per capita) and 'quality' (the frequency with which other scholars cite publications in their own articles).

In computer science, Israel ranks second in the world in productivity and third in the world in quality.

Second, discovering truly superior scientific revelations is contingent on the brilliance of small numbers of researchers. Using the incidence of Nobel Laureates as a proxy for genius, Israel's population stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world. While China and India may have hordes of good but less than phenomenal scientists and engineers, their numbers alone will not mute Israel's advantage in producing transformative breakthroughs.

Those passages betray some braggadocio, but also a copious amount of truth.

Ties between Israel and China are strong and getting stronger, especially in the realm of weapons development and manufacture. Cyber weapons are the weapons of the future.

While it's never clear who the players are behind this perpetual information war, researchers are able to dissect the tools and compromised systems to portray a fascinating tale of computer-based cloak and dagger.

How do you develop new internet based weapons in an open environment? Once you reach a certain scale of weaponry you cannot leave the testing to the laboratory alone. This is why they exploded nuclear weapons in the deserts or in the South Pacific. Is this what we're now seeing online in terms of the latest iterations of these advanced botnets?

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...disappointed me. At least, I'm disappointed by the reaction. I expected conspiracy buffs everywhere to link to that post. Jeez, I gave 'em everything they usually like... Secret messages in popular culture! Weird 9/11 stuff! Occult secret societies! MK-ULTRA! Spies!

Time was, any post with those ingredients would be sure to attract the attention of Alex Jones and the rest of his crew. I mean, I thought this one was a lock. But did Alex link to my important exclusive?

Not this year. Right now, the '06 post is getting more attention, thanks to a mention by Mike Malloy, of progressive radio fame. Proof, once again, that the left is now just as wacky as the right. Permalink

Rachel Summers is a telepathic comic book character who first appeared in the well-known X-Men franchise. Uncanny X-Men issue #189, published in 1985 -- written by Chris Claremont and illustrated by John Byrne -- featured this prescient panel in which the heroine "remembers" the future. Seeing the New York skyline of 1985 causes Summers to visualize a future tragedy. Eerily enough, that future came to pass in the real world on September 11, 2001.

Coincidence?

Before you leap to that conclusion, consider the sheer number of these "coincidences" that one can find in popular culture -- especially within the pages of the often-despised comic book medium. As we shall see, the creators of this imagery often have very interesting backgrounds.

Before we look into those resumes, let us examine further examples. And don't scoff. The FBI isn't scoffing.

This page on the official website of the Federal Bureau of Investigation draws our attention to another eerie "coincidence."


Dan Cooper was a popular comic book in France throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. This issue, featuring Cooper in a high-altitude skyjump, was published shortly before the infamous "D.B. Cooper" incident in 1971.

Seattle Special Agent Larry Carr, who took over the Cooper case two years ago, believes it’s possible the hijacker took his name from the comic book (the enduring “D.B.” was actually the result of a media mistake). That’s important because the books were never translated into English, which means the hijacker likely spent time overseas. This fits with Carr’s theory that Cooper had been in the Air Force.

Legendary artist Jack Kirby (co-creator of The Fantastic Four, Thor, The Hulk, Captain America and a host of others) has offered quite a few glimpses of things-to-come. Perhaps the most uncanny image he ever produced is this one (click to enlarge)...


This page was published in September, 1958, in the second issue of the Harvey comic book series Race For the Moon. Obviously, that date precedes NASA's publication of photographs displaying what appears to be a massive face on the red planet. As this world-renown scientist notes:

...how did Jack Kirby know about “the Face!?

The answer's obvious: He was simply told.

By “who” is the key question, isn’t it? As well as “why”...

Let me be clear on one point: I remain skeptical of all theories positing the existence of a Martian civilization. In all likelihood, the "face" in those photographs is an artifact of light, shadow, and geography. Still, no-one can deny that the Martian sphinx has become a cultural artifact, deeply embedded into our awareness.

Somehow, Jack Kirby seemed to know that this image would fire up our collective imagination.

"King" Kirby displayed predictive powers on other occasions. Before 9/11, he offered these remarkable images (click to enlarge):


He even predicted a popular recruiting slogan for the United States Army:


In the same1958 science fiction comic book referenced above, Kirby offered a story which prefigured the plot of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. In Arthur C. Clarke's novelization, we learn that the moon artifact is named Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 1. No evidence suggests that either Clarke or Kubrick had any awareness of Kirby's story, in which a magnetic anomaly is found on the Moon:

Jack Kirby did not draw the following page from a 1952 comic book called T-Man, which offered an advanced glimpse of the neocon foreign policy agenda. I have discussed this forecast in this blog before, although I could previously only hint at the implications. (Click to enlarge the image, or go here.)

In the black-and-white horror title Creepy -- issue #75, published in 1975 -- writer Jim Senstrum and artist Neal Adams offered "Thrillkill," about a high school student who goes on a shooting rampage -- an unnervingly exact forecast of Columbine, Virgnia Tech and other school shootings.

It is said that the designs on the shooter's print shirt include the Chinese characters for "spring" and "field," perhaps in reference to this event.

In a now largely forgotten series called Captain Action -- issue #5, published in 1969 -- artist/writer Gil Kane depicted the bombing of a U.S. federal building -- a chillingly precise forecast of the 1995 Oklahoma City event.

Later in that issue, we learn that the explosion was set by the leader of an extreme right-wing paramilitary group. This story reminds us not only of the Clinton-era "militia madness" but also of more current events. It's hard to deny the similarities between Kane's "Matthew Blackwell" character and Chuck Norris, who has recently called for armed insurrection.

In the following sequence from 1963, our hep-cat protagonist is magically propelled thirty years into the future. There, he stumbles onto a world of advanced consumer electronics. Some of these devices now look quite familiar:

An issue of Howard the Duck, published in February of 1978, predicted a wave of terrorism against American interests committed by suicide bombers. The secret leader of the attack turns out to be an American, wearing a symbol now commonly associated with Wal-Mart.

One could cite hundreds of similar examples, including this weirdly accurate 1953 prediction of the Charles Manson murders, along with the 1983 discovery of an underground Nazi encampment near Loch Ness, as predicted by issue #3 of Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., published in the summer of 1968.

One of the few comic book creators to discuss the phenomenon in public is artist John Byrne, perhaps best-known for his work with Chris Claremont on the X-Men:

Chris Claremont and I did a story about a blackout in NYC. The week it came out, there was a blackout in NYC.

We did a story about an earthquake in Japan. The week it came out...

Okay, so those are no big deal, as such things happen all the time. But on my own I...blew up a Space Shuttle in the second issue of MAN OF STEEL (and hastily redrew it as a "space plane" before it came out.

...named an aircraft carrier after a former Canadian Prime Minister (against the tradition of only naming ships after dead folk). He was dead by the time the book came out.

...and killed Prince Diana (Wonder Woman) in a book (replete with fake newspaper cover) that shipped week before the Saturday that...

It is no coincidence that writer Chris Claremont had an involvement with so many of these predictive sequences, including the startling image of the fallen Twin Towers.

At this point, we must come to the crux of the matter. Claremont was heavily involved (through his former wife) with the occult scene swirling around New York's Magickal Childe bookstore.

A room in the back of the store served as a temple and classroom for the various strains of wicca that began to gravitate to the place.

That temple also served as the launching pad for the explosive growth of Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) in the city in the late 70s and early 80s.

Herman had vigorously encouraged and supported the creation of the Schlangekraft Necronomicon, edited by "Simon."

The Necronomicon was a team effort. Herman provided the sponsorship, while the design and layout were the work of Jim Wasserman of the OTO, a raving cokehead from Jersey named Larry Barnes whose daddy had the production facilities and a fellow who called himself Khem Set Rising (who also designed the sigils). The text itself was Levenda’s creation, a synthesis of Sumerian and later Babylonian myths and texts...Structurally, the text was modeled on the wiccan Book of Shadows and the Goetia...

The above-quote text, from an important expose in the New York Press, offers a rare public admission of a fact known to many cogniscienti: Many comic book creators -- as well as other popular culture luminaries -- are heavily immersed in the world of the occult. On this page, we find another brief (but important) reference to this phenomenon:

Marvel comic artist Marie Severin says the Kabala (Cabala --Jewish Mystical System) was a source of material for certain issues of Dr. Strange that she worked on.

At the time (the mid 1960s) there were few published popular works on the cabala. Even so, Jack Kirby (Bohemian Grove) and Gil Kane (32nd degree Freemason) were known to have mastered the wisdom contained with the Sefer Yetzirah, the key cabalistic text.

They were far from the only adepts. Wonder Woman creator Charles Marston (Order of Wicca) belonged to a cult that advocated female supremacy and lesbianism. In the 1970s, comic book writers Steve Engelhart (Skull and Bones) and Steve Gerber (Loyal Order of Moose) introduced Crowleyan and Theosophical concepts into the Marvel Comics "universe." As artist Frank Brunner (Engelhart's frequent collaborator) explains,

YES, I was already studying the occult...both the old stuff, including Aleister Crowley and the "Golden Dawn Society" to modern books like "Real Magic" by P.I.E. Bonewits, and the writings of Carlos Castaneda! (Who mixed ancient indian magic with drugs!)

Filipino comic book artist Alfredo Alcala is said to have learned various magical disciplines within a fraternity known as SinagAraw. The wildest story holds that he learned a method to create doppelgängers of himself, effecively tripling his productive capacity.

Today, the most noteworthy comic book professional to admit his occult involvement is famed British writer Alan Moore (New and Reformed Palladium; Book & Snake). Many have opined that the finale of his 1986 Watchmen series offers a forecast of the events of 9/11. Since that time, Moore has "come out" as a disciple of such notorious occultists as Aleister Crowley.

Indeed, Moore's magnum opus Promethea can be considered a transparently-disguised initiatory text. The series introduces readers to the techniques of Goetic evocation, Tarot divination, and Qabalistic meditation. Aleister Crowley himself puts in several appearances at various points in the series.

As one reviewer notes:

Promethea reads like he's saying, "Here's everything I've learned about the Occult." And boy, you would not believe how much Alan Moore knows about the occult. There are long stretches where the plot (except in the loosest sense of the word) gets pushed to the side completely so he can tell you more about magic. As a result, it's one of the smartest and most explanation-heavy comics in recent memory.

As Moore himself confesses:

I wanted to be able to do an occult comic that didn't portray the occult as a dark, scary place, because that's not my experience of it. I don't thinks it's the experience of many occultists. Why would we want to be occultists if that meant that we had to spend our lives in a dark, scary place?

Utilizing my occult experiences, I could see a way that it would be possible to do a new kind of occult comic, that was more psychedelic, that was more sophisticated, more experimental, more ecstatic and exuberant... So Promethea is about as perfect an expression of the occult as I could imagine doing in a mainstream super-hero comic book.

All of which brings us to the bottom line: The predictive imagery so prevalent in comic books is not accidental or coincidental. Those images represent the careful and scientific recording of impressions received during rituals designed to bring out innate psychic/paranormal abilities.

Similar experiments in ESP and precognition have been conducted by such scientists as J.B. Rhine. But the question remains: Why place this material before the public in a popular format? For the answer, we must return to the afore-cited New York Press article on the Magickal Childe milieu, which included X-Men author Chris Claremont.

At last, we come to the intelligence/espionage connection:

Not all of us took Simon’s hints of dabblings in intelligence work all that seriously, but apparently the Feds did. An agent infiltrated the OTO with the apparent intent of getting close to Simon, who was doing a great deal of consulting for the local lodge and seemed to be flirting with affiliation. As the noose tightened, Simon became more and more critical of the OTO, finally denouncing it as "fascist" and vanishing, some said to Singapore. Other reports placed him in Hong Kong or Shanghai. The truth is, no one knew.

"Simon," you will recall, was actually Peter Levenda, later famed for his brave attempt to infiltrate the Chilean Nazi cult Colonia Dignidad, as described in his book Unholy Alliance.

He cultivated an elusive, secretive persona, giving him a fantastic and blatantly implausible line of bullshit to cover the book’s origins. He had no telephone. He always wore business suits, in stark contrast to the flamboyant Renaissance fair, proto-goth costuming that dominated the scene. He never got high in public.

In short, he knew the signifiers and emblems of authority, and played them to the hilt. He hinted broadly of dealings with intelligence agencies and secret societies operating at global levels of social influence.

Over the course of several decades, one faction of the American intelligence community attempted to infiltrate -- and manipulate -- the occult underground.

Unlikely as that assertion may at first seem, it has been documented in many books and articles. See, for example, this site:

Military funded academic research from 1964 included, "witchcraft, sorcery, magic and other psychological phenomena and their implications on military and paramilitary in the Congo".

The 1969 CIA 'Operation Often' was an exploration of Black Magic and the supernatural.

E. Howard Hunt's espionage novels often discuss the CIA's strange dealings with occult secret societies. Much of this research was conducted in conjunction with Project MKULTRA.

On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said:

The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations."

In such social situations, the field operative would likely abstain from using the test drugs while making them freely available to others within the group. (It is not yet known whether Moore became involved with the program during his period as an LSD distributor in the U.K.)

"Operation Eel" -- MKULTRA subproject 131 -- was a program designed to disseminate the results of this psychic/occult research to the public, in a carefully-circumscribed and disguised fashion. (Please note: Some sources make reference to "Project Eel." This terminology is incorrect.)

The leaders of this subproject hoped to test an intriguing hypothesis: By using popular media to imprint these images on the public, one might actually increase the likelihood of the forecast coming true.

The predictive images were first culled from various receivers. An image recorded by two or more independent participants was considered to be of particular significance. The images were then randomly assigned to the "public" and "private" categories. "Private" predictive images were never revealed in any media, and remain closely held within the case history files; these images constituted the control group. "Public" images were worked into fictional narratives, which appeared in media likely to appeal to the young and the imaginative -- comic books, animated films and so forth.

The subproject leaders soon discovered that public forecasts had a 65% success rate, while those forecasts kept private came true at a rate of 35%.

Although Project MKULTRA was shut down shortly before the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, Operation Eel continues under another rubric. Later project cryptonyms remain unknown. Most of the participants in the operation were mere dabblers in occultism, and thus unwitting of any agency involvement. A few of the participants (Moore, Kirby) are considered psychic "super-receivers," and thus may in fact be witting (or were witting), although this point has not yet been confirmed.

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