Global Warming - redux

This is an update to but independent of  http://used-ideas.blogspot.com/2012/06/climate-change-maybe.html

Politics, damned politics, cursed politics...  Such a more conservative institution there has ever been.  Whatever the view, your view, my view, politics invites a type of rigidity from which retraction of positions becomes extremely difficult.  Politicians are loathe to change their minds regardless of evidence to the contrary - unless it presents itself on their doorstep.  That said, let's get to the business of the day: Our Climate.

Global warming, climate change, extreme weather, whatever you wish to call it is a signature issue of our age.  It has a large group of believing in its precepts, based on rather sophisticated mathematical and statistical models.  None accommodate that global weather is a thermodynamic system and is therefore very much fundamentally unpredictable in the long term.  (Imagine, setting afire a piece of paper and trying to predict the exact form of the ash.) Yet the models work on statistical and projective models that work well looking backwards, gaining agreement with the past, and then boldly projecting into the future.   On this basis all the predictions are made.

Some have call these predictions and this pursuit as "junk science,"  jokingly calling for a "junk PhD."   It is serious business, junk or genuine.  We can't call it junk or genuine until a full vetting is available.   We do not know at this point whether the planet is evolving in a normal cycle, if the sun eruptions are making an effect, whether grasslands are declining or increasing, whether deforestation is a factor, or really anything firm.
  
Nonetheless, these folks have proposed a model, and if they were open to investigation would demand or recommend a government program to set the models on a firm scientific basis, open to critique by qualified scientists.  Indeed, there is evidence of warming.  This is our planet.  We should check it out, just as we do for any newly discovered virus.

Many adherents simply want to believe that mankind is at fault.  They feel badly and want evidence to believe.  The models give it, and they jump on board the Global Warming train. Many feel this is an "weighty" issue worthy of their concern and attention, and while not understanding it simply want to do something, maybe something that can be conducted at cocktail parties.

However, there is a political agenda held by some of the Global Warming adherents, namely further government control of all things human. Weather is big;  medical care is big; financial systems are big; education is big; nutrition is big.  All of these, also signature issues of our age, have a similar remedy proposed that the government should do something such as spend, regulate, or generally interfere.

Recall, there was once the widely accepted medical treatment for fevered patients by blood-letting.  It did, after all, serve to reduce the fever.  Had blood-letting become a political issue, we might still have it.  On climate change, we are merely in the first phase of investigation.  Too bad it has become so political. With political stakes at hand, there comes a rigidity of theory very difficult to penetrate.

Terrorism at Home

Terrorism at Home 

The President has finally announced there are terrorists amongst us.  My goodness, in his recent speech he smeared the term about something like catsup on a burger.  This is new for someone who's used at most the term "extremist" for a couple of years.  Thank goodness for his awakening vision.  

  

We have radicalized Islamic participants on many fronts, most prominently given in the list below.

• Underwear bomber
• Shoe bomber
• Time Square bomber
• Boston Marathon
• Fort Hood massacre
• Lockerbie
• Kenya embassy
• Libya consulate

The US has instituted its own terrorist campaign using the secrecy of drone events. Several enemies have been eliminated.  We celebrate the result but fear the technology that allows this to happen. Here at home we have right a deeper and more subtle type of terrorism.  Recall, terrorism implies the creation of fear of the citizenry.  Fear?  We have it! You have it!  

This more insidious form of terrorism is right in our midst.   It was created by the Department of Justice (DOJ) through the sequester of personal data and phone records of members of the press.  It has been created, as well, though the machinations of our very own Internal Revenue Service through errant audits and targeting of a tax exempt status for a select few. 

My simple question is this:  Who do you fear most?

•       Underwear bombers or the DOJ?
•       Libyan gunmen or the IRS?

We may say these terrorist attacks are one-off, though carefully plotted by hateful groups.  The others are carefully instrumented through a bureaucratic system so thick and so deep it is virtually impossible to identify the perpetrators.  So protected are they that denials (I don’t know nothin’ …) are accepted, though simultaneously ridiculed and rejected.  Often simple public servants are pulled into the service of being fodder of a most nefarious goal - the fear and denial of constitutional rights. 

So, we have terrorism right here vs. terrorism over there. 

Big Data

Newer information on the Information Snooping.  About Edward Snowden, the now high profile leek in the NSA snooping scandal.  It is not what he did at this point, it is about what information he carried with him.  This fellow seems clever enough to have covered himself with tools to help his future situations. Of course, a nefarious host government will smoke them out, much to Edward's displeasure.   The other problem is how many others (i.e. NSA contractors) have done or or doing the exact same thing: harvesting information.  This is a serious issue.  With the data mining capacity of various programs available to the NSA, any operative, with appropriate keywords, can uncover the identity of any secretive email senders, and to whom they have communicated.  One simply does not need the secret email address, one can inversely deduce the identity.  This is dangerous - really dangerous.  Folk can read this post all day long, uncover my email, check on what I'm up to, but I'm basically a nobody, probably uninteresting to anyone.  But we are now at the point where big time secrets can be completely uncovered, no matter how disguised the sender may think he/she is covered.   The moral of this story is to use serious encryption software in all communications if you really want them private. Even the NSA, with all its computing power and expertise, has trouble decrypting, for example, RSA encrypted messages.  (I think.)


New Information on Information Snooping.  It has now been disclosed the NSA has been compiling information on hundreds of millions of Americans.  Indeed, a fully new agency in Utah has been build to store and analyze this information.  The leak comes from a NSA contractor Edward Snowden.  See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/nsa-secret-surveillance-lawmakers-live. This seems to be a fact.  Snowden is now under scrutiny for possible criminal charges. OK. This is how the event is playing out. What would you expect?  Someone needed to make the leak, and that someone is in big trouble.   But...

What about other countries?  Are citizens of England, France, Germany, Russia also under similar scrutiny.  The software is there; the need is perceived; the knowledge is desired; the will to thwart whatever is rampant.   Politicians are fundamentally nosy.

You see this cheap war by the terrorists is having far reaching consequences.  Those people know what to do and are likely doing it.  (Just think a moment or two and you can envision easy countermeasures.)  More revelations are coming.  Make no doubt.

See update  on voice calls below...

Data mining is all the rage these days. It counts heavily what it can do for medicine, for education, and for taxation. How can it help us discover trends and patterns?  Statistical specialists consult on these bases.    Big data is the name of this game.  It can be done by subject, by predicate, by tonality, and simply by words. It depends on the bot-client profile of what information is desired.  Political, religious, food, you name it.  It is concomitant with the vast amount of information now posted.  Whether the form is blogs, news articles, commentary, web forums, email, Facebook, twitter, and all the others, this information is available to any and to all. Let us note the backups to the "cloud" though innocuous to most of us is one serious component of what we reveal.  The use and misuse of this information is the topic of our discussion.

We focus, not on how it can help, but how it can be used in nefarious ways.  This is what our society has come to.  Finding an edge to wedge a victory of sorts is the name of our story. While it may be easy to dismiss all this as a proto-paranoia, the fact that is possible, and may only have benefits to a few, indicate it should be considered by us all. We should worry about how much information we divulge, if only innocently.

Data mining is aided and abetted by the WWW robots, also known as bots. These are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. They receive and read everything . The greatest of these are web spidering, in which an automated script fetches, analyzes and files. The analysis and purposes for this analysis are the issues of this brief post.

We are discussing Exabytes of information.  This amount of information is absolutely unassailable by individuals, and even states.  However, it can be routinely scanned and codified for any conceivable purpose.

Important points to consider follow.

a. Your blog is routinely scanned by bots for information therein. Threats to this or that; support for this or that.  All recorded.  Neutral - family, cooking, gardening, etc. Don’t know.

b. Under the radar?  No.  All information is gleaned and stored as to the criteria of the bot-client. Democrat, Republican, Catholic, Islamic, and on-and-on.

c. Your email and newspaper is scanned for the same.

d. Your information is used substantially for advertising.  Why not?  Mercantile outfits need to target their customers.  They do it well.

e. Your local televised news is textualized, using parrots, for scanning. 

What is safe?  Maybe phone conversations. Maybe not. 

You may believe you are not subject to any of these.  Wrong.  Imagine a cadre of millions of minions who's sole goal is to read what is online, indeed read what you post online.  Let's look at a single example, seemingly innocent but with potentials for all sorts of analyses.

Wordle.  This is a website from which you can input information, lots of it, and see which words dominate the content. Simple counts . Wordle bills itself as a toy.  It is by no means a toy for a determined amateur at the determination of the valuation of a large amount of text.  What you will see is a "cloud" of words input each enlarged to their relative frequencies.  Suppose you have the frequency counts.  Then it becomes possible to evaluate the message(s) according to how they are used.

The next level is only slightly more complex.  Look at sentences, subject, predicate, and object. 

Points for scanning.

1. The subject sets a pointer to the file into which the information is sent.

2. The predicate indicates positive or negative aspect.

3. The object confirms the locator pointer.

Keep in mind the unlimited data mining under consideration.  (In a future post we will show how fundamentally easy this is to do.)  Make no doubt about any anonymity.  Make no assumption that it will not be noticed.  Anyone can post something unfavorable to whatever is the targeted issue.  Usually, though duly recorded nothing results. No flags are raised.  No information is communicated.  But there is the…

Preponderance. With so many blogs, there becomes a preponderance factor.  Are similar words and predicates used?  Do subjects and predicates correlate with established patterns?  Originally,  there may be only a few billion accounts worth recording. But the preponderance of posts may indicate trends, patterns.  The number is now just in the millions.  You may post something deleterious to the purple-polkadot-ed party.  Do is once or twice, and you are unnoticed.  Do if often and it is noticed by the anti-purple- polkadot-ed party. The number is now in the tens of thousands.  Manageable!

Examples:
1. My daughter just got another tattoo.  I am so distressed and cannot convince her of the long term effects.   Little notice
2. I have heard the mayor has yet another tattoo.  Big notice.

Popularity.  An important factor is how many hits one gets.  If you publish on an accepted blog often the numbers of hits are recorded.  These are available to the bot. If the number is high, ...  If low, ...  But the determination of the number of hits may rest with the provider.  We do not know whether providers make this information available to clients.  Providers do wish to make money.  This is clearly a source.

Applications.

·         News reporters - These have a byline publically available.  Their views are well recorded.

·         Bloggers - These often have a political tone. Neutral blogs on recipes and the like are happily discounted. 

·         Commentators - Commentators have a clear signature of views.  While scanned and reported to the client, nothing new is rarely discovered.

Security of bloggers. Whatever blogger host may indicate, there remains the issues of secuity of their clients remain in question.  You give your email address to the host. The email address is located to a person.  The person is identified and coded in the data base.  All of this happens transparently to you, and perhaps to your wishes.  All of this cannot happen without the cooperation of blogger hosts. Do you know how your information is posted, and who has access to it?  Do you know for sure?

Correlation with established blogs.  Note: You are not the first to write on any subject. Many examples obtain. Megabytes of information are available.   Currently, there is software that can automatically grade essays for high stakes testing environs.  This same software can be used to "grade" news article or blogs for political, medical, educational slant or other purposes. 

Keep in mind, we do not have philosophers in charge of data mining well read in the works of Aristotle, Plato, and Hume, but rather of operatives, all trying to make a point, upgrading their utility, enhancing their presence, and making a buck.  All will do what suits their purpose and control. Being an "American" is secondary. This has become errant ethics.  Succeeding is paramount.

Voice Calls.  It has just been reported (6/6/13) that the NSA (National Security Agency), our valued foreign security agency, responsible for the detection of threats against the US, has sequestered  phone call records from millions of Americans - even every day folks.   Of all agencies, the NSA buys the fastest and biggest computers on the market.  They have a data processing capacity that eclipses your imagination.  Can you conceive of the data processing power to analyze a million phone calls per day, or ten million, and scan them for possible threats?   One account indicates more than 100 million records have been  obtained.
What has been obtained for specific numbers are calls from one number to another, the locations, and the duration of the calls.  From this, a net is constructed, and then patterns are analyzed.  This is truly big data, so big it is impossible for a single person, a team, or even a battalion of analysts to discover anything meaningful.  This is looking for tiny needles in a gigantic haystack.  What is so difficult for you and I is the magnitude of computing power this requires.  It exists.  In fact, there is an entire established field of big data with data mining now widely used in banking, government, and industry.   These are ultra hot topics these days.

If you have sufficient resources, you can uncover almost any information you seek.

The NSA, which has strongly contributed to the security of this nation, has those resources.

The next step, fiction as far as I know, will be to obtain the calls themselves.  Here is a rather rough scope of the project.   First, you have to get the phone recording; then you have to textualize the speech - even with foreign languages or accents; then you have to scan for keywords and grammar; finally you need to construct possible threatening contexts.  All the pieces of this scenario even now exist.  This may sound like science fiction, but in my view, the NSA would be remiss in their mission if there were not experimenting with such technologies.  My goodness, if even I can conceive of this, one must conclude that when such software is fully integrated, even your local business could analyze phone calls of all corporate phone conversations.  Some already do this for email - child's play in comparison.

It is a certainty this will be accomplished.  The software will be packaged.  The software will be exported.  Any government with the digital capacity to handle the magnitude of this data will be co-opted to use it.  After all, it is in the interests of national security, something we've all heard before.  Ten years.  Ten years before all of our phone conversations, emails, and Internet transactions will be fully integrated with an individual profile for all, and a net, technically a neural network, connecting one to the other.   Everywhere! 

Flash, the latest (6/6/13) is that the NSA is now screening all web activity of untold millions of citizens.  Be careful what you click on.

However paranoid or suspicious you may be about external eavesdropping on your personal business, things are probably worse.

President Obama and his Staff

Over the previous weeks and months the President has claimed, usually though his press secretary, he did not know details about certain events.  Notably, we mention the Benghazi murders, the IRS scandal, and now the AP press subpenas of telephone records.

The White House has normally and routinely claimed no real knowledge of the events, or claimed a complete picture of the events was not clear but was under investigation.  Take this word as correct, if you will.  The President is very busy with more issues on a daily basis that most of us have in a lifetime.  The President, collectively all of them, must delegate authority to make really high level decisions.

What conclusions can be derived?  Even though the President has trusted others in trying to protect him, trying to protect his oath of office, and trying to promote a narrative favorable to him, he is the chief executive responsible only to the people.  Perhaps we could conclude his confidence in others has been  misplaced.  Perhaps we could conclude his personnel selections have been misguided.  Perhaps, we could conclude he has not been fully at the switches of his administration.  This would not be the first time that underlings have failed or over-reached their duties.  Even the President must implicitly trust his appointees.

However... It is incumbent upon the President to monitor, to correct, and to revise erroneous reports.  He must know what his staff is doing, good and bad.  He must monitor their performance.  He must adjust and correct the course upon which he has set our Nation.  He must not be overly involved in signature issues to the exclusion of other matters.  The Presidency of the USA is a monumental job requiring the quintessential politician, philosopher, manager, and leader.

A more strident view is that the President is and has been the architect of all this: the excuses, the spin, and the valuation.  Can we guess?  Can we know?  Can we prove?  On the one hand, this is distressing, on the other depressing.

At Times - Targeted Taxation

At times, we are presented an issue not Democratic, nor Republican, nor Libertarian.  It is an issue not sectarian or religious. It is not gay or straight, male or female.  It is definitely not constitutional.  Taxation is this issue.   Transcendent is a good encapsulation.

 At times there is only a single exponent of a foul circumstance.  At times there is only a single agency championing or exposing the crime.  At times,  only one conclusion can be made.  Even the most abject partisan outlets must see this light.  Case in point: the IRS (Internal Revenue Service of the USA) admission of targeting groups with opinions  unfavorable to the executive branch.  This is a monumental issue, impinging on our basic rights, abrogating fundamental freedoms, and all of us should be deeply concerned.  This means everyone - like you and me. 

At these times, we must celebrate those willing to stand and deliver the scandalous news, whether individuals or corporations.  They are at risk in the event their trumpet fails.  They are lost if their “papers” are not in order.  They are toast unless the agents of news, of natural justice, and of the courts do not concur. 

Things are grim, in this, the land of freedom and personal rights.  This news, as IRS has confessed, is horrific in its possible consequences. It is devastating about the future of our country.  If these charges are ignored or dismissed without proper and convincing adjudication, the USA, as we know it, is doomed.  Control of the press is child's play compared with control of taxation.

In past times, the single exponent has been warned, then has been muffled, then maybe has been co-opted by the perpetrators, or in finality has been destroyed.

We await full disclosure.  My faint hope is a favorable resolution, implying justice to all Americans.

Odious is a term not used much these days.  But this IRS disclosure does stink.  I am concerned that if the IRS admits to this error in judgment, actually illegal by some constitutional lawyers, what other errors remain concealed?  It is unlike anyone or any agency to confess the full extent of their error.  It is more like human nature to reveal a little, hoping the larger sins go undiscovered or at best unpunished.   

Democracy is Unstable

From Aristotle, "Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are  equal in all respects, because men are equally free they claim to be absolutely equal."

Sounds terrific.  Yet, democracy is unstable as an institution.Why so?  There are a number of alliances that make it so and may lead to our collapse.  In a democracy, citizens are totally free to select their views, their philosophies, and their actions.  Equal in all respects?  This is fine for a responsible and cognizant society, one that is aware of its responsibilities and duties.  It is unsuitable for a society easily persuaded and self-destructive citizens.  However, there remain alliances between power centers in a democracy that serve to undermine their efficacy.When there are many, it is not a problem.  One neutralizes the other.  When there are only a few, military, government, industry, finance, information, as is now the case, there is a problem with these structures imposing disproportionate influence. When each acts individually, no problem exists.  When two or more act in concert, then ...

Democracy is inherently and fundamentally unstable.  It is a form of government that permits the promulgation of destabilizing forces.  For each of these forces, there must be a countervailing force to keep the motion on a true course.

These alliances can and do act as a pack of wild dogs, tearing at the flesh of America, each striving to promote their cause at the expense of everything else.  Each assumes the institution will remain in tact, but not cognizant of the fact that when too much flesh is torn away, the system changes.  Look at just a few...

• Military and Industry.  This was first warned against by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.  
• Political Parties and the Press.  Remarkably, this alliance has always been with us.  The ebbs and flows of the alliance has been present since the early days of our confederation. 
• Political parties and the Voters.  This is a relatively new aspect of democratic alliance in that the practitioners seem to be willing to demagogue their way to power through persuasion by emotion.
• Magistrates and the Church.  For millenia the alliance between magistrates and the church has been a fixture of the lives of many governments and the people.  That currently this may not seem the case does no diminish this sort of alliance - the one supporting the other. 
• The Government and its Citizens.  Any movement that persuades it citizens that it can provide all services needed is initially successful - in times of prosperity.   In other times, and they will certainly occur, the government must resort to alternative means to maintain order. 
• Unions.   Unions in counterpoint with  industry seems to work well.  Each demands more of the other.  But either of them separately or in alliance with government can be very much destabilizing for the entire country. 

According to Plato, democratic self-government does not work, according to Plato, because ordinary people have not learned how to run the ship of state. They are not familiar enough with such things as economics, military strategy, conditions in other countries, or the confusing intricacies of law and ethics.  See http://facultyfiles.frostburg.edu/phil/forum/PlatoRep.htm

This view suggests a naivety of the ordinary folks about how to operate a vast state.  Possibly correct unless the democratic leaders are well read and well experienced in philosophy, psychology, and administration.  This is particularly rare in our modern times. 

Political Compromise

The other day at his press conference, the President expressed the fact that we have a divided government, meaning the GOP controls the House. He inferred that because of this little gets done in Washington because of this division.  This most striking comment resonated as I believe most governments of the US, since its founding have been "divided,"  yet the congress and executive branches compromised frequently and achieved much - and congress was not so maligned by the public as it is today. It occurred to me the President must truly miss his first two years in office with a "unified" government where compromise was an unnecessary and unneeded tool for agreement. 

It is one thing to not compromise on the basis of a firmly held principle, and quite another not to compromise when you don't know or have forgotten how.

The unwillingness or inability to compromise, now on both sides of the aisle, is a significant reason why little happens in Washington these days.