Category Archives: Science and Technology

Former NSA Tech Director says “Fire everyone in DC!” Reply

by • Science and Technology

Truth Axis

Former National Security Agency (NSA) Technical Leader and whistle blower Bill Binney has stated that the biggest threat to U.S. citizens is their own government. In a Reddit.com Ask Me Anything the long time NSA critic answered questions from the reddit community, covering topics related to NSA mass surveillance and his own thoughts on privacy. When asked about the biggest threat to US citizens and what can be done, he responded:

The biggest threat to U.S. citizens is the U.S. government.
Fire everyone in DC!

Binney also responded to questions about the surveillance and wiretapping system he developed for the NSA, ThinThread, which was designed to automatically detect terror threats while protecting the privacy of US citizens. Binney left the NSA in the wake of 9/11 shortly after ThinThread was discontinued in favor of the Trailblazer Project, which did not have the same privacy safeguards in place and would eventually be shut down after going over budget and costing taxpayers billions of dollars. Of the switch from ThinThread Binney said, “ThinThread was killed in 2001 and so is not producing any threat assessments now…. All the programs currently in use by NSA have failed to produce results on anything, but are really good at bulk collection.” He went on to advocate for infiltration of national intelligence agencies and associated contractors by hactivists and other concerned citizen tech workers:

Im all for infiltration! And when you do that you bring with it your integrity and character.

More…

Cody Wilson – 3D Printed Guns, PC Hacktivism & Cultural Terrorism Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Police State/Civil Liberties, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Science and Technology

An great interview of Cody Wilson by Lana Lokteff.

Radio 3Fourteen. Listen here.

Cody Rutledge Wilson, a student of law, political philosophy, and social theory, is a USA crypto and free-market anarchist. He is best known as a founder/director of Defense Distributed, a non-profit organization that develops and publishes open source gun designs, so-called “Wiki Weapons,” suitable for 3D printing. USA Carry named Wilson one of America’s “30 Influential Pro-Gun Rights Advocates,” and Wired Magazine’s “Danger Room” has named him one of “The 15 Most Dangerous People in the World.”

More…

…And Then They Came for the Tech Workers Reply

by • American Decline, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Immigration, Race and Ethnicity, Science and Technology • Tags:

doug-stanhope-banner-750x400

From RightOn: Labour-market laughs and lamentations mit Ann Sterzinger.

Y’all in Europe might find it a challenge to accommodate all of your new friends right now, but there’s hope: on this side of the pond, the native-born American worker just scored a massive coup, I tell you what.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a bit of a hullaballoo when SunTrust Banks in Atlanta decided to take advantage of our government’s generous H-1B special occupational visa program. The H-1B visa is a great boon to the American economy, allowing companies to replace their spoiled, entitled, costly native-born skilled labor force with cheaper, more compliant computer programmers, IT assistants, and scientists from countries like India.

It’s not that Indian people are innately more charitable toward their great and benevolent employers than Americans, mind you; but people who are in the country on an H-1B visa can’t change jobs without risking deportation, so they have to shut up and take what they’re given. The ideal employee!

But that wasn’t what made the news; such abuses of the H-1B are becoming commonplace. Just as humdrum was the way SunTrust humiliated the American employees they were firing by making them train their own replacements.

But then SunTrust pushed their luck a bit too far.

Showcasing both their lack of esteem for the American employees’ years of service and their lack of confidence in their cheap new workers’ ability to hit the ground running, SunTrust stuck a “continuing cooperation” clause in the severance agreement.

If they wanted severance pay, the rejected workers had to agree to donate their own time to step in and provide emergency help if something went wrong—for NO ADDITIONAL PAY.

More…

The Coming Golden Age of Anarchism Reply

by • Activism, American Decline, Anarchism/Anti-State, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Electoralism/Democratism, Environment, Fourth Generation Warfare, Law/Justice, Left and Right, Military, Police State/Civil Liberties, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy, Science and Technology, Secession, Strategy

It is not unreasonable to suggest that the decades ahead will witness the unfolding of a golden age of anarchism. What is the evidence for this?

-The most powerful state in the world, the United States, the mother country of the empire, is slowly losing its internal legitimacy and serious political discontent is beginning to rise.

-Antiwar sentiment in the United States is at an all time high. War fever could rise again in the event of a war with ISIS or Iran, an intervention in Syria, or a confrontation with Russia. But none of these scenarios would turn out well for the United States in the long run. Instead, the state would continue to lose its legitimacy and antiwar and anti-imperialist feeling would come back on an even stronger level.

-Class divisions are the widest they have been in a century in the United States. This all but guarantees the re-emergence of class-based politics at some point in the future. Proponents of alternative forms of decentralist economics will then begin to find a ripe audience for their ideas.

-Public opinion is slowly turning against the police state, prison-industrial complex, and the war on drugs. Sentiment of this kind will likely begin to grow exponentially in the future. It is likely that resistance to domestic American fascism will be the civil rights movement of the 21st century.

-One in four Americans are now sympathetic to secession by their region or community, and these sympathies will probably increase as the system begins to deteriorate.

-One in four American adults now has a criminal record due to overcriminalization. This can only have the effect of undermining respect for the state and its legal decrees.

-The idea of the state as the savior of humanity is an idea that is coming under increasing disrepute. The fiscal debts alone of modern welfare states likely guarantee their ultimate demise.

More…

The Road to Turkdom Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military, Science and Technology

By John Robb

Global Guerrillas

It should be clear to everyone that the economic and political system that replaced feudal agriculture is starting to fall apart.

It’s also pretty clear we need a new system, one that can operate at a global scale and fully embrace the potential of new technologies without turning us all into slaves (or killing us).

What does that system look like?  Obviously, it’s very hard to see what is going to replace industrial capitalism and the nation-state while we are still inside of the system.

Despite that, it’s possible to get a sense of where it is going by looking at where technology is taking us.  I recently did some scifi writing on a short book I’m writing and this is some thinking that came out of it.

More…

The Cat is Out of the Bag Reply

by • American Decline, Anarchism/Anti-State, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Electoralism/Democratism, Environment, Immigration, Law/Justice, Left and Right, Military, Police State/Civil Liberties, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy, Science and Technology

By Keith Preston

For an opposing perspective, see this article by Joseph Nye. For an article that makes comparable arguments, see this piece in Foreign Policy by Gideon Rachman.

When the future history of the former United States of America is written, the pivotal turning point that likely marked the downfall of the USA will be the events of September 11, 2001.

The United States emerged from World War Two as the most powerful nation-state in the world, rivaled only by the second-rate Soviet Union. American hegemony and dominance spread throughout the world as Western Europe became protectorates of the USA, and the colonies of the former European colonial empires in Asia, Africa, and Latin America became U.S. client states. However the postwar era and the late 20th century were also a time of anti-colonial insurgency, leading the U.S. to get bogged down in the anti-colonial war in Indochina and eventually experience defeat. This had the effect of de-legitimizing U.S. militarism to a great degree. More…

The State: Its Rise and Decline Reply

by • Activism, American Decline, Anarchism/Anti-State, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare, Immigration, Law/Justice, Left and Right, Military, Police State/Civil Liberties, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy, Science and Technology, Secession, Sexuality and the State, Strategy, Therapeutic State

Read this classic lecture from 2000 by Professor Van Creveld, and then read my “Philosophical Anarchism and the Death of Empire” from 2003. Van Creveld’s lecture describes the emerging world order, and my essay outlines a new paradigm for the “worldwide Grey Tribe” as it might be called.

By Martin Van Creveld

October 16, 2000

This is an excerpt from the keynote lecture given at the Mises Institute conference on the themes in Professor van Creveld’s talk.

The background of the state as we know it today is formed by civil war, although at that time, of course, it was not yet called civil. The endless wars between the various principalities, some of them Christian and others Moslem, that took place in the Iberian Peninsula during the fifteenth century; the English Wars of the Roses; the French guerres de religion; and the Thirty Years War which devastated much of Germany and Central Europe–all these resulted in so much death and destruction that, to end them, people were even prepared to have their appetites controlled. As figures such as Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes argued, the only way to bring about peace and quiet was absolute government invested in a single person. And peace and quiet, more than anything else, was what people wanted and what history seemed to demand.

More…

Two Views on Climate Change: Learning to Live with Climate Change Will Not Be Enough Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Environment, Science and Technology

By David Orr

Yale University

The awareness that humans could alter the climate of Earth has dawned slowly on our consciousness. In 1896, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius deflected his anguish over a failed marriage into remarkably tedious and, as it turned out, accurate calculations about the effect of CO2 emissions on climate. It was an oddly therapeutic thing to do, but it had no more effect on public attention than the smallest cloud on a distant horizon.

Another 69 years would pass before scientists warned a U.S. president of the potential for serious climate disruption, and still another 30 years before the first report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Now, facing climate destabilization, our choices for action are said to be adapting to a warmer world or mitigating the severity of climate change by sharply reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, neither adaptation nor mitigation alone will be sufficient, and sometimes they may overlap. But in a world of limited resources, money, and time we will be forced often to choose between the two. In making such choices, the major issues in dispute have to do with estimates of the pace, scale, and duration of climatic disruption. And here the scientific evidence tilts the balance strongly toward mitigation.

More…

Contra: Johnson 22

by • Science and Technology

This is a reply to Greg Johnson’s “Moses the Egyptian” at Counter-Currents.

By Todd Lewis

Mr. Johnson’s Moses the Egyptian is yet another ill thought-out screed against Christianity worthy of the atheistkult. In fact most of Mr. Johnson’s claims are taken verbatim from atheistkult in this and other screeds. For the sake of brevity I will deal with his completely ridiculous gloss on paganism.

“Ancient polytheism did not just promote religious tolerance. It also helped promote peace between nations in an age of constant warfare and bloodshed. The idea of a universal divine order served as a foundation for international law and peace between nations. ”

Despite the fact that you provide no evidence for this preposterous claim, there is absolutely no historical evidence to back it up.

More…

Neither Progressive nor Conservative: The Anti-Modernism of G. K. Chesterton 2

by • Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Religion and Philosophy, Science and Technology

By Keith Preston

AlternativeRight.Com

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) bears the distinction of being a writer who resisted virtually all of the dominant trends of his era. He lived during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, precisely the time that modernity was fully consolidating itself within Western civilization more than a century after the apex of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Chesterton began his writing career as a young man and as the twentieth century was just beginning. As much as any other writer from his era, he predicted the horrors that century would entail.

More…

Has Chris Hedges Been Reading ATS? 15

by • American Decline, Anarchism/Anti-State, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Education, Electoralism/Democratism, Environment, Left and Right, Police State/Civil Liberties, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Religion and Philosophy, Science and Technology

He sure sounds like it. Hedges is an example of what a serious Left would look like, although he’s still obviously not as radical as ARV-ATS.

Domestic Drones Are Inevitable 1

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Police State/Civil Liberties, Science and Technology

By Lucy Steigerwald

As the weekly – sometimes daily – news stories never tire of telling us, domestic drones are coming. And as ABC News reported on March 17, they are arriving faster than the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) can suss out the rules over their use. Though it’s technically illegal, and the FAA may issue fines if they catch you, ABC reports that commercial use of drones is starting to happen whether or not the government approves – as long as it doesn’t notice.

In February, the FAA sent a cease and desist letter to the Lakemaid Brewing Company – the beer makers may not use drones to send ice fishermen a six-pack of cold ones. Even for such a charming purpose, their commercial use is banned at least until 2015, when the FAA will issue rules on drone integration into U.S. airspace. The FAA is also currently appealing a judge’s decision rejecting the $10,000 fine it tried to levy against a Virginia filmmaker for unauthorized drone flights. At this point, the US is actually trailing far behind the rest of the world in terms of domestic drones – we’re skittish about their dystopian potential, and our privacy laws are (relatively) strong compared to some.

More…

Contra Lewis: The Drooling Moron on Creationism and Race Realism 17

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy, Science and Technology

By Matt Parrott

Traditionalist Youth Network

More Weird ScienceSome guy named Todd Lewis strongly disliked my recent Counter-Currents article, Weird Science: Liberal Creationism vs. Christian Creationism. His response, hosted at the otherwise praiseworthy Attack the System anarchist website, Contra Parrott: The Emptiness of Third-Way Anthropology, was absolutely riddled with scathing insults. While I often find it necessary to look up obscure references when I’m engaged by an anti-White blogger, Mr. Lewis has the distinction of being the first critic who required me to look up an insult.

I haven’t actually taken the time to read Harold Covington’s critically-acclaimed series of White Nationalist action/adventure novels, so I had no idea what a “DM” was. According to Mr. Lewis, I’m a “drooling moron”. I’m also an adherent of Madame Blavatsky, a neo-nazi kook, a fascist, a neo-nazi-fascist, anti-Jewish, what I claim to hate, stupid, a liar, deaf, anti-social, stupid, a hypocrite, and most damning…formulaic. With so much buckshot fired in my general direction, I’m sure I’m guilty to varying degrees of some of these charges, but I object to being formulaic.

After leaving nothing but a charred spot on the ground where I had stood, he turned the label gun on himself for his closing remarks,

In conclusion I could be accused of irreverence, bellicosity, meanness, and misconstruing Matt Parrott, CC and Race-Realism. This might all be true, but this is nothing less than Matt Parrott’s SOP (Standard Operating Procedure). He takes all the leftwing crap and regurgitates it like a good Marxist drone when he is criticizing Christians, but whines when the left returns the favor on race.

More…

Weird Science: Liberal Creationism vs. Christian Creationism Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy, Science and Technology

By Matt Parrott

I’m a bit old for Bill Nye. By the time his children’s science show came on in the early ’90′s, I had already graduated to reading Carl Sagan’s more advanced presentation of the vapid and vacuous “I Fucking Love Science!” worldview.

My love of critical thinking and the scientific method itself has only strengthened with time, which makes me despise all the more those who distort this elegant and powerful process and its findings in the service of their secular humanist agenda. William Saletan, a Jewish science columnist for the Leftist webzine Slate, said it best before being brutally checked by his colleagues and bosses for heresy: Bill Nye and his ilk are essentially “liberal creationists,” religious adherents of their own supernatural creation myth.

I don’t have any patience for Ken Ham and other Creation “scientists” who are feverishly trying to pitch Genesis as a literal record of what really happened. But Answers in Genesis and all those angry Kansans crashing school board meetings wouldn’t exist if science hadn’t been politically and philosophically weaponized against Christianity in the first place. “Science!” has been deployed as a battering ram in our public schools and universities, in our children’s programming, and in our Hollywood media, invariably conflating the scientific method and its fruits with secular humanism and its political agenda.

So, it’s with this bitter contempt for both parties that I sat down to watch Bill Nye “The Science Guy” debate Ken Ham “The Creationism Guy.”

READ MORE AT COUNTER-CURRENTS.COM