Top 10 Signs of the Impending U.S. Police State

http://www.alternet.org/rights/36553/

Is the U.S. becoming a police state? Here are the top 10 signs that it may well be the case.

1. The Internet Clampdown

One saving grace of alternative media in this age of unfettered corporate conglomeration has been the internet. While the masses are spoon-fed predigested news on TV and in mainstream print publications, the truth-seeking individual still has access to a broad array of investigative reporting and political opinion via the world-wide web. Of course, it was only a matter of time before the government moved to patch up this crack in the sky.

Attempts to regulate and filter internet content are intensifying lately, coming both from telecommunications corporations (who are gearing up to pass legislation transferring ownership and regulation of the internet to themselves), and the Pentagon (which issued an "Information Operations Roadmap" in 2003, signed by Donald Rumsfeld, which outlines tactics such as network attacks and acknowledges, without suggesting a remedy, that US propaganda planted in other countries has easily found its way to Americans via the internet). One obvious tactic clearing the way for stifling regulation of internet content is the growing media frenzy over child pornography and "internet predators," which will surely lead to legislation that by far exceeds in its purview what is needed to fight such threats.

2. "The Long War"

This little piece of clumsy marketing died off quickly, but it gave away what many already suspected: the War on Terror will never end, nor is it meant to end. It is designed to be perpetual. As with the War on Drugs, it outlines a goal that can never be fully attained -- as long as there are pissed off people and explosives. The Long War will eternally justify what are ostensibly temporary measures: suspension of civil liberties, military expansion, domestic spying, massive deficit spending and the like. This short-lived moniker told us all, "get used to it. Things aren't going to change any time soon."

3. The USA PATRIOT Act

Did anyone really think this was going to be temporary? Yes, this disgusting power grab gives the government the right to sneak into your house, look through all your stuff and not tell you about it for weeks on a rubber stamp warrant. Yes, they can look at your medical records and library selections. Yes, they can pass along any information they find without probable cause for purposes of prosecution. No, they're not going to take it back, ever.

4. Prison Camps

This last January the Army Corps of Engineers gave Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root nearly $400 million to build detention centers in the United States, for the purpose of unspecified "new programs." Of course, the obvious first guess would be that these new programs might involve rounding up Muslims or political dissenters -- I mean, obviously detention facilities are there to hold somebody. I wish I had more to tell you about this, but it's, you know... secret.

5. Touchscreen Voting Machines

Despite clear, copious evidence that these nefarious contraptions are built to be tampered with, they continue to spread and dominate the voting landscape, thanks to Bush's "Help America Vote Act," the exploitation of corrupt elections officials, and the general public's enduring cluelessness.

In Utah, Emery County Elections Director Bruce Funk witnessed security testing by an outside firm on Diebold voting machines which showed them to be a security risk. But his warnings fell on deaf ears. Instead Diebold attorneys were flown to Emery County on the governor's airplane to squelch the story. Funk was fired. In Florida, Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho discovered an alarming security flaw in their Diebold system at the end of last year. Rather than fix the flaw, Diebold refused to fulfill its contract. Both of the other two touchscreen voting machine vendors, Sequoia and ES&S, now refuse to do business with Sancho, who is required by HAVA to implement a touchscreen system and will be sued by his own state if he doesn't. Diebold is said to be pressuring for Sancho's ouster before it will resume servicing the county.
Stories like these and much worse abound, and yet TV news outlets have done less coverage of the new era of elections fraud than even 9/11 conspiracy theories. This is possibly the most important story of this century, but nobody seems to give a damn. As long as this issue is ignored, real American democracy will remain an illusion. The midterm elections will be an interesting test of the public's continuing gullibility about voting integrity, especially if the Democrats don't win substantial gains, as they almost surely will if everything is kosher.

Bush just suggested that his brother Jeb would make a good president. We really need to fix this problem soon.

6. Signing Statements

Bush has famously never vetoed a bill. This is because he prefers to simply nullify laws he doesn't like with "signing statements." Bush has issued over 700 such statements, twice as many as all previous presidents combined. A few examples of recently passed laws and their corresponding dismissals, courtesy of the Boston Globe:

--Dec. 30, 2005: US interrogators cannot torture prisoners or otherwise subject them to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.

Bush's signing statement: The president, as commander in chief, can waive the torture ban if he decides that harsh interrogation techniques will assist in preventing terrorist attacks.

--Dec. 30, 2005: When requested, scientific information ''prepared by government researchers and scientists shall be transmitted [to Congress] uncensored and without delay."

Bush's signing statement: The president can tell researchers to withhold any information from Congress if he decides its disclosure could impair foreign relations, national security, or the workings of the executive branch.

--Dec. 23, 2004: Forbids US troops in Colombia from participating in any combat against rebels, except in cases of self-defense. Caps the number of US troops allowed in Colombia at 800.
Bush's signing statement: Only the president, as commander in chief, can place restrictions on the use of US armed forces, so the executive branch will construe the law ''as advisory in nature."

Essentially, this administration is bypassing the judiciary and deciding for itself whether laws are constitutional or not. Somehow, I don't see the new Supreme Court lineup having much of a problem with that, though. So no matter what laws congress passes, Bush will simply choose to ignore the ones he doesn't care for. It's much quieter than a veto, and can't be overridden by a two-thirds majority. It's also totally absurd.

7. Warrantless Wiretapping

Amazingly, the GOP sees this issue as a plus for them. How can this be? What are you, stupid? You find out the government is listening to the phone calls of US citizens, without even the weakest of judicial oversight and you think that's okay? Come on -- if you know anything about history, you know that no government can be trusted to handle something like this responsibly. One day they're listening for Osama, and the next they're listening in on Howard Dean.

Think about it: this administration hates unauthorized leaks. With no judicial oversight, why on earth wouldn't they eavesdrop on, say, Seymour Hersh, to figure out who's spilling the beans? It's a no-brainer. Speaking of which, it bears repeating: terrorists already knew we would try to spy on them. They don't care if we have a warrant or not. But you should.

8. Free Speech Zones

I know it's old news, but... come on, are they fucking serious?

9. High-ranking Whistleblowers

Army Generals. Top-level CIA officials. NSA operatives. White House cabinet members. These are the kind of people that Republicans fantasize about being, and whose judgment they usually respect. But for some reason, when these people resign in protest and criticize the Bush administration en masse, they are cast as traitorous, anti-American publicity hounds. Ridiculous. The fact is, when people who kill, spy and deceive for a living tell you that the White House has gone too far, you had damn well better pay attention. We all know most of these people are staunch Republicans. If the entire military except for the two guys the Pentagon put in front of the press wants Rumsfeld out, why on earth wouldn't you listen?

10. The CIA Shakeup

Was Porter Goss fired because he was resisting the efforts of Rumsfeld or Negroponte? No. These appointments all come from the same guys, and they wouldn't be nominated if they weren't on board all the way. Goss was probably canned so abruptly due to a scandal involving a crooked defense contractor, his hand-picked third-in-command, the Watergate hotel and some hookers.

If Bush's nominee for CIA chief, Air Force General Michael Hayden, is confirmed, that will put every spy program in Washington under military control. Hayden, who oversaw the NSA warrantless wiretapping program and is clearly down with the program. That program? To weaken and dismantle or at least neuter the CIA. Despite its best efforts to blame the CIA for "intelligence errors" leading to the Iraq war, the picture has clearly emerged -- through extensive CIA leaks -- that the White House's analysis of Saddam's destructive capacity was not shared by the Agency. This has proved to be a real pain in the ass for Bush and the gang.
Who'd have thought that career spooks would have moral qualms about deceiving the American people? And what is a president to do about it? Simple: make the critical agents leave, and fill their slots with Bush/Cheney loyalists. Then again, why not simply replace the entire organization? That is essentially what both Rumsfeld at the DoD and newly minted Director of National Intelligence John are doing -- they want to move intelligence analysis into the hands of people that they can control, so the next time they lie about an "imminent threat" nobody's going to tell. And the press is applauding the move as a "necessary reform."

Remember the good old days, when the CIA were the bad guys?

Ignorance or malice?

America's consistent retreat from victory over the last century cannot be the result of buffoonery, silly mistakes, blunders, good intentions gone awry, or blind chance - had it been, the individuals making those decisions would surely have made a few mistakes in our favor. Alas, they have not... ~ John McManus

"By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." ~ John Maynard Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920)

The system will be made up of a single currency, single centrally financed government, single tax system, single language, single political system, single world court of justice, single head (one individual leader), single state religion. ... Each person will have a registered number, without which he will not be allowed to buy or sell; and there will be one universal world church. Anyone who refuses to take part in this universal system will have no right to exist."
-- Dr. Kurt E. Koch, Professor

"The changing nature of the threats facing America requires a new government structure to protect against invisible enemies." ("We will have a new form of Government") --George W. Bush

The Future of Console Gaming

We're currently up to the 7th generation of gaming consoles (the first being PONG, the third being the NES and Sega Genesis, etc). The 7th generation consists primarily of three consoles - Ninendo's Wii, Sony's PlayStation 3, and Microsoft's Xbox 360. The Xbox 360 is the only console currently available on the market, with the other two expected out late this year. But where are these consoles, their successors, and the console gaming market in general headed? It might help to examine why consoles exist in the first place.


The earliest form of what we today consider "gaming" was, of course, arcades. The 1970s is considered the golden age of the arcade and coin-op video games. Home video games and gaming systems became available in the '70s and '80s - the Magnavox Odyssey, PONG, etc. Everything was going swell until the gaming market crashed in 1983 and a bunch of companies lost their shirts. After this a sort of dark age followed, where there wasn't much of a market at all for home video games.

BUT! That's why God made the Japanese! The Nintendo Entertainment System, released in 1985 and popularized about two years later, completely revitalized the gaming industry. (Those years only apply to the States, by the way - Japan was ahead.) The NES was so awesome that it remains popular to this day, which is impressive for a computer that's so old, its patent has expired.

Speaking of computers - what effect have they had on the console market? Well, home computers began getting quite popular in the early '90s, around the same time the SNES, successor to the NES, was released. The SNES didn't have hardware that impressive; processor was around 4MHz, a couple kB of RAM, and so forth. A computer could run circles around that! 25, 33MHz, multiple megs of RAM! But the important quantity to note is that computers still cost - I'm told - around $3,000. And this was before eMachines, folks - all computers were mega-expensive. Everything about the computers of the early '90s was considerably more painful and intimidating than today, and there was also another major problem: the lack of a suitable, widely supported gaming peripheral.

Now, I'm sure there was some sort of early joystick or even gamepad in the early '90s, but try to:

1. Convince your parents to buy a computer for your 8th birthday
   
2. Convince your parents to buy a newfangled PC joystick for Christmas
   
3. Install the newfangled PC joystick
1. Install all kinds of weird drivers
2. Do god knows what to config.sys
3. Do god knows what with IRQs
4. Find some games that will work with the damn thing

What's easier?

1. Convince your parents to buy a SNES for your 8th birthday

Comes with a controller ("plug and play," in the parlance of our times) and a game (Super Mario World) right out of the box, hooks up to any modern TV, retails for $199. In fact, the SNES controller is considered by some people, like me, to be among the finest controllers ever designed. (I've had mine for over a decade. Hell, I didn't even treat them well, and they work perfectly.) This is critical, because the controller more than anything else determines what kind of gameplay your console's games are capable of. SNES games are fast, responsive, addictive - just look at the MegaMan X series, or Super Mario World (1 and 2), or Mortal Kombat 3. If you've ever used an emulator, you know that you can't get that with a keyboard.

Now, certainly there were hobbyists writing games for PCs, and companies like The Learning Company making edutainment games for PCs, but consoles appealed to all demographics; they were simple and fun. So PCs didn't really hold much influence over the market, or pose much of a threat. The situation today couldn't be more different.



Everyone and his grandmother (quite literally) owns a computer. They're cheap, even comparable to modern consoles. (A Mac Mini costs less than a PS3.) They're easier to use and set up. They have USB. All of the old reasons that people bought consoles - cost, ease of use, interface - hardly apply anymore. This leads to the rather unsurprising trends of modern consoles:

• Great expense (the full Xbox 360 is $400 and Microsoft still loses tons of money on each one sold)
• Architectural similarity to PCs (NVidia graphics cards, etc)
• Massive porting

The porting is quite a threat to consoles. Games are released for multiple consoles (or even all consoles of a given generation), and more importantly, console games are ported to PC. You show me a successful Xbox game, and I'll show you its PC port that runs faster and at a higher resolution. So aren't consoles going to eventually die out as people realize the superiority of the modern PC? (Note: this is the most inflammatory thing you could ever say, this side of a comment on the genetic inferiority of the negro. I am only using it rhetorically.)

The inherent strength of the console is its uniformity. If you buy a given console, like a SNES, it'll be the same as all the other SNESes in the country, and will be able to play any licensed SNES game, guaranteed. This certainly cannot be said of the PC, and is one of the reasons that stuff like controllers haven't caught on in the same way; a PC is only guaranteed to have a keyboard and mouse (or trackpad or something). This brings me back to the issue of interface.

I think that Nintendo is going to revolutionize the gaming industry again, just like they did 20 years ago. This time, it will be with the Wii (home consoles) and the Nintendo DS (handhelds). The primary innovation of the Wii is its motion-sensing controller. If it works as well as they say it does (last thing Nintendo needs is to release a lemon), it will revolutionize console gaming. It will add an entire new level to the console interface - swing a sword, aim a gun, steer a car. It's all much more visceral, and well suited to group gaming. Because of console conformity, all Wii games will be designed from the ground up to use this interface; companies don't have to make calculated risks by hoping that people will buy a special peripheral (at added cost) with the game, and games won't have to be ported and retrofitted to work around the differences/limitations of the new controller, as the focus is on original Wii games.

So where are the other consoles headed? Possibly due to a lack of better ideas, Microsoft and Sony are screwing themselves by trying to make their consoles more like home computers. In particular, there's a focus on making a "multimedia center" out of the console - DVD player, music, things like that. In other words, they want to make a console that performs functions that are already performed, better, by things I already own. There's also focus on internet multiplayer gaming (e.g. Xbox Live), which is clearly the purview of PCs. These systems are also much more upgradeable; even upon release, there's a good/expensive/premium/cocaine version, and a bad/cheap/economy/crack version for $100 less or so. This is a disturbing departure from the console conformity which has been the rule for years and years.

The Wii is the only console offering unique features provided by nothing else. While the Wii game library could hypothetically be ported to the PC (with a special motion-sensing USB controller), this isn't likely to happen on a large scale, because of the Wii's inexpensiveness and simplicity. By being the only company to produce something that isn't an isomorph of a PC, Nintendo will reinvent the entire gaming industry, which has been reduced to a spinning miasma of low-quality ports, banal first person shooters, and safe sequels.

Unless they do something stupid.

Boys Beware

An eccentric friend of mine sent me this video. Do you realize that Alan Turing could still be alive today if it weren't for this sort of misinformation and attitude?