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clearly is not the same when it comes to @Rodvik in #SecondLife
As reported by Wagner James Au on New World Notes (and probably other places), Kim Salzer has left Linden Lab for greener pastures elsewhere. As the former Head of Marketing & Product at Linden Lab, Kim found quickly that a Metaverse is a wholly different platform than a video game. This is a valuable lesson that can be learned by Rodvik and Will Wright who remain at Linden Lab in official capacity and guide the vision of Second Life ongoing.
The problem is that the vision lacks actual vision.
Rodvik Humble at SLCC | You can only bullshit your way for so long.
I'm not as enthusiastic about the direction that Kim Salzer was looking to take Linden Lab and subsequently Second Life, in that from the start I had my reservations concerning her appropriateness and understanding of Second Life as a Metaverse construct and not a video game. It was not a stretch of imagination to believe she, along with @Rodvik, was making a left turn with their understanding of Second Life and how to address it going forward.
I expected that she would, coming from Activision/Blizzard and Electronic Arts, see Second Life as just another video game and focus solely on that aspect with her efforts which would, in turn, be expedited by Rodvik who is coming from the same background of video games. After all, they are both veterans of the video game realm, and seeing Second Life with similarities to a video game, they would be more than likely to blanket their approach likewise thinking that if there is a minor similarity with video games, then the entire approach being the same as video games would be most appropriate.
But the fact remains;
Second Life is patently not a video game.
It is not a game... it is a Virtual World. Wikipedia defines a Virtual World as an online community that takes the form of a computer-based simulated environment through which users can interact with one another and use and create objects. – APixelLife4me
Why is this such a hard concept to understand at the executive level of Linden Lab? First we see Mark Kingdon completely ignoring the community and trying to make Second Life about Enterprise Solutions, and now we see Rod Humble trying to treat it like a video game. We may never truly have insight as to what was really going on in Philip Rosedale's vision, but I'll bet the virtual house that there are people in the existing community who can come damned close to revealing that vision with clarity.
I find it nothing short of irony that a high profile woman working for Linden Lab, the makers of a vast virtual environment, would cite "the regular commute to the company's San Francisco office from Los Angeles" as the defining factor for her moving on. Second Life being, among many other things, a platform which by its very nature facilitates in-world communication and telecommuting opportunity for business use. It becomes, yet again, a moment where we take pause and wonder if they truly understand the nature of the product as a platform for content and communication. If anything, her stated reason for departure glosses over the fact that her tenure at Linden Lab enacted some of the most draconian policies which directly led to some of the worst PR disasters I've seen, PR disasters which could have been trivial to avoid on the whole, yet were not only facilitated but actively fostered to fruition with the blessing of Rod Humble.
Ginny Business Center – Because it has nothing to do with machinima, Meeroos or Vampires.
After all, there is countless business ongoing within the virtual environment itself, and even regular business meetings and such for marketing and other business use, yet the memo hasn't reached Linden Lab, as we see by their action… or more appropriately their inaction. This constitutes a systemic failure on the part of Linden Lab to immerse themselves in their own product and environment, and thus become the champion example of the benefits of their technology. If the company isn't willing to seriously utilize their own product, then it becomes little surprise that no other company in the real world would want to either.
Focusing on the in-world games such as Meeroos, reopening the development of further gaming aspects to facilitate further gaming development in-world, and focusing on the A.I. framework to facilitate the equivalent of NPCs and unintelligent "bots" disturbs me because it shows a contradiction in understanding for what truly matters with Second Life. It was the blatant position of stonewalling and ignoring the community that led to a very public community effort to raise the money and hire Qarl to code Parametric Mesh Deformer, in light of policies that likely stemmed from Kim Salzer.
As I've said before, that's the sort of colossal PR screw-up that is grounds for termination, and company-wide re-evaluation of priorities. Again, I've been on that evaluation end of a company a number of times and have made those observations and decisions. It's not easy, but it's far better than the alternative of consistently running a company into the ground and causing widespread public damages to your own brand. Doomsayer or not, I still called it in advance – she didn't stick around too long and her misunderstanding of what Second Life actually had rendered her nearly incompetent in relation to the job position she held, doing far more damage to the long term image of Linden Lab than we may possibly imagine.
It is the real, breathing and living people that make Second Life what it is. The community are using the platform (because that is what Second Life actually is: A virtual environment platform which is use agnostic) to create a wide range of virtual goods and services, fostering an in-world economy and literally creating most aspects of the virtual environment and not a multi-million dollar design team in-house. So again, I find it counterproductive when I see Linden Lab essentially undermining that community time and again by pillaging the existing ecosystem for "added value" and applying those things to exclusive Premium Accounts or even worse, polarizing the vision of an agnostic system by seeing only ways to facilitate games or machinima.
What good is artistic measure when Linden Endowment for the Arts may as well be defunct – seeing the demise of Shakespeare Theater and Frank Lloyd Wright Museum in-world? What good is having a platform that is suited for immersive education when you aren't intelligent enough to subsidize those educational institutions and indoctrinate the future generation to your technology? Even Apple had enough sense to donate computers and equipment to schools for free or drastically reduced cost for this very same reason, and write it off as a charitable donation.
Where is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Second Life? Where is the Aerospace Museum? Where are the Universities? I'll tell you where – They're rapidly jumping ship and moving over to OpenSim or elsewhere, because Linden Lab essentially screwed them over royally in exchange for cuddling Meeroos and Vampires.
Loyola Marymount University – Coming to an OpenSim near you, thanks to Linden Lab.
It's not a priority… but Meeroos and Machinima are. Being a Vampire is the marketing focus. I'm not saying that Meeroos, machinima and roleplaying vampires aren't important in SecondLife, but they are all things which can be integrated and put to use much better than they are currently presented today – especially not at the expense of cutting the things which have greater importance for breaking the stigma that your platform is nothing more than a video game niche'.
This is what you would expect from a group of people who do not really understand what Second Life is, or that there is a thriving ecosystem of community which the system itself is built for. Instead, it is the sort of myopic maneuvers that you would expect from somebody coming in and seeing only a video game, while surrounding themselves with video game veterans. After all, it is no surprise that the message isn't reaching Linden Lab when they surround themselves with video game "yes-men" and "girl Fridays".
The focus also on machinima is endearing but still heavy handed, as is promoting as an official stance that you can be a Vampire on Marketplace. Again, these are the sorts of attitudes you would only expect from a video game executive mentality, but clearly not from somebody who has a deeper understanding of virtual environments on the whole.
Of course, I cannot mention Marketplace without noting the unbelievable amount of grief content creators receive concerning the usage of marketplace and their own inventory. This content is time and again sabotaged, leaving little recourse for the content creators except to wait it out and manually change their listings in order to compensate. If you want to know what sort of horror this creates, simply ask Avril Korman at @DamnedGoodesign
This isn't a Public Discussion
Furthermore, as James Wagner Au reports,
"Kim was instrumental in implementing a corporate policy that tightly controls information and internal communication within Linden Lab, both between departments, and between Linden Lab staff and the community"
This direction has been extremely clear over the past year and has had wide-reaching detrimental effect. A recent altercation with Oz Linden in the JIRA left me completely taken aback at the shear ignorance of his response, which I know must have stemmed from Kim's own ridiculous policies of tight control. At least, I seriously hope it wasn't the sort of attitude that would come out of his own accord. It was this same asinine approach that led to the string of events concerning Parametric Mesh Deformation as well, and I point the finger clearly back to Kim and Rod for that – because the Linden staff are only taking their marching orders.
One would believe that actually correcting the broken feature you spent years on is a priority.
Essentially, in a JIRA that is designed for discussion, bug and feature reporting/requests, and targeting a demographic of the community which is on average technically savvy and of the highest contributors – their biggest proponents to the world – these are the sort of people you want to have discussions with, and when possible in the safe harbor of the JIRA and in-world, I was informed by Oz Linden that the JIRA was not an open forum of discussion. Even though the discussion was pertaining directly to that particular JIRA and whether or not it still held relevance in light of current roadmap implementations.
What's worse is the dismissive attitude overall for community requests which possibly mean the absolute most to the community and Second Life as a whole. Case in point: Parametric Mesh Deformation, which is a necessity in order to make the much touted Mesh import feature of actual use on a wide scale. Instead of understanding the absolute need for this correction, it was officially dismissed and largely ignored by Linden Lab until such point as the community not only publicly raised the capital independently but went ahead and contracted a former employee of Linden Lab to do the job Linden Lab was unwilling to acknowledge or do.
This, in itself, is absolutely unbelievable. It shows that Kim Salzer (facilitated by management at the highest levels) clearly did not understand the repercussions of her policies in the bigger picture, and more importantly neither did Rodvik Humble. For instance, it would be common sense to actually encourage on-topic discussion in the JIRA and with Linden Lab employees because it is a safe harbor. The JIRA is the first arena of discourse behind relatively closed doors and a first line of defense for addressing issues properly before the most passionate of your own community takes that discussion worldwide and public through social media and blogs – much like you are reading here.
If anything, the very concept of Agile Development is a system of work habit literally designed to handle rapid iteration and changes as they arise. So where was that Agile Development practice when the need arose to focus on Parametric Mesh Deformation? Better yet, where is that Agile Development prioritization when Linden Lab is writing out their roadmap going forward? Is it not disturbing that in the process of rapid development by Linden Lab, major features and components of the system overall are left in the wake indefinitely?
Whatever happened to finishing what you start? Where are the mirrors, what happened to Dazzle and the ability to skin the viewer, what happened to the other half of Windlight technology itself? What happened to making Windlight Settings an in-world asset tradable and able to be used by double clicking the asset in inventory?
"They are not on the short term roadmap" is the common answer. But more importantly, they aren't even on the long-term roadmap either. Windlight being a system acquired in 2007 and left half dead on arrival for now going on 5 years. Mirrors following suit shortly after, and so too Dazzle. Whatever happened to sincerely blending the Web and 3D together in a seamless manner using a layer over the 3D Canvas like you do with the login screen itself? Blending virtual worlds with the web has been the dream of the industry since it began, and here we are twenty years later and no closer to realizing that dream on a wide scale*.
* Note: And I don't mean pre-created environments or pseudo-plugins that cram a full viewer into a web page.
Viewer 2 shows full well what having half-baked priorities and implementation looks like. We have an address bar at the top and no UX logical connection for why it should be there – even though I've clearly and concisely explained why it should be there if it were to be finished properly.
Built-in Web Browser Uses New Canvas Rendering Layer [VWR-22977]
If public perception from Linden employees are such a concern, simply institute a policy which states the following:
The views and opinions of Linden Lab staff do not necessarily reflect or represent the attitudes or opinions of Linden Lab as a company and should be taken as personal opinion only.
Then you remove the gag order from your employees and allow them to converse with the community freely, as long as their opinions and expressions are respectful and do not incite. When you allow the community and your employees to speak freely, you'll find that there are grievances and issues which should definitely be looked into, and you'll find that the sentiments of the community may also reflect the sentiments of your staff. If you want true feedback and direction, you have to be willing to face when you are screwing up and make changes for the betterment of all. The alternative is surrounding yourself with people who will only serve to lie to your face and tell you everything is under control when the empire is crumbling down around you.
This is why the community itself gets it right, even when Linden Lab continues to get it so wrong. The community isn't afraid they'll be fired from Linden Lab for telling it as it is, but those employees are. You'll never likely hear a more honest evaluation of what Second Life is doing right and more importantly what they are screwing up beyond recognition than from the most prominent members of the community. They speak the raw and unfiltered truth of the situation.
The fact that they are often speaking that unfiltered truth from the confines of OpenSim should be the most telling indication in and of itself.
I'm not the sort of person that will lie straight faced despite knowing full well the situation is rapidly deteriorating or highly likely to have profound negative consequences. I'm also not the sort of person that isn't capable or willing to point out the raw and unfiltered consequences (good or bad) that current actions are likely to have. For that, you'll have to hire people like Kim Salzer, a woman of professional pedigree but no professional experience within the context of a Metaverse. All the professional pedigree in the world didn't make up for the fact that she was wholly unsuited for the position she was offered, nor had any willingness to truly understand that position. No amount of business pedigree made a difference in the ongoing public relations nightmare that has been the status-quo at Linden Lab since 2007.
By all means, not having this hang-up often makes me the messenger of very harsh realities, and there are quite a lot of people who would rather I didn't put these things forward unfiltered. I get called all manner of names from people across the board – but it doesn't phase me in the least. Nor will it phase me – because I continually prove to be correct well in advance despite not being the perpetual ass-kisser. Virtual reality needs a reality check – and I have no problem being one of the messengers, because you're nobody until somebody hates you in the professional world.
I'm more than qualified for that position, too, as a Synthetic Environment SME with well over 15 years of actual, hands-on experience in virtual environments and technology research. There are people more qualified than myself, and I readily admit that. What I will also admit is that those people and myself are the last to be heard in a priority that is horribly skewed in the industry. We aren't the sort of people who are going to tell you only what you want to hear, and in fact are likely to tell you what you don't want to hear (but is highly necessary).
It's time to understand what innovation and creative vision really mean on a wide scale.
The issue here is that the JIRA isn't likely to show up in a Google search for Second Life, but all of those social media posts and blog entries will, in abundance. So one has to ask the obvious question of whether or not Kim and even Rodvik really understand the repercussions of those policies of restriction and how much damage it does to the image of Second Life and Linden Lab in public when enacted. Just like the Internet itself, censorship and restrictive control is treated as "damage" and is routed around in a virtual environment, much to the grand demise of the company trying to enact them. This also applies to IP protection policies in a virtual environment where every single user is capable of creating every part of the world at will. Second Life and Linden Lab owe its existence to the very fact that it is the very users of the virtual environment platform which are wholly responsible for a majority of the in-world content and services.
The best policy Linden Lab could muster on that front was a typical non-solution. Make everyone take a questionnaire about IP policies and swear on their scouts honor they would be honest and uphold those policies.
From day one, the Mesh policies for IP protection were widely violated – even on the Beta grid itself in plain view, and it wasn't a surprise (at least to anyone outside of Linden Lab). It is wholly unenforceable as a solution, and any company thinking they can adequately enforce the public sentiment to the contrary is outright delusional. However, there is an actual workable solution to curb and enforce IP protection that actually becomes beneficial to Linden Lab, real world brands and the content creators in-world simultaneously if they really thought about it.
The underlying point to this is that not only is something like JIRA a public discussion forum, but outright denying that safe harbor for discussion wherein Linden Lab has some expectation of PR damage control in order to push those people out into the open of the Internet in general serves only to create collateral damages. This is a fundamental understanding that one would expect to see from the likes of a high profile Marketing Director at a major corporation. Second Life on the whole is a community driven experience, and absolutely demands public involvement and discussion on all levels. No amount of restrictive policy at Linden Lab is going to turn that tide, and all attempts to do so will end in failure on a grand scale.
Not-So Agile Development
Let me be perfectly clear. Agile Development policies are absolutely not an excuse to make half finished and broken products the official face of your company. Agile Development is a method by which rapid iterations can be worked on and implemented, facilitating rapid solutions and stability in shorter periods of time before making those changes the release candidate or official software release. When you miss that underlying point, you end up adhering to Agile Development even when it means putting out broken products to maintain the development roadmap timeline.
New features do not become release candidates until such time as within rapid development they become stabilized and proven within a high degree of stability across many use cases. To push them out half finished and widely broken, and call them the official viewer of your company is disastrous at best and lazy coding at worst. There is absolutely no sane person that will today state that the Official Second Life Viewer is remotely a stabile or finished product worthy of being the public face of Linden Lab to new users or existing veterans.
Again, I will not fault the actual staff at Linden Lab for this, because they are taking their marching orders from management and higher up. They are only doing their job, even when that job includes severely breaking the community and power that the wonderful platform they design and implement has.
Copy + Paste Premium
Absolutely, unequivocally no.
If I had a rolled up newspaper, I'd be swatting the ever-loving hell out of Rodvik right now and yelling "Bad CEO! Baaaad!"
At the very least, squirting him with a spray bottle.
Premium accounts serve professionals in Second Life more than consumer demographics. It should be billed as a Second Life Pro account, and not as something that desperately searches in vain and steals existing community structure for added value to appeal to consumer usage that has all of those added value available to them without the monthly surcharge.
You cannot poach the existing offerings of the community and offer them as added value for a Premium Account. There is absolutely nothing of added value in rehashing existing offerings from your community and calling them exclusive access only. If anything, you are deliberately polarizing the community and alienating your biggest supporters.
The community does not need exclusive sandboxes, they do not need Linden Homes, they do not need "exclusive" gifts, and they do not need a company so narrow-minded as to deliberately undermine existing content and practices within their own community for short term expectation of profitability – a result of which is one of the many reasons OpenSim exists. Targeting new users with this premium content is little more than a slap to the face of the existing ecosystem, and functions on the premise of the P.T. Barnum business model (sucker born every minute). Linden Lab is literally preying on the fact that new users simply don't know that a majority of those "added value" offerings exist in abundance without a premium account, and many times far better in every way imaginable.
Contrary to popular belief, Linden Lab does not have the luxury of continually driving their product into the ground without repercussion, nor do they have the luxury of playing the P.T. Barnum vision statement.
When new users who buy premium see this, they feel like Linden Lab ripped them off.
There is a healthy land rental market, there is a healthy custom homes market whereby the entire infrastructure facilitates the sales of those custom homes and rewards content creators. There are sandboxes maintained by the community – and if anything, a "premium" sandbox offering only makes sense to professionals in the very slightest of sense, only because one of the major real incentives for having a Premium Account is the ability to actually buy your own land, defeating the point of premium sandboxes. There are countless amounts of merchandise available to free members, so offering "exclusive premium" gifts is insulting to that foundation and misses the greater value of the community by ignoring what already exists and subsequently playing favorites with content creators.
Instead of poaching on the existing ecosystem and delivering it to the consumers, why not instead promote Premium Accounts as Second Life Professional accounts, showcase the existing content, land rental, and marketplace in conjunction with Second Life Verified Professional Accounts – which in turn encourages more users to pay for Second Life Professional accounts to become high visibility content creators to the consumers? Encourage it from the foundation of the Second Life ecosystem, and not the tip of the iceberg. In this manner, you are rewarding existing producers of content across the entire virtual environment, collaborating with them to foster a balanced and sustainable prosumer ecosystem instead of sabotaging it.
:: The most important paragraph in the virtual universe ::
What can you offer as Added Value and incentive for purchasing the Second Life Professional account upgrade? It makes you a Verified Professional in Second Life, and eligible to participate in submissions for Real World Brand Names coming to Linden Lab looking for virtual product representation for marketing purposes. Those Professional accounts then get to include those brand names within their own in-world store for added revenue and notoriety (Verified Vendors on Marketplace), Linden Lab benefits from increased volume of legitimately branded sales through transaction fees, and the Real World Brand Name receives innovative and brilliant viral marketing in-world for a fraction of the cost and orders of magnitude of meaningful longevity. This also solves the problem with supply and demand for real world branded IP in the virtual world in that verified professionals will facilitate the supply aspect of those brands readily, thus reducing the consumer need for illegitimate products.
For somebody who is largely ignored at Linden Lab, I seem to have just succinctly and brilliantly outlined a wide-scale marketing strategy that Kim Salzer couldn't accomplish in all the time she worked at Linden Lab, despite her video game marketing pedigree.
The funniest part about all of this is, it will never be considered by Linden Lab. They will continue looking in all the wrong places for somebody capable of coming to the same conclusion as above, and they are likely to continue finding more Kim Salzers instead.
I wish with all my heart this wasn't the case, I really do.
The sad alternative is that at literally every possible level of engagement, Premium Membership not only misses the point and deliberately undermines the community, but it is the very example of misunderstanding the ecosystem that is a virtual environment such as Second Life. It is the expectation of a video game professional in a world where only 10% similarity to a video game exists, and applying video game management practices as though they constitute 100% of the very different ecosystem you are working within.
What we have is excellent vision and perilous execution at best.
The Second Life X-Factor
As I said shortly after Kim Salzer was hired, if you cannot recognize the potential and the x-factor that a virtual environment like Second Life offers within your first week on the job, you shouldn't be doing that job, let alone making sweeping policies concerning it.
Clearly this was the case, and she didn't last long – regardless of whatever politically correct reason she gave as her reason for leaving. It's in her nature to act as a marketing person, spinning a bad situation into something else, but for some reason she could not foresee nor adequately react to the myriad of situations which arose as Director of Marketing and Product for Linden Lab. see also: the most important paragraph in the virtual world above
The job of Marketing Director means it's your job to reverse corporate ghost towns like this.
It's very simple:
Facilitate and expedite the existing prosumer community to be paired with real world brands wishing to utilize your platform for long term marketing potential and ROI on behalf of the prosumers, Linden Lab and those brands.
This has been the missing factor since 2006 and is highly likely the underpinning cause to the hype bubble and subsequent collapse of the Second Life brand in relation to real world brand proliferation.
All of the infrastructure is in place today, with the exception of official policy and vision from Linden Lab to utilize it all to their advantage. Worse still is the misunderstanding of what exactly the ultimate power for the Marketplace itself holds in terms of long term ROI strategies. If you want innovation and something new, look no further than this as it brings to the table something fresh, new and massive potential for rethinking the way we approach virtual world marketing and community based producers and consumers. It also serves as a solid method by which to harness the creative power of the community, while helping to curb IP infringement on a wider scale, all while bringing in a successful revenue stream to Linden Lab and the in-world content creators.
What's not to love about this?
At the base of it all, Linden Lab should first make it a point to realize that even "free" users of Second Life are highly valued customers. The free users outnumber the premium users by far, and they are providing a massive secondary revenue structure in their purchasing habits, making them one of the most valued commodities in the virtual world, even though they are routinely treated as the very last priority.
Instead, Linden Lab focuses on direct revenue streams at the expense of lucrative secondary streams, which in turn serves only to fracture the entire ecosystem overall. This needs to stop if they ever want to return Second Life to another Golden Age of virtual environments. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory should not become the battle cry of Linden Lab.
The Virtual Light At The End of the Prim Tunnel
I know full well that I come down hard on Linden Lab and many other virtual environment companies. I offer a cynical and harsh reality check to current situations. However, keep in mind that while the things that I'm pointing out are those that are the negative sides of things, they are also alluding to the positive side as well when you read between the lines.
What I do not want to see is blatant and ignorant decisions which harm this company and the community. What I do not want to see are all of the educators leaving Second Life for other virtual environments, what I do not want to see are perfectly good content infrastructures squandered for short term gains.
I want nothing more than to see Second Life and Linden Lab return to their rightful position as the darling of virtual worlds, and I want nothing more than to see them rise again and taken seriously on a worldwide basis. Most importantly, I want the CEO of Linden Lab to succeed at doing all of this.
I want to see Second Life as a viable platform for Education, The Arts, Collaboration, Business and Real World Brand Marketing. I want to see this once amazing ecosystem of prosumers return to their golden age and find balance once again in conjunction with understanding at Linden Lab. I want to see Linden Lab actively promote and utilize their own system in the myriad of ways that I know it can be used for, to be the champion of their own technology on an ongoing basis.
What I want to see is that Linden Lab can not only work hand in hand with OpenSim and the greater community as part of the greater Metaverse, but that doing so would be the most beneficial thing possible. What I want to see is that the spirit of open communication and collaboration be restored between Linden Lab and the community which continually helps to build this wonderful and awe inspiring environment. What I want to see is that Linden Lab understands that doing all of this will give them everything, while ignoring it will leave them with nothing.
What I want to see more than anything, is the future of Second Life.


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Beluga Messages Select Groups of Friends in Near-Real-Time [Downloads]
Android/iOS: Somewhere between unwieldy chat rooms and focused-but-limited SMS must lie a way to tell a group—co-workers, friends, roommates—that you're stopping at India Gate, if anyone wants takeout. Beluga is that middle ground. You might also call it BlackBerry Messenger for the iOS/Android crowd.
Yes, Beluga is only really useful if the people you intend to message are using it as well—but that's kind of the point. Rather than filter a particular group through the same crowded channels of your inbox or SMS app, Beluga lets you set up "Pods" in which you and a group of folks can quickly fling out messages that everyone can see. They arrive fairly quickly, if not instantly, and if you want to embed your location or a picture with your message, that's easy, too. There's early support for setting up Events, too—but only the time for now, with the location of said event to arrive later.
Beluga is a free app for iOS and Android devices. You can sign in quickly using Facebook, or set up a separate Beluga account. Since Beluga has just been acquired by Facebook, that latter option might drop off.

subset: commoncrawl


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Aug 24, 2011
Is Obama losing black voters?
In today's Huffington Post, Rebecca Carroll looks at Pres. Obama's sagging support in the black community. I'm quoted toward the end:
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Thung Por Thueng at Rai Thammachai It is considered as the first field of Por Tuang of Tak Fa District, Nakhon Sawan Province, with an area of more than 40 rai in which this flower will bloom in winter. From November to January, the highlight is the view terrace that can see the Por Thuong field in 360 degrees.
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"I don't understand the partisan response to the killing of Trayvon Martin.
Yes, many liberals are upset that a child was gunned down with impunity. (It's been more than a month now.) But they are not upset for partisan reasons or for "liberal" reasons or for Democratic Party reasons.
They are upset because a child was gunned down with impunity. That ought to upset conservatives too. I appreciate that the Republican Party ca. 2012 has a knee-jerk opposition to anything that President Barack Obama says, but just because Obama is saddened by the senseless killing of a child shouldn't have to mean that Republicans should reflexively take the other side.
This shouldn't be partisan. Those saddened and angered by the killing of Trayvon Martin are not fighting a partisan battle. This child's death does not advance some liberal or Democratic agenda. Those of us upset by this are not saying, "A child has been shot and therefore we must restore parity between taxes on labor and taxes on capital gains." We are saying that it is horrifying and wrong that a child can be gunned down with impunity.
There is no reason that conservatives shouldn't completely agree with that.
Well, there's one reason, but there's no decent, moral, legitimate reason." (Source)
I wonder what Fred is thinking of. I bet he and I are thinking of the same thing.
Finally, have you ever heard those wingnuts complain about the liberals and leftist teaching their kids in America's colleges and universities? It has gotten so bad that they have actually started creating their own personal wingnut institutions of higher learning complete with their own wacky curriculum.
Anyway, I am here to tell you that America's colleges and universities are full of right wingnuts and racist. Just because you are smart enough to get into college, doesn't mean that you can't carry around a certain amount og ignorance with you.
I give you exhibit A, the editorial board of the University of Texas student newspaper.
"The University of Texas' student newspaper, The Daily Texan, was accused of being racially insensitive when it printed a bias cartoon on Tuesday that belittled the
The cartoon depicts a Mother reading a book to her child and referring to Martin as a "colored boy," with an underline and three arrows pointing to it for added emphasis. The title of the book also labels the coverage of the Martin case as "yellow journalism," which is journalism that is sensational or crudely exaggerated.
The editorial board of the paper — who first stood behind the cartoon's artist — has now apologized for printing the controversial cartoon. The artist has also been given the boot, reports the Los Angeles Times.
When word began to spread about the racially insensitive cartoon, tempers began flaring. How could The Daily Texan sanction such blatant racism and make light of an unarmed teen being brutally shot to death by a trigger man who felt threatened by a youth who was minding his own business?
Working on a school paper should offer lasting teachable moments, but a few people made some very poor judgements, and the editorial staff are now being called on the carpet. Seemingly backing up their cartoonist, the paper initially printed the following statement late Tuesday evening:
The views expressed in the cartoon are not those of the editorial board. They are those of the artist. It is the policy of the editorial board to publish the views of our columnists and cartoonists, even if we disagree with them.Not good enough.
The media soon got wind of the blatantly racist cartoon. Its artist, Stephanie Eisner, who also spelled Trayvon's name incorrectly, got lambasted as a racist about her tongue-in-cheek depiction of the Martin case. Eisner put forth the following apology on the day after the cartoon was published:
I apologize for what was in hindsight an ambiguous cartoon related to the Trayvon Martin shooting. I intended to contribute thoughtful commentary on the media coverage of the incident, however this goal fell flat. I would like to make it explicitly clear that I am not a racist, and that I am personally appalled by the killing of Trayvon Martin. I regret any pain the wording or message of my cartoon may have caused." [Source]"Ambiguous cartoon"? OK, we get it. The Trayvon Martin killing has not made A-merry-cans collectively look and see injustice. It has caused folks who view certain people in society as less than human to double down and defend their position and a child's killer.


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Export 57 results:
Author [ Title] Type Year Filters: Author is Antonio Tristán-Vega [Clear All Filters]
"AMURA with standard single-shell acquisition can detect changes beyond the Diffusion Tensor: a migraine clinical study", ISMRM 28th annual meeting, vol. 4549, 2020.
, "About the background distribution in MR data: a local variance study", Magnetic resonance imaging, vol. 28, no. 5: Elsevier, pp. 739–752, 2010.
, "Adjugate Diffusion Tensors for Geodesic Tractography in White Matter", Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision, vol. 54, pp. 1–14, 2015.
, "Alternative Diffusion Anisotropy Metric from Reduced MRI Acquisitions", Computational Diffusion MRI: Springer, Cham, pp. 13–24, 2020.
, "Anisotropic LMMSE denoising of MRI based on statistical tissue models", Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), 2012 9th IEEE International Symposium on: IEEE, pp. 1519–1522, 2012.
, "Anisotropic diffusion filtering for correlated multiple-coil MRI", Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2013 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE: IEEE, pp. 2956–2959, 2013.
, "Apparent propagator anisotropy from single-shell diffusion MRI acquisitions", Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, vol. 85, issue 5, pp. 2869-2881, 2021.
, "Bias of least squares approaches for diffusion tensor estimation from array coils in DT–MRI", Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention–MICCAI 2009: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 919–926, 2009.
, "On the Blurring of the Funk–Radon Transform in Q–Ball Imaging", Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention–MICCAI 2009: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 415–422, 2009.
, "Comments on: A locally constrained radial basis function for registration and warping of images", Pattern Recognition Letters, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 586 - 589, 2011.
, "Compressed UAV sensing for flood monitoring by solving the continuous travelling salesman problem over hyperspectral maps", Remote Sensing of the Ocean, Sea Ice, Coastal Waters, and Large Water Regions 2018: International Society for Optics and Photonics, 2018.
, "DWI acquisition schemes and diffusion tensor estimation: a simulation-based study", Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2010 Annual International Conference of the IEEE: IEEE, pp. 3317–3320, 2010.
, "DWI filtering using joint information for DTI and HARDI", Medical Image Analysis, vol. 14, no. 2: Elsevier, pp. 205–218, 2010.
, "Deblurring of probabilistic ODFs in quantitative diffusion MRI", Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), 2012 9th IEEE International Symposium on: IEEE, pp. 932–935, 2012.
, "Design and construction of a realistic DWI phantom for filtering performance assessment", Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention–MICCAI 2009: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 951–958, 2009.
, "Effective noise estimation and filtering from correlated multiple-coil MR data", Magnetic resonance imaging, vol. 31, no. 2: Elsevier, pp. 272–285, 2013.
, "Efficient and Robust Image Restoration Using Multiple-Feature L2-Relaxed Sparse Analysis Priors", IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol. 24, pp. 5046-5059, Dec, 2015.
, "Efficient and accurate EAP imaging from multi-shell dMRI with Micro-Structure adaptive convolution kernels and dual Fourier Integral Transforms (MiSFIT)", NeuroImage, vol. 227, pp. 117616, 2021.
, "Efficient and robust nonlocal means denoising of MR data based on salient features matching", Computer methods and programs in biomedicine, vol. 105, no. 2: Elsevier, pp. 131–144, 2012.
, "Estimation of fiber orientation probability density functions in high angular resolution diffusion imaging", NeuroImage, vol. 47, no. 2: Elsevier, pp. 638–650, 2009.
, "Fuzzy regularisation of deformation fields in image registration", Proc. IPMU, pp. 1223–30, 2008.
, "Homeomorphic Geometrical Transform for Collision Response in Surgical Simulation", Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 433–440, 2013.
, "Impact of MR Acquisition Parameters on DTI Scalar Indexes: A Tractography Based Approach", PLoS ONE, vol. 10, pp. e0137905, 2015.
, "Improving GRAPPA reconstruction by frequency discrimination in the ACS lines", International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery, vol. 10, issue 10, pp. 1699-1710, 2015.
, "Influence of noise correlation in multiple-coil statistical models with sum of squares reconstruction", Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, vol. 67, no. 2: Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company, pp. 580–585, 2012.


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- The coating process shall cause no injury to the glass surface which would cause rejection of the optical element under other applicable specification. Any optical element which has met the requirements of other applicable specifications prior to coating shall not be rejected after coating because of fine hair lines or other defects in such optical element which are made more visible by the coating.
- The coating shall have negligible absorption of visible light.
The coated element shall reflect from the front surface 32 plus or minus *3% of the total incident light in the visible region as defined by a Viscor filter, when using an incandescent tungsten filament lamp light source.
The coated element shall transmit 68 plus or minus *3% of the total incident light of above type in the visible region defined by the Viscor filter.
Test: The tacky surface of cellulose tape shall be carefully placed in contact with a portion of the coated surface and firmly rubber against that surface. It shall then be quickly removed with a snap action that exerts the greatest possible stripping action on the mirror surface.
- The coated optical element shall be carefully washed first in a solution consisting of one (1) ounce of sulphated alcohol, one (1) ounce 15 Baume normal amomonium hydroxide, and one (1) gallon water; then cleaned in acetone or grain alcohol and dried with lens tissue or soft cloth.
- A thick past of U.S.P. precipitated chalk and water shall be applied to the coating and allowed to dry, and then wiped off with a soft cloth.
- A pad of clean dry cheese cloth (previously laundered) 3/8 inch in diameter, 1/2 inch thick, bearing with a force of one pound on the coating shall be rubbed across the coated element in any direction 150 times.
Note: During the above tests, care should be exercised to prevent contaminating abrasives contacting the coated surface causing slight sleeks.
- The coated element shall be placed in a thermostatically controlled cabinet with a salt atmosphere at a temperature of 95° F. plus or minus 4° F for 48 hours. The salt atmosphere shall be obtained by allowing a stream of air bubble through a salt solution containing about 1 1/2 pounds of sodium chloride per cubic foot of water.
- The coated element shall be placed in a thermostatically controlled humidity cabinet with an atmosphere of at least 95% relative humidity and at a temperature of 120° F. plus or minus 4° F. for a continuous period of 24 hours.
A drop (0.05 milliliter) of distilled water shall be permitted to dry at room temperature on the coated surface and the coated surface shall then be cleaned with acetone or grain alcohol.
* This production tolerance can be reduced for special applications where closer tolerances are required.


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While there's a lot your veterinarian can determine from a physical exam… there are also certain pieces of information about your pet's health that can only be determined through diagnostic testing.
For that reason, diagnostic tests may be recommended for both well pets, and for pets who are ill.
What are diagnostic tests used for?
For ill pets, diagnostic tests can help get to the root of the problem more quickly — and thus, get your pet treated and back to normal health faster and more efficiently.
The thing about sick pets is, they often have "non-specific" symptoms. That means that something like vomiting could be caused by dozens of different factors, including: eating something that upset their stomach, eating something poisonous, a parasite, an infection, a hormonal condition, or a problem with the liver or kidneys… just to name a few.
In that case, certain diagnostic tests can help determine exactly what's causing the vomiting, so that it can be treated appropriately and your pet can start to feel better!
Why does my pet need diagnostic tests if they're not sick?
While diagnostic tests are often crucial when caring for a sick pet… they can also be very valuable in keeping your dog or cat healthy for the long-term.
Read more about Wellness Testing, and how it helps your pet.
Which diagnostic tests does my dog or cat need?
This depends on your pet's breed, age, medical history, and any findings from their physical exam.
The most common tests include…
A fecal exam
This test is performed very commonly — both for sick pets, and for well pets as part of their routine health checks (since certain parasites can affect humans, especially children, as well as pets).
Bloodwork can be basic or extensive, and can check for many things, including…
- Heartworm infections - this parasite can damage your pet's heart, and even be fatal to your pet; and unfortunately, it's very common here in Panama City
- Blood cell counts, to look for signs of infection, inflammation, anemia, or other blood disorders
- Blood sugar
- Electrolyte levels
- Organ functions, including the liver, kidneys, and pancreas
- Hormones such as thyroid or cortisol levels
- Cholesterol and triglycerides
- Certain infectious diseases, such as feline leukemia virus, FIV, Lyme disease, and other infections carried by ticks
As you can imagine, bloodwork is an important part of checking for many different diseases and disorders.
Urine analysis
A urine analysis may be recommended for your dog or cat if they're unwell, or even as part of a general health check. It gives information about the health of the kidneys and urinary tract, as well as certain hormonal conditions.
Skin and ear tests
Skin and ear problems are one of the most common health complaints we see at Parkway Animal Hospital. Many are related to food or environmental allergies, but there are lots of other causes, too.
Taking a swab or light scrape of the affected area, and then looking at it under a microscope, can help your veterinarian come to a diagnosis more quickly, and determine the best, most effective treatment.
X-rays and ultrasound
Radiographs, or x-rays, give a picture of what's going on inside the body, and they're often recommended in cases of illness or injury (such as severe vomiting, or broken bones). But, they may also be recommended at a checkup for your senior pet.
The same is true for an ultrasound, which helps us look at the abdomen or the heart… or even monitor puppies or kittens during a pregnancy.
Infectious disease testing
There are special tests that may be recommended if your pet isn't feeling well. Common examples include the test for Parvovirus infection in puppies, as well as a test for diseases carried by ticks.
Other tests
Due to the variety of different medical conditions that occur in pets, we can't cover every possible diagnostic test here. But, here are two more that are fairly common…
- Bacterial culture - This test helps to determine which antibiotic is most effective for infections, and to prevent antibiotic resistance. It's most commonly used for urinary tract infections.
- Fine needle aspirates and biopsies - These tests involve taking a sample of a growth, lump, or mass. Then, the sample is evaluated under a microscope to help make a diagnosis and determine treatment.
How long does diagnostic testing take?
In some cases, you'll get results during your visit. This is true for many routine tests.
In other cases, such as with bacterial cultures and biopsies, samples often need to be sent to an outside laboratory and it may take several days before results are available.
If there's any question about the waiting time, just ask us! We'll let you know what to expect.
What's next?
We're here as your partners in keeping your furry family member happy and healthy!
So, if you'd like to learn more about which tests they may need, give us a call at 850-763-8387.


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WTSH Interviews
Jaike Stambach || The History of Colour TV
Starting out as a conceptual audio-visual project, The History of Colour TV was created by Jaike Stambach in early 2010. After relocating to Berlin and releasing a string of cassette-only experimental EPs and videos, the project soon evolved into a full band line-up. The music underwent a slow but radical change, gradually incorporating dark, dreamy pop and abrasive electronic soundscapes with a new focus solidly anchored in the song format, the band released the Colour TV EP in 2011, its fusion of "majestic pop melodies and rivet gun industrial swathes" (Louder Than Bombs) being the first manifestation of the sound and style the History of Colour TV have been exploring since.
The History of Colour TV began 2014 with a newly finished second album, When Shapes of Spilt Blood Spelt Love, one year after releasing their debut Emerald Cures Chic Ills on Saint Marie Records (US). Voluntarily adhering to a more stripped down approach to production, the band nonetheless retain the sonic density of their previous releases. Working predominantly in Berlin, with additional elements tracked in France and the U.S., the album was recorded in 30 days and nights. In keeping with the band's typical work method, it was self recorded and produced with minimal outside intervention.
It would be an understatement to say WTSH adores THOCTV. Jaike Stambach, the mastermind behind the project, was kind enough to answer a few questions for WTSH, the content of which you can find below.
The History of Colour TV began 2014 with a newly finished second album, When Shapes of Spilt Blood Spelt Love, one year after releasing their debut Emerald Cures Chic Ills on Saint Marie Records (US). Voluntarily adhering to a more stripped down approach to production, the band nonetheless retain the sonic density of their previous releases. Working predominantly in Berlin, with additional elements tracked in France and the U.S., the album was recorded in 30 days and nights. In keeping with the band's typical work method, it was self recorded and produced with minimal outside intervention.
It would be an understatement to say WTSH adores THOCTV. Jaike Stambach, the mastermind behind the project, was kind enough to answer a few questions for WTSH, the content of which you can find below.
Somehow I've only recently learned that
the now-defunct Safeashome, a band I remember well from the late 2000s, was
actually your project. Listening back now, it's so obviously you. Can you
explain the transition from Safeashome to The History of Colour TV, your
current project?
was a band I formed whilst living in Paris. We were active until 2009, and then
split just before I made a move from Paris to Berlin and everyone in the band
kind of started other stuff. Any continuity in style between the two bands was unintentional.
Initially Colour TV was a very different sounding project, but I can see how
you could connect the two now.
The cover art for THOCTV's debut LP (Emerald Cures Chic Ills) was easily my
absolute favorite album cover of 2013, and the art for the new record is excellent, as well. Who's the artist?
The artist is
Stefanie Walk,
with whom we have collaborated with for all our artwork since the Badnite
single. She's a
fantastically talented photographer and painter, has a great sense of colour
and depth, and a great eye for noticing random, chance interactions between
things in everyday situations. Working on these two album covers was a very
satisfying experience. Both were the result of avoiding Photoshop and
experimenting with sculpture, light and photography, in that order. I see them
as an integral part of each album and its music, there isn't one without the
THOCTV has just released its sophomore
LP, When Shapes of Spilt Blood Spelt Love.
I'm curious about the title; I hate when people ask artists about their album
titles so I apologize in advance, but this one is interesting to me. Any story
or particular meaning there?
Somewhere I
wrote down a slightly different version of that phrase, a while ago, before the
album was ever started. It came back to me during the making of the record, and
in its new form it was a perfect fit, it completely made sense. It's very
ominous, although it's in past tense. It seemed inevitable that the album would
have that title, even though it was met with some resistance initially. You can
interpret its meaning in different ways, but like Emerald it seems to announce a story of some kind, and it happened
to weave the various semantic elements of the album together into one phrase.
I love both of THOCTV records equally,
but stylistically they are quite different. Emerald Cures Chic Ills was a very
synth-based record; it was unnerving, gritty and sometimes even abrasive. The
new LP seems much more guitar driven, the edges smoother. Why the change?
It's part
choice, and part a result of the equipment and approach to recording we used. Emerald was consciously a very processed
sounding record, very electronic, with lots of layers of sound. There was a
feeling that the next one could be a little more open and organic, and the
approach to recording was a reflection of that. Although it ended up being a
lot more mellow than I predicted. A significant part of it was recorded in a
bigger space, an actual studio in Berlin, as opposed to doing it all in rehearsal
rooms and apartment spaces.
What's your gear set up for this record?
Which synths and guitars are you working with and why?
The guitars
are either Jazzmasters or Jaguars, and a couple of different basses,
semi-hollow and solid bodies. The reason for using those particular guitars is
mainly because they're the ones we have…
But each one is slightly different, with a couple of modifications here
and there, and those individualities sometimes influence the direction a piece
of music might go in when being written. There's five or six alternate guitar
tunings across the record, and each song uses one or the other, so those also become
an important part of the overall texture. The synths are a Korg Polysix and a Yamaha DX7, with some software-based synths
in there as well.
The new LP also features more emphasis on
lyrical content and vocal clarity than in your previous work. Was that a
conscious choice or a natural evolution for you at that time? The lyrics on the
new one are brilliant, by the way.
Oh thanks a
lot. Well the fact that the record is less
densely layered opened up some space in the mix for the vocals, but again it
wasn't really a choice that was made before starting the album. The tracks are
a bit more song-based than the first record, so I suppose it was natural that the
vocals would end up a bit more to the fore. The decision to include printed lyrics
with the record for the first time was a very conscious decision though; it's a
complete part of the artistic statement. It makes complete sense for me on a
conceptual level with this album, whereas on our previous releases it really wouldn't
make sense to be able to read the lyrics separately from listening the songs.
For this record did you generally write
lyrics first and sculpt the music around them, or did the melodies come first
and the lyrics later? Or is the process completely different every time?
It can vary,
but generally the music comes first. The lyrics sometime change the length or
structure of a song, but there's pretty much always some music there to begin
Even the though 2 LPs are so different,
do you feel that the nucleus of what you're trying to say on both records is
essentially the same? Are you continuously working out a specific philosophy,
one particular demon, a single emotion at the very heart of it all? I see so
many common threads between the two...
I would tend
to say no, but I can see connections once the songs are written and the records
are finished. But I think it's more of a subconscious thing than an attempt to
deal with specific themes and interests in a direct way, which I wouldn't be
any good at any way, in terms of writing. I could never comfortably approach
writing a song with some kind of theme in mind. And it's so beautiful and scary
to see them emerge by themselves, once the song is done.
"Split Blood" is a great single. Planning
any other singles or remixes from When
Shapes of Spilt Blood Spelt Love?
There might
be, but probably not in a physical format, probably just a video or something.
It's rumored that Screen Vinyl Image are working on a remix, according to Jake
of Screen Vinyl Image…
Will there be any chance of a US tour in
the near future?
I really hope
so. We keep getting offers from people and venues across the US. Hopefully at
some point we'll make a list of all the offers, place dots on the map and draw
lines between them, and if the lines all form a nice shape, we can put on a
tour. If all the offers still stand at that point that is…
You mentioned in another conversation
that you recently caught Slowdive live in Paris at la Villette Sonique. What
did you think of the show? How did it feel hearing those songs?
It was an
exciting prospect to go see them there. They were headlining, and the venue it
was taking place at is not so huge and is indoors. Many of the other places
they seemed to be playing were big outdoor festivals, stuck between other
bands, which didn't seem so great. Anyway my expectations before the show were precautionarily
modest, but the band was genuinely amazing. Powerful and dynamic, great control
over their sound. They played some of the key tracks off Pygmalion, and just
rocked them as a five-piece, truly amazing. The atmosphere in the room was really
intense. It was a magical night. I wish I could go back to that.
Are there any other classic
shoegaze/dreampop bands you'd love to see play live or release new music?
There are
some bands I feel it would be nice to have some new music from, but on the
other hand, in their positions, I can't imagine making the same music 20 plus
years later. Any reformation which includes new stuff is either going to be
more of the same, which you'll inevitably compare more or less favorably to
their classic stuff; or will be something completely different, which might be
unsatisfying, although it should be the more exciting prospect. There was that
joke that the new MBV album might be a Drum 'n' bass record. It's a bad example
because in a sense Drum 'n' Bass is also very era-specific style and sound, but
it would have been so cool if their new record had had nothing to do with the
sound they're famous for. It was a good album though. The bands I'd really like
to see reform and play live aren't Shoegaze bands, haha…
It seems like quite a few first
generation shoegaze artists are reappearing after 20 year silences to find that
listeners still very much consider them relevant, not in the least obsolete,
and new music made by these classic bands sounds unexpectedly current. Now some
of them are enjoying the kind of success that really should have been theirs
the first time around. Shoegaze was considered to be a blip on the radar in
terms of genre evolution, but clearly the strength and meaningfulness of it
endures today. Why do you think that is?
It's hard to
say why things retain or regain relevance and others age so badly. There was also a lot of below-par
shoegaze-style music back in the day, which is probably best left in the past. But
I feel the classic, most famous Shoegaze/Dreampop bands, whose music has aged
so well, Slowdive, MBV, Cocteau Twins, etc., all actually sound very different
to one another. What they all have in common is great songwriting and some kind
of bullet-proof authenticity, which are timeless, in a way. On a side note, at
the Slowdive show every song sounded like it should have been a hit single – I
mean that in the best possible way - it was pretty incredible.
What sorts of things are inspiring you
right now? What are you reading, listening to?
Poino's new record
is the album of the year for me so far… Check it out. I keep wanting to say Still Life
Van der Graaf Generator crossed with Fugazi, but don't dare. And you can't
really argue with the new Swans album.
We recently
played shows with Slowness and Yes Deer, both have just released great albums.
I'm still gnawing my way through Maurice Blanchot's œuvre, which takes forever.
It's like building your own house, you can't really stop until it's done. It
will probably take forever. Some Henry Miller to balance it out. And Badrock.
How do you envision your sound evolving
from here? Do you have any plans yet for what comes next?
Working on
new stuff, there's maybe half an album's worth of new ideas and songs. We
tested out a couple of pieces of new-new stuff at the recent shows. I think any
future the History of Colour TV may have will be more abrasive in its texture.
I might be wrong though, but I hope not.
See also:


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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: We're back, ready to roll in 2014. On Tuesday, expect a major story from Nick Turse. In the meantime, I just wanted to thank you again for your staggering generosity toward this website as 2013 ended. (The donations poured in!) Your support truly means the world to us and is a moving vote of confidence in what we do and plan to keep doing. A deep bow to all of you as the new year begins. Tom]
American Jihad 2014
The New Fundamentalists
By Tom Engelhardt
In a 1950s civics textbook of mine, I can remember a Martian landing on Main Street, U.S.A., to be instructed in the glories of our political system. You know, our tripartite government, checks and balances, miraculous set of rights, and vibrant democracy. There was, Americans then thought, much to be proud of, and so for that generation of children, many Martians were instructed in the American way of life. These days, I suspect, not so many.
Still, I wondered just what lessons might be offered to such a Martian crash-landing in Washington as 2014 begins. Certainly checks, balances, rights, and democracy wouldn't top any New Year's list. Since my childhood, in fact, that tripartite government has grown a fourth part, a national security state that is remarkably unchecked and unbalanced. In recent times, that labyrinthine structure of intelligence agencies morphing into war-fighting outfits, the U.S. military (with its own secret military, the special operations forces, gestating inside it), and the Department of Homeland Security, a monster conglomeration of agencies that is an actual "defense department," as well as a vast contingent of weapons makers, contractors, and profiteers bolstered by an army of lobbyists, has never stopped growing. It has won the undying fealty of Congress, embraced the power of the presidency, made itself into a jobs program for the American people, and been largely free to do as it pleased with almost unlimited taxpayer dollars.
The expansion of Washington's national security state — let's call it the NSS — to gargantuan proportions has historically met little opposition. In the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations, however, some resistance has arisen, especially when it comes to the "right" of one part of the NSS to turn the world into a listening post and gather, in particular, American communications of every sort. The debate about this — invariably framed within the boundaries of whether or not we should have more security or more privacy and how exactly to balance the two — has been reasonably vigorous. The problem is: it doesn't begin to get at the real nature of the NSS or the problems it poses.
If I were to instruct that stray Martian lost in the nation's capital, I might choose another framework entirely for my lesson. After all, the focus of the NSS, which has like an incubus grown to monumental proportions inside the body of the political system, would seem distinctly monomaniacal, if only we could step outside our normal way of thinking for a moment. At a cost of nearly a trillion dollars a year, its main global enemy consists of thousands of lightly armed jihadis and wannabe jihadis scattered mainly across the backlands of the planet. They are capable of causing genuine damage — though far less to the United States than numerous other countries — but not of shaking our way of life. And yet for the leaders, bureaucrats, corporate cronies, rank and file, and acolytes of the NSS, it's a focus that can never be intense enough on behalf of a system that can never grow large enough or be well funded enough.
None of the frameworks we normally call on to understand the national security state capture the irrationality, genuine inanity, and actual madness that lie at its heart. Perhaps reimagining what has developed in these last decades as a faith-based system — a new national religion — would help. This, at least, is the way I would explain the new Washington to that wayward Martian.
Holy Warriors
Imagine what we call "national security" as, at heart, a proselytizing warrior religion. It has its holy orders. It has its sacred texts (classified). It has its dogma and its warrior priests. It has its sanctified promised land, known as "the homeland." It has its seminaries, which we call think tanks. It is a monotheistic faith in that it broaches no alternatives to itself. It is Manichaean in its view of the world. As with so many religions, its god is an eye in the sky, an all-seeing Being who knows your secrets.
Edward Snowden, the man who in 2013 pulled back the curtain on part of this system, revealing its true nature to anyone who cared to look, is an apostate, never to be forgiven by those in its holy orders. He is a Judas to be hunted down, returned to the U.S., put on trial as a "traitor," and then — so say some retired NSS warriors (who often channel the opinions and feelings of those still in office) — hung by the neck until dead or swung "from a tall oak tree."
Al-Qaeda is, of course, the system's Devil, whose evil seed is known to land and breed anywhere on the planet from Sana'a, Yemen, to Boston, Massachusetts, if we are not eternally and ever more on guard. In the name of the epic global struggle against it and the need to protect the homeland, nothing is too much, no step taken a point too far. (As the Devil is traditionally a shape-shifter, able to manifest himself in many forms, it is, however, possible that tomorrow's version of him may be, say, China.)
The leaders of this faith-based system are, not surprisingly, fundamentalist true believers. They don't wear long beards, wave the Koran, shout "Death to the Great Satan," or live in the backlands of the planet. Instead, they speak bureaucratically, tend to sport military uniforms and medals, and inhabit high-tech government facilities. Fundamentalist as they are, they may not, in the normal sense, be religious at all. They are not obliged to believe in the importance of being "born again" or fear being "left behind" in a future End Times — though such beliefs don't disqualify them either.
They issue the equivalent of fatwas against those they proclaim to be their enemies. They have a set of Sharia-like laws, both immutable and flexible. Punishments for breaking them may not run to stoning to death or the cutting off of hands, but they do involve the cutting off of lives.
Theirs is an implacable warrior religion, calling down retribution on people often seen only poorly by video feed, thousands of miles distant from Washington, D.C., Langley, Virginia, or Fort Meade, Maryland. It's no mistake that the weapons fired by their fleet of drone aircraft are called Hellfire missiles, since it is indeed hellfire and brimstone that they believe they are delivering to the politically sinful of the world. Nor is it a happenstance that the planes which fire those missiles have been dubbed Predators and Reapers (as in "Grim"), for they do see themselves as the annointed deliverers of Death to their enemies.
While they have a powerful urge to maintain the faith the American public has in them, they also believe deeply that they know best, that their knowledge is the Washington equivalent of God-given, and that the deepest mysteries and secrets of their faith should be held close indeed.
Until you enter their orders and rise into their secret world, there is such a thing as too-much knowledge. As a result, they have developed a faith-based system of secrecy in which the deepest mysteries have, until recently, been held by the smallest numbers of believers, in which problems are adjudicated in a "court" system so secret that only favored arguments by the national security state can be presented to its judges, in which just about any document produced, no matter how anodyne, will be classified as too dangerous to be read by "the people." This has meant that, until recently, most assessments of the activities of the national security state have to be taken on faith.
In addition, in the service of that faith, NSS officials may — and their religion permits this — lie to and manipulate the public, Congress, allies, or anyone else, and do so without compunction. They may publicly deny realities they know to exist, or offer, as Conor Friedersdorf has written, statements "exquisitely crafted to mislead." They do this based on the belief that the deepest secrets of their world and how it operates can only truly be understood by those already inducted into their orders. And yet, they are not simply manipulating us in service to their One True Faith. Nothing is ever that simple. Before they manipulate us, they must spend years manipulating themselves. Only because they have already convinced themselves of the deeper truth of their mission do they accept the necessity of manipulating others in what still passes for a democracy. To serve the people, in other words, they have no choice but to lie to them.
Like other religious institutions in their heyday, the NSS has also shown a striking ability to generate support for its ever-growing structure by turning itself into a lucrative global operation. In a world where genuine enemies are in remarkably short supply (though you'd never know it from the gospel according to them), it has exhibited remarkable skill in rallying those who might support it financially, whether they call themselves Democrats or Republicans, and ensuring, even in budgetary tough times, that its coffers will continue to burst at the seams.
It has also worked hard to expand what, since 1961, has been known as the military-industrial complex. In the twenty-first century, the NSS has put special effort into subsidizing warrior corporations ready to enter the global battlefield with it. In the process, it has "privatized" — that is, corporatized — its global operations. It has essentially merged with a set of crony outfits that now do a significant part of its work. It has hired private contractors by the tens of thousands, creating corporate spies, corporate analysts, corporate mercenaries, corporate builders, and corporate providers for a structure that is increasingly becoming the profit-center of a state within a state. All of this, in turn, helps to support a growing theocratic warrior class in the luxury to which it has become accustomed.
Since 9/11, the result has been a religion of perpetual conflict whose doctrines tend to grow ever more extreme. In our time, for instance, the NSS has moved from Dick Cheney's "1% doctrine" (if there's even a 1% chance that some country might someday attack us, we should strike first) to something like a "0% doctrine." Whether in its drone wars with their presidential "kill lists" or the cyber war — probably the first in history — that it launched against Iran, it no longer cares to argue most of the time that such strikes need even a 1% justification. Its ongoing, self-proclaimed global war, whether on the ground or in the air, in person or by drone, in space or cyberspace (where its newest military command is already in action) is justification enough for just about any act, however aggressive.
Put all this together and what you have is a description of a militant organization whose purpose is to carry out a Washington version of global jihad, a perpetual war in the name of the true faith.
A Practical Failure, A Faith-Based Success Story
Looked at another way, the national security state is also a humongous humbug, a gigantic fraud of a belief system that only delivers because its followers never choose to look at the world through Martian eyes.
Let's start with its gargantuan side. No matter how you cut it, the NSS is a Ripley's Believe It or Not of staggering numbers that, once you step outside its thought system, don't add up. The U.S. national defense budget is estimated to be larger than those of the next 13 countries combined — that is, simply off-the-charts more expensive. The U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft carrier strike groups when no other country has more than two. No other national security outfit can claim to sweep up "nearly five billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world"; nor, like the National Security Agency's Special Source Operations group in 2006, boast about being capable of ingesting the equivalent of "one Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds"; nor does it have any competitors when it comes to constructing "building complexes for top-secret intelligence work" (33 in the Washington area alone between 2001 and 2010). And its building programs around the U.S. and globally are never-ending.
It is creating a jet fighter that will be the most expensive weapons system in history. Its weapons makers controlled 78% of the global arms market in 2012. When its military departed Iraq after eight years of invasion and occupation, it left with three million objects ranging from armored vehicles to laptop computers and porta-potties (and destroyed or handed over to the Iraqis countless more). In a world where other countries have, at best, a handful of military bases outside their territory, it has countless hundreds. In 2011 alone, it managed to classify 92,064,862 of the documents it generated, giving secrecy a new order of magnitude. And that's just to dip a toe in the ocean of a national security state that dwarfs the one which fought the Cold War against an actual imperial superpower.
Again, if you were to step outside the world of NSS dogma and the arguments that go with it, such numbers — and they are legion — would surely represent one of the worst investments in modern memory. If a system of this sort weren't faith-based, and if that faith weren't widespread and deeply accepted (even if now possibly on the wane), people would automatically look at such numbers and the results they deliver and ask why, for all its promises of safety and security, the NSS so regularly fails to deliver. And why the response to failure can always be encapsulated in one word: more.
After all, if the twenty-first century has taught us anything, it's that the most expensive and over-equipped military on the planet can't win a war. Its two multi-trillion-dollar attempts since 9/11, in Iraq and Afghanistan, both against lightly armed minority insurgencies, proved disasters. (In Iraq, however, despite an ignominious U.S. pullout and the chaos that has followed in the region, the NSS and its supporters have continued to promote the idea that General David Petraeus's "surge" was indeed some kind of historic last-minute "victory.")
After 12 long years in Afghanistan and an Obama era surge in that country, the latest grim National Intelligence Estimate from the U.S. intelligence community suggests that no matter what Washington now does, the likelihood is that things there will only go from bad enough to far worse. Years of a drone campaign against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has strengthened that organization; an air intervention in Libya led to chaos, a dead ambassador, and a growing al-Qaeda movement in northern Africa — and so it repetitively goes.
Similarly, intelligence officials brag of terrorist plots — 54 of them! — that have been broken up thanks in whole or in part to the National Security Agency's metadata sweeps of U.S. phone calls; it also claims that, given the need of secrecy, only four of them can be made public. (The claims of success on even those four, when examined by journalists, have proved less than impressive.) Meanwhile, the presidential task force charged with reviewing the NSA revelations, which had access to a far wider range of insider information, came to an even more startling conclusion: not one instance could be found in which that metadata the NSA was storing in bulk had thwarted a terrorist plot. "Our review," the panel wrote, "suggests that the information contributed to terrorist investigations by the use of section 215 telephony meta-data was not essential to preventing attacks." (And keep in mind that, based on what we do know about such terror plots, a surprising number of them were planned or sparked or made possible by FBI-inspired plants.)
In fact, claims of success against such plots couldn't be more faith-based, relying as they generally do on the word of intelligence officials who have proven themselves untrustworthy or on the impossible-to-prove-or-disprove claim that if such a system didn't exist, far worse would have happened. That version of a success story is well summarized in the claim that "we didn't have another 9/11."
In other words, in bang-for-the-buck practical terms, Washington's national security state should be viewed as a remarkable failure. And yet, in faith-based terms, it couldn't be a greater success. Its false gods are largely accepted by acclamation and regularly worshiped in Washington and beyond. As the funding continues to pour in, the NSS has transformed itself into something like a shadow government in that city, while precluding from all serious discussion the possibility of its own future dismantlement or of what could replace it. It has made other options ephemeral and more immediate dangers than terrorism to the health and wellbeing of Americans seem, at best, secondary. It has pumped fear into the American soul. It is a religion of state power.
No Martian could mistake it for anything else.
Tom Engelhardt, a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Ann Jones's They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America's Wars — The Untold Story.
Copyright 2014 Tom Engelhardt


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text:
Remarks by the President on the SAVE Award and Making Government More Efficient and Effective
THE PRESIDENT: Hello, everybody. Good morning. Before I begin, I want to say a brief word about the historic vote which took place early this morning. The United States Senate knocked down a filibuster aimed at blocking a final vote on health care reform, and scored a big victory for the American people. By standing up to the special interests -- who've prevented reform for decades and who are furiously lobbying against it now -- the Senate has moved us closer to reform that makes a tremendous difference for families, for seniors, for businesses, and for the country as a whole.
For those who have insurance, reform will mean greater security and stability. No longer will people with preexisting conditions be excluded from coverage. No longer will people who are seriously ill be dropped from coverage. And no longer will families be allowed to go broke because they're forced to pay exorbitant out-of-pocket expenses.
Many people recall the enormous fights around the Patient's Bill of Rights that never got done. Well, you know what, the Patient's Bill of Rights is embedded in this health care bill and -- to make sure that all Americans who have insurance right now are getting a fair deal from their insurance companies.
Small businesses and those who don't get insurance through their employer will finally be able to get insurance at a price that they can afford with tax credits to help. And Medicare will be stronger and its solvency extended by nearly a decade. Seniors will get more assistance with prescription drug costs than they're getting right now. And finally, these reforms will help the inexorable and unsustainable rise in health care costs that are overwhelming families, businesses, and the federal budget.
The Congressional Budget Office now reports that this bill will reduce our deficit by $132 billion over the first decade, and by as much as $1.3 trillion in the decade after that. So I just want to be clear, for all those who are continually carping about how this is somehow a big spending government bill, this cuts our deficit by $132 billion the first 10 years, and by over a trillion in the second. That argument that opponents are making against this bill does not hold water.
Now, embracing this kind of responsibility in Washington is what also brings us here today. I am pleased to be joined this morning by my Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Ric Shinseki; my budget director, Peter Orszag; and our special guest, last but not least, the winner of the first annual SAVE Award -- and that's Nancy Fichtner of Loma, Colorado.
Having met with Nancy a few minutes ago, I can tell you Nancy means business. She is a single working mom; she's a clerk with the VA; she's an artist; she's an outdoorswoman; and she is an avid hunter. In fact, somewhere in the western United States, there is an elk that is breathing a sigh of relief because Nancy is here instead of where she would have been: hunting with her kids. (Laughter.) And I believe her children are here -- where's Nancy's kids? There they are right there. It's great to see you guys. Nancy's daughter -- she skins and guts her elk, so don't mess with her either. (Laughter.)
We're all here for a simple reason. At a time when we face not only a fiscal crisis, but also a host of difficult challenges as a nation, business as usual in Washington just won't cut it. We need a government that's more efficient, that's more effective, and far more fiscally responsible.
When my administration walked through the door, the country faced a growing economic downturn as well as a deepening fiscal hole. Washington had passed massive tax cuts for the wealthy and an expensive new entitlement program without paying for any of it. Health care costs continued to rise, year after year. And little effort was made to cut wasteful spending. As a result, over the previous eight years, the national debt doubled -- doubled. In January, the deficit stood at $1.3 trillion. And we had to make the difficult decision to add to the deficit in the short term to prevent the potential collapse of our economy.
But as I've said, in the long run, we can't continue to spend as if deficits don't have consequences; as if waste doesn't matter; as if the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money. That's what we've seen time and time again. Washington has been more concerned about the next election than the next generation. It's put off hard choices in spending bill after spending bill, budget after bloated budget.
Government contracting is a perfect example. Between 2002 and 2008, the amount spent on government contracts more than doubled. The amount spent on no-bid, non-competitive contracts jumped by 129 percent. This is an inexcusable waste of money. And that's why, back in March, I ordered federal departments and agencies to come up with plans to save up to $40 billion a year in contracting by 2011. And over the past six months, agencies have been making cuts by looking for better deals, by ending contracts and doing work in house, and by opening up no-bid contracts to competitive bidding. Because of these efforts, I'm proud to announce today that we are on track to meet our goals. Twenty-four departments have identified more than $19 billion in savings for this year alone.
And this is only the latest example. At my very first Cabinet meeting, I directed every secretary to join us in scouring the budget, line by line, to find ways to make government more efficient and less wasteful. Together, we identified more than 100 programs to scale back or end completely, as well as other ways to cut costs, finding $17 billion in savings so far.
We're also going after roughly $100 billion wasted on improper payments to contractors, organizations, and individuals. To put this in perspective, these mistakes, and in some cases abuses, cost taxpayers more each year than the budgets for the Education and Homeland Security Departments combined.
We have done what some said was impossible: preventing wasteful spending on outdated weapons systems that even the Pentagon said it doesn't need. And I've insisted from the beginning that health care reform will not add one dime to our deficit. And as I just noted, not only is it not adding to our deficit, it's actually reducing it.
Finally, I've issued a challenge to every man and woman who works for the federal government: If you see a way that government could do its job better, or do the same job for less money, I want to know about it. That's why we started the SAVE Award, to draw on those who know government best to improve how government works. We asked federal employees to submit reform proposals based on their experiences. And in a testament to the seriousness with which these folks are taking their jobs, we received more than 38,000 proposals in just three weeks.
From these submissions, four finalists were selected and put to an online vote. Nancy is here because she won. Her idea stems from her experience at the VA Medical Center where she works. She noticed that whenever patients left the hospital, leftover medications like eye drops or inhalers were just thrown away. And often, veterans would have to go right back to the pharmacy to refill what was discarded. So the VA is paying twice -- it's waste, plain and simple. And thanks to Nancy -- and to Secretary Shinseki and the folks at Veterans Affairs -- we're putting a stop to it. The change is already underway.
Of course, Nancy's proposal was just one of many great ideas that came to us. We've already begun to implement a host of suggestions made through the SAVE contest. And while promoting electronic paystubs or scheduling Social Security appointments online or re-purposing unused government supplies may not be the most glamorous reforms in history, when taken together, these small changes can add up; they add up to a transformation of how government works.
And that's why we're going to turn the SAVE Award into an annual event. That's why we're holding a forum at the White House next month to seek more ideas from the private sector, specifically about how we can better use technology to reform our government for the 21st century.
After years of irresponsibility, we are once again taking responsibility for every dollar we spend, the same way families do. It's true that what I've described today will not be enough to get us out of our fiscal mess by itself. We face a deficit that will take some tough decisions in the next year's budget and in years to come to get under control. But these changes will save the American people billions of dollars. And they'll help to put in place a government that's more efficient and effective, that wastes less money on no-bid contracts, that's cutting bureaucracy and harnessing technology, that's more fiscally responsible, and that better serve the American taxpayer. That's the government we need. That's the government I intend to implement. That's the kind of government that the American people deserve. And that's the kind of government that people like Nancy are helping to build each and every day.
So, Nancy, congratulations. We're proud of you. Thank you so much. Thank you. We're very proud of your mom. (Laughter.) That's great.
Thank you, everybody.
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