cheese it, the cops!

not being

the one person i least want to be, or for that matter want to be around, is john malkovich as represented in the iphone ads. his taste and his demeanor are so fucking precious, so gratuitously yet blankly pretentious, so numbly self-satisfied, that all i want to do is eat a burger, pull on a baseball cap, jump into the truck, throw on some george jones, and head to nyc to kick his ass. that's what siri is thinking as she talks to him; you can hear her rolling her eyes.

jobs

i don't know whether steve jobs really 'made the world a better place,' etc. but one thing he did was bring aesthetics to information technology: apple made many beautiful objects, which is one reason they sold so many things. it's not just the shape of the unit, but the interfaces or even the ways apple shaped a whole online environment. on the other hand, they exercised excessive proprietary control of that environment, and you have to ask also about labor practices etc. no amount of money can overcome mortality.

i'm already tired of the endless tributes: "what was it about steve jobs that allowed him to entirely transform reality??" etc etc. morning joe: he's a combination of thomas edison and john, paul, george and ringo (also benito mussolini, sounds like). it took people ten seconds to reach extreme hyperbole, and ten minutes to reach extreme repetition. 

obviously a coup for wikileaks or anyone else would be the "trophy photos"  that american troops allegedly took with allegedly previously-alive afghan civilians. it's funny because the representation in the msm is almost all on the obvious legitimacy of repressing those photographs. look the abu ghraib shots led to a an insurgency! on the other hand, if you are doing the things that they were doing in the photos in abu ghraib, you deserve an insurgency. don't underestimate the effect of those photos in deterring whole years of monstrous abuses in a u.s.-run gulag (and insurgency and counter-insurgency without end: the release of those photos led to a profound change in strategy.). that is precisely why there is a press, but i will bet that the new york times or washington post will not publish them even if they have access. at any rate, you would think that they will leak eventualy as they will have to be discovered to the defense?

listening to an npr piece on the stuxnet worm, which is apparently tantamount to a weapon of terror. but the expert was saying: well it was a well-funded, well-organized effort. "it could be organized crime," he said, "or worse, a government." that's a pretty good representation of where the real threat comes from. then these same people will autonomically decry and suppress all "non-state actors" as obviously illegitimate, while giving more control over these networks precisely to states. (one among many reasons to line up with wikileaks.)

the piece at least presented the speculation (which surely would occur first to almost anyone) that it was built by the israeli government, or for that matter the u.s., as it appears to have been trained on the iranian nuclear program. (at a guess: um, israel.) but it left the impression that a state cyber-attack is a brand new idea. it's an open secret that the russian secret services have run attacks on estonia and georgia. you can't tell me that cheney didn't have teams working on worms, and if i know my obama he just kept right on. escape into the environment makes a nice doomsday scenario, if you're writing a film script.

at any rate, maybe the story of stux will come out or maybe not. if you could persuade the mossad that you could significantly damage or set back the iranian nuclear effort without risking any lives &c they'd be foolish not to give it a whirl before they resort to air raids. indeed for all we know this thing did do some damage.

the flash mob thing is incredibly interesting. there could be a revolution or an insane street party or a riot or a huge work of performance art out here before the authorities even know what world they're in. not to minimize the dangers (well, maybe to minimize the dangers): in the reporting, i'd look out for the moral panic phenomenon. the characterizations of the things as insanely violent seem wildly out of proportion to actual injuries and damage reported.