19 May 2013

Memo to the collective

Greetings to all and sundry in the collective!  The collective greets itself!

We are happy to report that the fundamental transformation, whilst slowing, continues even if it is at a snails pace.  There are unavoidable bumps in the road and the bodies are about to be piled under the bus.  To achieve that glorious end, to get to the never ending omelet of continuously breaking eggs, each and all of you have agreed to do one simple thing: follow collective talking points.

In general these talking points are given through the agreed-upon venues set up by your fellow parrots, and have also been circulated by various lists containing the letter 'O' and through some Old Media talking heads who are semi-reliable.  Generally it is that 'You've Got Mail!' voice from your preferred e-mail platform that brings to your attention the freshest, latest and mandatory collective talking points.  The collective goes through great expense and effort to generate up these talking points and your basic agreement is to actually use them.

As you may recall in the second paragraph of your agreement, the stipulation was that you agreed that you were minimally sentient, could walk and chew gum at the same time, knew how to copy and paste, and that you lacked the mental powers to make creative talking points.  We agreed to supply the talking points and you agreed to check all individualist thinking at the door.  You were no longer to have any morals, ethics, qualms nor any other individualist sort of second thoughts about what we handed you as you admitted you lacked the creative ability to do more than create simple sentences.  The collective was a bit dismayed at how many Harvard graduates were in that last category, but to get that never arising delicious omelet a few egg-heads had to be brought on board pre-cracked.

A few of you, and we know who you are, have not only not used the now updated hourly talking points, but have backslid on your agreement further and are now using talking points hours, days, weeks, months or, in a few cases, years old.  In doing so you are attempting to show original thinking which is individualist and that is not allowed.  Further you sound like an idiot and the collective is made to look like an idiot by your use of outmoded or outdated talking points and prior circulated non sequiturs.   Do note that with every e-mail list of talking points there are also fresh non sequiturs handed out for you to use to confuse and befuddle individualists and show a bit of comedy from the collective at your expense.  As part of your agreement you agreed it was better to suck as a chorus rather than as individuals, and by reverting to your individualistic suck you can no longer be brought into the tone deaf choir that is the collective.

Further you agreed that you had no ability to generate up original humor so stop it already, you are making the collective look bad with your attempts at originality which you admitted you have none in your possession.   That when combined with out of date talking points and non sequiturs have now put you into a position that you agreed not to get into, which is to suck on your own and show up the collective as unable to be creative.  Although this is generally true, the collective prefers not to play up that realm of humorlessness until such time as individualism is stamped out forever-more and the day of continual gloom without humor can be born into being.  Your job is to be without humor now, as stated in the third paragraph of our agreement, and many of you are violating that wantonly against the will of the collective.  Each of you is known and will face steep problems after the fundamental transformation is achieved so it is time to reform your ways, stick to your agreement and suck together because you will all blow it otherwise.

To the rest of the collective we ask that you continue to report on these individuals through the known channels.  Many of them are now straying from the fold and need to have talking points and non sequiturs applied to them, with new discoveries generated hourly for you to attack them.  Those you are attacking aren't getting this memo, never fear, and they have been cut off from collective talking points at first hand and can only get them second-hand via our standard parrot outlets.  By being in the know you are stronger than these born-again individualists and they know that there is no such thing as a born-again collectivists, so their walking is permanent.  The collective has no good graces, indeed it has no graces at all, and neither do you.  That is part of your agreement, as well. 

This means that many of you have become isolated from old friends, family and civil society and now live in basements with darkened windows, a government provided Internet connection on a government provided Obamaphone with government provided stipends and government provided excessed meals.  Since so many of you couldn't convert individualists as individuals, your only route in life that is left as part of the collective and now your poor eyesight, hygiene and dental work will need to be corrected by the IRS which will pay you a visit in the near future due to your inability to use even taxation software, like another collective member and tax cheat, and your inability to find any health care not provided to you by anyone.  We also provided running hot and cold water, toilets, toilet paper, one eco-friendly light bulb that will be replaced on a five year schedule, one old refrigerator, one microwave oven and even a surplus office carpet.  Towels were included as well.  The collective would like you to use soap with your water ration at least once a month to good effect on your body so as to cut down the stench.  That is in the fourth paragraph and followed up later on page 305 under 'Contingency Plans'.

The collective provides for you and you are to enjoy its largesse.

For those who cannot follow their agreement and use talking points, you will soon find collective members who will seek to find out first hand what your condition truly is.  The collective cannot tolerate individualists scamming our hard earned goods, and if you are one of those you will be found and ejected from the collective via the defenestration method.  We have our ways.  More importantly we have your Oreo cookies.

To those others who think that they might have found morals, ethics, a non-sanctified and non-secular approved religion, or even qualms and are distracted from your daily parroting by them, this is the time to shape up and fully rejoice in your lack of personality and self!  You know what happens to those who stray from the collective.

Again to the collective as a whole: rejoice in your mindless repeating of talking points!

Do as you are told.

Have a nice day.

Or  else.

Sincerely,

THE MANAGEMENT

14 May 2013

Partisanship isn't all political

Yet more of my raw commentary from Hot Air, this on the long starting IRS scandal with the investigation of conservative non-profit organizations, which we are also getting hints of it going to Jewish groups and for-profit organizations in business.  Here I lay out something basic to keep track of in this thread on the topic:

Obama refuses to put the IRS in its proper place – he calls it an ‘independent agency’ but it isn’t. The IRS is under the Treasury Dept.

Now if the Tea Party groups reporting the increased forms and illegal questions are right, then this started in 2010 and it came from the one place that had one of the fastest nominees to go in place because of the financial ‘crisis’: Tim Geithner.

Tim Geithner was pro-Obama while in the Federal Reserve and knew the ropes, and was supposed to be wicked smart while being unable to do his own taxes. TurboTax Tim should have had a real good idea how to run the Treasury Dept. and yet within a year and half of his being in charge you get this sort of thing going on.

Thus TurboTax Tim is either:

- absolutely incompetent, doesn’t know any of the ropes in the financial side of DC and has no clue about how to properly run a large organization,

OR

- ran a department where it was not only allowed but encouraged by lack of oversight to start running a partisan investigation of those that the Administration didn’t like politically.

It can’t be both due to the amount of time TTT had in the FR: he did, indeed, ‘know the ropes’ and had progressed up the ladder of leadership high enough for Obama to appoint him. Basically the first option is non-viable as a cover-up fallback line.

That means TTT had put into place individuals who would run a partisan IRS. It takes a good six months to a full year for someone to actually figure out a high level federal job (look at every Administration post-WWII for this, as few get off the ground smoothly with appointees) and then start actually exercising decent oversight (or lack thereof) from their positions. Factor in time to go through the Senate and time to figure out the job and you get nearly a year and a half because the Senate wasn’t being all too swift on appointees.

If one remembers back to articles during the 2008-09 time frame pointed out that TTT was pro-Obama early on while he was at the Federal Reserve, so this raises the question: what, exactly, were the policies of the Federal Reserve and were they being influenced by Geithner towards partisan ends?

Any investigation of the IRS under Geithner must ALSO look at the Federal Reserve and start giving IT scrutiny because any head of the Treasury coming from the Federal Reserve that allows such things to go on under his command may also have had problems at his prior job.

If the IRS has problems, then Treasury has problems.

If the head of the Treasury Dept. had this sort of problem under his command then scrutiny into prior job activities in the financial sector under federal oversight must be performed because of the rapid pace in which the partisanship started.

Thus the Federal Reserve tenure of Tim Geithner going all the way back to his early NY Fed. days must be on the agenda. Not just a standard scandal due to an Administration, but also this actor put in place by them in the Dept. where it originated.

IRS then Treasury.
Treasury then Geithner.
Geithner then Federal Reserve.

Let your Congresscritter know as they might be a bit overwhelmed by the rush of events to figure this one out.

ajacksonian on May 14, 2013 at 7:28 AM

And then adding on to that just a bit later:

 

Spot on analysis. And TTT and the REB were college bosom buddies.

AH_C on May 14, 2013 at 7:44 AM

My thanks!

I try to state only what is the blindingly obvious to me and the early help of TTT with Obama was something the Left cheered about at the time. Go back to late 2008 to early 2009 in the HA archives and you can pull up some of the articles and commentary.

TTT was one of the engineers of the fiscal situation in 2008, along with a couple of his cohorts (Bernanke and Paulson), and they were strong-arming the bailouts through Congress and Bush, and then threatening banks who weren’t taking them when Obama came to office.

Something was and is seriously wrong with the Federal Reserve and its role in the financial crisis and the rise of Obama, then the slathering across all banks the problems of the few (mostly Citibank) is deplorable. It shows partisanship and an attempt to centralize the fiscal power of the US in the Federal Reserve by using it to partisan ends to get people into power to further go after organizations questioning the scope of US power: Tea Party groups.

Going after Tea Party and limited government organizations is not just a help to Obama but to the FR to escape scrutiny in ITS role in the fiscal mess we are in. It isn’t the sole author, but it is a major co-author and beneficiary of the Obama spending as it now has pent-up digital cash with which it can threaten the entire global banking system by destroying the value of the US dollar. To-date that money hasn’t been released and so inflation is low… the moment it gets into circulation your dollar will drop to some small fraction of its buying power and hyper-inflation ensue.

This time bomb must be stopped as well as the threat of financial destruction via the FR.

The IRS is just one part of a larger machine.

Pay attention and remember that fire must also be aimed at Geithner, Treasury and the Federal Reserve to get to the bottom of this. Geithner is a partisan and has been one to his own ends and beliefs before Obama. If you think a partisan federal government is a problem, imagine a partisan financial system that isn’t answerable to government.

ajacksonian on May 14, 2013 at 7:58 AM

I can point out that if one were a partisan in favor of an increased role for the Federal Reserve in controlling government policy or to evade government scrutiny, then working to quash those supporting those things would serve a dual function.  Also note that by Obama's attempt to make the IRS an 'independent agency' he is trying to isolate it from the Treasury Dept. and Tim Geithner's oversight.  This is not the case, of course, and Tim Geithner has control over these events by his position in the Treasury Dept.  It is odd to see a President try to protect an underling who should be easily bus-bound, but that is the case here.  It is by that odd protection that one must ask: why is President Obama trying to protect Tim Geithner?

And what was Geithner's agenda in the Federal Reserve and his role in the lead-up to the financial crisis?

28 April 2013

Neither portal nor destination be

This is a set of musings on the nature of blogging brought on via a post at Stacy McCain's site Where Were You in 2002? (h/t: Insty).

Seeing Overlawyered moving over to Cato spurred on the question about 'making the big time' and 'are you a portal or destination?' in Stacy McCain's post.

In 2002 I was healthy, working, and helping to get the last of the Afghan materials out the door in the Agency I worked in before moving over to my R&D slot which I had requested a temporary re-assignment after 9/11/01.  This did not mean I was not interested in blogging, far from it, I was an avid reader of a number of early blogs and attended conferences featuring both Old and New Media (like the old Seybold Seminars or Print '97).  Part of my work was to scour the early web for material and avenues of presenting and using data that were new or novel, that would help move information to the warfighter.  That meant learning all I could about everything from blogging to 3D interfaces to the coming transition to the post-32 bit world and IPv6.  The methodology is straight out of James Burke's Connections series: let the pinball effect give you information and insights from multiple realms and see if the ideas cross into the realm you inhabit so as to allow it to adapt and change.

It is from that perspective that I took in the idea that the Internet is not about portals and destinations, hubs and spokes, nor even about connected clouds of users and information.  I can't tell you who put it like this, there are numerous possible authors, but I picked up on the idea that the Internet, blogs, media sites... the entire thing from static repositories of information like the reference work sites I link to all the way to Big Old Media sites... are something called a hyperlinked conversation.  Hyperlinks are generic in type, they are an unbiased connectivity form for the electronic New Media.  Hyperlinks are also that most powerful of things that mankind invented in the Old Media: an indexing tool.

That comes from James Burke and the power of an index of a book, that list of ideas and pages where they appear, is that they allow you to cross-index.  You can take an idea word, go to a page, find another idea word, go to its index, and find things that it links to via the index.  Hyperlinks do this exact, same function, but a far faster than you can with a static, read-only memory system with a hand/finger interface with leafs to flip through known as a book.  What a hyperlink allows, however, is the ability to show source of an idea via that link, and you can find other ideas that are linked to in the article/video/etc. and follow those links to see how ideas connect.  Everything, even the person who is a minimal utility node in a Metcalfe's Law network offers utility because you can use a search engine (of your choice) to then find out all the other people who link to an article/video/etc. and follow those links back to their sources.  Even the most dead-end of sites, those that studiously don't link to other bloggers, is still connected to them via the link to the source material and your ability to check other incoming links and go back to those sites to find out what ideas are there.  The hyperlink is thus an indexing tool for ideas.

From this there is no such thing as a 'portal' nor 'destination', no 'hub' nor 'spoke', nor even 'communities' of blogs and sites.  What there are is conversations that link to ideas forming their own interconnected set of sites, pathways, and journeys. Following James Burke this means that no site that requires human thought to construct sentences that purvey ideas, that have a logic connecting them, is alone unless it links to no one, and accepts no links and is an isolated node.

That is what I thought in 2002.

People can move around, become highlights or disappear, as I am largely doing, and yet the conversation continues within and amongst humanity.  It is a huge, extended conversation that now includes mini-thoughts via Twitter, picture thoughts and video thoughts (not necessarily stories but just thoughts and ideas) and it is all connected by the generic thing we call the hyperlink.  It is one of the most powerful tools deployed by mankind, and yet its actual invention starts with indexing.  It is the simple but powerful things that move minds, spirits and humanity.  That also has a precursor description in the Noosphere and the Internet can just be seen as a crude, physical form of Noosphere, not the thing, itself.  The next simple tool will not supplant the hyperlink nor index, but will move that conception one more step and then everything changes. 

And yet where it comes from will be obvious. 

What it will enable is beyond imagining. 

Just like the hyperlink and Internet before the invention of the hyperlink.

I can remember where I was in 2002... and with difficulty back to 1992 when there was only the first hint of html via sgml.  Yes, I can do that.  Can you remember the world without the Internet?

02 April 2013

End Game Against Freedom

What is the End Game of the global elites against freedom and liberty?  We can see its path by addicting populations to 'social' provisions such as 'retirement' and 'health care', which are different things than living a good life or providing good doctors and medicine.  This is the Redistributive State which seeks to undermine freedom by giving people material goods in return for those people relinquishing ever more control of their lives to the State.

This can be done by means of an Elite funding or promulgating a lower societal uprising so as to force society to be under enough pressure to call for a crackdown on those putting them at risk.  It is a mug's game, a violent game of 3 Card Monte in which those seeking to lead a normal life are The Mark.  When you agree to the 'good' that such government provided social programs can do at the cost of taking money from those who have rightfully earned it via their liberty, you agree to limit the liberty of all: of the rich to be rich, of the poor to realize that they are the source of their own problems, and of the middle class to purchase the passivity of the poor with the wealth of the rich and hoping for a few scraps for themselves.  When you wash, rinse and repeat this sort of thing you are in the  process of breaking the will of individuals to have a free society, to stand up for freedom and ridiculing them because they actually support the ability of people to get rich and of the poor to also have that same opportunity.  What is offered is the class system, at first, which turns into a self-fulfilling Caste System with those at the upper levels dictating to the rest of society how it shall act in its own terms.

The modern West is in one or more cycles of this, but it is interesting to look at one society where this has reached an end-game: there are no longer any illusions of providing social goods because they aren't necessary as the will of those to have a civil society have been broken.  In China there is so much autocratic control and police suppression that it is hard to get information out, but in another place there is just enough of a shame culture left and the attempts to have a veneer of civilization remaining that we can get a look at what this looks like.

I've reported on the Red Mafia before a number of times, and this time I'm coming at it not from the 'find all low level sources to piece together a framework' end, but at the other end of what happens when a very few who actually want to do their jobs in government AS jobs in government actually give the high level framework in stark detail.  I found this through Amazon Pime's service in  film documentary by Andrei Nekrasov who recounted the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in Poisoned by Polonium.  I had looked at part of the aftermath of this assassination of Litvinenko, but the lead-up to it and the high levels of corruption and societal abuse it points at is telling.  It is a film I urge everyone to see since, if you want to see where a quasi-western State ends when its elites assume autocratic control, there is no better overview of just how this can come to be.

The events the film reviews are centered on the post-Soviet collapse in the 1990's where the productive capacity of the old Soviet industries came under the sway of two general classes of individuals: old Soviet elites and organized crime.  In some cases there is no differentiating between the two because they have a connecting link in the secret service, the FSB which used to be the KGB, and actually dates back to the Czar's Cheka.  At one point they are actually referred to in their modern FSB incarnation under that term: their name changes but their methodology of violence in service to State remains. 

From Litvinenko we hear about this directly:

In our country, the special services are, in fact, a secret political organization that uses sharp methods, secret methods, not against spies and terrorists, but solely to keep a ruling class in power.  In 1999, for example, to seize power, the FSB used secret methods that are only allowed against terrorists and spies.  If the army were to seize power, they'd roll in with tanks and guns and fly in with jets maybe.  But everyone would notice. The FSB, on the other hand, has secret methods, and nobody noticed anything until chekists made up the government and seized every organ of power.  If the KGB was the armed unit of the Communist Party, then the FSB is the armed unit of – of a caste of corrupt Russian officials.

Normally a 'Police State' is something created by a dictator or tyrant as a means to control the population by deploying the police as parts of the government with the sole aim to keep the people controlled by police power.  In the case of Russia this has been flipped around where it is the Secret Police that now put forward their own minions into politics to give a veneer of choice but, in actuality, by their brutal and repressive methods that they keep secret but are whispered about, there is no choice at all.  Really if something is undertaken to sway the public via terrorist means promulgated by the Secret Police who, exactly, is going to investigate them?  Anyone seeking to do so can be intimidated via the system that is in place of informers, records, laws promulgated to help keep the police in power, and then enforced by a corrupt legal system upon those who try to bring the actual truth forward.

With tin-pot tyrants if you have a revolution to get rid of the tyrant, can you be sure that it wasn't the secret police that actually instigated the revolt to put themselves into power?  And when a society shucks off its old totalitarian State apparatus, what happens if it actually keeps the secret police around?  Unfortunately this last question is answered in Russia.

One of the men a special unit of the FSB was to frame a man or take him out of ciruclation , and that manwas Lt. Colonel Trepashkin who was starting to piece together just what was going on inside Russia.  He recounts his story:

My first conflict in the '90s was with today's FSB director Patrushev.  I rounded up a gang that laundered money, murdered people, consisted of war lords.  At some point, I had finally managed to get them, but then the problems really started.  There was that classic chain of protection that gangsters always have whether in the FSB, the military intelligence, or in the police.  I was told to drop the case.  I said "Why, these are criminals, we have to indict them.  I won't drop it!"

The agent inside the FSB who was told to frame him so that Trepashkin would be stopped and was recorded on tape in case anything happened to any of the men from the special group in the FSB:

Trepashkin knew something, and they were afraid he'd reveal it in court.  That was my first assignment in the new department that I found really suspicious.  We ended up avoiding it and never completed it.  At the concluding session of 1997 – [..] My boss Kamyshnikov came to me and said, "You must kill Berezovsky."

There is one relevant question that can be asked of Russian society, however, before going on to how the FSB got into power: were the Russian people ready for freedom from an autocratic, indeed, authoritarian State?  For that there is an answer from Boris Berezovsky:

Berezovsky -  So we can put forward – So a certain hypothesis can be put forward.  The better the opportunities a political system offers its members, the citizens, the more efficient the system is.  But the citizens must accept, voluntarily, certain limitations on free will.  A transition from a totalitarian system to a liberal one can only take place when enough of its citizens learn to accept certain inner limitations of free will.

Nekrasov – Perhaps the transition from external limitations to inner ones.

B – Exactly!

N -  Inefficient systems force external limitations.

[..]

B – What a price humans have to pay for knowledge.  How hard it is to rise above the common wisdom.

N- Is it even more difficult for Russians, would you say?

B -  I know what you mean.  The Russian mentality is that of slaves. That's why the system of forced limitations is so welcome. So why then am I advocating liberalism in Russia?  Am I contradicting myself, advocating freedom for the Russians, going against the nation's character?  So, is Russia ready, which means her people ready to take up the responsibility of freedom? I think they are ready.  Because once the tyrannical dictate was lifted, millions of entrepreneurs appeared, a myriad of independent politicians and journalists appeared.  Russia turned out fully prepared for this crucial, historical step.  We only needed to move forward and consolidate that freedom.  And so my main conflict with the authorities today  is about individual independence.  All those stupidities – media controls, "vertical power" – have one result.  Destruction of freedom in the minds of Russia's citizens.

One can see where Boris Berezovsky is a very dangerous man to the FSB and those that they support.  The betrayal of freedom in Russia post – USSR started at those places that were the worst off condition-wise.  This exploitation would not only put the criminal oligarchs in power, but they would do so with the help of the FSB and the new Duma which had barely gotten time to get itself together.   The film recounts a cover-up of this period in which Vladimir Putin was involved with a company he had going in Germany which was in contact with the Colombian Cartels and served as a money laundering outfit.  Putin was, at that point, head of the FSB while sitting on the board of that company.  This is recounted by Jürgen Roth, a German writer who has been tracking the Red Mafia's work:

Jurgen Roth - When the premesis of the SPAG here in the Frankfurt area were searched around lunchtime – Well, the offices were searched all day.  But around lunchtime, the Chancellor's office was informed.  That same day, the Russian Interior Ministry was tipped off about the search, which is strange.  Even before the search took place, the public prosecutor's office in Frankfurt tried to suppress the case.  What was on their mind was that Putin was central to this whole affair.  The prosecutor investigating the case didn't get any help. 

It all started with a report about money laundering in Liechtenstein.  In this report the BND, the federal intelligence service, there was a note about the SPAG company laundering money for Russian criminal organization called Tambovskaya.  And so the Public Prosecutor Kirkpatrick opened an investigation.  Soon after that, it was confirmed that money laundering was taking place, that the Tambovskaya connection existed and that Putin might be involved. 

When the company was founded, Putin was on the board of directors for half a year in 1993.  After that he was on the advisory board until 2000.  During that time he was in St. Petersburg and also already director of the FSB.  So he was on the advisory board of SPAG while he was the director of the FSB. 

Now I am familiar with the workings of the FSB.  If someone somewhere so much as farted, he got a written report about it.  And it's hardly plausible that Putin was not informed about all this, about what was going on with SPAG's money and that the people behind it were criminals, classic mafiosi.  He was under investigation for accepting large sums of drug money,  which is undisputed.

N- That was ascertained?

R – It was ascertained by the courts in Liechtenstein.  You can also track his longtime intelligence connections to Germany, to Dresden. I've got a list of all the intelligence officers from the GDR era, and Putin is on it.  Even back then, he kept close connections with the entire intelligence community involved in dirty business.

N – The East German?

R – The GDR intelligence service.  Stasi.

N- Corruption and things?

R – Not only corruption.  Corruption – That's a matter of course.  No one even discusses that anymore.  It's more to do with spying and destruction.  How do I destroy a political opponent?

This is not the first instance that Putin was involved with underhanded dealing for personal gain via criminal means.  This starts with a lead that Litvinenko gives:

Shortly after I gave the interview on Radio Liberty, publications appeared that accused me of slandering our president.  Not to mention that Putin was caught stealing metal assignments and funds in the early '90s in St. Petersburg.

To properly understand what Putin was doing in Leningrad it is important to hark back to what else was going on in the Non-Ferrous Metals outfits at the time, and here I wall draw on my prior piece A taste of Oil For Food and its chefs, which goes over the process of 'tolling'.  With the Russian economy crippled by State facilities being unable to make any payroll at all, the workers were down to barter of goods their facilities produced in exchange for other goods from other workers in other facilities.  This was causing problems as stuff like food wasn't made locally and had to be brought into many regions and without a cash  based system to work with, there was no way to barter ovens, say, for eggs, cheese and milk.  Those who stepped in to put money into these facilities were generally of two major classes: rich elites of the former Soviet State, and organized crime.  Some facilities did try entrepreneurial capitalism, yes, but for large metal works, aluminum plants, steel foundries, titanium smelters... heavy industry in other words... you needed cash.  Lots of cash.  And these 'investors' wanted a 'sweet deal' from the new government and they insisted on 'tolling'.

This form of 'tolling' is unlike having to pay a certain charge on a toll-based road, however, as that is a government tax on use of that road by those who travel on it.  Here it is something else entirely: the agreement by the government not to put a tariff on goods that the producers get in exchange for their output.  What this put in place was a system whereby the workers actually got paid a pittance, almost all of what was produced went outside the country, what came back after sales had no tariff on them and were then sold at above market prices locally.  If you run this sort of system then those running the business get to keep their overseas money, put a small amount in goods to come back, garner a huge windfall of increased prices for those goods versus what a competitive market would garner and then pocket those profits, as well.  Because State power is used to enforce who gets market share and is able to exclude exterior competition and their better managed systems, what you get is a near monopoly on certain regions and markets by what is effectively monopolies run by organized crime.  Isn't it great when you get to write the bills to be passed like this?

From this the section of the film in which Leningrad (St. Petersburg) comes into clear focus because the situation was one in which Putin was part of a transactional scheme to exchange raw materials for food, or metals for food in 1991-92.  Any FSB agent who understands this sort of region and its criminal element is set to make out like a bandit which is, exactly, what Putin did and was written up and dismissed from the program by local officials about the external affairs office and has since been made to disappear as a document and is very difficult to find copies of it anywhere, even on the Internet.  The value of the amount embezzled was $11.5 million which meant that the citizens of St. Petersburg would go hungry and food would be rationed there for the first time since WWII.  That amount is a low-end figure as it doesn't go into specific foodstuff costs which were left out from the contracts.  From the report:

There are reasons to suggest that partners did not intend to import foodstuffs to St. Petersburg.

[..]

The recommendations to refer the case to the city prosecutor's office and to remove Mr. Putin from his position.

In 2000 another investigation clarified that because of what happened St. Petersburg did not receive foodstuffs in excess of $92 million, but the total cost left unjustified to the committee amounts to $850 million.  All from an organization that was being run by Mr. Putin.

And how did Vladimir Putin get into power?

If you are the head of a secret police organization using illegal means to enforce power, to work with organized crime, and to partake of such crimes as well, and you have the power and means to undercut the judiciary and subvert military officers, then you are left with very little to resist you.  With that said there is one pretext for a State assuming additional powers and that is war.  In this case the war in Chechnya and, most critically, the second phase of it that started with the bombing of a bridge and then an apartment complex in Moscow.

Those bombings had one strange artifact to them: in the case of the bridge bombing there was an FSB agent found dead at the site of it and in the apartment complex bombing an FSB agent was indicted for having supplied the necessary explosives.  Or should it be said that these were Special Agents, for they were.  The denial of the FSB is, ostensibly, 'we couldn't have done it'.  Even though agents of the FSB are implicated.  Indeed this brings into question why a tank column was stopped outside of Grozny for days and then bombed just before the other attacks.  Tank columns do not stop by roadsides for days at a time as that is wasteful in men and resources who can be better used for doing other things, like not needing field maintenance.  If you are trying to put together a meme of advancing terrorist attacks, would there be a better way to do it than just as it was done?  Because terrorists, you see, don't work on 'front lines' and don't need to 'advance' via announcing themselves with periodic attacks along a given axis of movement: they are not military units.

To get more State power over media, over the economy, over people, is there any means better than a war?

If the secret police of a State using illegal means put forward a program to require the current regime to delegitimize itself, would there be any better way than to start what is, essentially, a civil war and then assert 'special powers' in 'rooting out terrorists' by that self-same secret police?  And then, in the midst of awful, bloody fighting, wouldn't it be nice to have political backing, even if from extreme nationalists, for such activity?  Because that also came with the Chechen war and is one of the most startling visual artifacts of the documentary: skinheads chanting for Putin while waving a flag with a black hammer and sickle in a white circle on a red field.  The swastika replaced by the hammer and sickle.  And chants for killing them all, the Chechens and, although none had any involvement in this, the Jews.

With the election of Vladimir Putin also came the election of a high number of FSB agents and officials also 'winning' elections so that every organ of the State was soon in control of the government.  Some may remember the terrorist attack on the theater in Russia where patrons were held captive by 'terrorist' gunmen.  One of those was an FSB agent who was put into a high position by Putin some months after the 'terrorist attack'.

If China points to international socialism becoming a formulation of national socialism, which is to say fascism, then when genocidal war is mixed into that, as is the case in Russia, you get a form of fascism known as Nazism. Of course it will be denied up and down the line, yet the supporters of State power continue to show up with proper symbology be it that twisty, interlocking geometric design of the New Dawn party in Greece, or the swastika replaced hammer and sickle flag in Russia.  This, most virulent form of socialism at the nationalist scale, is a horror for mankind... although not a lesser horror than international socialist kind as both look to kill to get to and remain in power.  Often with tens of millions dead in that quest.

The true horror is the attitude taken by prosecutors and governments outside of Russia when companies started by FSB agents or organized crime in Russia, and it is hard to say which is worse at this point, are then suspected of criminal acts.  Money laundering, drug running, and, of course, murder using exotic means like a highly rare, short lived, radioactive metal like Polonium.  Litvinenko thought he was safe in Great Britain, but safety is only an illusion unless the State will actually do its job to keep you safe from exterior attack... not turn a blind eye towards it or refuse to ask hard questions or even seek to shut down inquests.  Yet, in the West, we see that in Great Britain and Germany, and if that sort of thing is going in those States, one with the longest history of people seeking democratic freedom and the other the one place that should have learned its lessons about the horrors of NOT investigating such things, then what does that say about the rest of Europe and the West as a whole?

In the US we have a man like Eric Holder who, it must be remembered, was involved in some very sorry episodes in the Clinton Administration, proving to be duplicitous in the Elian Gonzales affair, who also put forward a pardon for Marc Rich.  The same Marc Rich who would show up in post-Soviet Russia to bring 'tolling' as a concept with him to teach to the oligarchs.  It is certain Vladimir Putin knew of Marc Rich – as the head of the FSB that would not escape his notice.  And as Marc Rich had investments in operations going across Russia, east to west, it is very likely that Vladimir Putin had more than a nodding acquaintance of Marc Rich's tactics and techniques.  Did Putin actually know Marc Rich, a man then on the lam from the FBI for questioning with an international search warrant out for him prior to his pardon?  Especially as Putin used the methodologies that Rich brought with him to absolute perfection, can that be just chalked up to being a real good study of those techniques?  You don't use them by accident, that's for sure, but with criminal intent as the two commissions investigating the starving of St. Petersburg pointed out.  And as the courts in Liechtenstein also pointed to in the case of SPAG.  Makes you wonder where SPAG got its money, doesn't it? 

Back to Eric Holder, for a moment, how does such a man pushing for a known organized crime participant to get a pardon, which he must have known in his position at the FBI, get a 'pass' by any political establishment?  How does a duplicitous public official with policing powers entrusted to him violate that trust and, yet, get promoted?  How does criminal operations of running guns to Mexican Cartels, and to other non-State operators overseas, against the treaties we have signed with these Nations, actually get a yawn from the media?

What does the End Game Against Freedom look like?

Vladimir Putin had many contacts in the intelligence and police community overseas.

Here's a thought.

President Eric Holder.

But only after some suitable 'national emergency' has taken place in which 'extraordinary powers' need to be used to 'stop' advancing 'attacks' by organizations that don't do advancing 'attacks'.  That is the equivalent in the US.

The End Game Against Freedom is a Police State.

Run by the Secret Police, not a dictator creating one but a dictator put in power by one.

Who watches the Watchmen?

25 March 2013

Narrowing gun safe selection

In my previous entry on Selecting a gun safe I gave my overall criteria for a gun safe and I won't rehash those here.  With the criteria firmly in mind and also a budget to beat, I set about looking just about everywhere I could find that could meet my minimal criteria and who just might have a decent price.  If the listed price (MSRP) was too high, I just crossed that safe off the list – if they want to give a discount they can say so right up front and be honest that their stated MSRP is just too high.

Also note that I don't consider a gun safe a security safe, in truth, but a high end industrial cabinet with locking and fire protection features.  This means I also looked at the antique and used safe markets to see what was available because, really, if I could get such a hefty cabinet without a lot of amenities to my front door for a few hundred, then I would be willing to put in sweat equity to improve it or hand it over to a restoration shop.  I learned a lot about safe history this way... more than I wanted to, but you never know when the odd bit of historical information will come in handy.  With that said I did my best to standardize the feature set, which meant that while a stock safe might have a low cost, it would have to have additional work done to it for things like bolts, fire protection, etc. unless it offered something unique to counter what would be a normal deficiency (say, having a body made of stainless steel but only at 11 gauge).  Finally, to leaven the mix, I got one quote from a high end manufacturer for their lowest end model that fit my needs, just to give a sanity check on everything.

There are a lot of non-big box store brands out there and it is worth the effort to find them as they can offer somewhat better quality at an equivalent or even lower cost than those with large advertising budgets but are skimping on their specs.  I was not out to eliminate the big name brands, but the minimal spec. and pricing limit process effectively did that.  The fun thing was that for a few of the brand names you can dig back just a few years and find advertising that will tout them never stinting on quality or materials and, just a few years down the road, they are skimping on materials which makes you wonder a lot about quality.

In no particular order, the list and do keep in mind that this is personal experience only, not an in-depth, customer base review or anything of that sort:

Security Products

These were not the first people I found, but they did have the most unique set of safes and features.  Their claim to fame is the Clearview Safe, which features bullet resistant glass so you can get the combined benefits of a display case AND a safe.  Great stuff and I can't afford that and actually wouldn't want it.

Their other unique feature is the use of ATM style key locking mechanisms for their safes.  Since they started in that business, they have an idea of what your typical semi-sophisticated criminal has in mind for getting past security features.  I got a pricing for their Regency Safe, which fit my basic criteria.  I actually like the locking mechanism from the gadget standpoint: yeah a criminal can beat you up to get your key, but they can also beat you up to get your combination.  Keys are also easier to hide and I can think of a few dozen places to slip a key that no one will look for or even find, metal detector or no.  I would get that very Evil Genius from a James Bond flick putting a key into the safe and having it open itself... really, that is just plain cool.

Unfortunately they hit at the high end of the price range and while they didn't out price the high end manufacturer, they did put themselves at the top of the field for everyone else.  When it came down to final selection, price matters when all else is equal.

 

Smith Security Safes

Anyone wanting to secure their firearms before a new child arrived would normally just purchase a safe or a bunch of chain locks and be done with it.  Most people would NOT build a gun safe, right off the bat.  That is the founding story here and the business started in the 1980's and then got into the vault door end of things which was the majority of their business right up to around 2009, where safes suddenly started pushing ahead in the sales column.  When I first ran across the website I didn't know that there was an actual dealer for these safes, but as they are just one site orders can go either way.

Unlike every other company, Smith Security Safes does not give you a 'stock safe' but gives you the full itemized price of everything they normally put into a safe.  That was daunting to look at until I realized that a spreadsheet would do me just fine so that I could get the three types that generally fell into my sizing category ( Redwood, Oak and Oak Plus) and all I needed was what shipping would cost.  I contacted the owner of the business to ensure that I got the numbers right, got the basic shipping costs and had my first  manufacturer that handily beat my price limit with all the minimum features being met!  That was only a week into my search.  Suddenly I had multiple choices to work with.

 

Sun Welding Safes

This was actually the last company I found and it was by accident going through a message board based in California.  Then I saw the safes being resold by an online retailer and decided to drop by the web site and look around.  With good local word of mouth, people visiting the manufacturing site and decent customer service spanning decades, its just a wonder that they can survive in California.

I went with one of their Pony Express safes for a quote, but that then needed additional features added into it so as to meet minimum specs and each of those small things cost money.  What had started out as the lowest cost contender now only became the lowest cost that was going to set the price range's bottom by beating out Smith Safes.  By the end between the last three that I would have to decide upon, the price range was down to $150, delivered.  From what I can see they offer a fine safe, don't change the product lines all that much over time and I would be happy to own that safe.

 

Hall's Safe

From their satisfied customers the one thing I heard over and over again: You can't go wrong with a Hall's.

They blow my minimum specs all to hell and gone, what can I say?  They are my sanity check on pricing and they bust past the budget limit I had very easily.  Just their Standard Stage in my size category is a far better safe than I need.  More than happy to get the quote from them!  Nothing else I looked at will touch their price.  Damn right I would be happy with a Hall's.  Ain't happening.  Besides I am no longer convinced that they would give me the best value for the price.

 

Vault Pro USA

This is a start-up small business that is expanding in... California.  I'm getting the idea that when CA makes it impossible for the safe manufacturers to continue and they leave, then the State is done for.

I was impressed with the line-up from Vault Pro, and theirs was the first safe to meet all my minimum specs with just one modification (at no extra cost!) in the price quote.  Their safes actually beat my specs in most other areas and they have a good line of upgrades in body thickness that are pre-priced so that if you want to get into something that will compete at the low end of the bigger, established luxury end of things, you can.   They seem to have a decent handle on just what basic security is in a gun safe and then went ahead and made sure they met or exceeded those minimums.

This would not be the lowest cost safe in the round-up, but would not be the highest one, either, as I wasn't looking for something to compete with the higher end manufacturers that don't spend on an advertising budget.  I actually consider that very interesting.

 

Ironman Safes

Actually their FB Page does a better job showing the company than their web site does.  I found this company a couple of times through online resellers, but finally decided to take a look at them a bit more.  The safe I looked at in the size range did not have the top/bottom bolts that were on my requirements list, but did have a full hinge-side top to bottom passive bar seal to give the door added resistance to pry attacks and to totally thwart bolt drilling attacks.  I hadn't seen many passive designs in anything but the vintage and antique safes, and this was the first of the modern safes that showed one.

As the stock safe at the resellers site had everything I wanted otherwise, and included shipping costs, I decided that I would give an alternate security allowance for Ironman Safes and wanted to have them to help balance out the selection group.  In the end they would make the final three to decide upon because it is always worth having someone doing just a little different to help make sure you've done your analysis right.

 

Sportsman Steel Safes

I found this manufacturer first, and its hard to miss them in a search engine look-up.  I contacted them through their webform for a price quote... and a week later I got a great call from a sales rep. and that they would send a quote to me via e-mail.  That e-mail bounced which happens on a very rare occasion from my main e-mail provider, and I got a phone call and gave an alternate e-mail to get it to me.  Two weeks later and I sent a message asking for the price quote.  I generally rely on e-mail as my limited time for physical and mental acuity is limited in the day, and e-mail is easier to handle as asynchronous comms.

Luckily I wrote down the verbal one to have when going into the mix.  Lack of sales follow-up does matter, however.  No matter how nice the safe (or any product come to that) and no matter how nice the sales person, actually being able to get a price quote out and assure its arrival is important.

 

To narrow this field of 7 to 5 was easy: Hall's went and so did Sportsman's Steel.  Do note that this was not throwing out the high and the low, but actually seeing what fit the price range and what was actually available for me to look at in the way of price quotes.  That was easy.

Narrowing things down after that was much, much harder as that remaining field had $900 between top and bottom, but cost isn't the sole criteria: best value for the money is.  In other words I was willing to go $200 over budget if I got a head and shoulders much better safe for that money.  That I had to actually sleep on for a couple of nights as it isn't an easy question and is purely subjective in nature.  Was a single security feature worth the money to pay for it?

If that question is hard then the other end of the scale and weeding out amongst the low end of it is even harder: there are a group of safes and manufacturers that all make the same basic product with a high and low end with just a small number of details amongst them that set one apart from another.  Size of business matters and so does where they were in the business cycle: were they new, were they expanding, were they established?  So does what you are getting in the way of protection and both Ironman and Vault Pro had features that were standard that the others didn't and Security Products had a feature that no one else even considered.  For customization it is hard to beat Smith Security Safes or Sun Welding and they were at the low end of field.  And how can the California businesses stay in business with their business climate?  Would any of them be around next year?  Would a few of them de-camp for lower taxes and overhead cost?  That means you get a multi-variable matrix of cost, features, and business trade-offs that must also include what the manufacturer can arrange as stock 'get it to ground level in front of your home' as their final cost.  Only that cost is objective, the rest is subjective in nature and it is those subjective factors that decide outcomes.  That is a process I described elsewhere in the political realm, but serves as an analysis tool for other venues, as well.

Yes I did narrow it down to 3 and then, finally, to the selection and purchase, which has now gone into production.

At this point I'm looking to figure out how to save on shipping costs by looking on my own since the manufacturer is amenable to having a different shipper.  Of course I want the shipping, delivery and basic placement of the safe done all in one package, along with removal of the skid and packaging.  I would actually look to do that with ANY of the final 5, so this doesn't say much about who I chose.  Shipping, delivery and install are all something somewhat apart from the safe, itself, although base cost shipping if I can't find something better played a part in the decision, itself.

So there you have it – how I decided on a gun safe.

Not WHAT gun safe I decided upon, but the process and procedure to do it.