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> The Jade Helm scare-o-tron rollout was completely botched and scrapped as far as I can tell.

Can you explain what you mean? As far as I can tell Jade Helm was a fairly routine military training exercise, which was latched onto by a group of conspiracy nuts. What’s a “scare-o-tron rollout”?

I personally draw a distinction between the gigantic-sized stuff the US federal government does (military and wars, fiscal and monetary policy, taxes, transfer payment programs) and the medium-sized stuff (HUD, EPA, FCC, etc.)

The medium sized stuff can be steered by the adminstration in power. The people you elect can exert influence in those areas, I mean.

But the huge stuff is out of their control. The military especially is very interesting to me because no war just happens spontaneously. It's all got to be planned years in advance. In that context, where does a Jade Helm fit in?

Anyhow, regardless of what you think of the loudmouths regarding Jade Helm, that campaign was certainly odd in its conception both in terms of size and setting.

What possible valid reason would the US military have for doing large scale trainings in US urban settings? I don't mean that question in a conspiracy sense. I mean, logically speaking, why? The military has the tactics and hardware to engage in urban settings down pat. Just training for training's sake? That's nonsense.

I'll leave the speculation as to the "real" motives for Jade Helm to the more frothy-mouthed. What I know after-the-fact was there was an odd/confusing move by the military, followed by a terrible sales job by the stuffed shirts in power that led inevitably to a failed/cancelled campaign. It reinforces my point that the power structure seems to be creaking here.

With respect, I understand many people viewed that one training event with skepticism. I'm not going to try and change your mind. I would, however, like to address the idea that "training for training's sake" has no value.

Tough, frequent, realistic training is exactly what is required to keep certain parts of the military prepared. I'm not talking about logisticians or acquisitions types. Personnel turnover is a problem. People must learn how to work together. For people like you and I, we have the opportunity to learn to work with our coworkers... every day! In the military, a service member only really learns how to work with their coworkers during these kinds of exercises. When it's cold. When it's dark. When everyone is tired and hungry.

You've also suggested that "the military has the tactics and hardware to engage in urban settings down pat" ... and you're absolutely correct. Senior personnel have lessons learned. Those lessons are captured in various documents. However, much like a start-up, execution is everything. The execution comes from personnel who typically have just a few years experience. There is an enormous amount of knowledge which must be transferred in a short period of time. These training events are how the lessons and doctrine are shared with those junior leaders. Classroom instruction is not sufficient.

Finally, I will disagree that the training event was "odd in it's conception." Certain parts of the military perform these kinds of exercises regularly. The only part of this exercise which was odd was the amount of attention it garnered.

I agree with everything you've said except the last paragraph. Training the troops is important! Too bad the knuckleheads in power did nothing to explain or justify the size/scope/location of the exercise, maybe it would have been worthwhile.

Sounds like you think it would have been okay though. Want to sell me on rolling tanks, helicopters, and troops through town? Can they fire their guns and cannons (with blanks)? What limits would you put on the exercise if you were in charge or is everything the military does reasonable?

These are all things that actual militaries do for exercises. In fact, under certain conditions they'll fire their weapons a LOT without blanks (live-fire exercises).

Ed, great question. It would be absolutely unreasonable (...and not being a lawyer... I would suspect illegal... but I don't really know) for tanks, helicopters, and troops to "roll... through town." I also agree that you touched on the key failing in that training event: poor explanation to the national audience of the scope of the event.

The military has many places to train. There are places to shoot. There are places to blow things up. There are places to maneuver tanks. There are few places which include a civilian population.

That event was a training event for parts of SOF community; a community which is operating in over 100 countries at any given time. Very few of those countries are in active conflict... by that I'm referring to a shooting-war. These types of units must be prepared to perform their tasks in a peaceful environment without undue notice. Units are typically small; think less than 15 people with maybe 2-3 civilian-style vehicles. They operate dispersed over large areas. They don't have tanks. When such units move around, they are usually in non-military vehicles and attire. For this kind of unit many tasks are related to interacting with people, either local security forces (police and military) or local civilians. There is a legitimate need to train on such tasks.

These types of training events focus on the military tasks which need this kind of a training environment (large area, dispersed operations, civilian population). Training for tasks related to shooting and blowing things up happen in areas the military 'owns.'

I highly doubt any of the training plans included detonations, live-fire, or even dry-fire events anywhere outside the normal military training areas. It's more likely that the interactions with the actual civilian population would have been completely un-noticed. An interaction would more likely look like a strangely fit group of guys were putting fuel in their Toyota and then drove away... maybe making a few jokes with you while you both wait at the pump. Almost certainly the same (or less) level of impact as your average Reserve or National Guard unit driving around on a weekend.

I feel like your last paragraph there is an attempt to subtley troll that went too far. If not, then I'd love for you to cite your sources for such speculation (beyond the original JH 15 powerpoint, which has to be intentionally vague regarding scope and specifics regarding an operation which hasn't yet taken place).

> Just training for training's sake? That's nonsense.

I'm...seriously baffled as to what confusion of ideas would lead you to say something like this. Do you not know what the word "training" means?

You're right, that's not a complete thought.

"Does the need to train troops for urban combat provide enough justification for the military to conduct realistic exercises in actual US cities?" is how I wish I had written that.

I hope my other comment sufficiently addressed that "urban combat" was not the task being trained in that exercise. There are places the military trains for "urban combat" ... Main St. USA is not it.

I'm a Brit, first time I've heard about Jade Helm. a quick DDG search showed multiple hits for "conspiracy theories".

Ultimately people want to think they are living in the most critical important times of the world ever. But this is a fallacy of how we live, in the present. Everyone has thought that their time then was the most critical. Look to history to get perspective and the pinch of salt we need.

The problem with your take on this is that if you look to history then the US military has a long and very well documented history of massacring innocents. toppling democracies, supporting despots, waging pointless wars badly etc. Hopefully we are living in a special time when they can live up to their PR.

I see the TPP as part of the obsolescence of the nation state in favor of global corporate governance. The incompetence you mention fits in with this-- those boobs are just leftovers from the old system. The fact that Donald Trump is being seriously considered for president should tell you that the nation state is dead.

Not saying this is a good thing. Read any 80s cyberpunk novel to see what's coming. William Gibson was a prophet.

The fact that Donald Trump is being seriously considered for president should tell you that the nation state is dead.

It doesn't tell me that at all.

go on...

It means people are so tired of listening to self-interested politicians toe the party line that they're willing to elect a candidate solely based on how crazy his ideas are and how much he won't backpedal on them, even in the face of adversity.

In terms of fearless leaders, he definitely is one.

Of course, I also think his ideas are mostly inane and that within fifteen minutes of his inauguration he would have already started World War III. But I can understand why people want to elect him.

Excuse my ignorance as I'm not American and perhaps miss all the nuances.

- Wants to stop illegal immigration. Not immigration. Only illegal. i.e. people not paying taxes but living there undocumented

- Non-citizens giving birth in USA and then automatically the baby is USA's problem until it dies

- Tax reform that wants to stop corporate inversion and bring money back to USA (Google, Apple, etc.)

- Wants a more competitive health care system than Obamacare

- Wants USA to make better trade deals because there are crazy trade deficits.

Why are any of these ideas seen as being crazy by Americans?

Because of the how and why

The second is a result of the United States being based on the principle of jus soli, as opposed to the more common jus sanguinis.

It's not some incidental issue. Resolving it would mean completely overhauling what American identity is.

First off, I'm not American either.

It's crazy because you've just given the entire substance of his campaign. He hasn't actually given any more details than that, and the points are ostensibly chosen because they're easily latched onto by people who can't be bothered to pay very much attention. Also the wall thing.

But I don't see anyone on the internet writing articles rebutting any of the points. I.e. I'd expect someone to write an article where they negate each point on that list e.g. "Illegal immigration - I think Trump is crazy to bring this point up because there is nothing wrong with illegal immigration. The reason we should not be against illegal immigration is because ..." and so on and so on, for each point. The wall is an implementation detail. I see people focus on that but then it's almost like they're trying to avoid the topic.

Trump seems like a very pragmatic reasoner. Keeps things simple. His way of reasoning seems to go something like this: "Illegal immigration. Are you for it, or against it? Against it? Ok. Would a wall help? Yes or no. Yes? Ok but you seem apprehensive about it. Why are you apprehensive? It's going to be expensive? We have a trade deficit with Mexico. I bet I could force them to pay for it by using strong arm tactics and adding taxes onto things they like exporting here. I'm good at negotating shit like that. Are you still apprehensive?" And so on.

I just simply can't find any coherently written rebuttals other than articles that go "Trump is crazy. He's an narcissist. He's a racist" basically just ad hominems. No one is being critical about any of his points. So it's very weird when I see all the hostility against him but no actual counter arguments.

Not sure if you have ever paid attention to politics but what politicians say is not what they usually do. Especially the claim: "Tax reform that wants to stop corporate inversion and bring money back to USA (Google, Apple, etc.)" is very unlikely as he himself is part of that system and so are his friends and stakeholders.

I think his election would result in... nothing. No change at all. The office is almost a chair warmer position at this point.

See Jon Gnarr, who started an openly satirical joke political party in Iceland called the Best Party, but actually ended up winning the mayoral post of Reykjavik. At which point the Best Party became a serious effort.

Nation state fully intact. Donald Trump is far less dramatic and just another cookie cutter populist.

Corporate lawsuits against governments at the World Bank (ISDS) can offer data on the balance of power between states and corporations. See this Aussie explainer video, in the style of the Daily Show: https://youtube.com/watch?v=M4-mlGRPmkU

More at http://www.isdscorporateattacks.org & https://icsid.worldbank.org

  Water: Azurix v. Argentina
  Investor win (awarded $165 million plus interest)

  Ban of toxic fuel additive: Ethyl v. Canada
  Case settled (investor received $13 million, ban reversed)

  Toxic waste: Metalclad v. Mexico
  Investor win (awarded $16.2 million)

  Too-big-to-fail: Saluka v. Czech Republic
  Investor win (awarded $236 million)

This is incredible. Reading the details of the cases listed on that site makes me feel sick. And there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

Those pre-TPP cases are nothing compared to the future combined scope of TPP (Pacific), TTIP (Europe) and RCEP (China, Korea, India, and other Asian countries).

Never say there is nothing you can do. Tell other people about ISDS. Share the videos [1][2][3][4].

Jon Oliver's video [4] about the Philip Morris tobacco ISDS lawsuit against Australia (for brown paper packaging) caused such an outcry that TPP negotiators were forced to exclude the entire tobacco industry from ISDS. This is the first time such an industry-specific carve-out has appeared in a trade agreement.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=M9ZFDpuiFUs

[2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=M4-mlGRPmkU

[3] https://youtube.com/watch?v=AABOIcXZZwg

[4] https://youtube.com/watch?v=6UsHHOCH4q8

Whenever I think about this for more than a passing moment I just become so scared and angry. How the fuck is a company able to take a country to court over a public health measure? Who the fuck voted for the evil bastards who made that possible? How do they fucking live with themselves?

The ones who listen to what they "will do", complain about what they do, then promptly forgets during the buildup to the next election.

The ones who follow "the line" and are afraid of getting ostracized by their peers.

The ones who value pocket change now over future prospects.

Easy. Sociopaths. They are insect minds wrapped in human skin. Wolves in sheep's clothing if there ever was such a thing.

Claire Patterson was able to run a successful one man campaign against lead in our products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson#Campai...

I don't know about the rest, but Mexico won the Metalclad case; there's still no toxic waste dump there. Mexico had to pay for the stuff they told Metalclad to build while knowing all along they were going to deny the dump.

I do not think that a corporation should not be allowed to challenge a government due to decisions impacting its business. Some of its actions can be very harmful to businesses. If an harm is done, the victim should be able to initiate a process of _public_ investigation (which ISDS seems not to be, I wonder why) and if the government is shown to have done wrong, the corporation should have the possibility to get compensated.

The above Saluka v. Czech Republic case got me interested, so I have read a little on this. At the time Japanese Nomura had invested in Czech IPB bank in 1998, there was an international treaty on protection of investments in effect between the Czech republic and the Netherlands. Nomura had transferred the 46% ownership of IPB to their Netherlands-based fund Saluka (I am not sure on legality of this operation). The lawsuit took place after Czech government's actions reacting to IPB bank falling down. Nomura was partially responsible for the downfall as it did not make promised actions to help the bank, but the government also had their feet wet when later they helped other banks in similarly bad shape, but did not help IPB. Nomura was smart and resourceful enough to point out this is in odds with the above treaty and benefit from the situation. The government has tried to sue Nomura as well for its actions/inactions and law breaking for 240 billion crowns, but then dropped it to make an agreement with Nomura.

An international arbitrage took place in 2006-8 which found 5 out of 8 claims made by Saluka to be invalid, but the remaining 3 were found to be valid. The most important finding was that the Czech republic did not give the same kind of financial assistance to the IPB bank it had given to other banks in similar shape and thus failed to honor the international treaty ion investment protection. Saluka demanded 30 billion crowns as a compensation, the arbiters decided only 3.5 billion crowns, equal to initial Nomura's investment, should be payed. In this case at least, it seems to me, legally things worked well - the government screwed up, it got sued, it lost and it paid up.

Sorry for the long write-up. What's the morale of the story? I am not outraged so much by the possibility of corporation suing the government as by government's utter ineptness. We need more efficient, less corrupt government that can follow and enforce meaningful rules and at the same time, keep nasty investors and their schemes in check.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2144277

http://www.protext.cz/zprava.php?id=2487 http://www.kurzy.cz/zpravy/117569-respekt-nomura-na-investic... http://www.rozhlas.cz/radiozurnal/publicistika/_zprava/jan-m...

The nation state is dead unless Donald Trump manages to pull off a victory.

Yep, I don't know what Trump will lead US into (and I don't think it will necessary be worse than any other president in this day and age). But any mainstream candidate from GOP or Democrat will certainly lead to more TPP.

It doesn't much matter who is in the role, as it is exactly that: a role.

Even without conspiracy theories regarding secret cabals that rule the world from the shadows, there is overwhelming inertia baked into the system itself.

A fairly recent study that I very vaguely recall pointed to this fact: the conclusion being that it is extraordinarily difficult to effect change within systems that are essentially self-perpetuating.

Or Bernie Sanders.

They're both creative individuals that are willing to buck the trend and change things in the way they think is right rather than toeing the party line.

No they are not:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/stop-comparing-donald-tr...

Notably #6 in the article.

So Sanders gets less attention and is campaigning based on the facts rather than his personality.

But although he tends to vote the same as many other Democrats, he is very dangerous to moneyed interests in politics. No one's bothered to fix that for a long time.

>he is very dangerous to moneyed interests in politics

Which is exactly why he can't win: those moneyed interests have...money.

Citizens United eviscerated of at least the appearance of a democracy.

Meanwhile, the DNC is ignoring Larry Lessing in any way it can, despite him meeting fund raising goals and being pretty much the third most serious contender since Biden has not even announced yet.

Well we can't have any choice over there, can we? It's Hillary's turn god damn it.

"I could create the replacement to the internet and destroy the current corporate powers in doing so. And despite this replacement's power, it'd be designed in a way that governments could never infringe on it. I just don't because I have a comfy job"? Oh, please.

What wires/wavelengths is this free internet going to run on?

You lack imagination! There are so many ways to deliver what the internet delivers today that you have not considered. I wouldn't even have to foresake our current software ecosystem built up around tcp and http. Keep your YouTube and Twitter for as long as you'd like.

The only thing worse that not knowing how to fix something is to know how to do it and be unwilling.

What if you substituted "I" with "we" in that sentence?

>>>I'm wondering how long before we have government-sanctioned libraries, languages, and chipsets that we may develop for.

"You there! STOP!"

"Huh?"

"We've got you on record for bootstrapping, machine code, and compiler writing!"

"so?"

"That's a threat, and you are going to have to come with us and register."

"Register for what?"

"As a weapon. We need to know where you are and who you associate with..."

Your hands are deadly weapons.

As is the brain. Just talking to someone, in what we consider an ordinary way today, could be trouble.

I doubt it will go that bad, but I wouldn't be surprised if the end result of the War on General Purpose Computing will be laws limiting access to turing-complete machines to licensed software engineers. For everyone else, playing with a compiler will be illegal.

Your vision of the future sounds like hell to me! It's sortof like gun control ... only the bad guys will have access to development rigs.

Yes. It terrifies me. But that's exactly what we'll have if we actually get "programmer professionalization". This is a part of the War on General Purpose Computing; on one hand, as software runs more and more life-critical systems like cars or energy infrastructure, you see a push from both security professionals and big companies towards turning programming into real engineering discipline; on the other hand, you have media companies fighting to limit public's access to turing-complete computation. Unfortunately in this context, while everyone hates the big media shops, infosec has a lot of good karma currently, and they're also against us in this war.

https://github.com/linuxfoundation/cii-best-practices-badge/...

As I suspect the "unique digital exhaust" tracking problem will only get worse as machine learning improves, sometimes a proper Butlerian Jihad seems like the only solution. So I remind myself often that such an extreme solution can always happen later, so there's no excuse not to fight for a better solution in the meantime.

When faced with a very difficult task, there is a tendency in humans to feel helpless and unable to affect any meaningful change. This quickly spirals into a nasty form of learned helplessness. This feedback loop can lead to a nihilistic attitude. If you can't win, why bother trying. Even Feynman succumbed to this problem[1] after the Manhattan Project.

One thing I do know about the people trying to put the General Purpose Computer back in it's bottle, and the people who are so terrified of their fellow citizens they create a surveillance state to try to preserve their status quo: every person that succumbs to a defeatist or nihilistic attitude is one less person is one less person standing in their way.

[1] sigh - it seems the BBC took down the video I had bookmarked. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgaw9qe7DEE#t=1114 ). A quick search found the video at dailymotion (jump to 18:34 for the comment I'm referencing): http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x24gwgc_richard-feynman-the...

That's mostly the scenario I was writing about.

Take that bit of dialog and plug in a smart kid making their own stuff...

"heart cells: interact in a way allowing logic gates and hence are Turing Complete" - http://www.gwern.net/Turing-complete

I mostly agree, in the long term. There's no point in fighting if you'll need to replace what you're fighting with something more resilient, as merely building it and showing it is better can be a far more effective way of winning, by deprecating the entire system.

That's the approach taken by Bitcoin - why attack the banks when we can circumvent them? We can build what we need and ignore the old system. No need to get down to the level of kindergarten kids throwing mud. Do better instead.

Exactly! We can do better, or at least different, instead. Bitcoin has good incentives built into the system that improve its trustworthiness. And, it doesn't need to ever completely replace other currencies to be disruptive and useful. I think the same kind of design principles could be applied to the general problem of communications.

We CAN build what we need, in fact most of what we need exists in software bits and bobs already.

Connectivity to this alternative network I envision would be free, but users would need to pay local trusted individuals/businesses to aggregate and cache subscriptions to wider-area feeds for them. Consider that these feeds would necessarily constitute large amounts of data since you'd need to bring huge swaths of data you're interested in close to your locality.

The volume and freshness of the data users would subscribe to would be proportionate to how much they'd collectively be willing to pay to fetch and store on an ongoing basis (sortof like how we have tiers for internet connection speeds today.)

The software for the network would build on existing tools and libraries on the client with proper sandboxing of sessions. The storage, cache, feed management, payments, chargebacks, and crypto are all solved problems for the most part.

Yes, this would be a huge effort and would probably work best if some new consumer hardware were developed and that would require investment. But, I don't think anything I have in mind is technically infeasible. I'd like to have some reasonable systems and protocols in place that prevent users being identified and tracked on the network for most classes of communications.

Time's a wastin' ;)

I think that we need something like IPFS, which connects via covert channels, and is fully deniable. With ubiquitous HD video, download bandwidth would be trivial, even with ~1% signal/carrier. Upload bandwidth would be harder to hide.

We need fully open high bandwidth radio protocols for creating useful mesh networks (MU-MIMO tech in hardware you don't need licensing for), using protocols like CJDNS, anonymization like I2P, Tahoe-LAFS and IPFS for distribution and management of data, etc...

And we really need better crypto key management. Keybase.io, Namecoin, OpenKeychain, Yubikey NEO, etc, they all contribute to part of the solution, but we need something more comprehensive.

"avoid the social networks like the plague" he said and posted his opinion publicly to HN