Saturday, September 30, 2017

Human Cattle-CIS Division

Atop my isolated Stoa, I read a rather amusing and frightening article about Cryptocurrency and the Cashless society.

First, Cryptocurrencies are fine in my book, they have their uses and their place.  However, they will never, not ever, replace physical "currency".  Whether you barter colored bits of paper, shiny metal coins or your old jogging shoes, there will always be "currency".   Puerto Rico is currently experiencing what happens to electronic currency (ATM's) when the power goes out.  Granted, as long as your smartphones are still powered up and you and your client have Bluetooth, you can still exchange Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies.

What I'm finding both amusing and scary at the same time is the idea of bundling everything into a chip that is inserted under your skin.  How do I define "everything"?  Imaging that this chip looks very much like the chip you insert into the scanner today at the local "Try-n-Save".  On it resides your "debit card" data.  You purchase food, pay tolls, and even identify yourself by waving your hand, or otherwise chipped body part over the reader.  Sounds convenient, yes?  One need not imaging this as it already exists and thousands of people have already had these installed.  Several corporations in Sweden, India, England, and the United States have already started doing this for "security" reasons, among many.  These people can even pay for their snack goods at the local corporate vending machine by waving their hand at it.  Over 1 billion "B" Indians have already had biometric coding associated with their fingerprints and retinal scans...this is not coming folks, this is here...NOW.

The parts that begin to concern me on this, in no particular order:

  • The chipped individual gains access to specific and predetermined areas of the corporate building with this chip.
  • They gain access to parts of the computer network based on the security authorization granted to the chip.
  • The company knows where you have been...it also knows were you are...
  • These chips are not passive, they emit an EM field, this is how the sensors recognize your hand waving.  This means you can be followed, in real time, about your business.
Things this good are always shared by companies and the local government.  Imagine the company selling your RF tag frequency to other companies that want to sell you something.  Imagine the targeted marketing that can happen when Quilted knows how often you go to the bathroom.  Imagine the speeding ticket when the low Earth orbit satellite catches your RF tag number traveling 65 in a 45 mph zone?  

Some good can come from this as well, though.  Your medical history and data can be stored here, or at least the access codes for that data.  It can also all be stolen from you as well.  Imagine your tax refund depositing directly to your chip tag as soon as you file the paperwork, now that's cool.  It can also garnish your wages and take fees from you without you even authorizing it as well...remember, digital currency can be granted or taken away with a keystroke.

What made me want to write this, though was a flash thought that popped into my head.  Imagine a police murder mystery show set in 2025.  Scene opens on a janitor coming into work in the morning and finding a person dead on the floor, she reaches for the wall phone only to find a policeman standing in the doorway.  See, the biometric chip reported that the victim's heart stopped and this triggered the police to come and investigate.  The policeman waves the janitor away, telling him that he'll have this case solved in no time.  Pulling up the biometric tag data for the victim, he establishes the time of death to within one or two minutes of actual.  He then pulles up ecounter data to determine how many other tags were near him in the last 15 minutes of the victims' life.  The computer immediately gives him names and current locations of all the suspects.  Driverless pods are dispatched to those locations to pick the suspects up. Each suspect has been given an AI generated call to their smart devices informing them of the incident, their compliance is legally required.  They all arrive on the scene within 30 minutes or so and the policeman then taps a few more keys on his pc pad.  All the smart devices in that room upload their visual scanning for that period of time and several catch one of the present suspects arguing with and then striking the victim with a heavy, blunt object.  Visual and audio are included and because of multiple angles, a 3D representation can even be reconstructed.  Case closed before the first commercial break.

This technology starts out about creating a cashless society, then morphs into something Orwell could not have dreamed up no matter how high a fever he may have had.

Think on it and ponder other how other aspects of today's life can be observed, regulated, and punished with just a few keystrokes.  

Live well. 
Zavost

The Return of the Stoic

Today upon the Stoa, I sweep off the empty beer cans, stack up the protest signs, and scrub the anatomically impossible slogans off the walls.  I have been away from the Stoa, attending to life and other such things.  In my absence, all that was in decline continues to decline.  That which was worrisome has become terrifying.  Thoughtful contemplation turns to meloncholy.

Since 2012, the American Culture Wars have become global, though I'm certain they always were, we just did not notice.  Our Technology is plundered, our children and grandchildren endebted, thought has become regulated, five-year olds can be suspended from school for using the word, "she", people can be denied a boarding pass on a plane for having a cartoon drawing of an imaginary weapon on his t-shirt.  Corruption is no longer hidden, but proudly on display.  American royalty, worshipped in place of God.  Uncontrolled, ney, encouraged illegal immigration, abdication of space exploration, flouting of common morals and common sense...memory holes and thought rehabilitation.

Where to start?  Where to begin tying up all that has become frayed?  Is the America of my childhood dead and gone?  That of my parents and grandparents certainly is.  In fact, it was dying, in stages, for the last 150 years, I would suppose.  We are only just now, in the terminal stages of something that started a long time ago.  My only hope is that President Trump could be our Diocletian, our Constantine.  A chance to arrest the slide, go give our Republic one last chance at redemption.

In my humble, amature historian, opinion, the seeds of today's major problems stem from the converging cultural, religious, political, and geopolitical detritus of the American Civil War.  Feel free to disagree, in fact, it is your intellectual right to do so; however, this is my site personal musings, so if it irritates you too much, simply browse away and leave in peace.

So, to expand upon my thoughts.

I believe that the Civil War was more about defining the 10th Amendment to the Constitution then it was about Slavery.  Slavery, as an institution in America was in decline.  Cheap labor, import/export imbalances and all that were secondary to the centralizing tendency of the Federal Government.  Every power that the Federal Government took, or reserved, for itself, was a denial of the State's ability to excessive said power.  The Consitution enumerated quite clearly what the Federal Government could or could not do.  However, if the State acquiesced and did not challenge (as the Supreme Court has ruled about Congress), then the theft becomes an accepted exception to the Law.  Southern States had their own vision and the North had theirs.  We shared language and religion, common historical parentage, and a desire for our home State to thrive and prosper.  The issue of Slavery has simmered and boiled for decades, a thorn even in the side of our Framers.  A confluence of history and a spark set off the Civil War.  When a forest burns, its encourages new growth.  Change and evolution is granted space to experiment.  I leave it to you to draw specifics, there is certainly not enough to space to get bogged down here.  On to the next.

President Andrew Johnson.  President Lincoln had a vision for Reconstruction and Reconcilliation between North and South.  Republicans in Congress had their vision, and the President had his.  Unfortunately for Johnson, the swinging pendulum of Presidental vs Congressional power had swung back towards Congress, and they had powerful interest groups to enrich, er, listen to.  If the stated goal of Reconstruction was to mainstream blacks into free society then it failed.  I'm thinking Jim Crow laws, tax polls, reading rules, KKK (version 1.0, 2.0, etc.) and other variety of Democrat inventions.  Republican members castrated Johnson and saw to it that he got nothing done, and when he dared attempt to go around them, he got impeached.  Now we arrive at the dawn of Progressivism.

The Constitutional amendment allowing the Federal Senators to be elected via popular vote.  This was not what our Framers intended.    The Federal Senators were supposed to above the civil emotions of the masses and remain true to the States, fighting for their rights just as the Representatives in the House were fighting for the constituency.  This placed a major warp in our governmental machinery.  The carefully constructed checks and balances, structure within structure slowly broke down.  The Senate simply became a more elite version of the House, regardless of what all the original arguments for the amendment promised.

The creation of the Federal Reserve.  This Progressive monster had been aborted twice in our nations' history.  The first was killed early on when someone noticed it was unconstitutional and had it dissolved.  The second time was by the only Democrat I could have voted for, President Andrew Jackson (I see a lot of Trump in him).  Jackson too found it unconstitutional, however, this time, the Supreme Court said that somehow this time it was ok.  He dissolved it anyhow.  When told he was disobeying the High Court his response was something along the lines of, "what police force are they in charge of?"  However, this time it stuck.  It was a major crack in the foundations of the Republic.  Immediately the value of the dollar began to decline.  The stated purpose of the FR was to prevent or dampen the cyclical nature of the American free market economy.  Too much boom boom pretty soon boo boo, to borrow a common phrase.  This same progressive was to ram through another amendment allowing federal taxation.  For some reason, this was necessary, though for the entire past hundred plus years a Federal Tax was unnessary.  We built the Erie Canal, the Panama Canal, the Transcontinental Railroad,  built bridges and turnpikes and fought a dozen wars (1812, Civil, and WWI to name a few ) all without a permanent Federal Tax.  Sounds do me like a quickly centralizing Federal Beauracracy was getting greedy.

Coupled with these dry historical facts is the complex cycles of culture.  I recommend a series of books by the authors of the good "Generations" for an in-depth explaination of those complex, cyclical changes in our society.  To give a brief over-view of these changes just consider how our morals swing back and forth over time.  Victorian morals as it related to a woman's virtue gave way to Flappers and independent women.  Hollywood in the 20's and 30's and 40' had ALOT of what we would call Rated R films that were mainstream for the public audience of all ages.  Then things swung back hard the other way and in a short time you had "My Three Sons" and "Leave it Beaver", plus Hollywood clamped down on nudity and suggestive behavior.  Twenty short years later and you had Helter Skelter and It and Rosemary's Baby, plus a host of other....types of films.  Depending on when hisorical events land in the cultural cycle depends on how much of a 'big' deal that event becomes.  More on that in another post.

The Progressive Era never really died, it simply evolved to camoflage itself.  It created Copy Books and slowly infiltrated the schools and the courthouses.  It changed its name and its appearance, but it was always there, building the "Uniparty".  A single political agenda, but one with full fat and the other, slightly less fattening.  Democrat and Republican, two wings of the same party.  Granted, not all at once, and not all the time. There were notible exceptions to this, but if you draw a trending line, it will trend straight towards Uniparty.

So much, so much.  So many threads.  I grow more and more certain that there are hands at the other end of those threads, tugging and pulling to get us to jump one way or the other.  The hands change over time, but the purpose seems insidiously consistent.

I have returned to the Stoa and will muse and ponder my seemingly contradictory stances and thoughts, though if you think about them long enough, you will begin to see the symmetry.  Time to sweep off the rest of the trash and garbage that has polluted my Stoa over the years.  More to come.

As always, live well.

Zavost