Liberty Watch - Who Reads Your Email?

In this report, an ATT engineer reports that the NSA collects internet traffic with the cooperation of ATT. While they say they use computers to sift it and only read a tiny fraction of what goes through, the capacity to read anyone's email is now, seemingly in place. Who needs to go to court to get wire taps if they can read your email? I'd say this would be part of Step 4 of Naomi Wolf's ten steps for dismantling a democracy.


4. Create a surveillance apparatus for its ordinary citizens.

Dan Fagan on Vic Kohring

I've given Dan a bad time now and then here about his ADN column, so it's only fair that I give him credit for a decent column. Yesterday's column on Kohring actually offered a little more insight into what makes Vic tick.

Often, Dan's column has fallen into a category I'd call rhetorical pollution. By that I mean, when we discuss politics and other important issues in the public square, the ideal is to shed light, clarify positions, add new facts, so that we can come to understandings of how things work and what is the best policy. Unfortunately, there are people who have gained little corners of the public square who have used that soap box, not to enlighten, but to litter the public square with invective against people and institutions, with uninformed opinion, and often home made facts. People like this do actual harm, just as people who litter do harm. We have to clean up the mess they made before we move forward in solving public problems. We have to reestablish the facts, challenge the biased opinions, and basically undo the pollution in the pursuit of public truths. I've only listened to Dan's radio show a couple of times on the radio - internet actually - but I found his newspaper columns to mostly be in the rhetorical pollution category.

But yesterday's column wasn't in that category. It actually made interesting observations - comparing Kohring's public optimism as he faces prison to a character int he Shawshank Redemption who kept hope alive in prison. That guy was innocent Dan wrote, does Vic have hope because he thinks he's innocent? Insightful. Then Dan talked about his own observations of Vic's habit of eating other people's food. Yet, while being critical -

[t]he jury had no choice but to find Kohring guilty. He traded on the power we entrusted him with as a public servant.

- Dan is also compassionate about a fellow human being in trouble.

Dan adds enough anecdotes in addition to what others have related and to the trial evidence - that Vic was always on the lookout for a free meal - for me to speculate with a reasonable level of confidence that Vic has some deep seated issues around food and money. [OK, some of you are saying, "took you long enough," but I only really have any direct contact with Vic through the trial, and I think trying to understand who people are based on what they've experienced is a valid approach]

Vic is about 6'7" so he does have a lot more body to nourish than most of us. He's also a middle child - an older brother and sister and a younger brother and sister - he told us during a break in the trial. It doesn't sound like there was a lot of money in the Kohring household and with four siblings, maybe Vic actually went to bed hungry some nights. Many people who lived through the depression became almost stingy with how they spent their money for the rest of their lives. Possibly Vic has tapes playing in his head - maybe he can hear his father telling him not to waste money. I don't know, these things work in strange ways. Some, who were poor, spend like crazy when they get a little money. Others are always afraid of being poor again and just stash it. Pete Kott had $30,000 in cash in a closet when the FBI searched where he was living in Juneau.

Anyway, Dan's column adds a bit to what we know. It's in the positive contribution side of the scale.

It would have been really interesting if Dan had talked about the many times (according to the court testimony) Veco got Vic air time on Dan's radio show. Both Dan and Vic have been stalwart supporters of the oil industry. Dan, working in the private sector, doesn't have to report any support he gets. But what did he think of Vic at the time - besides his eating habits? A little more insight into what he thought of his guest at the time and how he might handle political guests in the future would have made this column yet better.

Paul Kendall on Hydrogen

I met Paul Kendall the other day when I was part of a panel that discussed the political corruption trials here in Alaska. He said he's learned that he's good at gathering information and finding things, but not at getting his ideas out to the world. So I pulled out my digital camera and took some pictures and made some sound memos. I only got him once he was into his pitch and I had to stop each time after 60 seconds. So what I have on the video are three interrupted clips of 60 seconds. But I told him I'd give him at least my small audience. If you want to know more, email me (there's a contact link in my profile) and I'll pass it on.



He's obvious intelligent, he is passionate, knows his subject, and is a very fluent speaker. He knows that some people think he's crazy, but assured me he's never been on meds and isn't 'off his meds.' I liked him.

More Horror Stories from Naomi Wolf

In a comment on the previous post, Phil linked to this piece by Naomi Wolf on another blog. These stories sound so unreal that I'm sure many will say, "It can't be true" or "She must have done something suspicious" but that's what they said as the Nazi's took over. We have the advantage of knowing about Nazi Germany, something those living in Germany in the 30s didn't have. Here are a couple of excerpts from her post:

Here in Australia I hear from the nation’s best-know feminist activist, and former adviser to Paul Keating, Anne Summers, who was also at the time this took place Chair of the Board of Greenpeace International. Summers was detained by armed agents for FIVE HOURS each way in LAX on her way to and from the annual meeting of the board of Greenpeace International in Mexico, and her green card was taken away from her. `I want to call a lawyer’, she told TSA agents. `Ma’am, you do not have a right to call an attorney,’ they replied. `You have not entered the United States.’

Apparently a section of LAX just beyond the security line is asserted to be `not in the United States’ — though it is squarely inside the airport — so the laws of the US do not apply. (This assertion, by the way, should alarm any US citizen who is aware of how the White House argued that Guantanamo is not `in the United States’ - is a legal no-man’s land — so the laws of the US do not apply.) Toward the end of her second five-hour detention she asked, `Why am I being detained?’ `Lady, this is not detention,’ the TSA agent told her. `Detention is when I take you to the cells out back and lock you up.’

Last week in Boston, while attending Bioneers by the Bay, I heard that one of the speakers for our event, an environmentalist named Gunter Pauli, was going to miss the time of his scheduled speech; he had been physically taken OFF THE PLANE by TSA agents and had to take a much later flight. More chillingly, the camerawoman doing my interview said that another well-known environmental writer found that his girlfriend was effectively `disappeared’ for three days as she sought to enter the US from Canada. Lisa Fithian, an anti-globalization activist, was denied entry across the Canadian border in 2001 and was offered the choice of turning back or being arrested.

– Is building a US Embassy in Baghdad the size of eighty football fields and at a cost of well more than half a BILLION dollars evidence of short- or long-term thinking?

In a June post, I created a vision of a military coup in the US to set up a scenario to imagine the choices that Iraqis must face daily. If Wolf is correct, Bush and company have been using the presidency and the power of the US government to set up the base for taking over the country - with Blackwater as their private military.

Many Jews perished in Germany because they didn't leave when they could. If you read this report seriously, you can get a sense of how it must have felt. Can you give up your home, your job, whatever savings you have because some people are saying this is going to happen? I don't know that Wolf isn't seeing things that aren't there, but I don't know that she is wrong either.

Naomi Wolf - Ten Steps to Dismantling a Democracy

My mother was 11 when Hitler came to power in 1933. As a Jewish girl, she experienced the various laws that step by step made life more difficult for Jews, including when she was no longer allowed, as a Jew, to go to school. She managed to get out of Germany and to the US in 1939, and I grew up hearing these stories. Hearing how the country she took for granted and felt totally a citizen of, slowly deteriorated and made her and her family the evil threat to society. Since then I've
read my share of books about this period to fill in more details. A recent one that I'd strongly recommend is Victor Klemperer's I Will Bear Witness

So when I see similar things happening here, I'm seriously disturbed. Most German Jews, not to mention gentile Germans, didn't believe it could possibly happen there. Just like most Americans don't believe it could happen here. When I've told people that the Bush administration is copying the Nazis in the steps they took to dismantle the rights of German citizens, they look at me like I'm crazy - we don't have concentration camps. I'm not talking about concentration camps, but what the Nazis did before they sent Jews and Gypsies and others to concentration camps. The steps they went through that allowed the citizens of arguably the most educated and advanced country in the world at the time, to accept concentration camps when the time came. [And if a number of blogs are correct, FEMA has set up a series of detention camps.around the country that could be used to put away dissenters and other undesirables. Originally set up for illegal immigrants and used for Katrina refugees, these blogs relate, there are such camps planned and being built all around the US already. The links I could find look kind of flakey, but I've been assured by people I trust and pointed to FEMA regulations for this.]

So I was pleased to find someone who has written a book about the progressive steps to dismantling a democracy. Wolf identifies ten steps that are used to overthrow democracies and shows how they have been used in various regimes and how they are being taken in the US today. Well, it's depressing as hell, but to the extent that this is exposed and people become aware of what is happening, the better our chances of blocking this.




[This is not showing in my preview window, but maybe it will show on the blog itself. Jeremy, at KWMD (87.7 and 104.5 FM in Anchorage) says they've already played this on the air and will play it again tonight -Sunday- at 6pm. You can try YouTube.]

Here are the ten steps as outlined by Naomi Wolf in her book The End of America and discussed in this tape from Youtube from a talk at the University of Washington October 11, 2007.

1. Declare the existence of sleeper cells.
2. Create a secret prison system where torture takes place outside the rule of law and very often establish military tribunals that strip prisoners of due process
3. Create a paramilitary force
4. Create a surveillance apparatus for its ordinary citizens.
5. Arbitrarily detain and release citizens,
6. infiltrate citizen groups
7. Target key individuals
8. Restrict the press
9. Recast dissent as treason
10. Declare martial law - months before an election, destabilization


A quote from Naomi Wolf's talk:

Name a society that created a secret prison system outside the rule of law where torture takes place that didn’t sooner or later turn the abuse against its own citizens

She does have some proposals for what to do.

Thanks to http://1984comic.com/ for posting this from YouTube.

Day Light Savings

Our old mountain ash drops its leaves reluctantly. All the other trees are bare. The little snow we had is gone. Got to run again today after the trial and then rain. I guess I've gotten soft since our time in Portland.

Day light savings ends today. It really isn't relevant this far north in the winter or summer. And gaining an extra hour on the weekend isn't bad. It's setting the clock forward in spring that bothers me.

My proposal for spring is to set the clock forward at 4pm on Friday. People who work get an hour off with pay, of course. They can just work harder earlier that day. Few offices do that much work on Friday anyway. And the bars and movies and restaurants can all deal with it. It's not a perfect plan, but it's better than losing an hour of weekend.

Web Surfing Tip

Don't Google in long sentences - actually this was an AOL search:


was george washington an average military tactician and a bad speller


I don't know how this search item got to my blog, but I have nothing whatsover on those topics. But I'm sure most of the words hit something (do I have tactician? Don't know.) If you're looking for a longish phrase, put it in quotes.

Buddhist Influence on my Views of Anger

Harpboyak left a comment early this morning on my post suggesting my reaction to Aaron Selbig's righteous lack of compassion for Kohring was not the ideal path:

Gimme a break! Vic is a CRIMINAL who refuses to recognize the reality of his behavior. I agree that he needs rehabilitation, but it won't happen until he admits that what he did was WRONG.

Aaron, me, and everyone else is damned right to be angry and demand retribution from these criminals that violated the public trust and their oaths of office. They gave alway BILLIONS of our oil money to the oil companies!

I guess the three years I lived in Thailand rubbed off on me. Buddhists take a very different view of anger. They see it as weakness, as losing control of oneself. They get embarrassed for you if you lose your temper. I know this is hard for Americans to understand, but I found this story on a site on Buddhism that might help explain my view on this. The link goes to the site which has a lot more on the topic of anger.

A BAG OF NAILS

Once upon a time there was a little boy with a bad temper. His father gave him a bag of nails and told him that every time he lost his temper, he should hammer a nail in the fence. The first day the boy had driven 37 nails into the fence. But gradually, the number of daily nails dwindled down. He discovered it was easier to hold his temper than to drive those nails into the fence.
Finally the first day came when the boy didn't lose his temper at all. He proudly told his father about it and the father suggested that the boy now pull out one nail for each day that he was able to hold his temper. The days passed and the young boy was finally able to tell his father that all the nails were gone. The father took his son by the hand and led him to the fence.
"You have done well, my son, but look at the holes in the fence. The fence will never be the same. When you say things in anger, they leave a scar just like this one. You can put a knife in a man and draw it out, it won't matter how many times you say 'I'm sorry', the wound is still there."

But what about righteous anger? The site has something on that too (though probably not as powerful as the story.)

As His Holiness the Dalai Lama mentioned:

"When reason ends, then anger begins.
Therefore, anger is a sign of weakness."

Is anger or hatred ever justified? A direct answer from Allan Wallace in 'Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground up':

"'Righteous hatred' is in the same category as 'righteous cancer'or 'righteous tuberculosis'. All of them are absurd concepts.

This does not mean that one should never take action against aggression or injustice! Instead, one should try to develop an inner calmness and insight to deal with these situations in an appropriate way. We all know that anger and aggression give rise to anger and aggression. One could say that there are three ways to get rid of anger: kill the opponent, kill yourself or kill the anger - which one makes most sense to you?"

Buddhism doesn't have rules in the Western sense. Rather it has teachings that show people how to live a life that will, eventually, lead one to perfection that releases one from the cycle of rebirth, and to nirvana. It is up to the individual to adopt those teachings or not, because it is the individual's life that is affected.

In Aaron's case, the anger was multiplied by broadcasting it over the airwaves. I just was expressing my disappointment that this alternative radio station, in essence, wasn't so alternative. As the quote above says, "anger and aggression give rise to anger and aggression."
He's just doing what his opponents do with a different spin. But he continues the cycle.

Rev. Koun Franz of the Anchorage Zen Community

impressed me at the discussion after the reading of the War Prayer.

The comment that was most enlightening to me was from Rev Koun Franz in response to what a good Buddhist would do if he saw someone violently assaulting another. It would be ok to intervene, he said, if you did it for the right reason, which would be to help both people. If you intervened from moral superiority to punish the aggressor you would cause a short term benefit, but you would be perpetuating what the aggressor was doing. This helps me understand a story I heard the other day about a survivor of the Mi Lai massacre during the Vietnam war. Asked today what she thought about Americans coming to Mi Lai today, she said she was glad they came. What if it was one of the people who killed her family? That would be even better, because then I could forgive them.

Of course, it isn't this simple. We also get this advice

The late Tibetan teacher Chogyam Tryungpa Rinpoche often taught that five kleshas (in the Tibetan tradition, they are greed, hatred, delusion, pride, and jealousy) are in essence five wisdoms. The wisdom side of anger, for example, is discriminating awareness.

How can this be? Anger makes us sharp and quick to criticize, but anger also helps us see what's wrong. Our feelings and emotions are actually serving like intelligence agents, bringing in news from the field of our experience. We should not dismiss, ignore, or repress them.

Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone.

The audio is bad, but the video gives a sense of the rush of the media get their story and Browne's love of playing them.



Driving home from the courthouse I heard Aaron Selbig on KUDO saying things like, "I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy whatsoever for Kohring. He violated the public trust, his constituents..." Aaron's not the only one.

Kohring sold out his constituents and the people of Alaska. I have no tolerance for what he did. But he is also a human being. I was sorry to hear Aaron's retributive ranting. I understand the righteous outrage he feels. But Kohring has been tried and convicted and will go to prison. Save that anger for the people who are still out there violating the public trust. Go after them. As I get older, I know that the total lack of compassion Aaron expressed simply perpetuates the win/lose, the us/them mentality that keeps us stagnant as a society. So, if Aaron gets his way, we'll have 'us versus them' Democrats doing the same thing in the state legislature? No doubt retribution is a natural instinct. But as we grow up we learn to positively channel those instincts that still survive in our amygdalas.

I was hoping KUDO would offer an alternative to testosterone radio mired in playground behavior and ideas. Retributive justice as we practice it in the US has gotten our prison population up to 2.24 million people. People that we pay to house and feed. People who aren't contributing to society, aren't working to help restore their victims. What's wrong with our society that we have such a relatively high percentage of our population in prison? KUDO should be asking these bigger questions and exploring alternatives like restorative justice. We should be figuring out why people have taken this path, how to divert people starting on that path, and how to help the Kohrings learn to give instead of only to take. Selbig wasn't modeling the kind of behavior we'd like Kohring to have. And, yes I realize that there are some people who will never be rehabilitated and we have to find ways to keep them from harming others. There are psychopaths out there. But they didn't choose to be born without a conscience any more than the rest of us chose to have that part of our brain functioning.

Having sympathy for a human being who is hurt does NOT mean one excuses that person for the wrongs he has committed,. Instead of lashing out at him for our own faults we may see in him, or because we can't deal with people like him who directly affect our own lives, or whatever reasons, it seems more practical and decent to recognize that we too are fallible; that we should deal with the Kohrings who directly affect us. Not through safely beating up on already injured person, but by taking more control of our own lives. Aaron use those stones to build something not to pick on a man who is already down.

Kohring Jury Says Guilty Three Times out of Four

In case you haven't heard, the jury found Vic Kohring guilty of three counts - bribery, conspiracy, and attempted extortion - and not guilty of extortion about 1:30pm today.

The media crowd around Kohring (left) and his attorney John Henry Browne. Kohring thanked people and apologized. It was hard to hear - he speaks softly and there was lots of noise.

The media were waiting in the Federal building waiting for Kohring and his attorney to come through the security for the District Court part of the building (no cameras allowed through the security.)








Here they are clustered around the security exit.