When trivial e-mails show your analysts are looking at PETA for Coca-Cola, you look bad. When you look bad, your schedule clears out. When your schedule clears out, you grow a scraggly beard. When you grow a scraggly beard, people think you're a beggar. Don't be a corporate beggar, gossiping about PETA for Coca-Cola. Use net search for good things.
Yesterday WikiLeaks published the stolen internal e-mails of the private intelligence firm Stratfor, taken last year by Anonymous.
They are here - along with a preamble pointing out some of the archive's highlights.
One of the WikiLeaks posts from the Stratfor shows people doing trivial research on People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals, for corporate flunkies at Coca-Cola. Presumably because Coca-Cola gets criticized by organizations that monitor corporate cruelty toward animals and the firm resents it.
Hi Van,I'm checking with our analysts to find out what information we already
have on the subject. I'll get back to you soon with more information.
Best regards,
Anya
Van C. Wilberding [senior manager for Coca Cola] wrote:
Hi Anya,
Thanks again for your help with respect to the Korean Peninsula
situation.
We are now looking at PETA and the potential for protests at the
Vancouver Olympics and related events. (Please see the following
questions below.) We'd like to schedule a time for a conference call
with you and/or your analyst(s) on this topic.-- How many PETA supporters are there in Canada?
-- How many of these are inclined toward activism?
-- To what extent will US-based PETA supporters travel to Canada to
support activism?
-- What is PETA's methodology for planning and executing activism?
(Understanding this better would certainly help us to recognize
indicators should they appear.)
-- To what extent is PETA in Canada linked to PETA in the US or
elsewhere?
-- To what extent are the actions of PETA in one country controlled by
an oversight board/governing body?
-- To what extent could non-PETA hangers-on (such as anarchists or ALF supporters) get involved in any protest activity?Please let us know what works in terms of timing of the conference call.
Thanks again,Van
Coca-Cola: LIVE POSITIVELY - Our Company and leaders have supported education for more than 100 years. Learn about our education programs around the world.
It's not much of a secret that thousands and thousands of a------- work for big US corporate multi-nationals. However, it is always illuminating to see how venal they are, that they run trivial intelligence operations which are the equivalent of hiring other flunkies to provide hearsay on groups which many Americans would view as good people -- or at least NOT security threats. Unless you're Ted Nugent.
Another post from the same collection:
Interesting, thanks Fred.
Fred Burton wrote:
The FBI has a classified investigation on PETA operatives. I'll see what
I can uncover.
That's some nugget of intel nose gold.
"[The] professional intelligence community is acknowledging us as being the gold standard of intelligence," wrote Stratfor CEO George Friedman in another well-publicized post.
The series of PETA mails -- brief -- is here.
There is similar corporate interest in material on the Yes Men, the well-known activist group of pranksters which has targeted various American multi-nationals. Most notably, Union Carbide/Dow, by famously posing as company officials offering redress to the victims of the lethal industrial accident in India in 1984.
One sees the Yes Men's public itinerary, its Twitter feed and so on, copied to the representatives of the firms it has embarrassed.
Whoever's paying for the alleged dirt -- well -- let's just say they're not getting much for their cash money. The e-mail spill makes the firms involved, like Dow, only look more stupid and evil than originally thought, if such a thing is still possible in 2012.
Also on display, an apple-polisher explaining how great it is to be an unpaid intern at Stratfor, this embedded in a longer post on an alliance with Goldman Sachs to use the firm's insider intelligence "to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like."
That post is here.
In the same mail, Stratfor head George Friedman exhorting the faithful with news of the company's predictions to the US Marine Corps and that it's the gold standard in intelligence.
Two other observations gained from the 2012 archive: (1) Stratfor's kinda cheap; and (2), being perceived as a spying firm for corporate interests is bad for the reputation.
"Our cash position is not spectacular by any means ..." reads part one memo from Stratfor's George Friedman.
"Intelligence organizations exist to make decision makers uncomfortable," they say.
While not the US government or a big predator bank, yesterday Stratfor was, I suppose one can say, discomfited by WikiLeaks.
Doomsday Preppers on the March in Wyoming
When you watch too much Doomsday Preppers you get brain damage. When you get brain damage you think too much about total economic collapse. When you think too much about total collapse you want to print new money, hoard gold and raise a small army. When you try to raise a small army you blow off your thumb. Don't blow off your thumb. Leave the state of Wyoming's Republican Party. Or just leave Wyoming.
The extreme is the mainstream.
From the wire, more precisely, the Star-Tribune newspaper in Wyoming, three days ago:
"State representatives on Friday advanced legislation to launch a study into what Wyoming should do in the event of a complete economic or political collapse in the United States.
"House Bill 85 passed on first reading by a voice vote. It would create a state-run government continuity task force, which would study and prepare Wyoming for potential catastrophes, from disruptions in food and energy supplies to a complete meltdown of the federal government.
"The task force would look at the feasibility of Wyoming issuing its own alternative currency, if needed. And House members approved an amendment Friday by state Rep. Kermit Brown, R-Laramie, to have the task force also examine conditions under which Wyoming would need to implement its own military draft, raise a standing army, and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier."
After this story went nationwide yesterday, public derision caused the bill to be rewritten sans the bit about an aircraft carrier. For DD's Euro-readers, Wyoming is a land-locked state.
By comparison:
population of Wyoming 538,000
population of Pasadena, CA 137,000
population of LA County 9.8 million
I'm betting Pasadena has more books and more people with advanced degrees than Wyoming.
In any case, this isn't new.
Down through the ages the hinterlands have been filled with unthinking, easily influenced paranoids. If you still watch Glenn Beck, or read his publication -- The Blaze, you'd think the country was going to collapse next week.
National Geographic's Doomsday Preppers has monetized the kooks and televised them nationwide. The country is coming to an end, they all insist.
In decades past in Allentown, PA, I was sent to cover a local municipal meeting of a local 'burg just prior to the first Gulf War. There, a couple of the local townsmen talked of emergency preparations for a town of about three thousand, in case Saddam Hussein destroyed the local interstate with a Scud missile.
It was hard to not fall out of the chair.
On Paphlagonia, utilized as a literary device in ancient Greece for describing the not-too-sharp locals who hunted bear for a living in a far-off place :
"Paphlagonians were drawn in crowds by the news. Only their outward appearance distinguished them from sheep. The thick and uncultured natives of Pontus and Paphlygonia were easily deceived ... Alexander, who had medical training, prescribed ointments made of bear's fat as one of his quack remedies ... [Real Paphlagonians were] shod in heavy leather clogs, they belched garlic fumes. Garlic, as well as a readiness to believe false oracles, was an insulting leitmotif that went back to Aristophanes ..."
A kind of Bigfoot of warfare
A no byline story on the website of the South Korean newspaper, the Chosun Ilbo, discusses the always said to be coming but never quite arriving electromagnetic pulse bomb.
It earns the quote of the day, of sorts:
"A military officer who asked to remain anonymous on Sunday claimed South Korea has developed basic technology that will one day allow it to produce a so-called electromagnetic pulse bomb capable of paralyzing all electronic equipment. The bomb is a kind of Bigfoot of warfare."
"But another military source said the technology is a long way from being usable as a weapon," concludes the paper.
Do they have Sasquatch south of the 38th parallel?
Apparently not.
This material was originally published at the very excellent Dick Destiny blog.
