A threat to our public sphere? Sabotage in Middle East? Government refuses comment.

Cut Gulf Internet cable

By KATARINA KRATOVAC, Associated Press Writer Fri Feb 8, 2:24 PM ET

CAIRO, Egypt – An abandoned anchor was responsible for cutting one of the undersea Internet cables severed last week, causing disruptions across the Middle East and parts of Asia, the cable’s owner said Friday. A FLAG Telecom repair crew discovered the anchor near where the fiber-optic cable was severed Feb. 1 in the Persian Gulf, 35 miles north of Dubai, between the Emirates and Oman.

Weighing more than 5.5 tons, the anchor has been pulled to the surface. The company did not immediately explain whether the anchor moved and snapped the cable or whether the cable itself was drifting when it was sliced.

 

It remains unclear exactly how any of the cuts occurred.

… A second FLAG repair ship continued work on two undersea cables that were cut Jan. 30. They are about 5 miles off the north coast of Egypt, near the port city of Alexandria, and run between Egypt and Palermo, on the Italian island of Sicily. One of the two Mediterranean cables was owned by FLAG. The other, identified as SEA-ME-WE 4, or South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 cable, was owned by a consortium of 16 international telecommunication companies.

 

Egypt’s telecommunication ministry said no ships were registered near the location at the time. The cuts slowed businesses, hampered personal Internet usage and caused a flurry of Internet blogger speculation, including mentions of sabotage. Government authorities and FLAG, which stands for Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe, have refused to comment on the speculation.

 

Reports of additional cuts in Middle East Internet cables could not be confirmed. FLAG, in a statement posted on the company Web site, said it has surveyed the cable cut off Egypt with remotely operated robots.

 

The FLAG spokesman said this week that it was laying a new cable underwater between Egypt and France that would be “fully resilient” against cuts such as last week’s and “provide a diversity in routes.” He did not say what that resilience entailed, but said it would take months to set up the new cable.

 

“It is difficult to comment right now on this,” said a FLAG spokesman, reached over the telephone. “We are doing our own investigation.” He spoke on condition of anonymity, in line with company policy. Ovum analyst Matt Walker said undersea cable networks are highly vulnerable to deliberate attack and need enhanced security.

 

… “The economic cost of losing, or even just slowing down, international communications is extremely high,” said Walker. “This risk has to be factored into the calculations behind the investment level and design of undersea optical networks.” …

 

AP Business Writer Matt Moore contributed to this report from Frankfurt, Germany.

 

U.S. heading to war in Iran, says former inspector

BY: MARILYN H. KARFELD Senior Staff Reporter

08/02/08 “Cleveland Jewish News“ — – The former chief United Nations weapons inspector and a retired Middle East diplomat recently warned that America was heading straight toward imminent war with Iran.

John McCain April 20, 2007: Bomb, Bomb Iran

 

Depoliticization of a subculture using artifacts

http://it.stlawu.edu/~global/glossary/bighegemony.subculture.1c.html
from McGuru Tim on the mike about subculture MC …
“Human beings need community. Human expressions in the forms of language, song, clothing, dance, can serve to identify an individual’s membership and status in a community. In order to preserve their corporate standing, the mass media must appeal to a huge population of people. These, as well as all other, institutions of mature capitalism must do their best to covertly homogenize this huge population, offering them up each month’s new pseudo-individualized Headbanger’s Ball rock hero or Swim Suit Issue blonde. In turn communities have for the most part actually become one big homogenized global Coka-Cola village.

“The nation- or world-wide population that they create is actually much too large to fulfill any of the real human need for community and it’s cultural signs are often much too expensive to be available to all it’s members. Consequently, many smaller groups of people become jaded with this poor simulacrum of a community and have sought to construct their own culture via more personalized and available cultural signs. They become a “sub-culture” or more specifically a real culture. These sub-cultures, using any accessible communication medium, both threaten the economic status of corporate sign makers and stand in direct opposition to the hegemony which preserves the existence of such money-deities.

For this reason, society has evolved mechanisms that depoliticize subcultures, sucking them back into the mainstream and into compliance with the current dominant hegemony. Evidence of this phenomena can be seen in advertisements. Why is it that advertised images of urban gang members who in reality declare “fuck the police” instead demand “wear Starter clothing”? Why are leather-clad “live to ride” bikers selling 200-dollar department store booties? How can images of drug and sex experimenting beatniks come to symbolize the ideal Toyota driver?

The production of such decontextualized and distorted images of these subcultures serves to fulfill what Dick Hebdige classifies as the two methods of “recuperation”: “the commodity form,” turning the signs of these subcultures into “mass-produced objects,” and “the ideological form,” “re-defin[ing] the actual “deviant behaviour.” In hundreds of ads we see what were the unique and usually inexpensive folk-art creations of those in the subculture turned into commodities for those with the cash. Such ads also show one type of the ideological form: all of these deviant subcultures are turned into safe fashion possibilities.

… there are certain desires in the consuming audience. The rebellion, community and identity-deprived members of the mainstream will thrive as long as there is some “other” whose styles can be stolen, whether it be from the mythic past or the contemporary streets. Those who live within the sign-constructs of the capitalist main stream, (in America: the white upper class) decorate their voices and bodies with the commodified artifacts of these othernesses: hobos, blues guitarists, street hustlers, gamblers, etc.This theft of style does not always occur in one giant leap; there are many steps between the ghetto rap act and Vanilla Ice. Whenever a group of people borrows the signs of another group of people they are decontextualizing it. If the borrower has other ideals or experiences than the previous owner, the signs original intent becomes diffused or reshaped.”

 

 

 

http://it.stlawu.edu/~global/glossary/bighegemony.subculture.1c.html
“The general direction in which a society develops is always in the interests of a ruling class or dominant group of one sort or another. If a society did not move in a direction in the interest of a dominant group then that group would no longer, of course, be the ruling class. Some other fraction would assume power. But society is made up of more than just the dominant group, of more than just the ruling class of the elites. In every society, there are numerous other factions that could be differentiated, whether by class, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, age, etc. And these subordinate groups do not always have the same interests as the dominant class. Each group would like to see the society move in a direction predicated on their own interests. …… Some of the institutions which function to maintain and expand the hegemony of the elites include the news media, the entertainment industry, the art world, the publishing industry, the university culture; political parties and governmental institutions; the legal system and the courts; and (not in the least exhausting the list) the adversiting industry.

The maintenance of hegemony requires the work of numerous specialists, persons trained, consciously or not, to strengthen and expand the ideological penetration and manipulation of the subordinate classes. These intellectual specialists include writers, artists, clergymen, grade-school teachers, university professors, journalists, movie makers, musicians; scientists, doctors, lawyers, politicians, labor leaders; philosophers, theorists and thinkers; and of course, ADVERTISERS — all people/institutions involved in the creation and dissemination of knowledge, ideas, and belief systems. Educational institutions function to create the intellectuals, the specialists who will maintain intellectual and social hegemony of the interests of the other groupings. Students attend these institutions to gain greater cultural capital. …

… The individuals who will be trained to specialize in hegemony can often, ironically enough, be drawn from the very groups that the hegemony works to subordinate. This is a base form of appropriation from subculture. Advertisements serve to create an appealing view of the dominant class and desire to become part of this group which teaches one to assume the behaviors, beliefs, ideologies of the dominant paradigm. In addition, they often appropriate the markers of signs of subcultures like hip hop, grunge and recently punk, and incorporate them into fashion which depoliticizes their content. The ironic fact of drawing from subordinate groups is a measure of the efficiency of hegemony. By drawing away the best and the brightest individuals and styles of other groups, hegemony works to prevent the possibility that those individuals/styles might be attracted to some alternative that might challenge the control of the dominant class.

Yet in a roughly democratic educational system, where attempts are made to extend intellectual training to many sectors of society, and to not keep it confined to the ruling elites, problems for hegemony arise. The system creates a vast number of more-or-less educated individuals whose economic expectations can not be met by a material system under the ever more efficient control of the elites and their ideology. When the economic system can’t meet these constructed desires for an ever higher standard of living for all those who have been socialized (through the ideological media of advertising and others) to expect nothing less, a great amount of dissatisfaction is bound to result. The vast majority of those trained to think, (or not to as the case might be) to maintain the hegemony of the ruling class, can never achieve the status of privilege held by those elites. In fact for vast sectors of the college- to high school-educated population will never be able to find an economic situation that is not in some regards alienating. And things are even worse for those who have never been educated in the first place. Institutions of hegemony have so far been able to divert the anomie and frustration felt by many to behavior that is not threatening to the hegemony, and in fact in some cases, as with consumerism, reinforce the economic control of corporate capitalism. The hegemonic ideology prevents most from ever realizing the reality of their material situation, or from doing anything active about it. … the tight control on ideological hegemony by dominant culture institutions, means that openings for alternatives to the status quo hegemony might have to come from crises in the material system of the current regime.

Hegemony is a “moving equilibrium” between the interests of a dominant class and a number of allied but subordinate classes. It is a self-contradictory compromise, though, that is always shifting, fluid. Since it is always in a state of flux, due to the shifting nature of the compromise between classes, it is not a universal state, always under the control of the same ruling class, though it does have pretensions of eternity.

Hegemonic power, which ‘naturalizes’ a certain set of social relationships can, however, be deconstructed, be read oppositionally, and, occasionally, be altered greatly. The naturalization that hegemonic ideology renders gives to the vast majority of society’s members a ‘common-sensical’ explanation for why the world is the way it is. “I don’t know why. That’s just the way it is. It’s common sense.” The common sense of hegemony suffocates questions, denies challenges, prevents alternative answers. For a subordinate group to gain power to shift the directions of the hegemonic power, however, is next to impossible in a stable society. The very forces of hegemonic influence which sustain the power of one group, prevents other groups from gaining enough alternative economic, military or intellectual resources to change the equilibrium in their favor. It can be seen that the times in which these shifts in the hegemony do occur are times of great crisis and change. In a world ordered and explained by the invisible, silent and omnipresent movement of common sense, how does one bring forward a challenge? …

… hegemony is never a monolithic force. It is a term used to describe a generalized tendency on the part of human societies to be oriented ideologically according to the interests of the institutions of a dominant ruling class, reflective of their material control of a society’s economic resources.”