Just say Yes!

Italian Fascist Headquarters in Rome

Si! Ja! Ya! Da! Oui! Yes!
Sir, Yes Sir!
Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full! Sir!

---

LANL, despite our high security has been an open society in many ways, but this has been shifting significantly over the last decade.

In this post, the Good Doctor summarizes Naomi Wolfe's 10 Steps to Close an Open Society. For the knuckleheads in the crowd (and there seem to be a few who simply cannot grasp the relevance of this kind of post to LANL) we also describe this relevance from our own point of view. Collectively our audience (what appears to be a steady 100+ daily readers) have a lot more detailed evidence of these steps being taken locally. We wonder if anyone but the hecklers and sycophants will speak up. (Hecklers and Sycophants are still welcome of course, but we will tease you mercilessly!)

---

10 STEPS TO CLOSE AN OPEN SOCIETY by Naomi Wolfe

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
Internal:
* Spies (goes with the territory)
* Cowboys and Buttheads (Thanks Pete, thanks a lot!)
* Polygraphers
* Piss Collectors
* Incompetent and Self-Serving Middle-Management
.
.
.
External:
* Evil Enemy Nations who want our secrets
* Evil Terrorists who want our secrets
* Greedy and Incompetent Bechtel who want ???
* Executive Branch who wants to give us to their corporate friends
* Legislative Branch who wants to shut us down because we are "evil"
and/or give the golden goose to their corporate friends
.
.
.

2. Create a gulag
* We already have the fences and guards.
* When will we quit worrying that the automated badge readers won't let us in and start worrying that they won't let us back out?
* Wen Ho Lee spent a year in Solitary *before* they proved anything (or not)...
* When will the results of our Urine and Poly tests (false positives and all) be used to prosecute the implied crimes related (illegal drug use, mishandling/misreporting/misthinking)?

3. Develop a thug caste

* Internally, our middle-to-upper management often fit this description.
* We have some powerful bureaucracies in the lab that fit this as well.
* Our guards have been pretty careful to avoid this image in the past, will this last?
* New "crimes" (anti-policy activities) may provide the thug cast new opportunity to exercise their (metaphorical) sappers, batons, tear gas, and stun guns. These new policies include drug-testing and searching of private vehicles (don't shop over the lunch hour and leave a bottle of wine in your car... that is technically against policy... alcohol on lab property), don't even pretend to take a picture with a personal camera or cell phone on lab property (say of the 3 pissmobiles lined up all red-white-and-blue), be in your office by 8 and don't leave it for 9-10 hours excepting the required minimum 30 minute lunch... the list goes on and the "thugs" are standing by for their orders to "enforce" them.

* Bechtel is a "privately held corporation". They can hide behind a different mask than DOE to protect their potential thuggery.

4. Set up an internal surveillance system
* This comes with the territory.
* But it can be amped up and abused.
* And the various new policies being put in place seem to support that potential abuse.
* Nanos encouraged us to weed out the Buttheads and Cowboys sitting next to us... sound like Fascist Italy and Germany and a few hundred other places?

5. Harass citizens' groups
* Notice how unwelcome any dissent in this environment is.
* The list is too long to put here.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
* If you don't show for your piss test in 30 minutes (by policy) you are considered to have failed and you are fired. If you show and cannot produce, you are not allowed to leave and after 2 hours are "escorted" to see a doctor to determine the reason.

* During Wen Ho Lee, NEST years, people were taken from their homes in the middle of the night for Polygraphs. Maybe they could have refused, but I don't know if we know that. Did anyone refuse? How did it turn out?

*Wait until YOU find yourself on a no-fly (terrorist watch?) list because you:
A) attended some dissenting rally
B) spoke up in public (including a blog)
C) read a blog (not trying to chase anyone off here!)

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't
toe the line.

* We might *all* be considered "key individuals". The abuse we are suffering (including the implied threat of it) might very well be little more than this Step being taken in a larger arena. Big as we feel in some ways here, we are "small potatoes" to the larger forces at work.

8. Control the press

* This is an important feature of these blogs... to gather relevant press information, to vet it against our own experience, to discuss it' s implications... and to notice what is NOT being published, what the biases are, etc.


9. Dissent equals treason

* There are voices in the commentary on our blogs that seem to precisely say this. LANS policy on misuse of government resources could easily be used (and may already) to slam the lid on people even glancing at these blogs on "company time and equipment". This might be well within their policy but their motivation is surely to intimidate potential dissenters.
* Very few bloggers (Pat the Dog, Pinky, The Brain, Strangelove Ourselves, MaskedCalvin, Oppy, Feynman, et alii) seem to be too excited about exposing their "true names" and few of the commentors seem to be interested in this. Hmmm???

* Doug, Brad and Eric are the only ones to speak up in-persona. Brad is the only one within immediate reach of LANS/Bechtel and as it has been pointed out, he only has a little to lose by this self-exposure compared to say, an early-mid career employee.



10. Suspend the rule of law
* By accepting a job and a security clearance, many of us have (voluntarily?) given up some rights explicitly and implicitly. How many of these they add as a condition for employment or clearance (adding drug-testing and polygraph screening, ...) and the (increasing?) consequences of refusing or of not passing (different than failing) are a close parallel to this. Get us to waive the "rule of law" around privacy and habeus corpus and ???

---

This Post is framed around the 10 steps in:

10 STEPS TO CLOSE AN OPEN SOCIETY by Naomi Wolfe

* Naomi Wolf's ‘The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot’
will be published by Chelsea Green in September.

Brad gets Pissed too!

This in from a friend of Brad's

Big Stupid is Watching

Big Stupid is Watching!

Dateline - 7 April 2007 11:00 PM MST
Just a quick snapshot from the weblogging system the Good Doctor linked into this page, to give us all a reminder of how much can be determined easily on the Internet. For what it is worth, at least 2 distinctly different subnets at LANL accessed GONE NUCLEAR in the last few hours and someone apparently from Sweden dropped by as well. We have security set to medium so anyone (including you!) can check the general statistics of who's blogging whom. The Good Doctor hisself (and plenty of other folks cleverer than Us) has access to all of the juicy details! We may try to track this map for a while... just to see when our good friends in various places wake up and smell the Urine in our (drug testing) cups.

8 April 2007 11:00 AM

Easter Sunday shows a bit more activity, naturally centered around LLNL/LBL LANL/SNL but a wide variety of other locations. Retired LANL? Vacationing (spring break) LANL? ORNL? PNNL? NNSA? Congressmen? Bechtel? Blackwater?

$#%#$@%@#$%@$#%$###$%^$$%$&@%$@^%@$^@$@%$@@$%^%^&^$%@$!!^$!&$!$%@!$

Stop Worrying and Learn to Love ...

The Blog!

The Bomb?
Pete Nanos?
Bechtel?
Random Drug Testing?
Buttheads and Cowboys?
Media Hacks?
Senate Hacks?


. . .
You have heard what happens when Postal Employees eventually get tired of being jerked around by *everyone* - they "Go Postal". What do you suppose happens when extremely well educated, extremely intelligent, and sometimes volatile Nuclear Weapons Scientists and Engineers get pissed off from *everyone* jerking them around? Fortunately for the world, most of these folks are also incredibly loyal, dedicated and humanitarian... so instead of "Going Nuclear", they sublimate those impulses by blogging!

Can Dr. Strangelove take over where:
Doug (lanl-the-real-story) Roberts and
Pat (lanl-the-corporate-story) the Dog left off?

Too Late!
Pinky and the Brain
have taken over where Pat and Doug left off
Paul Harvey style with:
lanl-the-rest-of-the-story !

I don't need to compete, so I hope I can complement their good work.
Whether you are:

• gruntled or disgruntled
• LASL, LANL, LANS
  
• UC/LLNL/LBL/SNL/INEL/ANL/AFWL/AWOL
• POGO/LASG/CCNS/EarthFirst!/Greenpeace
• Uncle Pete (Domenici), Admiral Pete (the butthead-cowboy) Nanos
• Uncle Jeff (Bingaman) or Governor-I-wanna-be-President Bill (Richardson)
• A concerned citizen of:
• Northern New Mexico
• The scientific community
• The United States
• North America
• the Western Hemisphere
• The Northern Hemisphere
• The Earth
• The Solar System
  

Send in your own contributions
to fill in the blank :

Stop Worrying and and learn to love . . .

Stay tuned, we are going to have some fun here, even if it kills us.
- The Good Doctor

Bechtel - Rhymes with Hell?

Is this an ugly logo or what?
Sherwin-Williams-esque "We can Paint the World in Blood"?

When the big sell-off of one of this nation's scientific jewels finally made it to the auction block and the only two bidders left standing were Bechtel and Lockheed (with UC and UT as trophy wives on their elbows), the good Doctor thought it was six of one, half-dozen of the other.

We thought it really didn't matter what huge corporation we got sold off to, it was gonna suck either way. Except maybe We didn't trust UT's motives and circumstances, them being from the same state as our clearly questionable (Was he really elected? Is he competent? Is his staff and cabinet honorable?) President.
And maybe We'd seen too much of what Lockheed-Martin has done at Sandia National Laboratory. And maybe the Doctor still felt a little loyalty to UC who had treated us pretty well (at least in retrospect and excepting the year of NanosManagement).


So maybe the Doctor was actually rooting for UC-Bechtel as the lesser of evils. Maybe We didn't really know who Bechtel was... that they were the ones who have botching Boston's "Big Dig" project for around a decade... or that the received the second largest no-bid contract at the start of the Iraq war, only to subcontract a big chunk of it to Halliburton (the first-largest no-bid contract winner, now offshoring themselves to Dubai!). Maybe We didn't know that Bechtel was entirely privately held and thus most of their business dealings was entirely opaque to anyone. Maybe We didn't realize all of the under-the-the table connections to the House of Bush and the House of Saud.


So no, Bechtel, under the thin beard of LANS owns us. Somewhere there is a branding iron with the creepy Bechtel Logo being heated white-hot to lay down their brand on the milky-white(mostly-white) flesh of the many thousand scientists, engineers, technicians and other support staff. While their series of succinct policies being published are refreshing in their relative clarity and directness, there is an ominous undertone. They all seem contrived to establish their dominance over their now at-will workers. They are all contrived to establish just-cause for firing anyone they don't like or trust, or perhaps even understand.

And what's to understand? Bechtel is a huge successful government contractor. What do LANL staff know that Bechtel management needs? They know everything they need to to do their job. If one scientist or engineer cannot do their job, they will find another. Replaceable parts, we are. If they need to fire one of us because we aren't at our desk at 0730 one day, or because the Ibuprofen, Vicks 44, poppy-seed muffin, or diet pills we have been consuming generate a false positive on our surprise piss-test, or because one of our guests from out of state snaps a picture of the NSSB
while we are driving them up SR 4 to the valle grande, or because their records show that we took a peek at LANL-THE-REST-OF-THE-STORY from a LANL computer or during work time... well they know exactly what the need to know...

Bechtel is good at obtaining and cashing in on government contracts. They might be good at hiring and firing people (from the perspective of swift and efficient processes, not human value). They might be good at writing reports that show that they have completed all tasks on time and on budget, even if they've requested (and been granted) numerous extensions and plus-ups. But are they good at science? Are they good at managing creative, educated, intelligent people?

Bechtel has no technical agenda. At least Lockheed-Martin seems to like to fly things into space, under the radar, over the horizon, down the hole. But Bechtel seems to have only one agenda... acquiring more money and power... yes, We said one, they are duals.

And was that what they were given the contract to do?

We guess we will see.

- The Doctor, waiting with 'bated breath.

Where's the Hook?

Nearly 2 years ago, a longtime Los Alamos employee and whistleblower was beaten severely. He, his wife, and his lawyer all called it retaliation, intimidation, threat. There was a police report. There were witnesses.

Where's the followup? If the guys who beat him so badly were just local punks, jerks working out a little testosterone, a little cultural exchange, why didn't *they* make the front page like Tommy did? Or the back page even? And if even more, why didn't they make the front page of every newspaper in the country?

The good Doctor knows Tommy Hook... not well, but we were once friendly acquaintances. We had a few hallway conversations over the eyars. Tommy told his story to the Doctor several times during the years leading up to the more extreme times. We hadn't had a conversation in several years when this came down... but in the "old days", Tommy was very sincere and earnest.

The good Doctor took him at face value in those days... nothing he had to say was really that surprising, that hard to believe. And for the life of us, we couldn't see any reason for him to make that shit up. But we are not big conspiracy theorists (just amateur dabblers) so we tried hard not to think too much about it all.

That was until I saw what was left of his face on the front page of the papers... Tommy is only about 5'5, in his mid-fifties, maybe 120 lbs... very polite, soft-spoken... not a scary guy... not somebody who needs beating up for anything he might do or say in the moment. Sure, he was coming out of a strip club around closing time. Sure he might have said or done something someone could use as an excuse ( I think it was intimated that he might have backed into someone... like a pedestrian.. or their vehicle?)

Tommy's story to the police indicated he had gone to the club after getting a phone call from another potential whistleblower. Tommy was slated to testify soon and supposedly he was gathering more dirt on LANL management... A strip club is a good location for such meetings in film noir, but not in real life... and it didn't help his story that his wife was out of town that night and in fact had spoken with him on the phone just before he got the phone call and ran off to meet the tipster. It was rumored that one of the girls from the club said she had given him a lap dance... not exactly what you'd expect for his cover story... but then maybe he just got bored waiting for his contact.

So... probably Tommy just likes scantily clad girls wiggling in his face... don't most men? Not all of us actually go to strip clubs, and if we do, we usually avoid getting beaten in the parking lot... so there *are* some questions worth asking.

But the most suspicious? What happened to the perps who did this? Not much justifies several guys beating another pulpy in a parking lot. This is just not acceptable behaviour... And what happened with Tommy's testimony? Was he intimidated out of it? Why did the whole story go dead?

Somebody got the Hook... the Doctor really wants to know what happened after that... what happened next, and why?

Riding it into the Ground

Strangelove Style

Who is riding this great Scientific Laboratory into the ground?

• Pete Nanos?
• Slim Pickens?
• Osama bin Laden?
• The Nuclear Navy?
• Texas Republicans?
• Democrats everywhere?
• Anti-Science Creationists?
• Anti-Nuclear Environmentalists?
• Rabid former LANL employees?
• Political friends of LLNL?
• Pork Barrel Politics?
• Our own ineptitude?
• The Park Service?
• Meth Pushers?
• The Media?

And why?

The Doctor wants to know. The doctor wants to know.

Brave New World?

• Thanks to Pat the Dog for using this image first in this context.
• Thanks to George Orwell for creating this image in the mind's eye.
• Thanks to the Ad folks at Apple for using it to challenge Microsoft.
• Thanks to the Guerilla Obama supporters who used it to challenge Hillary.

No... I don't think the LANL workforce are all a bunch of Soma-zoned out mouth-breathers... but I fear that LANS management thinks they are (or should be).

Yes, the remaining LANL workforce is pretty cowed, pretty intimidated, pretty numb. Who can say when it really started:

• Maybe the RIF of the early 80's.
• Maybe when the Berlin Wall fell.
• Maybe when the Soviet Union called it quits.
• Maybe in the RIF of the early 90's..
• Maybe when the CIA claimed the Chinese had one of our designs.
• Maybe when it was discovered that the documents couldn't have come from LANL.
• Maybe when the FBI didn't stop looking for the spy that didn't exist.
• Maybe when the FBI started knocking on doors at midnight to interrogate scientists under polygraph.
• Maybe when Wen Ho Lee spent a year in solitary to be released on minor charges, no apology.
• Maybe when the lab, town and mountains tried to burn down.
• Maybe when Pete Nanos suggested that ever other one of us was a cowboy or butthead.
• Maybe when Pete Nanos shut the lab down to punish and intimidate us.
• Maybe when Pete Nanos strutted around being as big of a butthead cowboy as he accused us of.
• Maybe when the Lab was put up for bid, after decades of threats to do just that.
• Maybe when Bechtel was handed the plum.
• Maybe when an (apparently erased?) USB memory stick marked classified was found in a meth dealer's room and they filled the USB sockets with epoxy.
• Maybe when Bechtel announced LANL was $200M in the red.
• Maybe when we added up Bechtel's profit ($60M) and NM gross receipts ($100M+).
• Maybe when we had to listen to Senators from Wisconson and Texas make rude and uninformed statements about us.
  
• Maybe when Bechtel announced random drug testing for people who have already sworn not to use illegal drugs on penalty of career destruction.