Are Trolls Really NSA Operatives?

Do you often have trolls commenting or dominating conversation on your blog posts, Facebook posts, etc?  My blog does not yet have a huge audience, so it is not much of an issue here, but it often is when I comment on public Facebook pages and on the articles of others.  The question always comes up, "what motivates an internet troll?"  The answer may be money, or some other compensation from the US federal government.

While scanning my Facebook feed I ran across what appear to be a fairly unreliable article claiming that internet trolls are often employees of the federal government whose goal it is to direct discourse on the internet in a particular direction.  However, this article appears to be linked to an article by The Intercept that is a bit more reputable.  The idea here is that agencies like the NSA monitor activity throughout the internet, particularly on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and yes, even Blogger.  The organization for whom we have the most evidence of this right now is the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG),   We only know of the existence of this organization as a result of the courage of one our our heroes here at the Alkahest Institute, Edward Snowden.  The two main purposes and tactics of JTRIG are to "(1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable".  These tactics are used not just against foreign governments and such, but are sometimes used as "alternative law enforcement" to destroy the lives of those whose activities, legal or not, the government finds undesirable.  They can do this by creating blogs claiming to be victims of their enemies, or by other "false flag" type operations.

As I said earlier, the organization for whom we have the most evidence of behaving this way is British Intelligence, but it would be silly not to assume that the FBI, NSA and CIA are engaged in the same types of behavior, if not worse.  These tactics have even been suggested by some close to the current president of the United States: "Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, a close Obama adviser and the White House’s former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote a controversial paper in 2008 proposing that the US government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-'independent' advocates to 'cognitively infiltrate' online groups and websites, as well as other activist groups."  This same person is one of the people Barak Obama appointed recently to the NSA review panel, leaving once again, the government fox in charge of the citizens' hen house.

Please, as you have time, read more about this from the original article and its companion article.  Now that we know that western, supposedly free, governments are behaving this way, how are we to handle it?  How should we react to minor or major trollish behavior on our own pages?  How skeptical should we be when a sudden destructive media campaign takes over a famous person's life for supposed bad behavior? (Bill Cosby?).  As for the first question, my future response to all trolls on my internet outlets will be to accuse them of being NSA or JTRIG employees, not just because it may be true, but because it will be entertaining to watch their reaction.  As for the second question, it will be much harder for me to believe in the publicly announced crimes of any famous person, almost regardless of the evidence, if that person has publicly held any opinions that are inconvenient to a branch of the government (cough, Bill Cosby, cough).

Right now, The Alkahest Institute is likely much to small to garner much negative interest from the American or British governments, but as we grow and the attacks begin, please remember not to believe the hype :-)

The Jeff Galloway Training Method

In 2008, I suffered what could some runners might call a catastrophic knee injury, catastrophic not because of the extent of the injury, but because of the effect it had on my running career.  As a result of a combination of the slowness of my insurance company to want to run through the appropriate tests and the general incompetence among most medical professionals to diagnose running injuries, it was about a year and a half before I was back to running and am still not quite pain free.  Combine that with the affinity I developed for fast food during that time and we have a ruined running career.  Not that I was ever close to elite, but I could sneak an age group award fairly regularly at local 5Ks.  The good news is though, I did manage to mostly recover without need for surgery.

At about the time I had given up on my running career altogether, I noticed a series of posts on the Facebook wall of a friend of mine who had broken her ankle and was recapturing her running career using the Jeff Galloway training method.  Jeff Galloway is a former Olympic runner with decades of successful running experience.  The idea of his plan is to break each run up into a series of short runs and walks rather than running the entire distance.  For example, on a 30 minutes "run", one might run for 30 seconds, and walk for 15 seconds repeatedly for the entire 30 minutes.  In addition to reducing the cardio and respiratory stress, the risk of joint and tendon injury is greatly reduced without losing much of the caloric or cardio benefit of the workout.

I began using the method in the spring of 2010.  On most occasions I would run for about 3 minutes and then walk 1 minutes, sometimes slightly shortening or extending a run period such that my walks would talk place on an uphill, thus even further reducing the strain on the fragile knee.  I am not back to pre-injury speed or mileage and I rarely run on consecutive days (another part of the plan), but I am able to run in a way that five years ago I figured would never happen again.

Jeff Galloway's page has a significant list of different training schedules for runners planning to run races ranging from 5K up to marathon.  One area that needs to be greatly improved and/or expanded is the page associated with improving speed.  At my age, I don't know how practical it is, but I would like to knock about a minute off my current mile time and about 5 or so minutes off my 5K time.  That would not get me back to pre-injury pace, but it would get me to about what we would expect me to have regressed to by now without the injury.  Jeff seems to have no practical suggestions for that, despite have a page on his site that appears to be dedicated to it.

If any of you have any experience with this or other similar training methods for old timers like me, I would love to read about it here in the comments section or on my Facebook page.

How to Be Libertarian on the Vaccine Issue without Placing the World in Danger

This is a difficult question.  One that even top Libertarians like Julie Borowski and Leif Bieberson are grappling with.  As Libertarians, we generally teach that government force and regulation should not force any particular behavior on the individual and that government force should only be used to prohibit activities in which one person harms another without his permission.  That becomes a sticky point even for some Libertarians, because the act of not vaccinating is seen by some to cause harm to others.  But government should only be able to prevent harmful action, not harmful inaction and at its core, Libertarianism MUST reject any policy that allows the government to forcibly insert something in an unwilling person's body.  So, back to the title, how can a person be Libertarian on the vaccine issue without being partially responsible for a world wide measles outbreak?

The best answer to that question is complicated in that it forces us to reexamine some of our assumptions and things that we take for granted.  For example, the question of whether public school children should be forced to be vaccinated begs the question, should we have public schools?  While not necessarily directly opposing freedom in general, the existence of public schools is antithetical to Libertarian ideals because once a society becomes dependent on government schools, they owe the government for that service.  The government acquires the right to require vaccinations, uniforms, drug tests, locker searches, etc. in payment for the education we depend on.  Before we can insist that the government shouldn't force certain behaviors on us, we have to stop accepting their handouts.

Once we give up on things like the public schools, we place ourselves in a position to be able to choose schools based, in part, on the vaccinations rules set by the private school owners, or just teach our children at home.  But what then about areas that are privately owned, but frequented by large portions of the public?  Should the government force vaccination in those cases?  No, we never allow the government to force things into an unwilling person's body.  However, in situations like this, when disease rates are rising as a result of people who choose not to vaccinate, what if there were a private solution?  Businesses, like Disney, to use the example that has been in the news, that have become incubation sites for formerly nearly eradicated diseases could start to require vaccination records for their patrons.  People could choose to attend the park (or other business) or not based on its vaccination policies.  Vaccination policies would change as markets dictated and government force would not have to be used.  Parks and other large businesses could decide for themselves whether they wanted to make exceptions based on a child having medical reasons for not being vaccinated.  People who thought a particular business's policies were wrong or unfair could boycott the business.  The market would be the force rather than government force.

This is my current thought, but it is open to growth as people share more ideas that I may have missed.  Let me know what you think!!