Category Archives: Illuminati

Kanye West may have taken some poetic license with a reference on his latest record to former CIA director George Tenet, but Tenets camp confirms to Danger Room that the rap star did in fact meet with the one-time U.S. spy chief.

On Clique, a standout track from this weeks Kanye West Presents G.O.O.D. Music: Cruel Summer, Yeezy relates an anecdote so unexpected and specific that it had several listeners suspending disbelief about rapper boasts: Yeah, Im talking business, we talking CIA/ Im talking George Tenet, I seen him the other day/ He asked me about my Maybach, think he had the same/ Except mine tinted and his might have been rented.

Verdict: partly true. To adapt the chorus for a second, George Tenet really was, uh, interacting with the clique. There is some truth to that story, longtime Tenet spokesman Bill Harlow tells Danger Room. Thats a better track record than most rappers can claim and, for that matter, most CIA analysts.

Harlow explains that a few months ago, Tenet was leaving a business meeting in a New York City building when, unexpectedly, Kanye West entered. They bumped into each other, Harlow said, and someone in the various entourages introduced the rapper to the former intelligence chief, who left government service in 2004 after infamously vouching for the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

They chatted briefly, Harlow says. The next thing you know, its recorded history. This should add grist to the online conspiracy theory that Kanye is a member of the Illuminati.

Only one thing: There was no discussion of Maybachs, Harlow says. Tenet doesnt drive one rented, leased, owned or otherwise. (Notice, however, that Kanye doesnt claim Tenet has one; he merely speculates.)

Not that the ex-CIA directors crew has a problem with Kanyes characterization: I think its poetic license. Nor is Tenet inclined to fact-check a rap song. Its not his genre, Harlow continues. Hes more of a Bruce Springsteen guy.

Still, now Tenet is immortalized in pop culture as a baller, without any reference to Iraq or WMDs.

Home page photo: NRK P3 /Flickr

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Kanye West Really Did Meet With Ex-CIA Director

While the rest of America grapples with an 8 percent unemployment rate and a generally MySpace economy, the New York Times reports Facebook's top 250 richest staffers gather to talk boats, art, and generally being unimaginably rich. Sounds fun!

The Times' claim undergirds an important aspect of Facebook's IPO disaster: you can be insanely rich, lose a ton of money, and still be insanely rich.. Particularly if you're one of Facebook's first 250 employees, who share a spot on what's called the TNR (The Nouveau Riche) 250, an illustrious group of rich people who talk about rich people things. You know, rare paintings and stuff, says NYT's Nick Bilton: "They discuss things they plan to buy when they sell their hundreds of millions of dollars in stock: boats, planes, artwork, even an island. (To be fair, philanthropy is also discussed.)"

I'd like to assume that these meetings take place with everyone dressed in Illuminati-style robes, but we're still waiting to hear back from Facebook for an official comment. A lamb is sacrificed. Blood is smeared on a map, and a Facebook engineer proclaims the next public school that will receive free iPads.

So, right, never let Zuckerberg's Silicon Valley ascetic lifestyle fool younot everyone is content with hoodies and chicken tenders. Facebook is generating cash like a nuclear power plant. [NYT]

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Facebook's Richest Employees Have a Secret Rich People Fun Club [Facebook]

Underneath the weathered tent canopy a man lets call him Steve sits at a table.

Behind him the broad steps of the Capitol march toward the towering Rotunda, on top of which the statute of Commonwealth gazes over Third Street.

Steve is wearing a tie-dyed shirt, the same shirt he wore yesterday and the day before that. He is surrounded by the physical props of protest. Anti-fracking, anti-Wall Street signs hang from the canopy, while pamphlets on social inequity are ready for handing out.

With barely a glance at the Occupy Harrisburg protest where Steve is sitting, lobbyists and legislators walk by in their tailored suits and golden watches.

It had been 340-odd days since protesters in Harrisburg started their occupation, now the second-longest in the nation. The title of longest belongs to Fresno, Calif.

Today in New York there will be marches and protests to mark the one-year anniversary of the movement. Many of the key figures still active in the Occupy Harrisburg movement are planning on being there.

In Harrisburg there are no plans for demonstrations or street marches. But at the marble feet of the edifice of state governance, the protest will continue. A lonely outpost of lonely men and women whom society has largely written off.

INSIDE THE TENT

In New York City, the protesters have long since been cleared out, most returning to their loft apartments, their houses or wherever they came from to be a part of the massive protests that captured the nations attention a year ago.

There were hard-core activists there, before the protests became fashionable for college students and housewives.

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One year later, the Occupy movmement is mostly low-key, with individual causes

by Alvin aqua Blanco (@aqua174) September 16, 2012, 11:30am

Shortly after his performance onSaturday Night Live,Frank Ocean let loose the official video for "Pyramids" off of his channel ORANGE album. Clocking in at about eight minutes, it's more like a short film that sees Ocean riding a motorcycle through the desert and stopping into a strip club where he gets trippy and dancers start looking almost demonic.

What, you thoughtall strippers looked fine?John Mayer cameo getting his Carlos Santana on, too. Watch the whole thing if you're an Illuminati conspiracy theorist.

Also, always wear your helmet, folks. Check out the Nabil directed video for "Pyramids" after the break.

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Frank Ocean - "Pyramids" [VIDEO]

If you read the comments of any major rap video on YouTube, you'll always see some authentic hustle shining through the racist bickering and Illuminati accusations. Aspiring rappers, dazzled by YouTube success stories like Soulja Boy, believe that fame is just a few dozen spam comments away. Rap spam ranges from cocky promo blurbs to weepy pledge-drive pleas; most are ignored, some are marked as spam, and one or two get some charitable thumbs-ups.

Do these comments really work? Are Kanye fans eager to explore the newest tracks by no-name YouTubers? Are A&R suits constantly scouring YouTube for undiscovered amateurs? I doubt it, but it's worth a closer look. Let's check out a few examples captured in the wild.

POSTED BY ENZZSCRILLAMUSIC ON KANYE WEST'S "MERCY" VIDEO:

IF YOU ACTUALLY GIVE A DAMN? AND READ ALL OF THIS, THEN THANK YOU! i work my ass off hoping to one day make it in the music biz, but its impossible to make it if nobody ever hears you, and its hard to get heard when you have no exposure. I dont have money for amazing music videos or big youtube advertisements . . . so all im left with is spam [. . .]You dont have to like me, just give me a chance to be liked. Thx

I appreciate EnzzScrilla's honesty and his everyman grind. He admits he's spamming, but without the big bucks and boutique VEVO channel, he's left stranded in an industry ruled by cash. Plus, he gets credit for humility: he's not asking for you to fall at his feet, he just needs a chance to be liked. Some points are deducted for the slightly aggro opener, which may have readers feeling accused before they reach the meat of the plea.

POSTED BY JW1GGS ON WIZ KHALIFA'S "NO SLEEP" VIDEO:

If you guys get a minute please just listen to my song called Kid. It's my most meaningful song and I want the world to hear it. Thank you

I'm all for brevity, but this is a pretty lightweight pitch. Who cares if it's some guy's most meaningful song? I don't know you, jw1ggs; you've got to work for it. (I checked out the track, and it's a maudlin white teen complaining that his dad doesn't take his rappin' seriously.)

POSTED BY YOUNGSOULJA462 ON CA$H OUT'S "CASHIN' OUT" VIDEO:

THUMBS UP IF YOU LIKE MY CASHIN IN (CASHIN OUT RMX) BETTER THAN THE ORIGINAL. APPRECIATE EVERYBODY THAT DOES CHECK IT OUT ON MY CHANNEL #KUSHSOCIETY KUSH IT OR PUSH IT!

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The Big Hurt: YouTube rap spam

PAULDING COUNTY, GA (CBS ATLANTA) -

Paulding County sheriff's deputies are trying to find out who is responsible for numerous acts of vandalism around East Paulding High School.

Around 20 areas of the school were tagged early Monday morning, according to a spokesperson with the Paulding County Sheriff's Office.

The tagging happened just months after the school was vandalized in March for a senior prank. In that incident, two dozen people were arrested.

In Monday's case, the vandals targeted the auxiliary gym, several hallways, sidewalks and the outside walls of several buildings. No damage was done to the interior of the school.

The vandals spray painted several phrases, including "Class of 2015," "Don't do drugs, just smoke weed" and "Illuminati."

School employees were able to quickly remove the graffiti, but the damage was estimated from between $10,000 to $12,000.

While no arrests had been made, school officials said that school surveillance video caught the vandals in the act.

If you have any information about the tagging, call the Paulding County Sheriff's Office at (770) 443-3015.

Copyright 2012 WGCL-TV (Meredith Corporation). All rights reserved.

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Graffiti found at East Paulding High School

(Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine)

Asked if hed heard of Lloyd Blankfein, the man in the Yankees cap standing by 295 Cozine Avenue in East New York muttered, What he do?

In the projects, when someone who looks like me comes up to you, it almost has to be bad news: a cop, a process server, a guy from the Housing Authority. But no, I explained. Blankfein was the head of Goldman Sachs. They ruled Wall Street, the Trilateral Commission too, sat at the table with the Illuminati.

He used to live in this building, I said.

It was so. Son of a postal clerk and a receptionist at a burglar-alarm factory, Blankfein had grown up right there, at 295 Cozine Avenue, a redbrick building more or less exactly like the other eighteen redbrick buildings at the Linden Houses. That was in the fifties and sixties, before the white people moved out of the projects and East New York became one of the citys most dangerous neighborhoods. Still, the Goldman CEO apparently retained affection for his childhood home, once sending a post to the East New York Project, a website for people nostalgic for the days of egg creams and spaldeens. It said: Graduate of Jefferson (71), Gershwin (68), P.S. 306 (65) and the Linden Projects. Currently reside in Manhattan with wife Laura and three kids. Lloyd Blankfein lloyd.blankfein@gs.com.

King of the world, right here? the man declared. No shit.

My visit to the Linden Houses was part of a self-guided tour of what Id come to call Nychaland. As in NYCHA, the New York City Housing Authority, a.k.a. the projects.

New York might be a city of neighborhoods, but Nychaland is a zone of its own. It is almost unthinkably huge: 334 developments spread from Staten Islands Berry Houses to Throgs Neck in the Bronx178,895 apartments in 2,602 buildings situated on an aggregate 2,486 acres, an area three times the size of Central Park. The population of Nychaland is usually cited at 400,000, but this number is universally regarded as too low, since most everyone knows someone living off lease. One NYCHA employee says that 600,000 is more like it. Thats about 8 percent of New Yorkwith 160,000 families on the waiting list. If Nychaland was a city unto itself, it would be the 21st most populous in the U.S., bigger than Boston or Seattle, twice the size of Cincinnati.

Despite these prodigious stats, the projects remain a mystery to most New Yorkers, a shadow city within the city, out of sight and mind, except when someone gets shot or falls down an elevator shaftjust these bad-news redbrick piles to whiz by on the BQE.

Indeed, perhaps Nychalands most compelling attribute is the fact that it exists at all. Across the U.S., public housing, condemned as a tax-draining vector of institutionalized mayhem and poverty, whipping-boy symbol of supposedly foolhardy urban policy, has largely disappeared. Chicago knocked down Cabrini-Green, St. Louis imploded Pruitt-Igoe, New Orleans flattened Lafitte after Katrina. Only in New York does public housing remain on a large scale, remnants of the days when the developments were considered a bulwark of social liberalism, a way to move up.

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The Land That Time and Money Forgot

Facebook still thinks pedophiles are funny. So today Im going to show you and, more important, Facebooks advertisers some of the other nasty stuff the social-network giant allows to co-exist alongside your childrens profiles.

Readers of this column know that my gripe with Facebook started about two weeks ago when Mark Zuckerbergs company refused to shut down a page on its site titled Pedophiles are people too.

Instead, Facebook allowed the person who posted the page to insert the phrase Controversial Humour in front of the title.

The pedophile page was still up and running on the Facebook site yesterday.

Facebooks manager of public policy, a guy named Andrew Noyes (noyes@fb.com), said the pedophile page did not violate the companys policies.

In general, pages or groups devoted to jokes, even disgusting and distasteful ones do not violate our policies, he said in an e-mail to me.

So Facebook and Mr. Noyes think that pedophilia sex with children, for those of you who arent familiar with the sicker side of humanity is funny.

Heres what one reader had to say about that.

Dear Mr. Crudele: I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart for your articles going after both FB and its willing advertisers for not paying attention to the sick Web page that is on the FB site.

I have a different take on this whole thing as I was sexually abused from the time I was 8 to 10 years old. Without boring you with all of the details, I will tell you that it was and still is the most horrific experience anyone can ever imagine.

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FB dark side, in the light

Summary: Dave Bartolleti reflects on VMWorld 2012 and VMWare's push to return to the future of the datacenter.

I had a great time, as always, at VMworld last week. My seventh time was busier than ever. If I had to summarize my gut feeling about this year, it was VMwares return to the future of the datacenter. Yes, there was plenty of cloud-ness, but the main thrust of VMwares message was: theres a lot left to virtualize, encapsulate, and mobilize in the datacenter, and were the best company to help you do itwhether or notyoure heading for the clouds.Thecloud isnt everything, nor should it be. Its one ofmany pathsto a more efficient, responsive, and available IT infrastructure. Companies arent going from datacenters and managed services to the cloud in one monolithic transition. Theyre looking at everything from their virtualized workloads to their big databases to their productivity apps and asking two questions: can I run them cheaper, faster and better in house first? And, when will it make more sense to run them in my or someone elses cloud? Part of that decision is cost will cloud save money?

A bigger question, though, is: Who decides? Will application teams and app developers go to the cloud themselves, without waiting for IT? In many cases, they already are. Or will todays virtualization admins lead the way? VMwares betting on both, and used VMworld this year to arm its core audienceVMware adminswith a strategy.My colleague Glenn ODonnell calls VMwares core audience theIlluminati (heh)and VMworld is certainly designed for them.

So is the newunified vCloud Suite, combining vSphere, vCenter Operations Management (with config and capacity rolled in last year) and vCloud Director into a complete virt+cloud management stack.Thats a lot of boxes, but VMware has to do it: as the hypervisor itself gets less sticky, and ascompetition catches up, VMware has to both broaden and simplify the management story to arm datacenter admins with enough of the right tools to not only create a killer private cloud but get their application environments ready for a public cloud.The vCloud Suite, combined with the DynamicOps and Nicira acquisitions, gives VMware a story for virtualization of every existing datacenter tier (and the foundation for thesoftware-defined datacenter), plus the connectors and lifecycle management tools to mobilize workloads to public IaaS platforms. Of course, the acquisitions also herald anew era of openness at VMware, with OpenStack also on the horizon.

vCloud Suite is still obviously a marketecture at this point. The acquisitions were just wrapped up a few weeks ago, so Ill give them a pass, but Im looking forward to some real guidance on when and how each should box is going to be built, integrated, and deployed. Which VMware orchestrator, service manager, and lifecycle tools have won the day? Which acquired management tools (and there are plenty) will quietly fade away? Im hoping to hear more on this from Barcelona.

And if you needed any more evidence that the VMware Illuminati still call the shots at VMworld, look at the two vendors that won theTechTarget Best of VMworld 2012awards Management category, New Technology category,andBest of Show:IntiguaandHotlink. Intigua virtualizes and encapsulates management agents, those bugbears of every admins life; HotLink lets you manage Hyper-V and other VM typesincluding AWS instancesfrom vCenter seamlessly. Im impressed by both companies and have been diving deeper on both recentlythese products are simple, laser-focused, easy to understand and demo, and designed to make real-world, everyday management of virtual environments simpler, faster, and less of a mess. Period.

For VMware, though, this was a management & strategy show, not a product show.Rounding out the news, VMware also announcededucation and advisory servicesand enhancedofferings for SMBs. And Dave Johnson covers theView-related content with his usual flair here. Finally, just for the record,Im neutral about the shift back to processor-based pricing. The backlash was fierce, and it was right to listen to customers, but I still dont think counting physical infrastructure is the way to license for the next generation of datacentersorclouds. Its clear vRAM wasnt the way either, though.

Next for VMware?Focus, focus, focus. Where does the company want to win? The current answer is everywhere: datacenter and cloud, packaged apps and new apps, the entire systems management stack, admins and developers, virtualized storage, software-defined networking, and the virtual desktop. Thats a lot of simultaneous vectors to juggle, a lot of established competitors to chase, a lot of partners to woo, and a lot of new acquisitions to pull together. Over to you, Pat!

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VMworld 2012: Back To The Future (Of The Datacenter): A Management Odyssey

Most people fear automation. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the "A-word" has conjured up rebellion by those who are vulnerable to replacement by machines. When you automate a job, there is a high likelihood that the machinery will reduce dependence on human interaction and may even eliminate the need for humans altogether. In the future, some IT roles will diminish in numbers and possibly disappear altogether -- but service management and automation will always need innovators and leaders.

The majority of organizations have adopted IT service management practices (ITSM) to manage business and technological change. But gone are the days ruled by the technology Illuminati. The future will require customer-obsession, relentless focus on the portfolio of services, automation, and expansion far beyond the walls of the organization. To stay relevant and competitive, business leaders must drop the "IT" from ITSM and embrace industrialized automation as a way to deliver customer outcomes faster, cheaper and at higher quality.

True service management evolution will be impossible without drastic, fundamental changes in automation. In Forrester's Service Management and Automation Playbook, my colleagues and I maintain that it is critical for firms to embrace automation from an organizational perspective. If executed successfully, firms will gain significant economies of scale and increase the ability to focus on services, as enhanced visibility into broader technology domains provides invaluable clarity. Naturally, automation will be heavily influenced and, in many cases, driven by individuals with strong process backgrounds.

As part of this critical transformation, a company must: 1) optimize IT staffing resources for maximum business value, 2) transform employees into technology and process innovators, and 3) develop fundamental service brokering and integration skills.

Step 1: Optimize IT Staffing Resources For Maximum Business Value

When a firm has employees performing multiple tasks, it is essential to make optimum use of the right talents and identify areas where individual skills are not appropriately leveraged. Some examples include:

- A network engineer who holds multiple certifications with years of technical experience, but is responsible for routine troubleshooting and configuration changes.

- A database administrator who would rather be interacting with customers, but spends valuable time digging through complex databases.

- A service desk agent with an innate ability to solve complex problems, but is unable to transfer to a command center position where they can be more effective at solving bigger issues.

Too many infrastructure and operations professionals fulfill both an engineering and operational function -- two distinct roles that mandate different mental faculties and emotional competencies. Engineering is an inherently creative process that takes time to master and requires deep technical expertise, while operations professionals stress methodical process adherence and an ability to switch tasks frequently and adapt to continuously changing demands. Most individuals can perform one or the other well -- but not both.

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How to Prepare for IT Service Delivery of the Future