04.16.10
Posted in Rock 'n' Roll, Sludge in the Seventies at 1:57 pm by George Smith
As promised, DD picked up a copy of the Legacy Columbia reissue of Iggy & the Stooges’ Raw Power.
The attraction was new live material from a 1973 show and a restoration/revitalization of the old David Bowie mix everyone respected. But which was shelved in favor of an inferior product a few years ago thanks to the overenthusiasms of Iggy Pop.
DD ripped “Search and Destroy” from the new and old editions for examination in an audio program.
Here’s a ’small’ snapshot of new “Search & Destroy”:
Here’s a snapshot of ‘old’ “Search & Destroy,” from the old out-of-print CD, and the first edition of Raw Power for the digital age.
Visually, there’s not a lot of difference. The Legacy edition is fit to the digital dynamic range slightly better than the old version. This makes it noticeably louder when comparing the two back-to-back, but not radically so.
It’s not brickwalled which is the practice for almost all current pop and rock releases — done to make them smash out of everything, from earbuds to home speakers. A variation on that ruined the remaster Iggy Pop did for Raw Power.
However, DD’s guessing the new edition was expanded and hard limited very slightly. This is a procedure in which the original is goosed a bit to give it a tad more zing and run up against just enough digital walling to keep dynamic peaks in bounds, but not so much that it’s noticeably squared and sawn off.
This means conservative judgment was used and it sounds very good.
But if you have the original, you can still just resort to turning it up for the same effect. (I did.) The dynamics are still all there. But there was never a lot of fine detail in the original vinyl recording, so to have kept it true to that didn’t take much effort. (The effort was in resisting the urge to ruin it. That test was failed once.)
Some notes on the bonus CD
The booklet shows a poster for the ‘Georgia Peaches’ Stooges show at Richards bar in Atlanta in 1973, near the end of the band’s run. It lists Hydra as the opening act.
Hydra was a typical southern rock band on the hard side of the genre. They were signed to Capricorn within a year.
Hydra made three albums, none of which are even remotely up to anything done by the Stooges.
At the time, they were probably deluded enough to think they were good in this context. If you listen to the recording, you’ll hear Iggy go off on some ‘little cracker boy.’ No southern rock bands delivered anywhere near the ferocity of the Stooges. There were disadvantages to growing up below the Mason-Dixon line.
At the beginning of the live material James Williamson’s guitar cuts in and out jaggedly, although he’s also in the room mix from stage volume blowing into the vocal mikes. But that’s really here nor there when it comes to Stooges live recordings. If you listen closely, at some point you’ll hear him kick in an octafuzz on one of his solos. If you’re good, you’ll hear that.
‘Georgia Peaches’ is the best live recording of Ron Asheton on bass. And there is lots of barroom piano from Scott Thurston which gives the band a somewhat different texture than on Raw Power.
For “Gimme Danger,” the piano goes away for a lot and Williamson’s guitar finally arrives in full glory. It is a great rendition. But “Search & Destroy” does not benefit from Scott Thurston’s rollicking piano.
Mix-wise Ron Asheton’s bass is in the same sonic range as Williamson’s rhythm, so they panned the latter to one side, Asheton to the other.
“I Need Somebody” is sinister, crunching and bluesy. And I won’t spoil the dirty poem that introduces it.
The crowd sounds about a dozen strong, including one girl totally infatuated with Iggy.
“Cock in My Pocket” delivers what you wanted. A good filthy song, now famous, one of the Stooges’ rampaging but more conventional numbers, worked off a classic rock n’ roll guitar figure.
“Doojiman,” a studio outtake from Raw Power is included. It features good jungle rhythms and chopping axe work by Williamson. Iggy’s vocal would have made people laugh had it been on the original album. Which was probably not the desired effect and why it was omitted.
Come to think of it, Columbia was probably appalled by “Doojiman.” As if they weren’t already unenthusiastic enough about the Stooges in ‘73.
If one wonders why a fair-to-great live recording of the Stooges never aired, Iggy’s stage delivery quickly sets the listener right. It would have been unthinkable for any label to submit it to FM.
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04.15.10
Posted in Rock 'n' Roll at 12:05 pm by George Smith
Crazy mean Ted Nugent was at Northern Michigan University recently. To talk to students.
It’s amusing on many levels, since Ted’s a gold-plated fool and schools are theoretically supposed to be devoted to broadening one’s horizons, rather than narrowing them to a Nugent-y crabbishness. On the other hand, a Nugent lecture could be considered mind-expanding if you actually are someone who has managed not to be exposed to enough examples of the everyday contemptible.
This was in Marquette, paradoxically the center of Bart Stupak’s district.
The Motor City Madman once had political aspirations. However, his antipathy toward unions, the auto industry and minorities — he uses the codewords ‘entitlement bloodsuckers’ — guarantee he’s unelectable in any of Michigan’s more populated areas.
Which makes Stupak’s district perfect for Ted.
The Democrat is retiring, run out for making himself the asshole of the health care reform fight. Second, since Marquette is about the size of Pottsville in Schuylkill County, PA — which is demographically similar, that means the voters — other than students, are just mostly white, old and Fox News addicts.
Anyway, here are a few laughers from an interview with Ted in the NMU student newspaper:
Nugent: I am getting used to some pathetic Americans acting like wannabe Euro sheep, going out of their way to intentionally misrepresent truth, logic and the American Way. I think they are funny, funny people, and I thank them for identifying me as the obvious good guy. God bless them all.
Student interviewer: How would you define “Hate speech?” Do you think that you have ever engaged in it?
Nugent: I would hope sensible people would know hate anything when they see or hear it. The evil, inbred rhetoric of the soulless KKK would be hate speech, I hope, to everyone. I have never engaged in anything remotely related to such intellectual vacuity. On the contrary, I have fought hard against it. [What a scrupulously honest and self-examing fellow is Mr. Suck-On-My-Machine Gun. -- DD]
Student interviewer: One of the reasons the alternative presentation has been organized is that many don’t think your statements encourage positive discussion pertaining to issues such as gun control and freedom of speech. What do you have to say about this?
Nugent: I shall elaborate the transparency of such asinine allegations and those that foolishly allege them on April 13. Bring your friends. This is gonna be fun.
If you’ve seen Ted on Fox News, you would bet his student appearance was unspectacular. Nugent can be counted on to be a paradigm of repetition, never departing from his standard political pitch as the white he-man battling Fedzilla, fighting for your freedom, like everyone else in the GOP.
According to the North Wind newspaper, students organized alternatives to Nugent-furnished boredoms:
For those who didn’t want to see Nugent, the Sticks and Stones event, hosted by various groups across campus, featured speakers about different forms of hate speech.
While Ted may think he doesn’t do hate speech, the distinction’s a fine one. And he’s on the wrong side of it, easy. For his better or worse, that’s how decent people think of him these days no matter how much Ted smiles, chuckles and breaks his arm patting himself on the back for allegedly being a jolly good fellow.
And this is from DD, someone who paid cash money for Nugent’s last two records.
Ted, in fact, isn’t very courageous at all. He jabbers about truth and speaking his mind but only does it in print or in interview.
His great gift of expression is through guitar. But you will never see Ted compose an album of songs based on what he really thinks.
Ted Nugent is chicken — buck, buck, squawwwwk — because he knows what would happen if he chanced it.
Never fear, DD knows Nugent’s music well enough to take a stab at what a new album should really look like.
Track listing:
1. Death to Tyrants (You Know Who)
2. Get Off My Land
3. Hey Fatty! (Get Sick & Die)
4. Parasite
5. Rich Kings & Poor Scum
6. Quarantine (Sodomites)
7. Union Huntin’
8. (Hands Off My Pile) Bloodsucker
9. The Great White Man-alo
10. Raghead Punks
11. Mr. Massey, Good Friends & a Bottle of Whine
12. HateSpeechin’
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Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 8:16 am by George Smith
ProPublica won a Pulitzer very recently for good reporting.
This next example, however, isn’t the same. It’s just a nuisance piece describing a book on fear furnsihed by another retiree from the CIA.
Writes Sebastian Rotella here:
During the years he dueled terrorists overseas as a top operative for the CIA, Charles S. Faddis came to see the world through the eyes of the enemy …
What he saw — despite a vast campaign to fortify the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks — scared him. In fact, he says it scared him so much that he has written a new book, Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security [1].
“Amazingly…as you tour this nation and examine the prime targets that beg to be defended from terrorist attack, what you find, eight years later, is that virtually nothing meaningful has been done,” Faddis writes. “True, large new bureaucracies have been created and shiny, new office buildings constructed, but in terms of concrete measures which will stand in the way of determined, evil men, there is very, very little.”
Rotella, incidentally, is a former LA Times reporter — one who left the ship, probably because of obvious Sam Zell/Tribune mismanagement. But that’s another story.
Back to Faddis.
Books like his have been a dime-a-dozen since 9/11. Everyone who comes out of the national security structure, or who works as a natsec consultant, seems to get charity-case book contracts for deadeningly repetitive tomes on how we’re still unprepared and everything is at risk.
And for years after 9/11 newspapers were filled with articles featuring literally hundreds of people proclaiming how easy it was for terrorists to infiltrate and attack — just about anything. There has never been a shortage of national security men working out in their heads what manner of badness terrorists can do, or walking and probing the countryside for vulnerabilities.
I’ve seen it firsthand.
I did a literature search on this a few years ago for purposes of outlining the nature of it. I’ll get to that in a minute.
Faddis’s book is probably not going to sell.
This is a good thing.
Americans have been burned out on fear. They’ve been abused by people who make simplistic arguments, who believe they should get some kind of award for making statements similar to this one, from Faddis:
[He] asserts, “long lines of railcars packed with the most dangerous substances on earth sit unattended all over our nation.”
What’s the answer then? Spend more money for armed guards on trains? Harden tank cars even more than they already are?
(Believe me, rail accidents are more likely to happen — and do happen — than terrorist attack. Chemical containers tend to be hardened so that they don’t all rupture catastrophically when a collision or derailment occurs. But sometimes they do and bad things happen. But it’s not often and there has never been a deadly Bhopal-scale disaster — not a rail car but a factory-size — release of toxic chemicals in this country.)
“When Faddis’ book was released in February, the reaction included accolades from nuclear safety watchdogs and from a security executive who met with Faddis to tell him the critique had been helpful,” writes Rotella.
Damned by faint praise, another harsh fact is that everyone has seen this stuff before, many times. At one point stories about attacking nuclear reactors, or being able to steal spent fuel rods which would cinder anyone getting near them trying to carry them away, were almost routine.
In real life, there isn’t anyone, who when presented with such a book as Faddis’, who won’t say ‘that’s helpful’ publicly.
What you don’t hear them say, sub-vocally, is: “Go away now. We’ve had enough.”
The method of writing a book on raging insecurity is lazy, even though Faddis did this:
For his new book, Faddis spent months on reconnaissance missions to likely terror targets in U.S infrastructure: dams, rail transportation, military bases, biological research labs and nuclear, chemical and liquid natural gas plants. He roamed along fences, visited authorized areas and otherwise tested security measures. Although his covert experience helped, he obeyed self-imposed ground rules and tried to maintain the perspective of an ordinary visitor.
The ProPublica article, for example, takes no account that there simply aren’t enough terrorists to take advantage of all the opportunities present in the book. Or that life, in general, is fraught with vulnerability. And that blowing up an office building won’t bring down the republic. Or that Biblical-scale disasters are, with the exception of Chernobyl, an exchange of nuclear weapons or WWII-style strategic incendiary bombing campaigns, almost purely only within the power of nature. You know — earthquakes, volcanoes, Katrinas — these sorts of things.
But hey, someone could walk into an office or federal building and just open fire! Or someone could crash a vehicle or airplane into the same! Or someone could take anthrax from a gold standard flask of anthrax spores at a top lab!
Oh, wait…
It also pays no mind to the idea that people and agencies are frequently resilient and valiant in the face of disasters. The only thing you have to know from guys like Faddis is that it’s a dangerous world and the government (and an entire laundry list of others) haven’t protected us well from the boogeymen who can do anything.
Remember, I said I’d get back to the vulnerability-everywhere meme, which was written about extensively years ago.
In August 2006, I reprinted this thing, a piece already a year old from Globalsecurity.Org:
The newsmedia, when dealing with potential problems, like the threats posed by terrorists . . . has an extremely poor track record. It does not ask hard questions of anyone. It simply acts as a conduit for the delivery of nightmare claims. Employing a Nexis search, [I] was able to quickly find around one hundred stories devoted to spreading permutations from the last two years containing some fashion of the assumption or assertion that “it’s easy for terrorists” to bring on calamity using a multitude of plans and practices.
Rail road yard security is a joke, it’s easy for terrorists to walk right in. .50 caliber sniper rifles, powerful enough to shoot down airplanes…are easy for terrorists to acquire [but even easier for Americans to get]. It’s [still] too easy for terrorists to get across the border. A new driver’s license bill is bad because it makes it easy for terrorists to have them. A blackout reveals how easy it might be for terrorists to knock down the electrical grid. Colorado is vulnerable to terror because federal focus on big cities has made it easy for terrorists to strike in landlocked states. It is easy for terrorists to contaminate water so [a scientist's] new sensor system is a necessity. Be alert for farm terror because it is easy for the enemy to strike there. [A state] [leads or lags] in bioterror readiness and it’s a matter for concern because it is easy for terrorists … Assume a bioterror attack is coming because it is easy for terrorists…
By themselves, they occasionally appear lucid and reasonable. Pile them together and the aggregate is astonishing. The message is everything is vulnerable and terrorists are capable of anything. Because of one terrible day and the cliche “9/11 changed everything,” devastating terrorist strikes have been theorized as transferable to almost any imaginable attack scenario.
After I read a stack of these articles, I thought for a moment I was in the wrong business and should devote a couple months and publications to predicting the ways in which terrorists could attack. Terrorists could imitate the methodology of the Washington sniper and his accomplice. Why haven’t they? Terrorists could go into the forests and high chaparrals of southern California during fire season and ignite calamitous blazes, making national news and sewing panic. Local arsonists do it. It would be easy for terrorists. Gang members from central Los Angeles shoot into cars on the freeways. Surely that would be easy for terrorists… [Anti-terror celebrity Richard Clarke did do this in a long piece for the Atlantic Monthly. Clarke is actually now in the business of writing books about what terrorists can do, like clockwork, every two years. He alternates between fiction and non-fiction, the only difference between the two being there is more dialog in the former.]
It’s a good game. It needs to take no account of what terrorists are actually doing, no knowledge of what tough to get human intelligence sources and materials may show, or historically — what preferences, capabilities, experiences and limitations terrorists carry with them. It can assume that there are more terrorists expertly trained in many degrees and methods of mayhem and working themselves into place than there are actual terrorists. For the anti-terrorism effort, it is only necessary to assign a simple universality to fragility and vulnerability and degrees of omniscience and unlimited resources to the adversary. It is easy, so to speak, to think of things that are easy for terrorists to do.
. . . If one looks at an article published for the August/September 2005 edition of the American Journalism Review, one found a lamenting over the lack of good reporting on homeland security. But in the first few paragraphs, the article promptly fell into the same type of reporting it purported to criticize. The review delivered a titillating and speculative disaster porn scenario, trotting out a reporter to furnish claims about how easy it would be for a terrorist to kill — again thousands — by sabotaging a tank of anhydrous ammonia at a chemical plant.
“This particular killer goes for the eyeballs and turns skin into a gooey mass. Respiratory systems are paralyzed by excruciating pain,” wrote the publication. “…thousands of people would have died. I have no doubt of that,” said a journalist who was a source.
And “To attack [America's electrical] grid, a terrorist need only study publicly available trade journals, which explain where new facilities are constructed,” again cried an op-ed piece in the New York Times on August 13, 2005. “A terrorist could then disable a particular system by destroying the computers and relays housed in the poorly protected building.”
Article after article can be found warning of dire consequences. No publication is too small, no facet of life too obscure.
The publication Arkansas Business, for example, furnished warning about attacks on rice.
“It would be very easy for terrorists to introduce anthrax or even something as simple as rat poison into rice being exported to the United States,” said a rice businessman for the paper.
“A shipload of contaminated rice, distributed throughout the nation, would be a security nightmare, creating not only a panic but possibly an economic meltdown.” (The subtext: Buy American grown rice, as only it can be guaranteed to be inspected, pure and clean.)
In any case, the hot button issue is again anthrax, the ultimate weapon, as has already been read, possibly to be blown through cities, worked into beef, poured into fruit juice, or also distributed in bags of rice.
And if not anthrax-tainted rice, how about lunches for school children?
At the end of July 2005, USA Today ran with the brief “School lunches a terrorist target? USDA calls meals ‘particularly vulnerable.’” “Currently, authorities are looking at how a popular lunchroom staple, chicken nuggets, may be susceptible to tampering,” wrote the newspaper. “Federal officials have distributed a food safety checklist to school lunch providers, who must show evidence of a food safety plan…”
Catastrophe-causing poisoning materials for terrorists are apparently available off the shelf everywhere, too, their capability facile.
“Robert Buchanan, a senior science adviser with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said mounting an attack on the food system would not require a great deal of knowledge or sophistication, and the result could be catastrophic,” wrote the Birmingham Post-Herald in July 2005 in the article, “Experts say food supply could be hit.”
“The number of biological or chemical agents that could be used in an attack [is huge],” said the government advisor to the reporter. “I’m amazed how many agents are available over the Internet.”
[W]hile such news often departs from reality, it generates its own truth and consequences by filtering into reports delivered by expert government, corporate and academic agencies. The action of this process as well as the close uncritical embracing of it dissipates organization into thousands of efforts going in different directions, reducing security to a chaotic scramble for money by crowds of experts and officials, all trying to paint scary scenarios because the more forbidding the manner of doom the easier it is to command attention.
Such collections of news stories and claims frequently lead to hearings, policy, entrenched beliefs, and funding of no immediately visible benefit to average Americans. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to put forward the distinctly not radical idea that given the recent national and local failures in the face of catastrophe, the needy would still take it in the shorts if all that was claimed to be very insecure to terrorists was made secure.
I concluded that the packaging and delivery of doom and terror stories comprised rigidly casted scripts which destroyed careful deliberation. They inspire a belief that everything must be secured and that nothing is secure. They lead to the perception or even conviction that the work of battening down the nation will never be over.
They fostered belief that it is rational and healthy to be in fear because everyone is threatened, “the world is not a safe place,” and maniacs can and will attack fruit juice, school lunches in Iowa, chicken nuggets or tubs of cafeteria spaghetti.
“[Faddis's] book reviews a litany of security flaws in the bio-weapons research world revealed by the 2001 anthrax attacks, which were allegedly the work of a disgruntled scientist, and criticizes the dramatic increase in the number of labs handling lethal substances,” writes Rotella.
No, actually, the DoJ/FBI Amerithrax investigation and report did that. And we’ve all seen this but despite the fact that the worst bioterrorist in history was an American insider, the bioterror defense industry — of which he was a key part — continues to expand.
Geezus.
Here you have another perfect example of misguided book publishing, one which asks the gullible to believe we need another where so many have already been.
I’m betting life’s going to punt on Charles S. Faddis’s Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security.
It will, suitably, subject it to an earned ‘willful neglect.’
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04.14.10
Posted in Why the World Doesn't Need US at 3:11 pm by George Smith
One of the phenoms of modern journalism is that of the non-scientist reporter who gets to explain stuff about science the rest of us are deemed just too dim to fathom.
They’re ‘explainers’ and it’s not surprising to see how clownish they are at real explaining, although the grand places which employ them pretend not to notice.
Today’s case study is someone named Michael Specter.
This is how CNN describes him:
Michael Specter is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens our Lives.” TED, a nonprofit organization devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading,” hosts talks on many subjects and makes them available through its Web site …
Wow! The New Yorker! Effin-ay! Specter talks on many subjects and makes them available through his website! That certainly is something not too many people can do!
This is how Specter kicks off his bit at CNN:
American denialism threatens many areas of scientific progress, including the widespread fear of vaccines and the useless trust placed in the vast majority of dietary supplements quickly come to mind.
That’s his lede. Really.
Yes, growing American denialism is a threat. And what does our swell from the New Yorker want to talk about?
The stubborn denial of evolution? The GOP disbelief in global warming, a rejection of fact so profound and rabid it threatens to overturn any rational progress toward mitigating the problem for future generations.
No. Too obvious and dull. Let’s do dietary supplements!
“Nowhere has the screaming been louder, however, than in the fight over how we grow our food,” Specter continues. “If you are brave enough to set a Google Alert for the phrases ‘genetically modified food’ and ‘organic food,’ you will quickly see what I mean.”
DD knows much about denialism. There’s the creationist biochemistry prof from his school, Michael Behe, someone who has so contributed to screwing up national debate on the subject that university’s biology department has to have a disclaimer on its website about him.
There are the Bruce Ivins deniers. Despite the hard work of scientists in the service of the FBI, they still believe the anthrax was made elsewhere than at Fort Detrick. And that it was weaponized.
No amount of exposition, no reading of facts, dissuades them.
And just last week, although it wasn’t science, DD dealt with a Lehigh Valley rock band named Poker Face, one with a website that exists merely to rant about “Jew-suits”, “Zionazis” and how Hitler’s WWII concentration camps weren’t extermination camps, but work camps. They were really big supporters of Republican Ron Paul.
Of course, the most damaging denials are over climate and evolution. And these denialists are the exclusive property of the GOP.
“Denialists replace the open-minded skepticism of science with the inflexible certainty of ideological commitment,” writes Specter.
“It isn’t hard to find evidence: the ruinous attempts to wish away the human impact on climate change, for example. The signature denialists of our time, of course, are those who refuse to acknowledge the indisputable facts of evolution.”
Well, there you go. Specter has mentioned it! Remarkable! But there’s something big missing. Can you spot it?
Yes, I know you can. Nowhere does Specter mention that it’s the Republican Party which is the formost hater of science in the United States!
And there is no mention of the development of the strongly held belief within the GOP that ’science’ is a political instrument or ideology of the opposition, one to be vigorously defended against wherever it is seen. It is the party of anti-enlightenment, the party of those who have contempt for science because science is a characteristic of the hated ‘elites.’
The GOP is the big tent for heevahavas and it couldn’t be plainer than the nose on your face. And you can’t have a responsibly run country, one that meets its commitments to the world, one that stands for something, when such people control national policy.
In fairness to Specter, perhaps he has written about this in his book and I have just not seen it.
Still — scan that column. After skipping all the real obvious stuff about American denialism on this high-rent real estate, look at what our swell has to say: The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is supporting scientists who are “engineering vitamins and micronutrients into cassava.”
“Who could be opposed to that?” he asks.
Good job. Atta boy!
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Posted in Bioterrorism at 1:23 pm by George Smith
It’s the Bob Graham/Jim Talent biodefense industry lobby, two guys who won’t gracefully leave the stage even when the US government has ended their lease.
Back in March DD wrote:
The most in-the-news duo of fuglemen for the US bioterror defense industry, the small operation known as the Graham-Talent WMD commission, will no longer be the Graham-Talent commission when its federal lease on life is not renewed this year. In short order.
It couldn’t come soon enough.
During 2008-09 the Graham-Talent Commission acted as an instrument of Tara O’Toole’s biodefense shop, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity.
After dismissal, they could no longer call themselves the WMD Commission. If the Obama administration rightly became tired of these guys, it was a very good thing.
Because a long time ago Graham-Talent ceased to actually be a commission for studying the threat of WMDs. Instead, it became merely a special interest lobby for biodefense, its staffers sock puppets of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity.
While this is obviously not well known by the general public, it’s well understood within the specialist corps of experts on bioterrorism.
So — this week — while everyone else in the news is talking about the nuclear security summit with Russia, Graham-Talent can’t resist being Buttinskis.
And they trade on their old name — the WMD Commission — in order to gull some editor who should know better into giving them space. In order to flog more bioterror defense.
Again.
At the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Graham and Talent write:
President Obama is right to seek significant reductions in the U.S. and the world’s nuclear weapons, but other proliferation trends are equally unsettling.
As the bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism noted in our World at Risk report, without urgent and decisive actions, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction (nuclear or biological) will be used somewhere in the world before the end of 2013, but a biological attack is more likely than nuclear. Biological attacks could come from nation-states (the State Department lists at least six countries with suspected programs), terrorist groups (al-Qaida first built labs to produce anthrax weapons in 1999) (Purposely deceptive and wrong. — DD), or lone-wolf terrorists (according to the FBI, the perpetrator of the October 2001 anthrax attacks was a U.S. government scientist) …
(Actually, the lone-wolf bioterrorist, Bruce Ivins — our man on the inside at the heart of bioterror defense research makes for a cogent argument that maybe we need less expansion of the biodefense industry, if only to minimize the number of people with dangerous reliability problems and access to potential weapons. — DD.)
Today, we have the option of building a viable biodefense system that could allow a future Nuclear Posture Review to declare that the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear force is to deter nuclear attack.
Just as President Kennedy gave us the challenge of going to the moon, President Obama can give us the challenge of removing bioterrorism from the category of WMD.
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04.13.10
Posted in Rock 'n' Roll, Sludge in the Seventies at 9:12 am by George Smith
Today marks the ‘release’ of Columbia’s Legacy edition of Raw Power by Iggy & the Stooges.
Undated and remarkable, Raw Power marked one of the more memorable instances of my mother shrieking at me over rock ‘n’ roll in the bedroom. Mixed by David Bowie, it came out of the cheap stereo shrill, glassy and dangerous. No other band had a guitar sound like the Stooges on Raw Power. Credit it to James Williamson, who piped his axe into a Vox AC-30 .
The only photos on the album were of Williamson in front of Marshall stacks — which still throws everyone off because it’s difficult to get into the area of Raw Power tone with that rig.
Never duplicated by any other hard rock band, it’s a benchmark, belonging exclusively to the Raw Power-era Stooges.
Iggy Pop’s remaster of the album sits in my stacks. He screwed it up terribly, rendering it unlistenable if you loved the original. Done only for the sake of correcting what he idiosyncratically thought was David Bowie’s bad mix. The original CD issue was then allowed to go out of print in the US. It suffered only from not having the volume it could have had for the digital format — something that afflicted every CD from that time when passed through an analog-analog-to-digital conversion. It was a ‘fault’ remedied simply by turning up the volume on the stereo even louder. Louder, got that?
Ten years ago I wrote a long piece on Rhino Handmade’s Stooges Funhouse box for the Village Voice.
Funhouse is the record for you today if you like repetition.
In terms of career, Raw Power was the top of the mountain. What made Iggy Pop, and what still does, is “Search & Destroy,” a number that’s the apotheosis of deadly hard rock.
Here’s a reprint of the old Voice piece, originally entitled “Net-surfin’ Cheetahs with Hearts Full of Outtakes.”
My first reaction when I heard about Rhino Handmade’s seven-CD box set of the Stooges’ Complete Funhouse Sessions was that it had to be a product dreamed up by lunatics for lunatics. Take after take after mind-rotting take (19 in all!) of “Loose,” among other eternal Iggy relics, available only to a subset of obsessed Netizens with their browsers set to secure encrypted transmission and $120 in the electronic billfold.
But after more examination, it appeared such a well-developed travesty, I had to laugh in appreciation! After all, this is the same Iggy Pop who says in the liner notes to the remastered Raw Power—in the part entitled “Stooges in the Funhouse”—that his band’s real 1970 audience was “high-school drop-outs, troubled drug kids.” A “constituency” —such an elegant weasel word for “penniless losers”—Elektra Records couldn’t and didn’t want to market to.
Yep, there’s an annoying poetry in the high-grade-steel fact that the Stooges could travel in the space of three decades from music for bottom-out-of-sighters —motorcycle gangsters, their floozies, and lovers of skank weed and roller derby, an audience of such presumed shallow pocket that advertisers ignored them — to an item at the pinnacle of weird-computer-snob-driven e-commerce: a domain reserved for those who dump hundreds of dollars a week on the Internet, and a creature never imagined on the broken-glass-littered stages of Michigan or in the dark of Don Galluci’s California studio.
Part of the credit, I reckon, must go to Rock Critic Received Wisdoms 101. It’s gotten so it is almost impossible to turn around without reading how some band of people not alive in 1970 have made a record that sounds like the Stooges. If it sounds like bad altie hard rock that you should buy anyway because bad altie hard rock is better than whoever is the current favorite critics’ scapegoat, it will be claimed to sound like the Stooges. And if it doesn’t sound like anything, if it is so glum and nondescript that all that can be determined from it is that people are playing guitars, beating a drum, and shouting loudly, it will be said — by some fanzine editor or David Fricke, somewhere, indeed, many times — to sound like the Stooges.
Pure gold: This is the kind of indirect, relentless hagiography that no amount of cash money can buy. And since it appears, to me, anyway, to have been going on more or less for at least a decade, it has generated a kind of kook Stooges fetish, one visible symptom of which is the Funhouse Sessions.
Stooges kooks, presumably those at which this box set is aimed, seem to have some parallel characteristics with the woozy fans of Star Trek,who can often be found at conventions paying stupid sums of money for trash: crumpled scripts or prosaic items supposedly clutched at one time or another by their heroes.
The Stooges lasted three albums, the third of which was almost accidental. The original Trek lasted three seasons, the third of which occurred only after fans conducted a campaign to admonish the network for canceling it after two. Most of the Stooges went nowhere after the end, until VH-1 dug a couple of them up as elder statesmen last year. Most of the original Trek actors went nowhere until conventioneering and movies rescued them a couple decades later. Bill Shatner wore a Nazi uniform in “Patterns of Force”; Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton wore a Nazi uniform. Shatner made TJ Hooker; Iggy, at times, seems to have made as many unlistenable albums as there are unwatchable episodes of TJ Hooker. Trek was kept alive by a media mania that gathered steam in fringe sci-fi magazines, where Gene Roddenberry was given God-like status. From the standpoint of rock journalism, Stooge devotion is functionally indistinguishable.
It only stands to reason, then, that Stooges worship will mirror some of the weirder excrescences seen in the Star Trek universe. To wit:
Like the production of Star Trek genre science fiction novels in which the same Trek plots are recycled again and again, with only the book covers, names of characters, times, and places subject to change, the endless recycling of wretched Stooges demo tapes released as historical CDs will continue and perhaps even accelerate. Some possible titles: Iggy’s Piles Opened Up and Bled for You, Pumping for Jim,and The Ignoble Prizes: Achtung mit Asheton,the latter of which Iggy could claim is a tape of the concert at The Joint in the Woods, where he goaded Ron Asheton into dressing in full SS regalia and introduced the show in Deutsch. (See Iggy’s bio I Need More for the provenance.)
Star Trek has “KS” literature — samizdat fiction about forbidden love between Kirk and Spock. Stooges worship will spawn “Jim Bowie” Net fiction, centering on imagined romantic relationships between Iggy and David Bowie.
Inevitably, Stooges conventions will appear. Horrified by his experience with dotcom stalker nerds who bought The Complete Funhouse Sessionsat an early assembly, Jim Osterberg will write another book, published only in Europe, entitled I Am Not Iggy. As the conventions gather interest, old Stooges, A&R types, engineers, and hangers-on associated with the Stooges will realize there is money to be made in speaking at such affairs. James Williamson will be the first to capitalize, giving a $5000 lecture about how his hand was broken in a fight with a roadie for Alice Cooper and what it meant for his professional career. Scott Thurston will speak about how he’s tired of being ragged on by nincompoop Tom Petty fans for being an ex-Stooge. Eventually, Iggy will recant his previous book, and receive a handsome publishing contract for two more: tentatively entitled Stooges Memories and I AM Still Iggy.
In 2050, a rock documentary will be made for the independent-film circuit. Entitled Jesus Loves the Stooges, it will be a history of the band framed around the recent discovery in a desert shack in Arizona of about 12 unlabeled tapes of undocumented Stooges rehearsal material of good quality. The documentary will show various rock critics, archivists, academicians, and label execs arguing acrimoniously about the nature of the tapes and expounding theories about how the sessions could have escaped scrutiny for so long. Carbon dating will indicate the tapes were created in the ’70s. At the end of the film, the tapes will turn out to be the work of Josefus, an obscure Stooges-like Texas band that never made it out of Houston in 1970 — part of an elaborate hoax conceived by a sophisticated con man who accepted a $300,000 check from a record company for them, and subsequently fled the country.
An anonymous seller on a Net auction site will receive a $40,000 bid for the reputed SS colonel’s uniform worn by Ron Asheton at The Joint in the Woods. Three weeks later, another anonymous seller will post a message saying the first uniform was a fake, and that he has the real one. . . .
As for Stooges bootlegs, my titles had a better sense of humor:
More Power, You Don’t Want My Name … You Want My Action, Heavy Liquid, Live in Detroit, Telluric Chaos, etc.
Zzzzzz.
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04.10.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons at 7:53 am by George Smith
It was only a couple days ago when the Short Count advised us the hottest idea from the mentally ill far right was to attack Iran with electromagnetic pulsing nuclear bombs. (Just hit the ‘Crazy Weapons’ tab on the right or type ‘Short Count’ into the search bar.)
But nourished by a steady diet of Heritage Foundation press releases (how’d that one naughty thing slip in there, tee-hee), it never takes long for GOP stalwarts to bring the threat of us being electromagnetic pulsed into discussion.
It’s been written into GOP national security policy that it must be mentioned at least once every 48-hour cycle. Or sooner. Generally speaking, the media’s opinion page editors pretend not to notice how nuts this is.
Writes Dick Morris today:
Republicans should reply [to Obama's non-nuclear retaliation announcement] by introducing a bill in the Senate committing the United States to a nuclear response should any nation attack us with biological, chemical or electromagnetic pulse weapons. Let the Democrats vote against it. Let them filibuster it. Let them explain why we will not use our strongest weapons to deter an attack that could kill millions of our citizens or immobilize our entire economy!
Obama’s motivations for this absurd policy are plain enough. He wants to up the ante for Iran and make it clear that the Islamic Republic can develop crippling weapons for use against the United States without going nuclear. He wants to invest chemical, biological and electromagnetic pulse weaponry with an impunity that can only be obtained at the price of nuclear virginity …
He has made a big mistake, and the Republicans must pounce on it.
Morris is counting on the assumption that GOP voters, Tea Baggers and such don’t know that the usual Heritage script for electronic pulse attack involves Iran using an atomic bomb. Which, of course, is a situation under which President Obama’s nuclear get-out-of-jail free card is not redeemable.
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04.09.10
Posted in Cyberterrorism at 1:21 pm by George Smith
Today, speaking for itself:
Several Republicans have criticized President Obama for placing new limits on the use of U.S. nuclear weapons, but Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., raised eyebrows among liberal foreign policy observers by suggesting during a Wednesday rally with Sarah Palin that the American nuclear arsenal is needed even to deter cyber attacks.
“If in fact there is a nation who is compliant with all of the rules ahead of time and they’ve complied with the United Nations on nuclear proliferation, if they fire against the United States a biological weapon, a chemical weapon or maybe a cyber attack, well then we aren’t going to be firing back with nuclear weapons,” Bachmann said. “Doesn’t that make us all feel safe?”
“No!” shouted the crowd of thousands in Minneapolis.
Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly seems surprised by the outburst here.
He shouldn’t be.
When prime media real estate like 60 Minutes and the Washington Post’s editorial pages have been given over to one person — Mike McConnell – screeching about how the US either is losing or would lose a ‘cyberwar,’ it’s unsurprising when a famously stupid person from the GOP says such a thing. After all, one of McConnell’s favored tropes is that a cyberwar on Wall Street would be worse than 9/11.
I covered this years ago when no one was interested in the subject. Institutional memory is in short supply. However, idiotic statements never have been. And they always have more leg.
Cult of Cyberwar – from the archives. Boy, that’s a lot of stories.
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04.08.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism at 7:00 pm by George Smith
The last time we read of Washington Times’ columnist Arnaud de Borchgrave, he was writing about how neocon Dan Pipes thought Barack Obama could save his lost presidency. (This was before healthcare reform passed.)
Called the Short Count behind closed doors, if he is called at all, de Borchgrave wrote:
Mr. Obama is floundering as he tries to reset his presidency on economics. Defense is sacrosanct. Either taxes go up, or entitlements go down, or both. On Capitol Hill, it’s still burned toast for the president.
For centuries, leaders faced with insuperable domestic problems found escape in foreign distractions. In some cases, the distractions occurred suddenly and fortuitously, such as World War II, which started in Europe and pulled America out of the Great Depression.
President Obama isn’t looking for such a distraction, but others have no pangs illuminating what they think is the way out of the “clueless in Washington” dilemma. Right-wing scholar-activist Daniel Pipes, a neocon icon, could not be more blunt: President Obama can “save” his presidency by bombing Iran. The fact that this also could cost him the presidency is not deemed worthy of discussion
It was time to bomb Iran — actually, it’s always time to bomb Iran — because, as readers of DD blog know, the mullahs could send the US back to the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance via electromagnetic pulse attack.
But electromagnetic pulse attack is a wonderful tool of the extreme GOP right. If one must pause for an instant in warning about how Iran will attack the US with electromagnetic pulse, the empty time can be filled with a discussion of how WE can attack Iran with electromagnetic pulses.
And today, the Count writes of allegedly fevered discussion recommending the excellence of attacking Iran via electromagnetic pulse:
If Israel decided to explode an electromagnetic pulse weapon over Iran, the latest hot rumor in the blogosphere, and fry all electric appliances, including those at 27 nuclear sites, would Mr. Obama disown America’s closest ally? Such a high-altitude nuclear explosion would, inevitably, cause collateral electrical damage in neighboring countries, e.g., Turkey, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. The answer: A loud yes.
Maybe Israel ought not to do that, the Short Count seems to be thinking.
But where is this hot rumor in the blogosphere coming from?
As you may have guessed, it’s not so hot. It’s kind of cooled off year-old tea, in fact.
Writing at Human Events, the agency which publishes Ted Nugent’s various advices, someone “who was closely associated with former President Reagan for a number of years” (quite a recommendation) writes:
There is another alternative [to nuclear-armed Iran]. It’s called EMP for “electro-magnetic pulse” …
Chet Nagle, a former naval intelligence officer and author of “Iran Covenant”, says that an EMP pulse is “much like a powerful radio wave.” It would have an impact on a conductor of electricity and could knock out transmission lines, transformers and even power-generation stations.
As Nagle put it recently: “The easiest solution to the threat of Iran’s nuclear weapons program is an EMP strike. A nuke detonated 450 kilometers over Tehran at high noon on a sunny day would not even be noticed by the folks on the ground; however, their lights would go out and everything electrical would stop, including those enrichment centrifuges.” He adds that, “a few aircraft could then drop commando teams in the resulting darkness, chaos and lack of communications and do whatever else needs doing. Iran then would be living in the late 19th Century.”
Remember: no radiation; no blast effect. A dividend could be that the “Greens,” the democratic reformers, would seize power. If that were to happen, we and our allies could help the country recover from the EMP attack, with the nuclear enrichment facilities permanently shut down.
Yes, no doubt Iranians would be really happy to have Americans assist them after we and/or the Israelis detonated a couple low yield nuclear weapons high in the sky over their country. The rest of the world would be mighty impressed by our great exhibition of good will, too.
Anyway, who is Chet Nagle?
DD has the answer for you.
Another old white guy, one who’s been flogging a self-published novel, Iran Covenant, on how the US and Israel smash Iran after the latter goes on the attack, for about a year.
“My first novel will be on Amazon.com by 1 January 2009, at last, and the second follows as soon as the editing process is finished, the man writes here.
“Iran Covenant is the story of a clandestine attack on Israel by Iran – using a smuggled nuclear weapon – ending with non-nuclear strikes by Israel and the United States that destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The plot details how that could be accomplished without putting boots on the ground.”
That was thoughtful.
More recently, Nagle writes of an apparently enjoyable to him fictional attack on Iran by Israel from the POV of the Israeli prime minister here:
The prime minister knows the calculus well. First, he thinks, will be the salvo of Jericho III missiles. EMP from their nuclear warheads will destroy Iran’s electrical power grid, communications, television, radio, air defenses, and most of the industrial infrastructure. At noon the flashes will not even be noticed, so high there is no blast or radiation on the ground. Then cruise missiles from submarines for high value targets. They should save one for Ahmadinejad’s presidential palace. With chaos in the dark streets, maybe our commandos have time to open that Evin prison hellhole and let out the political prisoners. Those kids, that ‘Green’ opposition—they can deal with the mullahs if they like. And the best part, with the radar and air defenses inoperative, our air force can overfly Iran. They will finish the job with none of my boys lost, God willing …
“Afterwards, he thought, to show no hard feelings I invite President Obama to make a visit to Jerusalem,” Nagle continues. “If he comes I will make him a present. Perhaps a little framed photo from our satellite that shows such a peaceful Iran.”
What is the title of this musing?
Electromagnetic Pulse: The Answer to a Jewish Prayer.
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Posted in Extremism, Rock 'n' Roll at 9:38 am by George Smith
Today the Allentown Morning Call newspaper got around to writing up a story on Poker Face and the Hutaree.
And the reason this happened was because of posts on DD blog over the past week or so. (See here and here and here.)
But the Morning Call still doesn’t quite put its finger on the matter. To see why, we go to the last quotes in the piece, where reporter John J. Moser questions Poker Face’s Paul Topete about his website.
But Poker Face also has raised eyebrows with a forum on its Web site that includes such topics as the authenticity of the Holocaust, Jewish control of the media and repatriating illegal immigrants.
”We most certainly do not deny the Holocaust,” Topete said. ”To suggest that is absurd. The reason this section of our forum exists is because people have been imprisoned for questioning details regarding this horrific slaughter of mankind.”
That story is here.
In the parlance, this is called being deceptive. Alert readers will notice the awkward mental slip-up in the phrase ’slaughter of mankind,’ since the Holocaust, to most sane people, specifically means Nazi Germany’s extermination campaign against the Jews. But we’ll get back to the hows and whys of deceptive practice in a minute.
Now, to the newspaper’s role in informing society.
A better story might have actually stated the title or words Poker Face uses to describe the Holocaust. That would be ‘Holohaux,’ ‘Holohoax’ or other variations on the same.
The ‘Holohoax’ is explained by a Holocaust denier site here.
Sample quote:
The Zionist Mafia’s conspiracy theory, of a secret plot involving “gas chambers” to murder six million Jews and five million undesirables and turn them into soap and lampshades, has proved immensely lucrative for them, but is now collapsing before their eyes
World Zionism’s problem is that none of their claims of “gas chambers” and an “extermination program” can hold up unless one postulates wholesale revision of the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, logic, and / or psychology.
The Web has many such sites. Another typical example is here. It described Fred Leuchter, the weird man who insisted the gas chambers were not gas chambers. The arthouse documentary, Mr. Death, was based upon his self-destructive pursuit of this belief.
Now, back to Poker Face.
When Topete speaks of questioning the details of the Holocaust and people who have been imprisoned for such, he is speaking of specific individuals listed in his site’s chats. One of them is Ernst Zundel, an infamous Holocaust denier.
The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Zundel in this manner:
German-born Ernst Zundel came to prominence in the world of Holocaust denial, or what he prefers to call historical “revisionism,” in the 1980s, when his Samisdat Publishing company began distributing propaganda like a “Did 6 Million Really Die?” pamphlet and Zundel’s own book, The Hitler We Loved and Why. By then a non-citizen resident of Canada (he moved there in 1958), Zundel’s repeated attempts at gaining citizenship in Canada were denied as he was decried by both the Canadian and German governments for his incitement of racial hatred. After several Canadian court battles over the contents of the material he distributed, he was deported in 2005 back to Germany, where he was later tried and convicted for Holocaust denial and inciting racial hatred.
On the Poker Face website, one permanent post reads:
The total absurdity in the first place for Ernst being locked up for anytime is crazy.
Its like telling JEWS that my feelings are hurt and they must go to jail becvause they dont believe in Christ, In His Resurrection, and His granting of eternal life to us. But no JEW goes to jail for believing or Not.
So why should ANYONE else goto jail because they choose not to believe in the fantasy fairy tale called the holohaux? Look into CD Jackson + Syke Troops and Buchenwald, and understand from the very BEGINNING THE HOLOHAUX WAS A CREATED FABRICATION by Jews for the sole purpose of giving Israel legitimacy. period.
Did some Jews die in work camps. Yes, so did many other peopls and races. But they were work camps. Not extermination centers.
Sorry Jews, your leaders have LIED to you, and preach to you your DEATH CULTURE you live in day in and day out.
A snapshot DD took of it is here. (For the original, click here.)
Here is more of Poker Face’s rationale:
So, typically, if by observation of Poker Face’s website, when its leader says he has forums which talk about people questioning the details of the Holocaust, in practice this just means stories about Holocaust deniers, all of whom are given supportive treatment. Accompanied by vitriolic denunciations of ‘jews’ and ‘zionazis’.
Naturally, free speech makes this perfectly OK in the US of A. However, what others think of it and how it illumines your character are other matters entirely.
Here, for example, is another post on how ‘Holocaust Hoaxer’ Simon Wiesenthal has been exposed for his ‘lies.’
Or, there’s this fascinating view – also in a prominently placed post on the Poker Face website — of what the Theresienstadt concentration camp really was:
From a Fan … and I’d like to draw my Czech friends and relatives to the word I put in red, Theresienstadt. I had sent an email some time ago about Theresienstadt and got some flack about it from the delusional crybabies who were drilled by the Communists to believe in
the Hoax. Theresienstadt was an old German fortress that was converted into a village for elderly Jews who were too feeble to be sent to work camps. I can no longer find the original info I sent and the links I quickly gleaned to add to this email were all genocide propaganda sites. Jewish “scholars” have plagiarized each other put up thousands of almost identical sites. There is now an Arbeit Macht Frei on its gate, though I highly doubt it was there during the war as Theresienstadt was not a work camp.
The ‘genocide propaganda site’ and ‘communist delusional crybabies’ at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC describe it this way:
Despite all the efforts of the Council of Jewish Elders and the camp-ghetto inhabitants to make the best of an atrocious situation, living conditions in the ghetto with respect to food supply, medicine, maintenance of residential structures, provision of basic services, and overpopulation in a limited space caused a death rate in the camp-ghetto comparable to that in Reich concentration camps like Dachau and Buchenwald. In 1942, the death rate within the ghetto accelerated so dramatically that the Germans built — to the south of the ghetto — a crematorium capable of handling almost 200 bodies a day.
Here is another screed which touches upon one of Poker Face’s favorite topics — how neo-Nazis aren’t always protected by rights to free speech in Europe, to the band’s great dismay:
The hollercaustics are crying for blood now over a musician who spreads the truth about their money making scam. It will be awhile before Poker Face tours Europe.
Europe is the laughing stock of the world, where they pontific how free they are, becayuse they will print cartoons that defame Mohammed. Not that I give a crap about Mohamed, but tit for tat I say. These same freedom screeing bastards WOULD NEVER PRINT A TRUTHFUL HOAX-A-SHOAH cartoon. The editors know they would get their ass canned immediately.
Freedom of thought, and speech goes out the window, when it comes to the mythology of the cult of holohauxianity.
People of the world. Wake the fuck up. As long as one brother is in jail for his thoughts or speech, while committing no crime against person or property, THEN WE ARE ALL IN FUCKING TROUBLE, because it will come to your country soon enough.
Talk about a Orwellian society. Blaspheme Christ, or Dont believe in Christ, collect 200$ and go ahead… Point out one of a million lies about the holohaux, and JAIL is there waiting for you. When did someones hurt feelings trump REAL Law.
Indeed, one could spend the entire day sifting Poker Face’s website for ‘information’ on the ‘myths’ of the gas chambers and 9/11, that Benjamin Netanyahu ‘planned 9/11,’ and so forth.
So when John. J. Moser writes that “Poker Face also has raised eyebrows” it’s a bit of an understatement.
Many many reasonable people, upon viewing the material outlined here, would find Poker Face’s political views astonishingly offensive, ragingly anti-Semitic and screwed-up to the max.
To call it eyebrow raising doesn’t quite do it justice.
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