The government is out of control! I’m heading to the store
for envelopes and baking powder, lads. Bastards will pay!
DD runs a daily search on “anthrax” at the Google news tube. As do many.
And everyone has noticed that minus hits for the heavy metal band named Anthrax, hits on powder hoaxes have ticked up.
The Idaho Statesman, which is in a state with its own anthrax hoaxer, has noticed, too:
Mailing a white powdery substance to scare people can land you in prison – even if the enclosed substance is non-toxic.
Ask Sandy Kevin Lamont Nanney.
The Boise man, who was accused of sending 32 powder-laden letters to hospitals, businesses and government offices in 2003, pleaded guilty to threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison; his next scheduled parole hearing is in 2012.
Spectacular fail, of which there has been much in the past couple years, also flushes the kook powder mailers from the woodwork, notes an FBI man:
“[After Ivins’ mailings is] when it became a cottage industry to scare people. It wasn’t really a tactic used much before that,” said Chris Allen, an FBI spokesman in Washington, D.C.
In 2002, the FBI responded to 2,500 reports of the use or threatened use of anthrax.
Reports nationwide tapered off significantly after 2002 and have been dropping every month – until the past few months, Allen said.
There were about 500 reports in 2008, Bertram said.
Allen said investigators have found there is a flurry of these cases after “key events,” such as the blackout in the Northeast, the Enron scandal and Hurricane Katrina.
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico could be another key event, Allen said.
Since government officials are common targets of anthrax hoaxers, the latter which are — by definition — extremists, one wagers if they vote, and are not already in prison, they’re probably predominantly from the party of opposition to everything. Although no definitive polling survey exists.
[DD challenge to readers: Google map anthrax hoaxer points of origin, by state. Red or blue? Secondarily: Active chapter of Tea Party within 50 miles, yes or no.]
In one instance, noted recently, the anthrax hoax was used as a retirement plan. Of sorts.
Watch Fox News without radiation shielding for too long and your intellect is shriveled.
Disappointingly, the rest of the mainstream media isn’t much better.
Readers recall a post on the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy about ten days ago. One linking to a KPCC story on the marketing of a survival bunker complex in the Mojave.
That story was noticed by others. And it was exploited, in the process, losing all the sanity the original reporter at KPCC put into it.
Instead, it became a marketing vehicle for the guy selling doomsday bunkers, Robert Vicino and his Vivos firm, abetted by the news agencies.
Most notable is a Fox News segment.
“Something epic is about to happen,” explains the Vivos developer. This in an exchange on why people believe the worst and are lining up to buy time shares in his business.
Savor the hypocrisy of the Fox News host who tries to pin the developer with questions like this one:
“[Aren’t you] trying to profit off people’s fears?”
The Fox News host wants to consider “the ethics of that.”
It is the rankest stuff coming from a news network that makes the idea that the US is facing imminent collapse a part of its regular daily menu of programming.
While not as out there as Coast to Coast radio, which — after all — has done that beat for years, Fox News has probably done more to mainstream US extremism than any news outlet, ever
And with it has come the constant peddling of doomsday, from the disease that’s Glenn Beck, to sunspot causing “the end of life as we know it” to recent humoring of laughingstock Arthur Laffer, who’s shtick is predicting the total collapse of the US economy in January of next year.
“Is the World Broke?” reads a caption on the Fox News screen. It’s one the news organization seems to stick on a lot of its current material.
And it is the application of pure cynicism — existing only to titillate viewers while strengthening the impression the country is going down soon, with the Obama administration at the helm.
Paradoxically, one can make a rational argument that the US is heading into failure. But that the failure won’t be as envisioned by the catastrophists. It may instead be the continued descent into existence as the world’s most powerful banana republic, a hardscrabble place of very little charm, no middle class and no observable social generosity or commitment to quality in civil life.
But that’s not the story the news organizations which use catastrophists like to tell.
They prefer segments puffing investment in a multi-story survival condo envisioned for placement in an old missile silo in Kansas. Like here at ABC News.
Observe again, the standard grinning host. So funny and amusing it is to see more clips from “The Road” and another benighted white guy, tossing his money away while he shows off a pathetic tackle box he has in a closet. Because, ya know, the man and his kid are going to have to be able to catch fish — out in the Mojave Desert — after the end has arrived.
DD does not have a camera phone so for this one you’ll just have to take my word.
Desperation hit a new high in Pasadena today.
At lunch time, on the corner of Lake and Walnut — directly in front of Satan’s Bank of Pasadena, aka OneWest — there was a thirtysomething man in a suit with a signboard. The signboard pleaded: “Hire Me!”
It said he had a B.A. and “experience.” “Help me win for my family,” it added.
Right beside him, a man who looked like Santa Claus, except in a hardware store man’s clothes. He has been begging for the last two weeks. And directly across the superhighway, two people have been regularly camped out for it seems like … at least a year or two.
If you’ve never been to Pasadena, the corner of Lake and Walnut is the place to be if you’d like to be seen with your alms cup. It’s high vehicular traffic for most of the day. And there’s are always a good number of pedestrians, particularly at lunch time, when many come boiling out of Satan’s Bank and head across the street to Ralphs or north thirty yards to Teri & Yaki.
Holding up a sign of desperation on this corner is a good tactical move. If you want someone from the local newspaper, the Pasadena Star-News to notice and get interested in your story, it’s high visibility and impact.
After all, no one ever checks out the guy living out of his van on El Molino. Or the half a dozen or so who regularly scrounge through my apartment building’s dumpster.
The number of millionaire households in the world has bounced back to boom-time levels, according to a new study.
The 2010 Global Wealth Report by The Boston Consulting Group says there were 11.2 million millionaire households in the world at the end of 2009, a 14% jump from 2008. That puts the millionaire count about where it was in the good old days before the global financial crisis.
The U.S. had especially strong growth, with the number of millionaire households rising to 4.7 million — still the largest number of millionaire households in the world …
The global growth at the top — driven by last summer’s rebound in financial markets — marks a stark contrast with the continued malaise at the middle and bottom. As a result, inequality around the world has widened.
New-home sales plunged in May to a record low, as buyers faced a lackluster job market without a longtime government subsidy for purchases. Sales tanked by 32.7% from the previous month.
I don’t support Obama. If I did, I would be a Democrat,” [a socialist political candidate named] La Botz said. “I find it astonishing that people would think he’s a socialist. He’s given trillions of dollars to bankers, billions to General Motors, created a health care system that supports the health insurance companies … his foreign policy is consistent with Bush’s foreign policy.”
Since President Obama was elected, “socialism” is a word on the lips of many conservative politicians, tea party supporters and political pundits. A CBS News/New York Times poll in April showed 92 percent of tea party supporters believe Obama is moving the country toward socialism – while 52 percent of all Americans held the same belief.
Socialists shake their heads – but they don’t really mind the attention.
“If folks like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh make their careers off of using the word socialism as a slur, how bad could it be?” asks 35-year-old Shane Johnson of Corryville, a union electrician who helped revive Cincinnati’s International Socialist Organization chapter this year, which has about a dozen members.
“We should be fighting for full employment. End wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan,” La Botz said. “We should immediately take over BP. What they own is too valuable and too powerful to be in private hands.”
Xavier University political science professor Mack Mariani believes Americans are frustrated with government leaders and skeptical of big business, but he’s not convinced socialist thought is spreading.
“I haven’t seen anything that would seem the Socialist Party is having a resurgence,” Mariani said. “Even though I think capitalism as a concept has taken a hit in terms of public approval … it wouldn’t translate into support for the Socialist Party.”
Which makes Glenn Beck’s recommendations for a book on socialist serfdom and his own Overton Window substantial proof that some deity has a great but very dry sense of humor. Plus, if you’re a believer, anyone who would bless the country with a Glenn Beck is sending the message that we’ve been rewarded with what we deserve.
Reads a Mediaite blurb:
Glenn Beck Makes Anti-Socialist Book From 1944 A Topseller In 24 Hours
The plot of The Overton Window is one big conspiracy theory in which the United States government, Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and the Trilateral Commission are all plotting an antidemocratic coup.
Why would they bother when things are already going so well?
Trudging toward the weekend in the United States of Epic Fail.
A majority of states saw their unemployment rates drop in May. But the widespread declines were mainly because people gave up looking for work and were no longer counted.
The unemployment rate fell in 37 states and the District of Columbia, the Labor Department said Friday. Six states had increases and seven experienced no change.
Forty-one states and the District of Columbia saw a net increase in jobs. But that reflected national data showing a huge gain because of government hiring of temporary census workers.
And the majority of census workers are now either finished with their work or on hold.
Suddenly, creating jobs is out, inflicting pain is in. Condemning deficits and refusing to help a still-struggling economy has become the new fashion everywhere, including the United States, where 52 senators voted against extending aid to the unemployed despite the highest rate of long-term joblessness since the 1930s.
The last thing someone who is unemployed needs to be told is that they shouldn’t even apply for the limited number of job openings that are available. But some companies and recruiters are doing just that.
Employment experts say they believe companies are increasingly interested only in applicants who already have a job.
It is not against the law for companies to exclude the unemployed when trying to fill positions, but Judy Conti, a lobbyist for the National Employment Law Project, said the practice is a bad one.
Everybody’s used to dealing with daily parasites. It’s a feature of living in a country where it’s been decided that it’s proper to not make anything and instead have an economy based on services and the provision of non-essentials and s— from China.
However, every now and then you run into a daily parasite who really takes the cake.
For DD, this usually happens outside Ralphs on Lake. And I’m not pointing at the beggars. Increasing numbers of beggars are a natural product of American business and you should always be nice to people at the bottom for someday you might join them.
The standard Ralphs supermarket parasite is someone with a clipboard who wants you to sign a paper so that an initiative favorable to the wealthy or some big company and inimical to everyone else needs putting on the ballot. Like this one in which PG&E tried to schwick everyone in the state right down to the level of local government.
Yesterday’s parasite, however, was a woman with a clipboard, not asking for signatures, but allegedly conducting a ‘survey.’
The question: Do you think Americans work more or less than they did fifty years ago?
It’s a question only an organization full of assholes would sponsor in 2010.
And I was immediately suspicious it was to collect coached or cherry-picked answers for some political survey by a right wing business group, to be unleashed at some future press conference on FOX News, perhaps as incontrovertible proof the majority of Americans really think they have it a lot easier than folks did fifty years ago.
So the socialist Obama government should get off everyone’s back and stop trying to fix things, get back to fiscal austerity and not worry about mass unemployment.
Because mass unemployment naturally means many people are involuntarily working much less than their peers fifty years ago.
Coincidentally, it dovetailed with much of FOX News afternoon broadcast, which devoted itself to the books of Ayn Rand and warning that Obama better be nice to BP or the company would be forced out of business with thousands and thousands of jobs lost.
Anyway, I laughed at the woman holding the clipboard and said I thought Americans definitely had to work more now than fifty years ago.
It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She did not record my answer. So I watched her from the parking lot for a couple minutes as she approached others. And she hardly did any writing at all.
I wondered what she thought about the hardness of her work outside Ralphs and its daily compensation vis-a-vis what her dad or grandpap did for a living. By the way, there was no identification of who was actually doing the poll or why.
In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, it was a commonplace that Americans would soon devote their lives to leisure, not work. The number of hours the average American worked had fallen by almost twenty-five per cent between 1900 and 1950, and pundits saw no reason for the trend to stop. By the end of the twentieth century, the futurist Herman Kahn prophesied in 1967, Americans would enjoy thirteen weeks of vacation and a four-day work week. The challenge, it seemed, would be figuring out what to do with all our free time.
Kahn was wrong. Today, Americans work about as many hours each year as they did in 1970, and, instead of thirteen weeks of vacation, the average American now gets four (and that includes holidays).
This bit, from the paper of Ted Nugent — the WaTimes, in 2009, is also a laugh riot:
American workers who still have their jobs are laboring harder than ever, keeping their companies operating profitably following the biggest rounds of job cuts since the Great Depression …
Because hourly compensation, including wages and benefits, increased by only 0.2 percent, unit labor costs dipped 5.8 percent during the second quarter. It was the biggest drop in labor costs in more than eight years. Over the past year, labor costs have declined 0.6 percent as productivity has advanced by 1.8 percent.
Soaring productivity and plunging labor costs helped to bolster second-quarter corporate profits …
Remember what DD said about an agency of assholes at the top of the post? Who would commission something like the Ralphs survey?
Lots of groups in America, one imagines. Employees of Satan’s Bank — OneWest — right across the street, I should think, if they weren’t so busy capitalizing on foreclosures.
Americans work hard for their money. Too hard, according to CNN. Even worse than even grovelling medieval peasants scratching the land to survive.
That conclusion came from reporter Polly Labarre of CNN’s “In the Money.??? In the June 9 broadcast, Labarre argued that Americans are working too much, using her “favorite comparison??? to explain “we work more than medieval peasants used to work.???
The “peasant??? claim has grown common in media outlets …
But [no organization has] provided basis for the idea that peasants worked less than Americans do now.
One of the ways to tell we’re fresh out of ideas is to look at how Americans love catch phrases and their linkage to delusional thinking.
Take the use of the term “Manhattan Project.”
You can tell a nincompoop is in the room whenever you see or hear it.
Use of it is much like the usage of “If we can put a man on the Moon, we can [insert another most wished for miracle].”
“Manhattan Project” signals belief in a pretend world, one which ignores the unpleasant reality of a country presented with problems of its own devise, made insoluble by leaders and doers of its own devise.
From the Google News tab, a list of current “Manhattan Project” usages, calls for magic wand accomplishments well beyond present or imaginable future capacity.
“[A report everyone appropriately ignored, issued by a biodefense industry group masquerading as a government agency] warned that the American people needed a combination of big business and big government to protect them against the looming threat. It said the kind of close cooperation between industry and government to develop bio-war defenses had to be on a scale comparable to building aircraft carriers, putting men on the Moon or funding the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb.” — FOX News editorial
“A group of industry leaders, including Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and General Electric boss Jeff Immelt, stepped up calls for a Manhattan project [on energy].” — a business publication
If the guy who made Windows thinks a ‘Manhattan Project’ is needed, who can doubt such wisdom? Better not take too much time to think before you answer that.
It’s our responsibility to take alternative energy seriously. Developing wind, solar, biomass, nuclear and other solutions must become our focus — as concentrated in time and effort as for any major crisis we have faced. Such a series of projects will require a partnership between government and private enterprise — and serious federal outlays. The challenge is enormous and too important to leave to the whims of the market.
It would be a mistake to regard this new ‘Manhattan Project’ as nothing more than a cost. On the contrary, developing such remarkable new technologies will create new industries and millions of new jobs.” — an editorial by some local Democratic Party leader
“That means whatever dreams we had of dealing with global warming through an economically efficient carbon-pricing scheme are pretty much out the window.
“What’s left is the hope that somebody invents something really impressive, really quick. Environmentalists talk about this in terms of a “Manhattan project” for energy, which is probably the right way to talk about it. But I’ve been reading a bit about the Manhattan project …” — Ezra Klein, who tried to put his finger on why the usage is idiotic but fell somewhat short, anyway. But he’s one of the current news celebrities given the license to know everything.
“We need something like a 1940 Manhattan project where American scientists worked to produce a nuclear weapon. Gather the best brains in the country …” — an editorial on what to do about the BP oil spill
“The Smerconish Show from 6/9/10 talked about a Manhattan Project to get us off oil. Something along the lines of small businesses locating in Silicon Valley … “ — the Huffington Post, by someone proudly calling himself “Joe the Nerd”
“The U.S. government should take charge of this major national emergency as if it were a 9/11 event. It should assemble the best global advisors, mostly U.S., and treat this like a Manhattan Project in terms of necessity.” — another vox populi/social networking search for solutions, at the WSJ
“Today, a mini–Manhattan Project could find ways to recycle used nuclear fuel in a way that reduces its mass 97 percent and radioactive lifetime 98 percent…” — Newsweek
In fact, the Huffington Post is larded with wishers for Manhattan Projects. None of whom appear to read a bit of what their closest peers write in the blog over.
“After so much rhetoric from politicians of both parties, we must finally embark on the Manhattan Project of energy independence…” — the Huffington Post, by someone named Fernando.
“Create a big, inclusive Brain Trust Project that will leave the Manhattan Project in the dust.” — the Huffington Post, by someone named Sarah, an editor of something called Yes! Magazine.
“After a vicious fight across the Pacific, we needed to defeat Japan without an invasion of the home islands, and by then the Manhattan Project had produced a couple of deliverable atomic bombs.” — the Huffington Post, by someone arguing using the twisted metaphor that, like the bombing of Japan through the fruits of the Manhattan Project, green house gases will not have to be dealt with through curbs — but will be handled in due course through geoengineering and ‘hacking the planet.’
” ‘Getting it right’ instead means implementing a program of Manhattan Project proportions to reduce our use of oil and other fossil fuels …” a newspaper editorial by some professor near Myrtle Beach, SC.
“Many renowned and intelligent scientists expound seriously that large amounts of bovine gasses have a measurable influence upon the temperature rising worldwide. If truthful, I propose the immediate creation of a Manhattan Project for creation of large Beano capsules to be given to the cows in their feed to eliminate this dilemma.” — a tongue-in-cheek letter to the editor in southern Indiana.
The University of Gas, now more appropriate than ever. How to handle raffinose, for not much money and trouble at all.
One of the recurring themes on DD blog is the massively annoying American delusion that we live in a can-do country, that our technology and business and people have an answer for everything.
Always.
It’s rubbish. Reality shows us repeatedly it’s not so, many times over the last decade. From alleged miracle weapons for the Iraq war, to Katrina, to even the smallest pieces of crappenstance like the underwear bomber’s smouldering privates, the world outside has shown Americans definitively what for.
Americans have long had an unswerving belief that technology will save us — it is the cavalry coming over the hill, just as we are about to lose the battle. And yet, as Americans watched scientists struggle to plug the undersea well over the past month, it became apparent that our great belief in technology was perhaps misplaced.
“Americans have a lot of faith that over the long run technology will solve everything, a sense that somehow we’re going to find a way to fix it,??? said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. He said Pew polling in 1999 — before the September 2001 terror attacks — found that 64 percent of Americans pessimistically believed that a terrorist attack on the United States probably or definitely would happen. But they were naïvely optimistic about the fruits of technology: 81 percent said there would be a cure for cancer, 76 percent said we would put men on Mars.
They just figured this out, huh?
One of DD’s touchstone books is Paul Fussell’s BAD.
In 1991, Fussell saw the future quite clearly.
“The United States especially overflows with [BAD] because above all countries it is the most addicted to self-praise and complacency — even more than France,” he wrote.
Further in: “And what’s made it worse is the recent rapid accumulation of technology. The current US can be defined as an immense accumulation of not terribly acute or attentive people obliged to operate a uniquely complex technology, which, all other things being equal, always wins. No wonder error and embarrassment lurk everywhere …”
On engineering, and this is very much pre-World Wide Web and instant global communication, Fussell had this to say:
If pressed, Americans may admit that the ideas that have made the modern world have all originated elsewhere — ideas like Darwin’s and Marx’s and Freud’s and Einstein’s and Jung’s — and never in These States. Our forte, which compensates for our weakness in creative intelligence, is held to be in engineering. Perhaps deficient in a comprehensive understanding of values and ends, we are said to be gifted in the management of techniques and means.
===
The American achievement — and I know it’s bad taste to mention this — is the Challenger, brought to you by faulty manufacture, inept and dishonest quality control, and lying and evasion for the sake of big bucks.
===
People as materialistic as Americans are supposed to be gifted at material operations, but the local urge toward the showy and spectacular constantly invites disaster … Bad design and construction, in fact, appear to be something like American specialties.
Chalk part of the rugged idiot belief that technology will save everything to bad — or at least incomplete — education.
After having spent close to a decade of my best learning years in a research lab and seeing the multifarious ways things could and did go wrong — how the toast often landed buttered side down, despite the best laid plans, I had no personal illusions about what science and technology could deliver in the short term. And that was on small scale shit.
Upper class reporters sometimes write very strangely in their zeal to cover the news.
Such was the case with a surprising story in the New York Times yesterday. It was on a scientific boat ride out to the very bad oceanic chemistry demonstration that’s the Gulf Oil spill. And I call it surprising, not because of what was reported, but how it was reported — like being in with the regatta crowd to gaily observe a curious experiment at sea.
At the site of a disaster of Biblical proportion, the reporter — Justin Gillis — wrote:
Soon, a giant winch on the rear of the boat hauled special bottles back from the deep, carrying water samples. The younger researchers rushed to the rear deck.
Special bottles? The younger researchers were rushing!
Exciting!
And:
Working quickly in a daisy chain, circling the bottles, they filled small vials and other containers, then hustled back to their makeshift laboratory on the main deck of the Walton Smith.
Slowly, as the Walton Smith and other boats worked the gulf this past week, the weird physics of a deep-water well blowout came into better focus. The idea that oil rises quickly to the surface of an ocean may be one of the casualties of this disaster.
They hustled! And there was the delving into of “weird physics.”
Then the meant-to-sound-gnomic-quote:
“Nothing really makes sense out here,??? Dr. Joye said as her ship plowed through orange slicks of oil.
Then even more excitement at the finish:
From the bridge of the ship, Capt. Shawn Lake made an announcement. Everyone rushed to the outside decks.
Once again, in the middle distance, the ocean was burning.
Wow!
Judging from the prose, it sure seemed exciting for the New York Times reporter to be on the “Walton Smith” looking for funnels of oil floating in the Gulf. Important stuff was being noted, like the surface of the water being on fire and graduate students taking water samples.
The reporter makes a conclusion about the import of vast bodies of underwater oil.
“That would be troubling because it could mean the oil would slip past coastal defenses such as ‘containment booms’ …”
Troubling? Only troubling? And has not oil already gone past ‘containment booms’?
This is the best work the New York Times can do?
But what’s the real message, one obscured by the vanities of trying to be calm, scenic and cineramic?
What, exactly, can a few US scientists in a boat do when confronted with an undefinable immense volume of underwater oil?
Nothing. There’s nothing to fix it except to hope for nature to slowly take it away.
“We really never found either end of it,” one scientist said to the Times reporter. “He said he did not know how wide the plume actually was … ”
It’s a colossal failure on every level.
No amount of deluding oneself about American business, science and technology, or promising leadership and the delivery of fine sayings, or that only the oil companies have the savvy to deal with it, makes any difference.
The one thing that does make sense is the human desire for revenge. The Obama administration ignores this — as it seemingly has done with the general desire to inflict payback on Wall Street — at very real peril.
A Reuters news piece mentions briefly, and with seemingly inappropriate humorous intent, that “Concocting revenge fantasies has become a popular sport.”
“A Louisiana resident suggested in a letter to the Times Picayune newspaper that BP executives be tarred in spilled oil, rolled in blackened pelican feathers and sent to the guillotine so their severed heads could be used in a ‘junk shot’ to clog the well.” it added.
When all is said and done, the US government must find a way to put the minions who did this on the end of pitchforks. And it will have to firmly and publicly. Or it will have also allowed BP’s disaster to not only destroy the environment of the Gulf Coast, but also take down its ability to effectively govern.
“Money is dear to everybody, and I’m no exception. Money is as valuable as the blood that circulates in a man’s body. But we have to keep in mind that money can be used as poison or as medicine, depending on how it is spent,??? [said Kim Yeong-Chol].
“So I have decided to spend it on high explosives.”
Kim, who has three children, one son and two daughters, said he didn’t tell his children about his donation because they are still young and ought to carry out their lives without depending on his money.
“My children will probably learn that I donated all my assets when the story goes out and they might feel regretful about the news,??? Kim said. “But I’m sure they will understand my intentions.???
The Defense Ministry said it will invest Kim’s money to build a center to conduct research on new environment-friendly materials. The center will focus on developing new substances that could be applied in cutting-edge weapons designs, such as micro missiles …”
Pap, we’re so happy to hear you’ve taken the family fortune and given it to the government so it can buy more missiles from US and Korean arms manufacturers!
“[Kim] founded and ran a midsized textile company in Gwangju, then sold his facilities to the government and amassed a personal fortune … With the government money, Kim initially thought he would establish a foundation or a school to give back to society,” reads the article.
But that was before his decades long twin desires to have revenge on his family and add to things for people to be blowed up with reasserted control.
