Last week Matt Taibbi’s on-line column at Rolling Stone ran the second installment in his Supreme Court for Assholes. Taibbi and selected friends form a court and then adjudicate whether or not someone in the news is an asshole. And then, if dubbed so, they’re given a score on a relative scale of assholery.
Surprisingly, the homeland security industry came in for a judgment.
For me, that’s an easy call. Everyone mentioned in natsec stories on this blog over the last few years is an asshole.
1) If you lobby the government to force taxpayers to buy a useless product at great expense [in this case the Rapiscan whole body scanner], are you automatically an asshole?
2) If you take advantage of and/or stoke widespread cultural fears to make money via government contracting, are you an asshole?
THE RULING
The court voted 7-2 in favor of assholedom on the first question. The dissenting votes were Sirota and myself. I was with David here, and we both bought the Lieutenant Calley/Nuremberg defense – see his dissenting opinion below.
On the second question, the court voted 8-1, with Sirota the only dissenter. To me, stoking public fear to make money is inexcusable even in a “just-following-orders??? situation …
Sirota’s dissent went as follows: “Ruling these kind of people as all assholes is too broad a ruling, because the Assholeocracy legally forces private economic actors to think solely of their profits – and nothing more. That’s their legal and fiduciary responsibility, consequences be damned. Many of them might individually be assholes, but as a blanket rule, you can’t say they are all automatically assholes simply because they work within the ubiquitous Assholeocracy.???
The Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy has no shortage of comical characters. While they are always well-treated on the pages of America’s newspapers, there’s are — occasionally — wrong venues.
William Forstchen, the Cult’s semi-famous author, made an appearance at the Homefront game’s balloon debacle in San Fran this week. He had the misfortune to be the opener for the Dillinger Escape Plan, a metalcore band with which I have some familiarity.
As an opener, if you’re not up to snuff, Dillinger fans will heckle you.
The event kicked off at noon, with the publisher first inviting foreign relations expert Tae Kim to speak on Homefront’s fictional future timeline, which finds the Greater Korean Republic occupying the United States in the year 2027. As the clean cut Kim spoke from behind a podium, a restless crowd shouted “Dillinger!” in his face as he did his best to keep calm.
Kim was followed by Electromagnetic Pulse blast expert and published author, Dr. William Forstchen. As Forstchen tried to explain the real (and quite terrifying) dangers of an EMP attack on the United States, the crowd continued to get rowdy, and shouted “Dillinger!” in his general direction. (One person even noted that he had an “awesome comb over.”)
The crowd was obviously ignorant of the toil Forstchen has put into peddling his book, One Second After, for the last century. And they were doubtless oblivious to the fact that he is Newt Gingrich’s co-author, too.
Shameful.
To set the scene more accurately, of the Dillinger Escape Plan, I once wrote:
It has been claimed that the Dillinger Escape Plan are kingpins of M.I.T.-inspired science rock. The band is the ultimate combination of skills in arithmetic calculation, progressive composition, and fantastically technical heavy metal. If you don’t get it, goes the argument, your brain is not of the cloth of Ph.D. material the band’s listeners are required to be cut from. A fine and entertaining story it is but the horse doesn’t trot well when the brags are dismounted.
On video, of which there is plenty, the Dillinger Escape Plan resemble nothing if not a squad of men doing calisthenics during basic training. The singer flexes and shakes his muscle at the audience like he’s captain of the wrestling team at the Danzig-Rollins Magnet School for Physical Fitness. This means, naturally, that he loses something on record. And it’s obvious on the new Miss Machine that Dillinger don’t even need a singer, really, for whatever it is they’re performing. The last 10 or so minutes of the CD veer between bursts of riff noise more smoothly recorded than expected and washes of music to watch soft porn by, indicating the charm of being proudly abrasive and busy is wearing off.
“Highlights include the shocked faces of those passing by as [Dillinger] wrecked the stage,” reported the game journal.
One of the leaders of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy was recently in San Francisco as part of a publicity stunt for the new Homefront video game.
The game is a shooter in which the United States is occupied by North Korea.
A publicity item described it earlier in the week:
The event will give fans an exclusive, in-depth look at the speculative fiction fueled by Homefront’s narrative. Scheduled guest speaker Dr. William Forstchen, a published author and leading expert on Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) blasts, will discuss the little known, yet extremely dangerous threat posed by such an attack. Also scheduled to address the crowd is Tae Kim, a foreign relations expert and former CIA Officer who will present Homefront’s fictional timeline and examine how the United States has come to suffer an oppressive occupation by a nuclear armed Greater Korean Republic in the year 2027. The event is scheduled to conclude with a free live performance by The Dillinger Escape Plan, a leading metalcore band.
The year is 2027. Her infrastructure shattered and military in disarray, America has fallen to a savage occupation by the nuclear armed Greater Korean Republic. Abandoned by her former allies, the United States is a bleak landscape of walled towns and abandoned suburbs …
A previous stunt for Homefront — a North Korean-themed lunch truck — has been given the thumbs down by SF locals.
The most recent, a release of 10,000 red balloons — most of which promptly floated into the bay — was given an even more angry reception.
A publicity stunt for a new warfare-based video game sent local environmentalists to arms when a mass of balloons carrying advertisements for the game cascaded into San Francisco Bay.
“When I looked out the window and saw thousands of balloons dropping straight into the bay, I was flabbergasted,” said Rod Fujita, a senior oceans scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund. “I never expected to see something like this in San Francisco, where there’s such concern about the bay and pollution.”
The release of the 10,000 ill-fated red balloons came courtesy of THQ, a Southern California video game company in town for the Game Developers Conference at Moscone Center.
Because the game is set in a near-future where the United States is invaded by nuclear-armed troops from North Korea, the company staged a mock lunchtime rally at Yerba Buena Gardens where the game’s supporters, in the words of the company’s news release, “will take to the streets to demonstrate against the North Korean regime and the treatment of its citizens.”
The staged rally was capped by the massive balloon launch, designed, the company said, to “simulate a method used by South Korea to send messages of hope to the North.”
The “messages of hope” carried by these balloons, however, amounted to an exclusive offer from GameStop video game store allowing gamers to “receive the resistance multi-player pack, featuring an exclusive weapon.”
Even that message didn’t get too far. While the balloons at first soared into the leaden gray skies above the city, wind and rain quickly sent thousands of them plunging into the bay, only blocks away.
“They were just dropping right out of the sky into the water,” Fujita said.
Pictures of the balloons bobbing on the bay quickly made their way onto social media sites like Facebook and Flickr, as angry environmentalists blasted the stunt in e-mails and on Twitter.
“Obviously, we have a problem with polluting of the bay and this is just polluting and littering,” said Amy Ricard, a spokeswoman for the environmental group Save the Bay.
“Your balloon campaign was a stupid thing to do to a city surrounded on three sides by water,” one San Francisco resident said in an e-mail to GameStop. “You should be held accountable for the waste.”
If you were in Washington today you were given quite a revelation, courtesy of the WaTimes.
The Great Recession, the economic collapse, perhaps not caused by Wall Street! No, we’ve been looking in the wrong place.
“Financial terrorism suspected in 2008 economic crash,” it reads on-line.
The terrorists here aren’t the banksters. Nope, they’re from China, maybe Russian criminals, and also the forces of “shariah compliant finance.”
“This is a front-page story in the paper, and the headline can be seen in vending machines all over DC,” reports one reader who we will keep anonymous. “I walked past one this morning and thought, ‘Huh?'”
For this piece of mischief, we see a touching upon of some of the hobby-horses of the of the lunatic right, conveniently furnished by a paper we have all unjustly ignored, apparently.
The paper in question was produced by small business contract with the Department of Defense in 2009.
Generally speaking, you can view articles and analyses generated in this manner as nuisances, ways for the small to take on a validation by being paid cash money by the US government for revelations and insights to be eventually tossed in the trash.
Unless someone like Bill Gertz runs across them at the WaTimes.
The paper setting off the story, entitled “Economic Warfare: Risks and Responses” is by one Kevin D. Freeman of Keller, TX. Gertz’s story never actually gets around to mentioning the bit that this isn’t from some inside-the-Beltway think-tanker.
DD is going to skip most of the fine detail of the thing. You can read it on ScribD.
The WaTimes article sums up well enough the intent: To get us looking somewhere else because no one has ruled out a direct attack on Wall Street.
“Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion carried out by unknown parties, such as terrorists or hostile nations, contributed to the 2008 economic crash by covertly using vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system,” reads the lede graf at the Times.
But here’s what you really want to know.
There’s no proof at all offered for the implication in the WaTimes as to the nature of the 2008 economic collapse.
Much time is devoted to the creeping advance of “shariah-compliant finance” as a danger to capitalism. For this part, notable Islam-o-phobe and kook Frank Gaffney gets cited.
Hugo Chavez and Iran get some space on the marquee, too.
And there are bits one usually finds coming from the Tea Party.
Namely, the “third phase” of an attack on the American economy will come through the printing of too much money and the revenge of bond vigilantes who will magically show up, causing a mass dump of Treasury bonds. The dollar will become worthless.
The “Ah-ha!” moment is furnished by a quick search of the Web for Kevin Freeman in Keller, TX.
An obscurity from 1980, this is Cher fronting a hard rock band with her post-Greg Allman boyfriend, the poor woman’s Greg Allman, Les Dudek.
Remember Allman and Woman? Well, if the answer is no, I’m not sure I like you. Heh.
On Geffen, the Black Rose vinyl packaging worked hard to disguise Cher’s membership until you opened it up.
Unsurprisingly, to me anyway, Cher’s more than acceptable as a hard rock singer although discussion of the album, when it occurs, has never been kind. For “Julie,” a metal torch song with chugging guitar, Cher randomly bends over and shakes her butt, a stagy but always popular move. Note the mysterious co-singer in tight shirt on the right.
Black Rose quickly dropped its petals although the vinyl, which you don’t see in used bins at all here, has been pirated to the web. And TV excerpts of the band for Wolfman Jack are on YouTube after having been disappeared from public consciousness for decades.
A hysterically funny cheap champagne-drenched review of Cher’s Black Rose, perhaps penned by someone familiar with her many drag club diva impersonators, is here.
“The heavy chugging of Julie is borderline embarassing,” it reads. “Julie is definately [sic] an upturned-collar polo-shirt-clad lesbian.”
Arnold in better times. No more good news, lads! Alles kaput!
After more than half a decade of misery and failure at the state level, via Digby,here:
In 2003 Californians recalled Gray Davis and elected Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now they say oops. 42% of voters in the state say that Davis was the superior Governor to only 32% who remain in Schwarzenegger’s camp. Democrats, at 56%, are a lot more sold on Davis having better than Republicans, at 48%, are on Schwarzenegger. Beyond that independents go for Davis by a 40/33 margin as well. It would be hard to claim that Davis is a popular figure at this point- but he’s certainly not as disliked as Schwarzenegger and his 25/65 favorability rating is.
In 2003, I had the right idea. Make a song, “I Think We Should Make a Carla Sandwich,” with purloined Arnold vocal bits taken from prank phone-call sites.
A couple of MP3 online musical parodies by “Arnold and the Gropinators,” a “Venice Beach garage metal” band, have surfaced … the A-side title, “I Think We Should Make a Carla Sandwich,” is taken from a description in The Times of an alleged movie set incident in which Schwarzenegger and his stand-in trapped stand-in Carla Baron next to a food service table. Schwarzenegger supposedly said, “I think we should make a Carla sandwich,” and the men squeezed her between them. After they released her, Baron said, Schwarzenegger stuck his tongue in her mouth.
It was popular enough to make its way across the country to the Pine Grove, PA, video rental store.
“I Think We Should Make a Carla Sandwich” — is here.
“I vould like to vork you out/Your ass feels to me, very stout!”
DD readers know I despise anything have to do with the idea of the ‘artisan’ economy. This is the new mind candy, now that manufacturing except for arms and some cars, is gone from the United States, that a nation of over 300 million will transform to making crafted premium goods for the world’s upper middle class shoeshine boys and plutocrats.
It’s a ludicrous concept, particularly if you still walk by businesses and stores everyday and actually rub shoulders with your countrymen. Yes, we’re surely a great mass of people, bustling with ideas for super apps and the next robotic chrome-plated coffee maker/alarm clock.
What it is: An editorial argument to rationalize sending most of the country to the poor house as too stupid and unskilled to flourish in the new world.
Today’s example, an article on craft beer exports from the Los Angeles Times:
After decades of taking hops advice from foreign brewers, American craft brewers are beginning to return the favor. Several are now exporting their beers, and others are inviting upstart foreign brewers stateside for a lesson in brewing American favorites such as double IPAs (an India pale ale amped up with extra hops to intensify the flavor). Or, as with Stone, they are getting a surprisingly bubbly reception in the bid for permanent resident status abroad.
“We had no idea we would suddenly need a Stone employee with ‘European acquisitions’ added to his title,” says Koch. After scouting locations in May, Koch and co-owner Steve Wagner received more than 75 brewery site proposals from nine countries, including Denmark, Estonia, France, Italy and Britain. They recently narrowed the playing field to the top two contenders: Bruges, Belgium, and Berlin.
Aside: History used to tell us IPA’s were “pumped up” so they wouldn’t spoil on the sailors and their long export trips to resupply the troops with bitters on the fringes of the British empire.
Anyway, I’ve had Stone. Meh.
When I moved to soCal in the early Nineties the domestic craft beer boom was in full swing. I tricked myself into liking a few.
About 2003, you stopped being able to get Lucky in Pasadena, right at the time the Tumwater plant closed. Which makes perfect sense in the context of this story. Downsize the middle class.
So Stone is popular in Estonia. I’m beginning to get a hate on for that country, particularly when it keeps showing up in business stories having to do with computing. That anyone from Estonia would like a US artisan beer is enough to warn you off the beverage.
Estonia’s GDP is less than the worth of computer security company McAfee. Get a grip. There are no lessons for us in Estonia.
The LA Times piece, from it’s food section, contains a few numbers, none of them interesting:
In 2004, the Brewers Assn. launched its Export Development Program with a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help American craft breweries meet the increasing demand for their products in international markets. According to the Brewers Assn., since 2003 total U.S. craft beer exports have tripled to more than 1.3 million gallons. (Sweden is the largest importer of American craft beer, followed by Canada, Japan and Denmark.)
Most of those sales are limited to large craft breweries such as Stone, but some small breweries are beginning to test the international waters. The Bruery in Orange County recently began shipping about 100 cases of its spice-infused ales to Europe every quarter as part of a shared shipping arrangement with Green Flash Brewing in San Diego and the Lost Abbey in San Marcos.
Top executives at Goldman Sachs collected a bumper increase in pay and bonuses last year in defiance of public opinion, and despite a 38% slump in the bank’s profits …
Regulatory filings also reveal the bank’s chief executive Lloyd Blankfein is in line for an astonishing 233% increase in his basic pay in 2011, which rises from $600,000 to $2m.
Blankfein last year was paid free shares worth nearly $13m, up from $9m in 2009, indicating that City and Wall Street remuneration is rising despite pleas by international regulators and politicians for financiers to show restraint.
