A great comic at DailyKos by Jen Sorensen who’s also picked up the rubbish pundit meme that American workers are obsolete in the world, incompetent for all the new work in the global economy. Like making Fender Telecasters, toilet seats, and the fancy goods furnished by the army of hexane swabbers for the Holy Steve Jobs Empire.
“These workers need retraining to compete in the 21st century!”
I gotta get a guitar … Call me Rock Pud! … Siri: From now on, I’ll call you Rock Pud, OK? I found 9 million websites and 12 magazine stores that sell pictures of puds for you!
I regularly run into people who rant against the government, vote Republican, who’s lives are utterly dependent upon various aspect of the social safety net.
The working class’ earning power has been so squeezed by corporate America it has fallen to the government to keep many from abject poverty.
Yet large numbers of the people dependent on government programs watch nothing but Fox News, detest the current President and argue vehemently to destroy all the things that make their lives survivable.
The New York Times has done a long story on them. It is a must read.
Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government.
“I don’t demand that the government does this for me. I don’t feel like I need the government,??? said KI GULBRANSON, who counts on an earned-income tax credit and has signed up his children for free meals at school.
He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region’s long-serving Democratic congressman.
Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.
[Dean P. Lacy], a professor of political science at Dartmouth College, has identified a twist on that theme in American politics over the last generation. Support for Republican candidates, who generally promise to cut government spending, has increased since 1980 in states where the federal government spends more than it collects. The greater the dependence, the greater the support for Republican candidates.
And, here, the man who resent others who spend “his” money, doled out by entitlement check, in the same boat:
Brian Qualley, 49, has a sister who survived a brain tumor but was disabled by its removal. The government pays for her care at an assisted-living facility. Their mother scrapes by on Social Security.
Mr. Qualley said that the government should provide for those who need help, but that too much money was being wasted. Mr. Qualley, who owns a tattoo parlor in Harris, north of North Branch, said some of his customers paid with money from government disability checks.
“They’re getting $300 or $400 tattoos, and they’re wearing nice new Nike shoes that I can’t afford,???
Having played in a biker rock band for many years I’m intimately familiar with the tattoo parlor crowd. The logical mind is not one of its defining characteristics. You find no gentleness, expansive spirit or progressive value in tattoo parlors and this can hardly be news. Momentarily, I wondered why the Times even saw fit to interview someone who ran one. (The paper also uncovered a bigot — the resentment over “nice Nike shoes” being the giveaway. The reporter and editors certainly know it.)
However, scapegoating is a common characteristic of societies enduring hard times. And Paul Fussell noted in Class that the afflicted kick down at those of their own circumstance.
There’s a very thin line between disdain or contempt and outright hate between the divisions which make up our various middle-class tribes. And often there are no lines at all. Needle someone hard enough in a tribe different from yours and see it erupt.
It is easy to understand the great anger in the Tea Party, or anywhere in the hinterlands. The urge to give a presumed tormentor a good punch in the face when you get the opportunity to swing is strong and human. The presumed tormentor is usually someone within arms reach.
Here I often marvel at the many folk music videos the opposition puts on YouTube, all with more enthusiastic fans than anything from my side.
The music may be bad, the lyrics awful, the sentiment horribly misguided. It’s easy to laugh at material by people who couldn’t pass an introductory college economics course singing about Ron Paul’s love of “sound money” and returning to the gold standard.
However, one thing it doesn’t lack is gutsiness; the willingness to be taken for a fool in letting the raw shout of hurt out.
A predatory economy has set into stone conditions in which Americans now always find themselves moving down. So they’re always going to be bitter. How many people on food stamps vote for pols who want to destroy the food stamp program?
A lot more than you think, I imagine.
“There used to be room at the top,??? Paul Fussell wrote in Class.
It’s a familiar term. It’s what happens when an article you’ve written gets linked to by Matt Drudge.
An onslaught by tens of thousands occurs in the space of a few hours, with almost everyone in it bearing the triple handicap of being nuts, stupid and extremely right wing.
The server may topple from the weight. The e-mail box overflows with slurs and calumnies upon your house. The comments section will be flooded.
A train full of crazy people has arrived, ejected its passengers, now all ranting, cursing and waving nonsensical digital placards. They pay no attention to what you’ve actually published, chew the carpet for a few hours and then depart, never to return.
Tomorrow Drudge will loose his army of fools and cretins on some other person or random net posting. And the entire process will repeat.
In the meantime you’ll be deleting all the comments and mail espousing violence and bigotry.
What happens when a nation forgets their God and makes football of greater importance on Sundays. And worships the work of their own hands above God. This is what they deserve. But in the end, ??? Those who lead into captivity shall go into captivity???. This system that all these elites are devising to control the masses will become their own prison and it will be just the opposite. It will be used upon their own heads. Our only hope is for a massive solar storm to destroy all the satellites and GPS and Comm of all these totalitarians. The PEOPLE are safe without them and their CONTROL. We have GUNS. So there is another reason these Marxists phags are doing this. To assume total control. Got news for ya. Our GOD is going to take your power and destroy you. Patience of the Saints.
May a solar storm destroy you Marxist totalitarian phags.
A collection of photos taken of FEMEN, a unique Ukrainian social protest group, at the World Economic Forum in Davis, Schweiz, is here at Cryptome.
Do go there at once to see them full size and — ahem — in the flesh.
The Davos World Economic Forum is where all the parasites and arch-villains masters of the global economy and idea farm meet each year to discuss how things are to be messed up in the coming months.
I think you’ll agree, though, the action to not be missed was all outside and of more humble origin. It was good to be a policeman on that day.
Those now dispensing judgment from on high are not gods, though they must feel like it. The people striking mortals down with drones are doubtless as capable as anyone else of self-deception, denial and cognitive illusions. More so, perhaps, as the eminent fictions of the Bush years and the growing delusions of the current president suggest …
These power-damaged people have been granted the chance to fulfill one of humankind’s abiding fantasies: to vaporise their enemies, as if with a curse or a prayer, effortlessly and from a safe distance …
[One] danger is acknowledged in a remarkably candid assessment published by the UK’s Ministry of Defence, which also deploys drones, and has also used them to kill civilians. It maintains that the undeclared air war in Pakistan and Yemen “is totally a function of the existence of an unmanned capability – it is unlikely a similar scale of force would be used if this capability were not available”.
The author also seems to argue that by not being put at risk, as Americans were when they had to dispense with the Japanese and the Germans in WWII, there is no deterrent to use.
However, deterrence can be thought of as deferred, put off to some future date as vengeance since the only way those attacked can retaliate is through terrorism, should the created enmities last long enough.
However, the use of terrorism on the US, or on clients, is always seen in this nation as a reason to turn loose more drones.
And I’m still waiting for someone, other than here, to dig into the issue of the haves bombing the have-nots. Strictly speaking, it’s a war of impunity against paupers. Drones will never be turned loose on those who have the money to immediately take action.
In this, Iran has a deterrent should they get the bomb. And Pakistan has the ability to make a similar threatening noise.
Through diplomatic channels it becomes plausible to suggest to American leadership that unless the war of impunity ceases, there are other far less pleasant methods of escalation than standard state-sponsored terrorism they’re prepared to let us come to grips with. Maybe such a thing would be a bluff. And maybe not.
In the old Star Trek episode — Mirror, Mirror — the evil Kirk had something called the Tantalus Field, a weapon to disappear enemies with impunity. The good Kirk chose not to use it to get himself out of a jam although in the hands of his alternative evil Federation girlfriend, it was.
The deluxe version comes with a year’s supply of injectable anabolic steroids in an on-board mini-fridge. Six gunports provide extra-clear fields of on-demand retaliatory fire.
Wha? Even local shires with no significant history of violent crime or threat try to get into the act. The Los Angeles Times informs today that South Pasadena, generally known for its population of swells, tree-lined streets and swank/genteel bungalow homes has acquired an urban combat vehicle for one dollar, sold off by Burbank, which is trading up on homeland security bucks.
These days a dollar can buy a can of soda, a song on iTunes — or, in South Pasadena’s case, an armored vehicle.
Last week the city took delivery of a vehicle known as a Peacekeeper, paying Burbank $1 for the privilege. Burbank originally received the Peacekeeper as surplus from the U.S. Air Force …
The Peacekeeper saw no action during its Burbank years …
“Active shooter training is also a high priority for police officers that are facing a new type of terror threat as was seen in the Mumbai, India, terror attack,” [a South Pasadena city report on the Peacekeeper acquisition] said …
Burbank decided to sell the armored vehicle after it obtained a new BearCat SWAT vehicle in February 2009 through a $275,000 Homeland Security Department grant.
The only way to keep the bully from punching you in the nose whenever he likes is to kick him in the nuts. You might get thrashed anyway, or maybe not. If you can land a few shots he may decide the price he has to pay to bloody your nose is too high.
In any case, the bully will continue to violate your sovereignty, so to speak, until forcefully discouraged from doing so.
The United States drone strategy is only pursued against people and countries who, largely, cannot effectively defend themselves. There is no way for them to give us a good one right in the nuts.
And so today we read from the New York Times, the continued use of drones in Iraq whether they like it or not. Further, the paper notes this was revealed in a call for bids to operate the drones, issued by the State Department. That is, bombing paupers is ripe for mercenary defense contracting.
Mr. Asadi said that he opposed the drone program: “Our sky is our sky, not the U.S.A.’s sky.???
The Pentagon and C.I.A. have been stepping up their use of armed Predator and Reaper drones to conduct missile strikes against militants in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. More recently, the United States has expanded drone bases in Ethiopia, the Seychelles and a secret location in the Arabian Peninsula.
Over the weekend, Pine View Farm pointed out a story on a navy drone, one developed to be used without a remote pilot’s chair.
Published at the Los Angeles Times, the story follows in the mainstream media tradition of never stating the obvious, mostly because it’s embarrassing or unpleasant.
A couple years ago Hollywood produced a summer blockbuster on an autonomous drone. It was a a bad sci-fi-ish adventure/buddy movie called Stealth.
The drone, named “EDI” (pronounced “Eddy”) talked, went rogue, stole all its music off the Internet, and saved the day at the end.
A Wikipedia entry on it drily notes it was a “colossal box office bomb.”
Crap movie. Unlike being stuck in the real, you could walk out of the theatre and tell your friends not to see it.
For the movie, the enemy actually had forces — fighter planes and anti-aircraft flak, not that it did much good.
However, in the real world the US employs drones exclusively in places and on people who can’t defend themselves. Iran included, the high altitude stealth drone being an exception to the rule that cost the country something when it malfunctioned. However, overflying Iran with Predators — which do the lion’s share of the drone work — would seem not to be done.
Increasing amounts of money on robotics technology is used on places and peoples with essentially nothing, either for themselves or in the quiver.
And none of the allegedly wise people who get talked to for these kinds of news stories bring up this matter. Instead they go on about side issues — like “what if a theoretically artificially intelligence-equipped drone makes a wrong killing decision?” Never mind there is already a long history of wrong decisions routinely made by the people directing them.
So as the robots become more sophisticated they are used on those left farther and farther behind in the global economy. This is all written off as pro-active work making Americans secure, guaranteeing there is always some further price to be paid for being in a desperate situation and hating America for all its freedoms (to bomb).
Whether the drones get some petty bad guys or not hardly matters. It just matters that there be an increasing market and budget for them.
???More aggressive robotry development could lead to deploying far fewer U.S. military personnel to other countries, achieving greater national security at a much lower cost and most importantly, greatly reduced casualties,??? aerospace pioneer Simon Ramo, who helped develop the intercontinental ballistic missile, wrote in his new book, ‘Let Robots Do the Dying.’ ???
Well, the air force and navy — the new autonomous prototype drone is being tested off an aircraft carrier — aren’t doing any dying now.
The only dying, and it’s fairly obvious to all except perhaps the ballistic missile expert, is done by those where the drones are overhead.
The pirates off Somalia can’t fight back against robotic or manned systems. They can’t fight back in Indonesia or Yemen or in Afghanistan. And the drones operate in Pakistan where there is largely no Pakistani army to say boo to them.
So it’s all rubbish.
There isn’t a conventional force the US is going to fight which could inflict any serious casualties because those with such armed forces aren’t won’t be pushed into a war with us and, further, we most probably won’t be fighting them. These wars are all by the wealthy country with the biggest world military against those who have nothing except their poverty and enmity. (If there is some manner of war with Iran, you watch how quickly it turns into bombing with impunity. And that thought may have something to do with why the mullahs want an atomic bomb.)
This is what made much of the Stealth movie silly. The scriptwriters, unlike our national security experts, had to at least try to sell something on the screen that seemed slightly real. There had to be an enemy to expose the heroes, even the robot one, to danger. They failed but, hey, they gave it a shot.
Our theoreticians don’t even make the pretense of trying. They’ll just take the money whether it’s eventually a colossal bomb or not.
Tom Friedman’s answer to everything that’s wrong in the economy is to explain it away as inferiority in the face of the rest of the world.
The only answer is for all Americans to become inventor/entrepreneurs, since they can’t compete with no protections labor in other countries.
These columns forgive all corporate malfeasance in leveraging desperate conditions in foreign places for making shiny goods to sell to the haves.
So Friedman entirely misses the central point of the Apple exposures done on the news side in his own paper — that the company has built its huge fortune being abominable.
Think of all the people you pass in the supermarket or on the sidewalk every week. How many are capable of designing premium goods to sell to the rest of the world?
What should those who can’t do?
In Tom Friedman’s world, nothing really. Giant corporations shouldn’t be encumbered by them. Neither should the government. And they only themselves to blame, anyway, for being sub-mediocre.
The news furnished this week is that they can be deliverymen. There will always be a need for deliverymen to deliver the premium goods of the “innovators” to the rest of the haves. But there’s an eat-your-peas warning embedded in it. You may not even be good enough as a deliveryman if you make multi-corporation world mad and don’t get the proper skills fast.
This is the world we are living in. It is not going away. But America can thrive in this world, explained Yossi Sheffi, the M.I.T. logistics expert, if it empowers “as many of our workers as possible to participate??? in different links of these global supply chains — either imagining products, designing products, marketing products, orchestrating the supply chain for products, manufacturing high-end products and retailing products. If we get our share, we’ll do fine.
And here’s the good news: We have a huge natural advantage to compete in this kind of world, if we just get our act together.
In a world where the biggest returns go to those who imagine and design a product, there is no higher imagination-enabling society than America
In a world where logistics will be the source of a huge number of middle-class jobs, we have FedEx and U.P.S.
Alert readers will have noticed last week’s Friedman wonderfulness was also labeled as from the loins of MIT. It was the MIT app-making engineers of Presto, the way to program iKit to get rid of minimum or sub-minimum wage workers in food service.
This week the wonderfulness is in the expert-minted knowledge of someone named Yossi: If you can’t make Presto things at least you might be able to carry boxes for FedEx or U.P.S.
Often it seems like I’ve made a song for every bit of cheer-leading for corporate predation and the excellence of using global sweat-shopping to find the biggest profit margin that comes out of Tom Friedman. Take, for instance, “That’s Logistics” song from a year or so ago.
It’s an accident.
Friedman’s columns are chapters for books that explain how the merciless corporate destruction of any social order devoted to economic justice and a good functioning nation is really only progress, the pursuit of innovation and serving the global appetite for consumer electronics and social networking software.
It’s purely coincidental that I hate all that stuff.
From the content/word cloup app at GlobalSecurity.Org, in working over copy mirrored there.
Unless, maybe, you’re a fanboi of The Dangerous Room of Examining US Tech for Killing Other People, All Smaller and Poorer blog, you can smile at the accidental poetry software makes of a collection of DD-minted slurs and pejoratives used to more accurately describe the world of national security.
Moe is dead, of course. Persecuting Paupers, Maim People and National Security Business sound like good names for indie bands in some college town.
Or you can work for free on Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Yeah, really, there are tons of “human intelligence tasks” on Amazon/MTurk that pay $0.00. Presumably, you’re encouraged to do them so you learn how to not fuck up and can build your HIT number so that your qualifications and experience are enough to get you into the rarefied environs of those that pay 2 – 17 cents per job.
In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.
And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Last April, Annie Lowrey of Slate wrote about a start-up called “E la Carte??? that is out to shrink the need for waiters and waitresses: The company “has produced a kind of souped-up iPad that lets you order and pay right at your table. The brainchild of a bunch of M.I.T. engineers, the nifty invention, known as the Presto, might be found at a restaurant near you soon. … You select what you want to eat and add items to a cart. Depending on the restaurant’s preferences, the console could show you nutritional information, ingredients lists and photographs. You can make special requests, like ‘dressing on the side’ or ‘quintuple bacon.’ When you’re done, the order zings over to the kitchen, and the Presto tells you how long it will take for your items to come out. … Bored with your companions? Play games on the machine. When you’re through with your meal, you pay on the console, splitting the bill item by item if you wish and paying however you want. And you can have your receipt e-mailed to you. … Each console goes for $100 per month. If a restaurant serves meals eight hours a day, seven days a week, it works out to 42 cents per hour per table — making the Presto cheaper than even the very cheapest waiter.???
Since this was invented by boffins from MIT it’s already much better than the elimination of polio in the United States. I mean, creating an app to rid restaurants of people who already earn crap is a whole lot more cool than giving away a cure to save people from iron lungs and crutches.
Anyway, I can imagine tens of thousands of people who would really like this all the time. All with iKit.
None of whom I ever want to meet. Although I may have actually met a couple in the last ten years. But we knew how to avoid each other from then on.
Which just goes to show Friedman is absolutely right. Eating unencumbered by others with your face down in multiple computing devices is common in lotsa places now. More fool you if you find such people complete boors.
