12.25.11
Good Misuse of Hank Williams
H/T to Pine View Farm for the heavy lifting.
Permalink Comments off
12.23.11
Sorta big in the Hindu Kush
The above is a Google/YouTube analytics shot of where the listens/views for “The National Anthem,” my Predator drone tune, come from. US is #1, obviously. Afghanistan is #2. Heh. Sometimes small curious presents come in the guise of statistics.
Now I’m not into much belief that the Taliban and civilians in the countryside have the most broadband connections for idle surfing.
Which leaves our guys, the men who call for the drones, stumbling across it. Or people in for the Karzai share of national loot.
“If you have gold and your ass don’t smell; We won’t bomb you straight to Hell”
Permalink Comments off
12.20.11
The Empire’s Dog Feces: Droning on
Despite reports that Iran hijacked a United States stealth military drone early this month and forced it to land in hostile territory, not everyone is buying the hype.
“Some kind of mechanical malfunction” is probably what caused the unmanned drone, a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel (nicknamed the “Beast of Kandahar” by Afghans who’d seen it), to go down 140 miles inside Iran on Dec. 4, according to John Pike, director of the Alexandria, Va.-based think tank GlobalSecurity.org.
George Smith, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity, echoed his colleague’s assertion.
“Stuff goes wrong,” Smith told SecurityNewsDaily. “It’s certainly an embarrassment to the United States, as advertised. The bragging on the part of the Iranian government is unsurprising.”
It’s all about us-US-US!
Competing for this year’s long list of produced news stories and factoids of unintentional bleak hilarity: Overstretched U.S. drone pilots face stress risk.
Flying drone aircraft over Afghanistan from the comfort of a military base in the United States is much more stressful than it might seem, even for pilots spared the sacrifice of overseas deployment and separation from family and friends.
America’s insatiable demand for drone technology is taking a heavy toll on Air Force crews, according to a six-month Air Force study, with just under a third of active duty pilots of drones like the Predator reporting symptoms of burnout and 17 percent showing signs of “clinical distress.”
That’s when stress starts undermining their performance at work and their family lives …
[The] biggest factor wearing down drone crews were things like long hours and inadequate staffing.
Inadequate staffing. One associates stress due to inadequate staffing to jobs where corporations have mercilessly downsized the labor force to increase short term profit.
In other words, drone crews suffer stress of the same nature as that of cubicle workers in corporate America. Letting Hellfire missiles off the hook on small groups of people, always poorer and smaller, on the other side of the world, is a smaller component of the job.
This is described as “bothersome.”
Really. Not joking, here. It’s what the man said.
“We try to select people who are well-adjusted … We select family people … People of good moral standing, background, integrity,” [Air Force] Lieutenant Colonel Kent McDonald, a man who worked on the study, told Reuters.
“And when they have to kill someone, and when they’re involved with missions when they’re observing people over long periods of time, and then they either kill them or see them killed, it does cause them to re-think aspects of their life and it can be bothersome.”
Stressful in Somalia
“The U.S. has used drones to hunt down al-Qaida-linked militants in Somalia and Yemen, among other countries,” reported the AP last week. “Their humming is a constant feature in the sky in many of the major towns in southern Somalia, especially the capital city and the militant-controlled southern port of Kismayo.”
Notable quote after recent news story after Iowa locals get all atwitter about Northrop Grumman shipping a shrink-wrapped naval aviation drone on a flatbed. (They thought it might be a UFO, seriously.)
“It’s difficult to fly an unmanned drone through commercial airspace,” a company man told the local news agency.
Easier to fly them in airspace over countries where we don’t give a s—
about the natives, except as targets, and whatever they do or don’t have flying around.
Stephen King donates money for heating oil assistance to poor
“Horror author Stephen King’s efforts to raise money to help low-income Maine residents pay their heating oil bills this winter have exceeded goals,” reported a Boston newspaper.
This was after it was widely reported the US government would reduce home heating oil assistance by over 50 percent this year, from $55.6 million down to $23 million.
Cost of stealth drone, the Beast of Kandahar, lost over Iran, based on estimation from price of prototype: over $24 million.
Cost of Predator drone, lost over the Seychelles: $4.5 million
Cost of misallocation of national resources and immorality in decision making: Priceless.
Nominated as best new electric folk song to sing, ever. “Predator loans, iPhones, and drones … Plus we got lotsa really crazy people!”
12.15.11
Where didth all the innovathion go?
More of the magazine writer’s fascination with asking wealthy people who used to be big deals for wisdom on solving the world’s problems. It’s the presentation of symptoms of a spectacularly America-centric disease — hubris: The witchdoctor-like related beliefs that great money means wisdom and that if you were once great in one thing, you’re stupendous in all endeavors thereafter.
In this case, it’s Jacob Weisberg speaking with Nathan Myhrvold, who many years ago was a big name at Microsoft.
I’m not sure what it is with the lithping speakers this week(odd coincidence, mainly) but if you go onto the videotaped interview at this link, you’ll notice Weisberg has one. If you can endure the entire segment, you’ll hear him actually say “yeth” at one point.
As an aside, I have no idea why anyone would think someone with a lisp is a good choice as an interlocutor for video interviews.
Myrhvold is not particularly interesting. He’s focused only on innovation in computer science. The first thing out of his mouth is Apple, all fine and good. But it’s no unusual observation and there’s a case to be made that iKit, illustratively, has had little power in getting the country out of the morass.
We will not be iTuning and iPhoning ourselves to national prosperity. And the Egyptians are not free of dictatorship yet, despite the existence of Facebook.
Surprisingly, Myrhvold doesn’t get anywhere near discussion of the hard
sciences, excellence in which has been dominating for most of my life. And which underlying achievement and discovery in provides the bedrock upon which all technology is built. Funding big science post WWII has been a government job. It is not about venture capitalists and wealthy benefactors rewarding big thinkers.
So this Myrhvold segment, you may guess, is nothing about that. Instead it is all talk about venture capital and bankrolling start-up entrepreneurs. It’s banal. And it’s also a threadbare cliche. This is all anyone ever talks about in these types of things — how to harness or gather means in bringing wealth to the funding of small businessmen with big ideas.
F—— wow!
Perhaps promised later segments will improve. However, I’d be willing to bet most readers won’t hang around for them, since this one’s so crap.
Plus, there’s the … lithp. (Can you see me rolling the eyes?)
Jesus H. Christ on a stick, one really can’t be supercilious enough!
It’s one thing to be sensitive to an obvious handicap, quite another when the handicap is passed off in this manner. It’s like asking people to entertain the notion that someone with an artificial hand could be a hot passer in the National Football League.
Anyway, here’s another excerpt from the Slate interview, taken only as a demonstration that if you let the wealthy computer geek talk enough, sooner or later he’ll spout the fatuous, believing it to be gnomic:
When he isn’t patent-hunting or contemplating how to slow global warming, Myhrvold loves to cook. Perhaps not surprisingly, he applies scientific principles in the kitchen, which are at the heart of his six-volume, 2,400-page cookbook, Modernist Cuisine: The Art of Science and Cooking, published this year. According to Myhrvold, food is at the center of a lot of our social issues. “If you can make food that’s good for you and delicious, that solves some pretty major societal problems.???
Forty five million people on foodstamps in this country, now, Nathan.
And not one of them served or much interested in a six volume 2,400-page cookbook from an ex-Microsoft guy, I bet.
Permalink Comments off
12.12.11
Art = Life
Krugman today:
It’s time to start calling the current situation what it is: a depression. True, it’s not a full replay of the Great Depression, but that’s cold comfort.
Art for all the songs I’ve put on YouTube, done months ago.
Depression or Great Depression, minor details to those stuck in it.
Permalink Comments off
United States of No Possibilities
The United States of Awesome Possibilities ad campaign was dead on arrival. After a flurry of minor publicity it sank like a rock.
And why should it have succeeded?
Systemic features of the US American economic model have destroyed any concept of “awesome possibilities” for most of even the most wishful thinkers not in the 1 percent.
This week’s issue of the Financial Times focuses on the American employment picture. It’s unremittingly grim.
It touches on issues that have been discussed before on the blog.
1. Big corporate America’s dislike of American labor. The result, except for taxpayer-funded weapons production, was the shipping of everything to Chinese plants. The destruction of jobs became paramount and remains that way.
2. The work that cannot be outsourced is not enough to sustain a country as large as the United States. This means a gradual slide into the irrelevance of a banana republic with the world’s largest military. (Like a patient just diagnosed with incurable cancer, the slope of decline is gradual but inexorable and sure. However, it is expected in all cases that at some point the cancer load, in this case US economic dysfunction, becomes too great and the rate of decline accelerates into fatal catastrophe.)
3. Primary non-military/security growth jobs are all in parts of the economy which produce nothing and, except for moving money and creating money products, pay very little. They’re either in finance, food service preparation, sales of retail goods (all made in China) or the old DD blog pejorative — bedpan technicianry — workers who will be needed in the warehouse industry for the elderly and sick.
Some excerpts from the FT (subscription):
America used to be exceptional. Postwar, it maintained lower unemployment than the Europeans and a higher rate of jobs turnover … No longer. Today, somewhat remarkably, US joblessness is higher than in much of Europe.
[In decades past jobs] might be lost rapidly in a downturn but were swiftly reallocated to more productive sectors when economic growth resumed. That is not now the case.
“I know companies that employ senior engineers whose only job is to find ways to reduce the headcount,??? says Carl Camden, chief executive of Kelly Services, a booming staffing agency based in Michigan. “The name of the game everywhere is to reduce permanent headcount and we are still only at the early stages of this trend.???
This is hardly a novel observation. — DD
… America is employing a decreasing proportion of its people.
Manufacturing is nowhere in the top 20, and such jobs cannot replace the pay and conditions once typical of that sector. “The food preparation industry cannot sustain a middle class …???
Some have moved from claiming unemployment benefits to disability benefits, and have thus permanently dropped out of the labour force. Others have fallen back on the charity of relatives. Others still have ended up in prison. In 1982 there were just over 500,000 in jail; today there are 2.5m.
There are no solutions in sight. Great inequality is intertwined with the inability of the country to mobilize its human capital. And the lack of interest and ability to maximize is human resources, historically, leads to decline and the inability to rise to any and all future challenges.
This is very much about class war, one conducted, since the Eighties, by a corporate monarchy imposed on the rest of the population, for the sole benefit of itself. There is no social compact.
The FT acknowledges this has made the 2012 election one about class warfare.
“This should be both welcomed and feared,” writes one columnist. “Welcomed because America needs an election focused on the economy.”
Finally, more of the obvious. Still, it is worth repeating:
Mr. Obama is not a class warrior. But he has not yet found a compelling way to address what lies behind America’s deepening inequities. The Republicans are even further from a solution. Let us hope class warfare marks only the starting point for a conversation.
The only thing missing is a detailed discussion of another big factor which accelerated the dysfunction of the American economy since 2000: The hardening of the state’s condition into one justifying a permanent war footing.
The permanent war footing separates one entire class of American workers — those who work for arms manufacturing and in the large homeland/natsecurity support role of finding and identifying enemies to use them on — from the ills affecting all other portions of the 99 percent.
The best song DD wrote in 2011. It should be on your critic’s list.
Welcome to the US of Penitentiary; we all get there,
eventually.
We lock up the poor for all the rich; and we do it right, without no hitch.
Welcome to the United States of Greed; it’s the only country you’ll ever need.
If you’re into frauds and useless devices — Uncle Sam, the best of choices!
12.10.11
A helpful guide to stealing labor
“CareerBuilder,” one of the many odious American job hunting sites published a handy guide to the stealing of labor in the US.
It’s called “a quick guide to minimum wage.”
Readers can see how penurious all the red states are, either below the national minimum wage or with no minimum wage law at all. The federal minimum wage is a big $7.25. In Georgia, they pay $5.15. And in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee, there is no minimum wage law at all. How surprising. (They may have lost the Civil War but …)
“Today, people still debate what should be considered an acceptable hourly wage, how changes to it might affect businesses and how much the government should be involved in the issue,” writes some minor minion of the devil.
Permalink Comments off
12.07.11
The Iowa town reliant upon slave labor
Short version: The biggest business in Postville, Iowa, was a kosher meat-packing plant that employed illegals and abused them. The Feds swept in a couple years ago, ended it, while arresting and jailing the company owner on criminal counts.
Since Postville’s economy was primarily based on slave labor, even now — with the company under new ownership and operating legally — it has been unable to recover.
It’s a pattern that is everywhere throughout the US system, an economic model built upon stealing labor. And it does not seem surprising that after decades of relying on such a thing, any place that loses it by force remains unable to cope and rebuild.
Today, the meatpacking plant, under new ownership, uses the federal e-verify system to check workers’ immigration status. The hourly wage on the poultry line is higher than it was before the raid, but few Iowan-born locals work there. Ridding this small community of its illegal workforce, far from freeing up jobs for American-born citizens, has resulted in closed businesses and fewer opportunities. Even nearly four years later, many homes still remain empty, and taxable retail sales are about 40 percent lower than they were in 2008 …
One reason immigrant turnover in the town is higher than before the 2008 raid may be that legal immigrants have more employment options than the mostly undocumented Guatemalans and Mexicans who used to work at the meatpacking plant. They are also less vulnerable to abuse.
“The only good thing I see about this raid is at least it brought to the front page that our food is cheap in part because immigrants are exploited and are victimized,” said Sonia Parras-Konrad, a Des Moines immigration lawyer who represented, pro bono, dozens of the Postville detainees. Undocumented people are often afraid to report labor abuses and crimes for fear of being deported, she says.
Parras-Konrad and Brackett, the Lutheran pastor, both told Yahoo News that the undocumented population is on the rise in the town and speculated that the plant may be hiring illegal immigrants again.
It’s a terrible story with no morals and no happy endings. It shows only
that when one of the foundations of an economic system reliant on abusing people is torn out most of what was built on top of it comes down, too.
Permalink Comments off
December 7th war salesman
From the New York Post, one ninny uses December 7th to take the absurd and indefensible position that the US is militarily weaker now than it was then.
President Obama reassured Asian heads of state in Hawaii last month, “We’re here to stay??? — which is supposed to intimidate China into playing nice. Plus, we’re sending troops to Australia to show a “more broadly distributed military presence??? in Asia, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton terms it. Our Navy will step up operations there, too.
Yet that Navy is even smaller than in 1933, with up to 60 more ships destined for retirement with few replacements in sight. And our troops in Australia will number less than 2,500 — just enough to be provocative, but far too small to do anything effective.
Meanwhile, our troops in South Korea and ships and airbases in Japan are more vulnerable than anyone likes to admit. China’s generals and admirals have spent the last decade building the means for Assassin’s Mace, an all-out Pearl Harbor-style preemptive strike, from anti-ship and anti-satellite missiles to a tsunami of cyber attacks that would leave our forces blind and mute around the globe — and render our military presence in Asia a smoldering ruin.
Yes, no doubt about it. The US Navy is in worse shape than the years before the Japanese sneak attacked at Pearl Harbor.
This comes from someone parked at the American Enterprise Institute, the center of neo-conservatism. Which brought us alleged WMDs in Iraq and that subsequent fine never-ending adventure. Today its frontpage also recommends denial of global warming.
The American Enterprise Institute is a valuable part of new America. It’s a top manufacturer of our always noticeable and significant non-durable goods exports to the world: really bad ideas, frank lies and the white assholes needed to deliver them.
Permalink Comments off
11.29.11
Arms manufacturing = plutocracy employment
Fuglemen and women for the arms manufacturers are common on news casts. And they will become moreso as the pleas to stave off defense cuts rise to the heaven. It will cost many thousands of jobs, they have said and will say.
This short video explains how their function is in the realm of duplicity. Arms manufacturing spending isn’t jobs rich when compared with equivalent dollars spent on non-military domestic needs, like teaching or infrastructure.
The private sector companies pushing defense spending invest in high end hardware, not people.
This is easy to see in 2011 because direct spending on people has produced a system in which a noticeable number of soldiers need food stamp assistance. Defense contractors, uh-uh.
This is the plutocracy manufacturing model, more for the small percentage of wealthy, nothing or very little for everyone else. It is the same as General Electric’s domestic manufacturing of giant jet engines and high end whole body medical imaging machines. (Both of which the company is currently pushing in a public relations tv ad campaign.)
These items cost a lot but the making of them, relatively speaking, doesn’t employ that many people. Which is why investing in teachers or infrastructure repair produces so many more hires.
In addition, when you hear that arms manufacturers, or companies like Boeing or GE or Northrop Grumman want the government to invest in scholarship money and training for more engineers and science people, it’s for the development of big ticket items and expensive weapons applications. In this we are talking really small numbers in the national big picture, a few thousand to ten thousand or so, as contrasted with the many millions out of work or chronically underemployed.
In the description to the above YouTube-posted video:
“Now that the deficit committee failed, war profiteer CEOs are launching an all-out propaganda campaign to protect their profit margins. They and their allies in Washington are working to protect the massive, corruption-filled war budget by slashing social safety nets that help create jobs. This would be a disaster for our economy.”
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »