09.06.16
Music for while you read
Old White Coot — field recordings in stereo! Collect them as they come. Perfect for readings on the Culture of Lickspittle.
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09.05.16
The US security apparatus isn’t telling us something
In the fall of 2016, fifteen years in, college football games suddenly need war-on-terror bags and some metal detector screening.
At Beaver Stadium, where Nittany Lion football still makes State College the third largest city in Pennsy every Saturday. Metal detection.
USC institutes metal screening at the Coliseum:
With the first home game coming this week, USC officials were urging fans to comply with new security rules in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
All patrons will be subject to new metal detector screening, said USC spokesman Tom Tessalone.
Bags that are carried into the stadium must have clear plastic sides and be no larger than 6 inches wide, 6 inches deep and 12 inches long, USC officials said.
In response to terrorist attacks around the world, Memorial Stadium will only allow fans to bring clear bags into the venue during football games, starting with the this season’s first home game on Sept. 17.
The new policy was adopted to increase security in the stadium after high-profile attacks in Europe and Asia. UC Berkeley Associate Athletics Director Wesley Mallette said the changes in policy are in line with security measures adopted in stadiums for professional baseball and football.
The same security measures will be put in place at Haas Pavilion, starting with the volleyball season this month. Eight of the PAC-12 stadiums have implemented similar policies.
The Rose Bowl for Bruins games.
The University of Central Florida.
KNOXVILLE – Football season is kicking off next week with a new bag policy at Neyland Stadium.
UT introduced the new rules last month. They state that fans will only be allowed one clear plastic bag no larger than 12 inches, by 6 inches by 12 inches.
With just over a week until the first game, fans are stocking up and clear bags are proving to be difficult to find.
Do you think there are terrorists plotting against Texas Tech out in Lubbock?
Texas Tech fans going into Jones AT&T Stadium for Red Raider football games starting Saturday should keep one thing clear: their bags.
Texas Tech athletics department officials, along with local business owners and managers, have been reminding Red Raider fans that only clear plastic, vinyl or PVC bags will be allowed into sporting venues after Tech officials announced the new policy ahead of this football season.
The clear bags must be smaller than 12 inches by 6 inches by 12 inches, or fans can bring a 1-gallon clear plastic freezer bag to carry their belongings.
The list goes on and on. It’s nationwide. Not a coincidence. Someone issued an order.
Now does this look to you like the American Wehrmacht’s bombing of the Middle East is making life better?
Note the exploding market for Homeland Security-approved public gathering and event plastic I-am-not-a-terrorist bags.
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Shut up about ricin and biowar. Carfentanil is here.
For the last decade and a half the American media has raised the poison found in castor seeds — ricin — to mythic proportion. And I’ve spent years doing my best to dispel the mythology.
Ricin has never been “easy to make.” And the mash of castor seeds is not a weapon of mass destruction. I’ve even been furnished expert consultations in criminal/terror cases involving it.
There is, however, a chemical that’s come to America’s white population. Carfentanil, a knock-out compound, with no real practical use other than tranquilizing elephants. And it is quite potent and already doing a great deal of harm.
Mr. Hatmaker became one of more than 200 people to overdose in the Cincinnati area in the past two weeks, leaving three people dead in what the officials here called an unprecedented spike. Similar increases in overdoses have rippled recently through Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia, overwhelming ambulance crews and emergency rooms and stunning some antidrug advocates …
In Cincinnati, some medical and law enforcement officials said they believed the overdoses were largely caused by a synthetic drug called carfentanil, an animal tranquilizer used on livestock and elephants with no practical uses for humans. Fentanyl can be 50 times stronger than heroin, and carfentanil is as much as 100 times more potent than fentanyl. Experts said an amount smaller than a snowflake could kill a person.
The implicated carfentanil is believed to be made in Mexico or China and put into heroin shipments, probably precisely because of its power, the manufacturers believing, perhaps, that it would lead to faster addiction and complicate forensic analysis.
But this is a clear miscalculation because he drug is so powerful.
“[Police] officers and sheriff’s deputies are so concerned about the potency of carfentanil and other synthetic opioids that they carry overdose-reversing naloxone sprays for themselves, in case they accidentally inhale or touch the tiniest flake,” reads the newspaper.
The chemical activity of carfentanil and the less powerful but more common fentanil, employed to spike heroin formulations now coming into the US, has catalyzed an exploding health crisis in rural and ex-urban America.
For the numbers, which are astonishing, read the rest of the piece.
In 2002, Russian special forces used fentanil when storming a theater in Moscow where 800 people were taken hostage by Chechnyan separatists who’d rigged themselves and the building with explosives. The results were catastrophic. One hundred and seventy people were killed due to the use of it.
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Plutocrat & Oligarch Preservation Society Fundraiser
From the New York Times, over the weekend:
At a private fund-raiser Tuesday night at a waterfront Hamptons estate, Hillary Clinton danced alongside Jimmy Buffett, Jon Bon Jovi and Paul McCartney, and joined in a singalong finale to “Hey Jude.???
“I stand between you and the apocalypse,??? a confident Mrs. Clinton declared to laughs, exhibiting a flash of self-awareness and humor to a crowd that included Calvin Klein and Harvey Weinstein and for whom the prospect of a Donald J. Trump presidency is dire …
But Mrs. Clinton has been more than accessible to those who reside in some of the country’s most moneyed enclaves and are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to see her. In the last two weeks of August, Mrs. Clinton raked in roughly $50 million at 22 fund-raising events, averaging around $150,000 an hour …
It’s easy to declare Donald Trump an unacceptable choice as President. And it’s become far too easy to think very poorly of the Democratic Party’s selection. Many say there are still orders of magnitude difference in suitability for the job. I agree there’s a difference — but not to the power of 100 or even 10.
HRC is custom-made for leadership in the Culture of Lickspittle. It’s not a virture.
“He’s a racist, and she is a liar, so really what’s the difference in choosing both or choosing neither???? another young black woman from Ohio said.
Feel free to add to your collection of tracks from Old White Coot.
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08.08.16
Perpetual warmongers flee to Clinton
You can’t be a Commie symp anymore.
But, better still, you can be a Russian Manchurian candidate or a Russian symp, particularly if you think pushing missile batteries in NATO always closer to Moscow is a lousy idea. It’s genuinely fascinating how my party became more cynically paranoid and pro-pre-thermonuclear war than the other side.
GOP & center-right Strangeloves are now welcome after ridicule by the nuts guy.
The same people who wholeheartedly supported or made the most horrendous mistakes in the last fifteen years:
[If] there’s a common theme to this most recent wave of GOP dissenters, it’s just how eerily close they sound to Hillary Clinton’s talking points.
“He is unable or unwilling to separate truth from falsehood,??? the GOP national security leaders said in the letter. “He does not encourage conflicting views. He lacks self-control and acts impetuously. He cannot tolerate personal criticism. He has alarmed our closest allies with his erratic behavior. All of these are dangerous qualities in an individual who aspires to be president and commander in chief, with command of the US nuclear arsenal.???
Trump is a cat’s paw of Putin. WikiLeaks, The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald, others are all in the tank for Russia to influence the US infection. If you’re not pro-HRC, you’re for Russian hackers.
“[Let’s] hope the unlikely unity extends beyond the neocons and with any luck, lasts longer than the election,” writes the explainer at The Guardian.
A most Culture of Lickspittle historical moment.
08.02.16
Nowhere left to go
Every day delivers news of the allegedly rabid presidential candidate. A psychologist attests he’s mentally ill. Trump throws a baby out of one of his rallies. (At first I read the headline thinking he’d actually waded into a long rant attacking a crying child.) Trump is unfit, declares the president. There will be thermonuclear war with him in possession of “the football.” And, of course, full time now, the ongoing cruel feud with the Khan family.
This kind of news doesn’t have any effect on the people who are going to vote for him and against HRC.
They just don’t care. I don’t care, either. Which is not the same thing as saying they’re universally equally mean or as prone to great flights of unreason as Donald Trump.
Many obviously know exactly what he is and will vote for him to throw a bomb into the establishment and Clintonism. And while there MIGHT be more productive ways to show dissatisfaction with the rigged system that we have, it’s still an understandable human reaction.
The constant call of “look, look, look how horrible he is!??? and the we’ll all be doomed if he’s president thing that comes out of our side, the place of so-called betters, ahould be seen as a repetitive sneering. It deserves contempt, too. By now everyone knows Donald Trump.
If you’re in the ascendant half of the population – as I’ve pointed out here before, it’s inaccurate to tar them all as “elite” – it’s hard to see how anyone, let alone nearly half of Americans, could think otherwise. The U.S. has the best economy in the world and by far the finest universities, driving further global dominance; new technologies are opening up a host of even greater possibilities, from elimination of manual labor to the ability genetically to engineer longer life, better health and greater abilities; minorities and women increasingly succeed on equal terms and people can marry whomever they choose; and one can easily travel almost anywhere in this amazing world – but needn’t, because there are Thai restaurants on almost every corner.
Unfortunately, not everyone is part of that wonderful world. Rather, for many, it stands as a threat.
Include me in the Trump-half of America although I won’t vote for him. I find it astonishing that he’s been able to carve out positions to the left of the Democratic Party, positions most certainly meaningless. But still the Democratic Party’s candidate has left no place to go, which is acknowledged.
I have nothing in common with those whose world is the first paragraph. Almost all of my face-to-face friends in Pasadena are from it. And to them I appear as an outsider, at best a nice person, who appears odd but one who can be tolerated in various situations, trusted to look after pets or house-sit.
“[Today], that [other] half is overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) white, male, religious and poorly educated. Since that’s pretty much the definition of what, until recently, has been the dominant culture in the U.S., basically no-one else cares,” continues the piece.
No, that’s not right, either. But there’s no way through the walls.
In other matters
Book(s) to be read:
How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything by Rosa Brooks.
The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones.
2017 War with Russia by Buck Turgidson some retired general.
Pirated ebooks encouraged until a new Kickass comes along.
Oh, That’s Rich!
From the Dept of “Oh, That’s Rich!:”
Economist N. Greg Mankiw of Harvard in the NYT this week on the unfortunate turn of events in which voters now don’t believe it when experts say trade is good:
“You see it in Donald Trump’s railing against immigrants and trade agreements. It may well be part of Hillary Clinton’s shift, under pressure from Bernie Sanders, against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she once embraced as ‘the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade.’
“You certainly see it in the British decision to exit the European Union, which has become known as Brexit. That vote flummoxed most political forecasters, and it makes one wonder whether Americans might also produce a surprise in November …”
The answer, according to Mankiw, is simple: more education. Although not stated baldly, those now opposed to “corporate America-style” (my words) global trade are the stupid — the less educated.
Mankiw: “In the long run … there is reason for optimism. As society slowly becomes more educated from generation to generation, the general public’s attitudes toward globalization should move toward the experts.’” Who are all for it.
N. Greg Mankiw was economic advisor to Mitt Romney. He is also opposed to raising the minimum wage. I would normally post the link to the NYT but globalism and all that hasn’t been good for me. I’m sore about it, even though I’m educated.
Also from the “Oh, That’s Rich!” channel, an explanation, now among the thousands, as to Why “The Tom Friedman Blues” needs to be on your gadget and reviewing stand.
From economist Dean Baker, on Tom Friedman:
“Thomas Friedman moves beyond his Flat World to divide the world into ‘Web People,’ who he likes, and ‘Wall People’ who he holds in contempt. Donald Trump is naturally the lodestar of the Wall People …
“Okay, so let’s work through some logic here. If you want to see a freer flow of ideas and technology, by replacing patent and copyright monopolies with more modern ways of promoting innovation and creative work, then you are a Wall Person. After all, Friedman’s Web People wouldn’t know how to get by in the world without these relics from the feudal guild system.
“If this means that life-saving drugs, which would be cheap in a free market, are priced beyond the reach of the people who need them, well get used to Thomas Friedman’s world. If it means that we have to turn the whole world into copyright cops to ensure that Disney can collect its royalties on Mickey Mouse, that’s a small price to pay to keep the Web People wealthy…”
I’d like to add that Hollywood got the FBI to confiscate the kickass torrents website and arrest its owner last week so that the Motion Picture Association of American and Marvel Studios would not be deprived of any of their due profits on Captain America: Civil War by the grasping BitTorrent clients of the leeching poors. And, of course, they have momentarily stymied me in my downloading of pirated eBooks on the inequalities and failures of the US system.
Of course, I will inform you as soon as an adequate replacement is put in place. Currently, the Pirate Bay and EasyTorrents don’t cut the mustard.
The downloadable tune — free — is here.
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07.23.16
Milchtoast, fair enough
Hillary Clinton’s choice of Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate sends a message to Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and their progressive populist supporters: There’s a home for you in the Democratic Party, but I’m still the landlord.
Some voices on the left howled at the last minute hoping to wave Clinton off from making the seemingly safe pick, insisting that he would not be so safe. Democracy for America, a progressive political action committee founded by Howard Dean, called Kaine’s recent support for different regulatory standards on regional and community banks “disqualifying.??? The Intercept’s Ziad Jilani argued that Kaine’s “measured praise??? for the Trans-Pacific Partnership means that “by picking him, Clinton is signaling that her newly declared opposition to the agreement is not sincere???…
Take the pot off boil, let the people digest the progressive revolution in small bites rather than in the kind of sweeping changes that disorient and cause anxiety.
If a big part of this country is saying “Slower, please,” this is a nod to them.
For all these reasons, picking Kaine made sense. But that doesn’t mean that it was definitely the right call. There are other theories of the case, and they say that people are looking for fast change. That’s what Trump is betting on, and that’s why, in his acceptance speech, he kept emphasizing how quickly he could solve our problems.
Kaine doesn’t help mobilize the Democratic base, and he probably hurts the Democrats’ ability to counter Trump’s anti-free trade populism.
But, I’ll tell you one last thing. My biggest problem with the Clintons has been all the drama they bring with them. Trump’s antics have kind of obliterated that concern in the public mind, but I love No Drama Obama and if we have No Drama Kaine, that’s something I can celebrate.
It’s obvious I won’t be voting for her. From my POV, there’s no choice that would have changed my mind, so whatever.
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07.21.16
Listen, snobs (continued)
From the Blind Pig Finds Truffle Desk: Mainstream media and apparatchik upper class and its shoeshiners aghast that Trump might not defend NATO nations if they’re attacked.
Now, hold yer horses and unbunch yer panties ninny snobs. NATO was made to defend Europe against the Warsaw Pact. It was not made to push farther into territory (little countries on the Baltic, for the sake of selling ballistic missile shields that don’t work) where the Red Army crushed the Wehrmacht during the last years of the Great Patriotic War. (That’d be WWII, ninnies, in which the Red Army destroyed a helluva lot more of the Wehrmacht than we ever did, and, consequently suffered losses completely unimaginable to Americans.)
So you think the US should pledge to automatically get into a shooting war with the other thermonuclear superpower (Russia has 7,200 of ’em) on, um, Russia’s old border for the sake of “freedom” in those little places? Or maybe you think perhaps our uppercrust apparatchiks and their shoeshiners ought to go back and read some history of WWII and the reason for NATO, at which point you may reach the conclusion that occasionally the Blind Pig gets onto something. If only accidentally.
That “the establishment” is so roiled tells you who’s on the wrong side of history.
And here’s where Hillary Clinton spells trouble, my friends, with a capital T, and that rhymes with “P” and that stands for “PISS POOR.”
HRC was a lousy Sec’y of State, now retconned as an accomplished one. She’s entirely capable of stumbling into a shooting war with Russia in the Baltics, the Ukraine or Syria, because — “freedom” — but, primarily, because she’s a corporate hawk with no obvious clues from her story to indicate she thinks much about consequences.
Definitely, another one of those Culture of Lickspittle moments.
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07.14.16
Freedom: Towards a more current definition
The symbol of the Strat electric guitar & big “Freedom,” at the — ahem — Quicken Loans complex in Cleveland, setting the standard:
“In Cleveland, officials are estimated to have spent at least $20 million in federal funds on equipment ranging from bicycles and steel barriers to 2,000 sets of riot gear, 2,000 retractable steel batons, body armor, surveillance equipment, 10,000 sets of plastic flex cuffs, and 16 laser aiming systems, which a technology retailer describes as being used for night direct-fire aiming and illumination.???
Because freedom is not free, particularly the crowd suppression and riot control parts.
(From The Intercept.)
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