03.16.11
Posted in Permanent Fail, Predator State at 1:04 pm by George Smith
It will have occurred to many that the constant peddling of US-made weapons to the Middle East oil producers willing to be American toadies in the pursuit of the war on terror has been just like tossing bags of crap at many fans. In Egypt, US-made tanks and tear gas were in the streets. The M1’s didn’t fire on the populace, fortunately. That was good, right?
In the case of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, it’s the case of US armed militaries — one acting as a mercenary force — putting down the revolts aimed at getting rid of their rotten leaders. The potential also exists for the notoriously bad Saudi Arabian military to fly US-made jets in any proposed no-fly zone thought to be needed for Libya.
According to the US State Department, the Obama administration proposed $88 million dollars worth of arms to Bahrain.
Astonishingly, Singapore, the well-known wart off the Malay peninsula,
received a 5.5 billion dollar sale. One supposes the arms, mostly F-15s, are thought needed to fend off invasions from Borneo or a sally from the port of Darwin in northern Australia. (No, no! They need a top rank air force to save world shipping in the Strait of Malacca from pirates!)
Mystifyingly, an expert from the Federation of American Scientists seemed to pooh-pooh the phenomenon in a recent story published by the Ventura County Star.
Look, if we don’t sell to these rotten countries arms, someone else will just get the business, was the message I received loud and clear. Which seems like no message at all except an opportunistic one rationalized with the excuse that if the sales are ours at least we can track them.
“Other defense experts cautioned that other countries would quickly move to replace the U.S. in any arms sales stopped for human rights concerns … ” read the newspaper.
Matthew Schroeder, an employee of the Federation of American Scientists, told the newspaper, “If you cut off arms sales, a client would go straight to U.S. competitors like Russia or China.”
That would obviously be so bad. To force them to buy tanks and stuff from Russia and China. It would make the balance of trade even more atrocious than it already is. Bummer.
The arms manufacturers, as I’ve written, enjoy the benefits of private sector socialism in this business. The US middle class, unless it’s actually employed in this protected industry, gets screwed twice.
First, it underwrites the business of US weapons-makers while it’s jobs are taken to the garbage dump and sent to China.
Second, we reap the bad publicity when it’s American-made stuff seen putting down those looking for a bit of democracy.
There’s a moral and logical argument to be made for letting Singapore, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates buy the gear for their token militaries from other nations. Part of it has to do with re-instituting an element of fairness to the American system.
Permalink
Posted in Imminent Catastrophe, Permanent Fail at 8:31 am by George Smith
Today’s bag of excrement from Google AdSense, as it relates to my territory at GlobalSecurity.Org:
More ads for Glenn Becks’ “Broke” through peddling by a crypto neo-Nazi far right political website.
An ad for a trailer about the “end of America” here which is aimed at getting people to buy advice from an investment consultant seen on Alex Jones’ conspiracy Internet radio show.
And — my favorite — right next to one of my Economic Treason pieces, an ad for offshoring manufacturing to your own custom maquiladora in the Mexican Baja because California wages are too high.
Google AdSense:
Making money off promotion of tearing the middle class down, chaos, perfidy and vulture economics, one micropayment at a time.
Permalink
03.15.11
Posted in Imminent Catastrophe at 8:26 pm by George Smith
Like most I’ve been watching US television for news on the reactor disasters at Fukushima.
The one source, outstanding above all, has been ol’ Frank von Hippel, director of the Program for Science and Global Security at Princeton.
I remember von Hippel from a time, many years ago, when I subscribed to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Von Hippel has been on Rachel Maddow and for tonight’s show he gave the clearest-for-the-layman explanation of what one of the primary threats is at Daichi.
Any mistakes in this interpretation are mine.
It centers on the spent fuel rods pool at, I think, Daichi 4. They need constant circulative cooling and no longer have it so their radioactive decay heat, which is no longer dissipated, boils off or splits what water covering remains or that which is added in insufficient volume in an emergency.
As it happens (or when it happens), the temperature of the rods rises even more intensely, destroying their cladding, blistering and blowing it off. Explosions occur because of the generation of quantities of hydrogen gas, leftover from the oxidation of the hot zirconium metal fuel cladding.
According to von Hippel there is now no easy way to determine the state of the infrastructure and the rods because intense gamma radiation — which means some large quantity of radioactive metal has actually been uncovered — and the destruction of sensors and cameras at the site.
When the rods are uncovered by the water mediator/shield and the cladding perforated or destroyed, the heat also drives off the spent fuel’s volatile radioisotopes. And that process is the spraying of radioactive waste into the prevailing winds. Unless it’s contained by intact walls.
Each Daichi reactor contains between 60 and 80 tons of fuel rod assemblies.
Spent fuel rod pools concentrate exhausted fuel rod assemblies.
Von Hippel said he had heard estimates of anywhere between 2 and 8 reactor cores being present in the spent fuel rod pool in question.
And so the problem of catastrophe, in terms of raw numbers, is rendered quite clearly.
It’s incomprehensible to me (well, cynically, no it’s not) that a significant number of Americans would think this disaster is about them and commence a hoarding rush on potassium iodide and Geiger counters.
But that’s the way it is.
“Ask a GE Technician” reads one of the evil AdSense ads on one of my posts at SITREP GlobalSec. Sometimes it disappears, so you have to get quick and lucky.
The catastrophically failed reactors at Daichi are all GE’s.
Permalink
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Permanent Fail at 11:27 am by George Smith
Select posts from here are syndicated at GlobalSecurity.Org’s SITREP here.
Originally, as part of that, the idea was to give the blog contributors Adsense. The term “revenue sharing” was used.
In practice, “revenue sharing” with anything Google means Google gets all the share.
That’s because AdSense, as a model, makes no sense for individual writers. Even if they plaster it all over their pages.
The ads are always woefully inappropriate. The algorithm that chooses them is dumber than dirt. And the click throughput is marginal to non-existent.
Now, if you exist everywhere all over the globe, as Google does, it works. For everyone else, it’s just giving Google free space.
I wouldn’t have actually looked at this closely — in the back of my mind the little voice always said it was a scheme of trash — if the Adsense things hadn’t suddenly stopped running on the SITREP posts.
This was because Google halts them if it decides you need to update your tax information.
When I looked at the problem on my Google dashboard, this is what I discovered.
Google doesn’t pay until a $100 threshold is reached. However, long before that milestone, it will summarily badger you to keep updating your settings with verifications of phone numbers, personal identification numbers and additional tax filing information.
Anyway, in 18 months of SITREP contributions, AdSense had earned me a big $15.00.
Readers will be amused to be informed there’s obviously no click through to an endless procession of brain dead ads for “military challenge coins,” dubious degrees in intelligence from seemingly non-existent schools said to be somewhere in Fairfax County, Virginia and power supplies and water containers shopped to gold-hoarding extreme right survivalists and assorted white supremacist kooks who believe hyperinflation and the end of all things are nigh.
At the rate AdSense was making money for me, it’d be a mere seven years before Google cut my first check. Laughable and worthless don’t even begin to encompass it.
Today’s raft of AdSense rubbish — go check here: An ad for AdSense (!), a blandishment that Glenn Beck is “broke” from one of the more popular neo-Nazi extreme right political websites, and come-ons for military-style emergency radios and flexible water tanks.
What an astonishingly good deal.
Permalink
Posted in Phlogiston at 9:31 am by George Smith
The USMC gets its money’s worth from Aaron Eckhart in Battle: Los Angeles. His Sgt. Rock/Nick Fury chin displays like a wall in virtually every scene, even when his gyrenes are getting ground up by the alien troops. Which is for most of this thing.
However, even when losing they’re winning, displaying to-the-last-man fanatical grit wrapped around hearts of gold. It’s royally corny but as a pure combat film for the sake of mindless entertainment it’s fine.
The grime, ruins and explosions are as real as Hollywood can make them even if the story isn’t. But no one comes to the movie for the dialogue or characters any more sophisticated than those in Marvel Comics’ Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos in the Sixties.
(Actually, the Howling Commandos were more colorful than Eckhart’s bunch. The exception is Michelle Rodriguez who’d fit right in with Nick Fury. Rodriguez now utterly owns the role of the heavy-weapon slinging woman in uniform twice as tough as the men surrounding her.)
If you go for the military tactics, you’ll be a bit disappointed. The Marines show almost no common sense. Right off they cluster in a bunch and neglect looking up in house-to-house fighting. Naturally, they’re ambushed from the “Santa Monica” rooftops.
The US military gives the alien force a long window of opportunity after it storms ashore before scheduling a shellacking from the air. This is one of those deus ex machina plot devices that allows the aliens to muster their own air power — drones, as it happens. They immediately tip the battle in the invading force’s favor.
The air strike never occurs. The aliens overrun the forward operating base. Everything looks lost.
The aliens, it’s said, are here for the water which they use as a fuel source. Don’t think too hard about that one.
Energy-wise, water isn’t trivial to split and because of that and a few other things particular to it we have life. So the vast power resources needed to do the physical-law breaking stuff the alien air does is unreachable by explanation.
Where are the salvos of cruise missiles? Where are the Linebacker B-52 strikes from superhigh when it’s obvious all of LA has been reduced to rubble?
Any alien shore-invading force that’s kinetically of a kind with the US military — that is they stock assault troops and crew-served weapons, mostly — can’t persist with supply that’s win with what you’ve brought.
[Spoiler alert]
When things finally look darkest, the Marines cut down by half and in retreat, it’s an electromagnetic pulse — another deus ex machina — that sets the stage for the inevitable reversal. The alien command center emits one, revealing its position, just as our boys are flying away overhead.
Let’s go get ’em, signals Eckhart’s staff sergeant.
There’s time for one more pitched desperate battle and then you know what happens.
Give it a B for volumes of ammo expended and hearty heroism.
Permalink
03.14.11
Posted in Rock 'n' Roll, Ted Nugent at 5:51 pm by George Smith
Ted Nugent released a digital single today, a download aimed at increasing membership to his mailing list. It’s a reasonable trade.
Now for the bad news.
It’s called “I Still Believe.” Ted has made the song to tell us he still believes in the American dream and that we are not in decline. Or at least he’s not in decline.
Unfortunately, lyric fail.
Here’s a sample:
I pursue life
I pursue my happiness
I’m so damn alive
I’m so in love with this
Geezus.
When the bridge hits, Nugent inexplicably shifts to referring to himself in the third person:
He believes
He still believes it
He believes in America
I’m going out on a limb here in thinking Nugent did it this way because he couldn’t find any female backing singers to deliver it inexpensively enough.
Music and riff: B
Message hindered by too high school-ish (or Tea Party) clumsy way with words: C-
If you want it, go to his website. A couple extra points taken off for bad web delivery which shoves the mp3 file at you in some browsers as I_Still_Believe.htm. Which, of course, won’t work until you rename the extent back to what it should actually be.
Oof.
Permalink
03.11.11
Posted in Made in China, Permanent Fail at 1:44 pm by George Smith
“We’re broke!” is the GOP blandishment used to justify imposing hardship on the middle class as Republicans go about the work of transferring more and more wealth to the already very well off. A few days ago, in the case of Wisconsin I highlighted Scott Walker’s famous number – $137 million in an immediate shortfall requiring drastic action. In this case, a forked-tongue claim used to usher in union busting and demonization of school teachers.
However, the same day the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel was publishing a story on defense contracts in the state.
It read:
The Army was the largest buyer of Wisconsin goods and services, with more than $7.2 billion in purchases.
Oshkosh Corp. has recently geared up to produce 23,000 Army trucks and trailers in a five-year deal valued at $3 billion. It is the largest Wisconsin-based defense contractor.
And Marinette Marine Co. expects to receive billions of dollars to build Navy combat ships. More than 600 people attended a recent vendor fair sponsored by the company in Green Bay.
Paraphrasing the famous filmmaker Michael Moore this week, the United States is not broke. It is awash in cash.
Arms manufacturing (defense spending) is a protected industry in the US. It is an example of socialism for the private sector. It is awash in cash.
And it is not hard to understand why businesses in Wisconsin, and every state, wants a piece of it. Once established, it’s guaranteed business, underwritten by the taxpayers. The workers are protected.
These conditions do not exist for anyone else in the US economy.
You can throw teachers and firefighters and policemen out of work because you want to throttle public services and destroy education for the middle class. Or you ship all the jobs overseas to China if you are in non-military domestic production because labor is an order of magnitude cheaper there.
But arms-manufacturing labor is holy. It competes only with itself.
And it is easy to see by the numbers from it that the US is definitely not broke. There is money to solve even fake crises like the one Scott Walker has brought upon Wisconsin.
“Weinbrenner Shoe Co. of Merrill recently won a $9.8 million contract to make hot-weather boots for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines,” continues the Journal Sentinel piece.
You go to Target or Wal-mart to buy shoes, socks, any garments.
This country used to make such things but that was all thrown away. Where is it made now? What do you get to buy? What is it that you can afford? Rhetorical questions to which everyone knows the answer. Made in China.
Now this does not begrudge the jobs of shoemakers for the US military. It is only to illustrate that when there is a will to preserve jobs and a good living wage, the US government certainly will do it. If it’s the right industry, connected to arms manufacturing and defense.
“If you are struggling like most companies are in this down economy, there is definitely a place for military business,” the vice-president of the Wisconsin shoe company told the newspaper.
And he is certainly right. As far as the argument is taken.
However, the larger picture is one that asks questions about fundamental fairness and rigging of the economic system, rigging in which middle class work has been compressed in the private sector until it won’t support a middle class, with the only parts left being in arms production, essentially subsidized by the taxpayer and government. It is a state of affairs which also reduces labor to a game of musical chairs with very poor odds in which you need to be a lucky person to get a job in manufacturing protected by defense spending.
A graphical breakdown on defense spending in Wisconsin, furnished by the newspaper, is here.
If you click out to it you’ll also notice one of the big recipients of dollars in the Wisconsin economy is General Electric. Overall, GE is a company now substantially into the business of national looting and tax avoidance, like many others.
As far as Wisconsin is concerned, the defense money is for the GE Healthcare subsidiary.
And despite the images in current General Electric commercials of happy workers doing a country line dance to Allen Jackson’s “Good Times,” GE’s jolly mood has nothing to do with the interests of average Americans.
When it’s private sector work is dependent on unprotected labor, GE outsources. Light bulbs? Make them overseas.
On the other hand, defense spending, for anything, is always good to take because that’s guaranteed by the taxpayer.
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman put it this way in a column from January:
A corporate leader who increases profits by slashing his work force is thought to be successful. Well, that’s more or less what has happened in America recently: employment is way down, but profits are hitting new records. Who, exactly, considers this economic success? …
Take the case of General Electric, whose chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, has just been appointed to head that renamed advisory board. I have nothing against either G.E. or Mr. Immelt. But with fewer than half its workers based in the United States and less than half its revenues coming from U.S. operations, G.E.’s fortunes have very little to do with U.S. prosperity.
By the way, some have praised Mr. Immelt’s appointment on the grounds that at least he represents a company that actually makes things, rather than being yet another financial wheeler-dealer. Sorry to burst this bubble, but these days G.E. derives more revenue from its financial operations than it does from manufacturing …
The Wisconsin economy, as it stands now, is shown by a chart at the Bureau of Labor Statistics here.
Mass layoffs increased in January, probably because of the end of sales jobs for the holidays.
The overall employment trends, as will the rest of the country, aren’t great. Employment is increasing in leisure and hospitality, jobs which generally don’t pay very well. Manufacturing also shows a significant rise.
Education also makes up a substantial part of the workforce. And this is the profession that is locally and nationally threatened.
Also worth noting is an article from Minyanville on a real protected part of arms-manufacturing.
It reads:
Right now, federal prison inmates in correctional institutions across America are making parts for Patriot missiles.
They are paid $0.23 an hour to start, and can work their way up to a maximum of $1.15 to manufacture electronics that go into the propulsion, guidance, and targeting systems of Lockheed Martin’s (LMT) PAC-3 guided missile, originally made famous in the first Persian Gulf conflict.
This is arranged by Unicor, a company seemingly precisely for the delivery of prison manufacturing labor. Happily, the workers won’t be attacked for being part of a selfish union needing busting.
One fully understands why Lockheed Martin may like prison labor. It’s guaranteed and protected, so to speak.
Naturally, it smells immoral. The story has a number of national security experts furrowing their brows over the implications and ludicrously speaking about inefficiency.
You don’t need to be an economist to figure out prison labor is inefficient. Or that efficiencies in the US economy exist only to increase inequality.
Prison-delivered arms manufacturing doesn’t look right. It creates a shabby impression. There is also pro and con talk about protecting “maintaining the defense industrial base.”
Break those union parasites, though. Ship everyone else’s jobs off to China.
Why Are Prisoners Building Patriot Missiles? — is here. Highly recommended.
Permalink
Posted in Rock 'n' Roll, Ted Nugent at 8:44 am by George Smith
Ted Nugent tries to pass himself off as the wholesome American family man. Then when he comes to smalltown USA and swears the atmosphere into rancid cottage cheese at the county fair the locals who hired him act stunned.
And most of the adults you know have probably made it through life without having children given up.
So there’s this from today’s New York Daily News on Nugent’s long lost son:
A Brooklyn restaurateur, adopted as a baby, was shocked to learn his biological father is none other than “Motor City Madman” Ted Nugent.
Bay Ridge native Ted Mann, 42, got the news about “The Nuge” in an October phone call from a sister he never knew he had. She had reached out to the adoption agency that placed him.
“I’m like, ‘What!?'” laughed Mann, whose newest eatery is Cabana Social in Williamsburg …
Nugent, the “Cat Scratch Fever” rocker known for his pro-gun stance and a VH1 reality show where he made people build outhouses and skin a wild boar, [and had an accident with a chainsaw] immediately welcomed Mann into the family.
“His first words to me were ‘Hello, son,'” Mann said. “Within an hour of knowing him, he said, ‘Let’s go shoot some guns.'”
Nugent had always been open with his other seven children about the fact that he’d given two kids … Nugent has since told Mann a little bit about his biological mom, but Mann has yet to get in touch with her.
Nugent was not yet quite the wealthy rock star of the mid-Seventies when he gave the child up for adoption, an item the stories on this don’t really make clear.
If the reporting on Ted Mann’s age is correct, the adoption occurred in 1969. At the time Nugent was in Amboy Dukes.
The Amboy Dukes had a minor hit with “Journey to the Center of Your Mind” in the late Sixties. The band recorded three pyschedelic hard rock records of no great impression for Mainstream.
Two more Amboy Dukes records came out on Frank Zappa’s Discreet label in ’73 and ’74 — Call of the Wild and Tooth, Fang & Claw. Band-wise, they’re the same group — minus a singer — that would put out Ted Nugent in 1975, the record that issued him into the US arena circuit.
Permalink
03.10.11
Posted in Extremism, Ted Nugent at 9:34 pm by George Smith
This is so pathetic and lame it’s virtually beyond comment. From an outdoors columnist at the Mitchell, South Dakota, newspaper:
Ted Nugent, the rock star professional hunter, put me on today’s topic. On his television program a few years ago, Nugent had placed his blind over a spot in a corn field where the combine or truck had accidently dropped a few bushels of corn. While baiting was illegal where Nugent hunted, he whole-heartedly endorsed finding such places and using them to one’s advantage. At the time I thought that Uncle Ted was pushing his luck a wee bit.
While watching his television program last week, Nugent emphatically stated that baiting was by far his favorite form of hunting. He then went on to say that the states that permit baiting have had no problems whatsoever, and that if our home state didn’t allow baiting, we should let our representatives know about this bit of bureaucratic mismanagement. Ted was fired up! In discussing the issue with Betsy, my wife, she said and I quote, “Real hunters don’t need to bait.’ ???
As previously mentioned, I don’t have a problem with South Dakota’s baiting restriction, and I am not going to endorse Ted Nugent’s view, although I admire his enthusiasm and political activism.
This isn’t the lousy part, just the backgrounder. Baiting, of course, is what got Nugent in trouble this past summer. Typically for the US press when dealing with Nugent, the public embarrassment and failure always gets left out.
“Political activism,” however, as a description of what Nugent does only continues to illustrate how a radical and nasty extremism has come to be redefined as mainstream.
Anyway, continuing:
Have I ever been involved in baiting? The African kudu, an elk-sized animal with splendid spiral horns, is nicknamed “The Gray Ghost.??? He has a habit of appearing and disappearing before one can take a shot. On my first African hunt, I wanted a good kudu bull in the worst way, but because of my tremor, I couldn’t hold steady enough, and there wasn’t time to use the tripod. After two days of fruitless pursuit, Dirk, my professional hunter, suggested baiting, which is legal in Africa.
Dirk radioed for a load of oranges while he and BaBa built the blind. By mid-afternoon we were ready to go. During the late afternoon, cows and young bulls began to show up. Though we were 75 yards away, they were extremely cautious as they didn’t like the blind. At sunset, a big bull came in and I dropped him with a single shot. I’d guess most South Dakotans don’t care for baiting as I received some critical mail about my kudu.
The thought crosses the mind that if you have a handicap that makes you inferior to the animal you wish to bring down maybe you ought to let him pass rather than rig the game.
The entire thing is here.
Permalink
Posted in Extremism, Permanent Fail at 1:36 pm by George Smith
Teachers get their rights taken away by a GOP ambush in Madison and the President spends the day on the scourge of Facebook bullying.
Democracy Now has an interview with Michael Moore where he states the obvious — the wealthy, through the GOP, are waging open class war. It’s here. He needs to do it a lot more in many more venues.
The Milwaukee newspaper ran a fairly conservative opinion piece. Although it had to admit:
Both parties are playing with fire. A walkout to thwart legislation will be as attractive to Republicans when they are no longer in power as it is to Democrats now. And scorched-earth tactics, such as those practiced by Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald, will seem just as attractive to Democrats when they regain control of the matches and accelerant.
Walker never campaigned on disenfranchising public-employee unions. If he had, he would not have been elected. He got a spare 52% of the vote – hardly a mandate for what he is trying to do.
Later in the day I’ll run a piece cut for the Economic Treason series.
It focuses on defense contracts to Wisconsin.
Here are the figures you need to know:
Contracts for defense manufacturing to Wisconsin, this year: $9 billion.
Wisconsin state budget gap claimed by Scott “We’re Broke” Walker in order to destroy public sector unions: $137 million.
Teachers, no! They’re selfish parasites.
But:
“Oshkosh Corp. has recently geared up to produce 23,000 Army trucks and trailers in a five-year deal valued at $3 billion. It is the largest Wisconsin-based defense contractor.” — a Madison newspaper
The defense industry in the United States is an exercise in socialism for the private sector. It’s jobs are protected and underwritten by the US government and taxpayer.
And while these contracts means manufacturing jobs, the remain virtually the only such jobs protected in the United States. While everyone else gets tossed to the mercies of the wind from Wall Street.
In a related rumination it’s seems fairly obvious the Wisconsin voters put Ted Nugent in a suit in the governor’s seat.
While Nugent is unelectable because of his public unsavory character and views, the current crop of GOP leaders are as extreme as he is. And they kept some of it under a basket for November. Now that they’re in power, it’s a different story.
It unequivocally shows the peril of staying home come voting time because the lame Democratic Party and its disinterested President have depressed you.
In California, it didn’t happen and the Visigoths were turned away at the gate. And it’s because the GOP tried to paint Latinos as arch enemies of the state. They voted.
Whether or not Wisconsin’s voters can recall the GOP extremists remains to be seen since the latter have shown they’re willing to break and bend laws to disenfranchise their opponents.
Paradoxically, it now seems like it was easier to arrive at some kind of result with a people’s revolt in Egypt than here, the so-called biggest democracy in the world.
Permalink
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
