The western press always inflates stories of electromagnetic pulse rays and bombs.
It’s in accordance with the rule of law.
A four paragraph newspaper story in a Korean newspaper story earlier in the week triggered the latest round of promises on the unseen weapon that’s always coming but never quite arriving.
Keep in mind that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — except in the case of the Iraq war or statements to the effect that “we’re broke.”
In electromagnetic pulse bomb stories, just the opposite holds true.
Since the early Nineties, any and all claims can be aired in the western press about the existence of non-nuclear EMP bombs. And none of them have to be true.
The collateral result: Tons of computers games, some big budget movies, countless telemovies and loads of tv adventure shows, some airing this season, using electromagnetic pulse bombs as plot devices.
If you’re a script writer and are asked to make all electronic devices fail at once so something bad can be allowed to happen, you take the literary EMP bomb out of the writer’s toolbox.
However, when that happens reality only gets more tortured. Failure was long ago redefined as success.
The Chosun Ilbo newspaper story took a couple days to get noticed. However, now the electromagnetic pulse bomb stories are starting to roll in courtesy of the rest of the western press.
“North Korea appears to be protesting the joint U.S. and South Korean military maneuvers by jamming Global Positioning Devices in the south, which is a nuisance for cell phone and computers users — but is a hint of the looming menace for the military,” reads the lede, rather lamely.
Nuisance jamming, in the context of the story, means electromagnetic pulse bombs are on the way.
“The scope of the damage has been minimal, putting some mobile phones and certain military equipment that use GPS signals on the fritz.” it continues.
On the fritz. Hmmm, sounds serious.
Then, voila, we go from nuisance jamming to using an undefined as such atmospheric atomic explosion:
The North is believed to be nearing completion of an electromagnetic pulse bomb that, if exploded 25 miles above ground would cause irreversible damage to electrical and electronic devices such as mobile phones, computers, radio and radar, experts say.
Then the echo from the four paragraph South Korean news story is heard, one confirming the EMP weapon arms race. We have one, too, claims a South Korean military man. Keep in mind South Korean defense high-ups have made a decades-long habit of claiming lots of rubbish in SK newspapers:
Park Chang-kyu of the Agency for Defense Development … confirmed that South Korea has also developed an advanced electronic device that can be deployed in times of war.
“News of EMP attacks has increased of late, on the heels of a documentary called Iranium, which discusses the possibility and fallout of Iran detonating a nuclear device 400km above the USA,” it observes.
It’s “the movie aimed at getting the bombers and cruise missiles flying toward Iran,” I wrote. A devastating Iranian atomic electromagnetic pulse bomb attack could end US civilization, the movie explained. Unless stopped, nine out of ten Americans dead within a year.
It’s a long speech. But Michael Moore delivered the goods on the 5th in front of what looked like a very large crowd in Madison. It was a call to arms — a fiery, inspirational and direct attack on the plutocracy.
By now, it’s unlikely that anyone besides Scott Walker would dispute that the protests at the Wisconsin state Capitol have energized the labor movement, as well as citizens throughout the state and nation. What became clear during raconteur Michael Moore’s 30-minute talk this afternoon is that these events have also radicalized the public, in ways no one anticipated and those in power should perhaps fear.
“The rich have overplayed their hand,” Moore shouts to thunderous applause.
Dr. Hugh Akston, On Friday March 4, 2011, 12:35 pm EST
Too many times after someone gets fired, they say, “I should have seen it coming.” But most of us don’t see the signs because we don’t want to see them. Dolts! They’re there, right in front of you.
Here are some signs your last day is nigh:
There’s been a “change” in your boss’ behavior. He keeps taking long meetings with security. This is always a fatal indicator.
Your boss speaks admiringly of Scott Walker. Beyond your boss’ attitude or changing behavior, if he starts doing something like this it’s because he considers current workers to be vexing grains of sand in the great machine of commerce.
The boss talks loudly about the great work of the US Chamber of Commerce and how he’d kill to play golf with William Hickey in Prizzi’s Honor Tom J. Donohue. Start learning how to file for unemployment benefits.
The office sycophant stops talking to you. Every team has someone we know is the boss’ boot-licker. This is the person who your boss talks to more than anyone else, always looking for self-validation. If someone you know is the boss’ lickspittle stops talking to you or begins avoiding you, then it could be that he knows more than you do and is reacting accordingly.
You work for a company acutely sensitive to Wall Street directives.
The clock’s ticking.
When you panic and think you’re going to lose your job tomorrow morning, realize only that it’s a sign you’re still sane and possess a functioning intellect.
The nub of it is the statement that arms manufacturing, as a protected and underwritten industry, is socialism for the private sector. And that social programs, like foodstamps, are only for parasites who are leeching off the profits of the more prosperous fit.
When I wrote the piece I knew it would punch the buttons of anyone from the knee-jerk right. They can’t tolerate the idea that others might think a US industry like weapons-making is a rig job. Or even that a mere thought exercise would impose additional taxation on them for the sake of fighting hunger.
Here’s the comment’s heart:
“The tools of war are sold to the feds & they in turn sell them to other governments. Are you going to tax the government for these sales as you suggest? Then giving this tax revenue to all food stamp receipants [sic], so now you want to make government dependent individuals more dependant [sic] & prosperous (with other peoples [sic] money), are you friggin nuts.”
And here’s the pitiless illogic of it.
Subsidized arms building, labor costs magnitudes higher than that which non-military US business employs in emerging markets, which in turn has led to mass unemployment and contributed to the astonishing explosion of people on foodstamps — very good.
Reallocating to prevent hunger at home — very bad. Only for bloodsuckers.
The GOP playbook is about the politics of scapegoating. In hard times, it a tool that’s even more potent.
This Associated Press article demonstrates it without spending much time getting at the root of what has gone on. This is surprising since all polls seem to indicate Scott Walker is now viewed as a totally unsympathetic character for attacking teachers in Wisconsin.
And so the AP story goes for the gratuitous and predictable comment furnished by someone of the Tea Party.
A USA Today/Gallup poll last month found show that Americans largely side with the employees, though about two in five that want government pay and benefits reined in.
Barbara Davis, a retiree from Cherry Hill, N.J., has been watching public workers in rallies in Madison, Wis., as well as Trenton. She says the protesters are wrong about tightening benefits hurting the middle class.
“I’m sorry, but what they’re doing is telling off the middle class,” said Davis, 76, and a co-chairwoman of the Cherry Hill Area Tea Party. “The middle-class people don’t get all the goodies that they do.”
At its heart, the issue is this: Some public workers get a sweet deal compared to other workers. And it’s taxpayers who pay for it.
That’s set off resentment in a time when economic doldrums have left practically everyone tightening their belts. Many people have found their tax bills rising even if their earnings haven’t.
In Davis’ case, it’s the property tax that smarts. She and her husband pay about $12,000 per year for the house she describes as a three-bedroom “tract home.” That’s a high tax even in New Jersey, where the average property tax bill tops $7,000 and where the Tax Foundation has found homeowners pay three and a half times the national median.
A half century ago, industrial jobs at car and steel plants provided high salaries and rich benefits. But as manufacturing moved overseas, many formerly well-paid workers had to take lower-paying jobs. By the end of the Great Recession, the economic order was undeniably changed.
“It’s the government sector worker who’s the new elite, the highest-paid worker on the block,” said David Gregory, who teaches labor and employment law at New York’s St. John’s University.
The previous sentence ought to read:
“It’s the government sector worker person still hanging on to their middle class job who’s the new elite, the highest-paid worker on the block,” said David Gregory, who teaches labor and employment law at New York’s St. John’s University.
When everyone is pushed to the bottom by economic failure, collapse and predatory business which has nothing to do with them, there’s a visible clawing and striking at others — often the neighbors who, in the case, might not have had it so bad, because unions — eliminated everywhere else — were able to protect them.
This is what operates. Instead of the question of how did we arrive at this awful place and who really put us there.
So instead of marching on Goldman Sachs and burning the place to the ground, vindictiveness is turned on the people beside you. Because you have had it bad, then so must others you know or see in queues also suffer.
I’ve made the point before that this describes Ted Nugent in a nutshell.
Nugent lost his career as an arena-busting rocker. And he no longer enjoys much respect from other aging rockstar peers.
So he went vindictive. Nugent turned being rancid into a new career as a “celebrity” voice for Tea Party views and sock puppet for the most extreme political positions from the right, those aimed at destroying the lives of those who used to fill the stadiums he played in. He passes it off through a couple of transparent strategies — bigotry as a cultural war social antidote to political correctness and a poor man’s Atlas Shrugged for the rabid outdoorsman shtick.
With Nugent, the subtext is always payback, revenge and getting even with wimps, cowards, weaklings and bloodsuckers, all favorite words.
If you look at any interview from his salad days, the polite younger man in the reels isn’t around anymore.
Books written about the politics of nihilism and getting even are around. I just don’t have one in front of me.
Best story of the day from the news wires, easy, is the LA Times piece on the 76-year old Japanese porn star, Shigeo Tokuda.
John Glionna tells the story of how Tokuda stumbled into his new career. Which took off because of the emerging market for elderly porn in Japan, which has an aging population.
A light bulb went off over your host’s head. As it must have with many others in the stricken US economy.
We have lots and lots of old people, too. With more coming everyday. And a lot of them either need work outright or need supplemental income.
Put this together with the unsurprising idea that a constant diet of bionic young porn actors and actresses, whose clips you can steal anyway on the Internet, gets old. As you grow old.
Tokuda has emerged as a major player in Japan’s emerging adult movie genre known as “elder porn.” He says he has appeared in more than 350 films such as “Prohibited Nursing” and “Maniac Training of Lolitas.” In these scripts, Tokuda always gets the girl.
The films play upon well-documented Japanese male fantasies. In each, Tokuda plays a gray-haired master of sex who teaches his ways to an assortment of young nurses and secretaries. Whips and sex aides often factor in the plotlines.
“I’m a role model for a lot of men,” he says. “I do my best.”
And:
But after a 2005 stroke (not on the set, he says), he was moved to a desk job by his travel agency.
With no opportunity to slip out unnoticed, he retired — not from porn but from the travel industry. The rest, as they say, is Japanese porn history.
Tokuda earns $500/day on a shoot.
The elder porn business “is a burgeoning industry in a nation that features the world’s oldest population and ranks second (behind the U.S.) in the personal consumption of pornography,” the Times informs. It makes up a fifth of the Japanese porn industry, earning $200 million dollars a year.
Undiscovered territory in the US, I tell ya. Ways to make people feel useful again, something this place sorely lacks.
Last week Matt Taibbi’s on-line column at Rolling Stone ran the second installment in his Supreme Court for Assholes. Taibbi and selected friends form a court and then adjudicate whether or not someone in the news is an asshole. And then, if dubbed so, they’re given a score on a relative scale of assholery.
Surprisingly, the homeland security industry came in for a judgment.
For me, that’s an easy call. Everyone mentioned in natsec stories on this blog over the last few years is an asshole.
1) If you lobby the government to force taxpayers to buy a useless product at great expense [in this case the Rapiscan whole body scanner], are you automatically an asshole?
2) If you take advantage of and/or stoke widespread cultural fears to make money via government contracting, are you an asshole?
THE RULING
The court voted 7-2 in favor of assholedom on the first question. The dissenting votes were Sirota and myself. I was with David here, and we both bought the Lieutenant Calley/Nuremberg defense – see his dissenting opinion below.
On the second question, the court voted 8-1, with Sirota the only dissenter. To me, stoking public fear to make money is inexcusable even in a “just-following-orders??? situation …
Sirota’s dissent went as follows: “Ruling these kind of people as all assholes is too broad a ruling, because the Assholeocracy legally forces private economic actors to think solely of their profits – and nothing more. That’s their legal and fiduciary responsibility, consequences be damned. Many of them might individually be assholes, but as a blanket rule, you can’t say they are all automatically assholes simply because they work within the ubiquitous Assholeocracy.???
The US press continues to massage stories on China’s alleged rising military and how it poses an imagined regional threat to the biggest armed force in history — ours.
They are repellent pieces, flying in the face of common sense and evidence as plain as the nose on your face and now hanging in US stores everywhere.
When China launched threatening war games off Taiwan 15 years ago on the eve of an election on the self-governing island, the U.S. deployed two aircraft carriers, and China quickly backed down.
Things don’t seem so one-sided any more.
China’s military has been on a spending spree at a time that the debt-ridden U.S. government is looking to cut defense costs. On Friday, China announced a 12.7 percent hike for this year, the latest in a string of double-digit increases.
That trend has triggered worries in Congress and among security analysts about whether the United States can maintain its decades-long military predominance in the economically crucial Asia-Pacific.
While the U.S. military has been drained by 10 years of costly conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, China has developed air, naval and missile capabilities that could undercut U.S. superiority in China’s backyard.
There are two places where things are one-sided. Like the growth of the missile, tank and jet aircraft factories of the United States.
And all the stores the middle and lower classes shop in where the durable goods are exclusively made in China or some other east Asian nation with equivalently cheap labor..
Which brings us to Guitar Center, a repeat easy example of China’s alleged excellence in factory production of stuff once invented and made here.
Almost two years ago DD went to Guitar Center to buy a Line 6 Pocket POD, a cheap palm-sized computer that produces virtually studio ready guitar amplifier tones. Line 6 is a US company. However, all its kit — like anything having to do with computers — is made in China.
The first two Pocket PODs were dead right out of the box, one with an obviously defective display, the other with a non-functioning power source. Guitar Center had to eat both of them before the third box I opened had an actual working model in it.
That’s Chinese quality control. You can count on rubbish and the sub-standard. Most Americans will have already noted that doesn’t mean so much in consumer goods when there are no other options. Sub-standard is the new standard.
However, it’s not exactly ready for prime-time in any modern big military, which — most people have also noticed, are highly digital and networked in their command and control functions.
Two out of three advanced fighter aircraft with parts of their innards dead even before action are OK when it’s all just for show and making news. However, when it’s time to meet the enemy for real … better hope you don’t have to go into action anytime in the next twenty years.
The new Guitar Center catalog shows the hollowing out which has occurred in the customer base. There are two tiers of goods. Pricey made-in-America guitar custom-shopped for the wealthy. And everything else, made in China for the US underclass.
Anecdotally from the pages of the catalog, it looks like a 90/10 percent, a split coincidentally something of a mirror image of US inequality.
The gross weight of goods in the store is taken up mostly by Chinese-made stuff. But the riches and high net value lies all in the top ten percent. If you buy anything made-in-China, it devalues to virtually nothing the minute you walk out the door, as a trip to any pawnshop in Pasadena will attest. If you buy the custom shop American-made goods, they are “investments.”
It’s a depressing experience, rock hard proof there’s no way to fix the American economy so that it’s more egalitarian or fair to the middle class short of radical government intervention, the re-establishment of union membership in the private sector and across the board increases in wages.
The people who work at the counters at Guitar Center do not really earn a good living. And while the prices for Chinese made rock ‘n’ roll paraphernalia are very low, the premium goods are priced well out of the reach of employees. Unless they wish to go deep into hock for the sake of a piece of something reserved for musicians with increasingly rare major label deals or members of the plutocracy.
For the plutocrats, in this edition:
Fender Custom Shop Heavy Relic 1962 Stratocaster: $3699.
Gibson Custom Shop ’60 Aged Les Paul: $4999
Paul Reed Smith JA-15 Spruce Top Hollowbody: $4041
A ‘real’ Chinese-made Epiphone Les Paul Std: $ 399
That’s an insurmountable order of magnitude difference.
Good news, lads! Good news! Chinese military kit is really made in China!
Fifteen minutes ago a Muslim guest on MSNBC dubbed GOP Gongressman Peter King a bigot. Like most of the GOP, he’s Ted Nugent in a suit and overweight, proving you can never be too odious and repugnant to be in the Republican party in 2011.
In the United Kingdom they’ve had a justified hate on for Peter King for a long long time. He’s simply despised across the pond. Before half the country turned rancid, respectable people here were also fairly united in their revulsion of him.
The loathsome Peter King is at it again. Speaking to Politico, he’s up in arms that some people think torturing prisoners is wrong …
It’s at this point that it is traditional to note that Congressman King has previous on all this. The only terrorists Peter King thinks should receive protection from the Geneva Conventions are Irish Republican terrorists. That terrorism – ie, blowing up pubs, slaughtering kids as they were out shopping and trying to assassinate the British Prime Minister – was a “noble” cause as far as King was concerned. If he had a problem with the IRA’s old interrogation tactic of threatening a “six-pack” – that is a bullet through each elbow, wrist and knee – one can’t remember him ever saying so. And, sure, if it was good enough for the IRA it should be good enough for the CIA. After all, the Provos were “the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland” weren’t they?
Even by the low standards of the House of Representatives, King is a disgrace. But I suppose, at least he can be relied upon to provide copy.
[The] 2008 Farm Bill included a program for new farmers and ranchers. Last year, the department distributed $18 million to educate young growers across the country.
Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture, said he hoped some beginning farmers would graduate to midsize and large farms as older farmers retired. “I think there needs to be more work in this area,??? he said. “It’s great to invest $18 million to reach out to several thousand to get them interested, but the need here is pretty significant. We need to be even more creative than we’ve been to create strategies so that young people can access operations of all sizes.???
In 2007, the Defense Department announced the sale of 125 more unassembled tanks to Egypt, at an estimated cost of $890 million. So far, Egypt has more than 800 of the tanks. — from the Sunday Times
$890 million to General Dynamics Land Systems for tanks for the deposed Hosni Mubarak. $1.3 billion/year in arms sales welfare.
[The] domestic arms manufacturer of flying killer (drones, General Atomics) and very little else is now half the size of the FDA, a regulatory agency for food and drugs in allegedly the foremost of western nations. — here
Unintentionally inane comment, worth repeating, from the secretary of argriculture:
“It’s great to invest $18 million to reach out to several thousand to get them interested, but the need here is pretty significant. We need to be even more creative than we’ve been to create strategies … ”
