1. It’s allegedly tied to revolution and birth of a nation. The only people’s revolution we’ve had recently is the Tea Party. Which was a revolution by people afraid of others not exactly like them. It was revolt against women’s rights, any religion not fundamentalist Christian, gay people, Mexican and Spanish Americans, all immigrants — illegal or otherwise, who don’t have white skin, Muslims, the imagined conspiracy of sharia-law sapping and impurifying our bodily fluids, money not backed by the old gold standard, the hoax of climate change, Charles Darwin and the socialist guy from Kenya living in the White House.
These are principles upon which one can build a great nation, certainly.
3. Because it’s an excuse to shoot off fireworks while the US fireworks seen firsthand around the world today will be from Predator drones attacking others, bad or good — whatever, much poorer than us.
4. Related to number 3, because we’ve dispensed with declarations of war. They just slow things down.
5. Because there’s suppressed guilt and shame over how things have turned out and nothing works better as salve than waving the American flag, eating grilled hamburgers and hot dogs, shooting off fireworks, watching re-runs of Clint Eastwood in “Heartbreak Ridge” or genuflecting toward “the soldiers” even though you ain’t one, and muttering “But this is still the greatest country in the world.”
The fundraiser continues. You fancied that song/video with the exploding lyric blurbs and Lindsay Lohan thumbnail, right? I know you
did.
You can bathe in the mass delusion of Independence Day having actual meaning in 2011 as we head into the 4th. And if you want to read tearful crap about the American flag as a security blanket for a “wounded nation” post 9-11, go here.
Or if you’d rather not indulge in these displays of mock patriotism and piety for the purpose of hiding from unpleasant reality you can briefly enjoy the Hooray for the Salvation Army Band slideshow. Which doesn’t pretend to be anything but humorous in a mildly disgraceful way.
It’s my version, posted as an MP3 on the blog a while ago, from the old Bill Cosby album of the same name, published by Warner Brothers in 1967.
Support an old independent voice in security affairs, fine music, and other interesting things in the fourth or fifth day of my first fundraiser, ever!
We continue with our quality programming in a moment.
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The economic crash of 2008 has been as hard here as everywhere else.
Since stepping into cyberspace in the early Nineties everything written has been provided largely pro bono. And this is the first fundraiser of any kind that I’ve held.
Originally, I went under the rubric of the old electronic Crypt Newsletter, an e-zine devoted to hacker culture, specifically that centered on the worldwide network of young computer virus-writers.
Much of the work published through it was aimed at increasing public understanding of issues in cybersecurity and the hype-laden subjects of cyberterrorism and cyberwar. That continues to this day.
In 1994 some of the earliest published content was used in The Virus Creation Labs, a book on the old computer virus underground published by American Eagle. Interesting side fact: While the book is now technically out of print, the publisher decamped to Central America before 2000, convinced the country would overturn or that hyperinflation would come about as the result of the Millennium Bug.
By 2004 I had moved to a slightly different place at GlobalSecurity.Org, still doing pro bono public research on various security topics.
This work moved into the domain of poison recipes, specifically those for ricin and alleged home-made chemical and biological weapons, which had originated in the American survivalist extremist fringe during the Eighties. By the Nineties these tracts had been migrated to the Internet and simultaneously translated into Arabic.
In terms of practical things, this was one of the first places you could see at least one of the claims made by the US government, delivered by Colin Powell in his address to the UN Security Council, on reasons for war in Iraq, shot to pieces.
The London ricin ring as a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda had been part of Powell’s presentation and the material published at Globalsecurity destroyed it.
At the time, the US news media largely ignored this but the work could not be erased. History had its way. (Examples of the news on the ricin trial in the US news media are here, at the Washington Post; and from Newsweek.)
Around 2006, the public work was formally moved to Dick Destiny blog.
Material published through here pushed back against mainstream and government claims that al Qaeda had capability in biological chemical weapons and that documents found on the Internet conferred equal capabilities to any jihadis interested in them.
While unpublicized that effort has been a success.
With the help of others the official public position was modified. One example was the grudging concession in the 2008 report from the US Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism: “We accept the validity of intelligence estimates about the current rudimentary nature of terrorist capabilities in the area of biological weapons … ” (Page 39.) Those intelligence estimates were not furnished by the US government’s analytical apparatus. They came from the work of outsiders, from here and analysis provided by colleagues.
Other proof is the anecdotal evidence that mainstream news is no longer littered with scare pieces insisting that al Qaeda men in some broken down hideout can make WMDs because of global access to terror capabilities granted by the Internet. Still, occasionally I have to issue burn notices on retired CIA men who resist getting the message. One example of such, from last year, is here.
Not bad for a blog.
Since then regular readers know I’ve kept up the fight while expanding into system domestic problems of economy and inequality which threaten the nation’s security in ways foreign threats during the war on terror never could.
This short history touches upon why the work has mattered. And so I ask for your help in keeping it moving forward and vital. Please help spread the word.
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Today’s bit of tripe from the business wire continues the received wisdom that mass unemployment is caused by a skills gap. Americans are stupid slobs, the story implies, completely unskilled for the work crying out to be done in the corporate shops of our formerly go-go nation.
John Russo’s chemical lab in North Kingstown has been growing in recent years, even despite a deflated economy, and he expects to add another 15 to 20 positions to his 49 employees over the next year.
But the president of Ultra Scientific Analytical Solutions has found himself in a vexing spot, struggling to fill openings that require specialized training …
“It’s very difficult to find the right person, and there’s all walks of life trying to find jobs. I honestly think there’s a large swath of unemployable,” said Russo, whose firm manufactures and supplies analytical standards. “They don’t have any skills at all.”
The man seems to actually believe this. The story eventually points out, near the end, what kind of job he’s actually trying to fill.
This is well after all the stock lamentation about not enough people being sent to re-training camps community colleges and a number of piddly private sector efforts, like one by the Aspen Institute, to counter the lack of enthusiasm for the idea.
As a grad student I taught laboratory courses which entailed training students in hplc. And I trained lab technicians how to do it when I was a postdoctoral researcher. One did not go to school to learn how to specifically run hplc. I went to get multiple degrees in chemistry.
It’s called building a foundation in a basic hard science. Handling equipment was a necessary part of it but not the essential or central part.
On paper, in standard news, hplc may sound like really high skill work. It’s not. People can be trained to do it and the outlay in labor and time isn’t particularly dear. And even if you are dealing with a person straight from some chem lab instruction at a vocational technical school or a community college, you will have to invest some time in training them on what you have.
My take on the matter, then, is that quite often the man in charge of hiring, or allegedly looking for skilled labor, is either too damn cheap or lazy or both to actually do what used to be considered the normal course of things.
That is, the not looking at people as machines fresh from a box, pre-programmed to operate as widgets for whatever you want done.
What you don’t see in these stories is who the people actually are that the human resources department is throwing out as unfit. Perhaps not all of them were but screening disposed of them, anyway. Or perhaps there were a couple of individuals who may have turned down a job offer or walked away because the company was just too irritating a place or diminishing in its returns. One is just delivered the implication that all job applicants are rubbish — which I strongly doubt is always the case in such matters.
The inefficiency then, as I see it, is not perhaps just in the labor force but also on the corporate side. Where it manifests as a profoundly selfish short-sightedness and disbelief and disinterest in entertaining the idea that people are very trainable. And that maybe it’s part of your civic responsibility to help in these matters.
Near the end of the Associated Press piece, all is revealed. The nature of the job is stated and the fact the Mr. Russo actually did eventually fill it.
“It took Ultra Scientific’s Russo more than half a year to fill one of those jobs,” reads the AP piece. “Until recently, he couldn’t find anyone to operate a specialized piece of equipment that performs high-pressure liquid chromatography, a technique that separates compounds in a solution.
“But his firm’s gain represents an economic loss to the state: The Ph.D. Russo is hiring is coming from [a company the closed its manufacturing facility in Rhode Island].”
In terms of just needing someone to run hplc, a Ph.D. is a bit of an over buy in terms of skills. So the man hired is probably making less than he formerly did.
While illustrates another aspect of hiring for “skills” jobs the AP piece does not mention.
Technicians for running hplc did not get paid particularly well back when I was working in labs although you can probably now find Ph.D’s, who earn a decent living doing only this at giant biotech and pharmaceutical firms. (If the work has not been outsourced to similar labs in Asia.) And these jobs are not good avenues to career advancement. But they are necessary busy work employment opportunities.
A $10 app purports to duplicate a piece of revolutionary home-studio kit from the Eighties, the 4-track cassette recorder. Well, the look of it, anyway.
I used what was known as a Fostex X-15 to record the first Dick Destiny & the Highway Kings LP, Arrogance.
Both pieces of original gear were in the $300-500 range, as I recall.
It was harder to make a decent multi-track recording than the appearance of a cheap app for iKit now makes it look.
Since cassette speed was slow and recording area much smaller compared to analog reel-to-reel tape, it was difficult but not impossible to duplicate high fidelity recordings done with traditional studio gear. And the azimuth on the recording head had to be corrected fairly frequently or the quality took another big hit.
It was also good to have a decent bit of quality tone-shaping gear outboard to get the best signal to the cassette tape.
The Rockman was sold as a high-end piece of guitar gear meant to put great studio sound to tape with a minimum of fiddling. It subsequently wound up all over hit records in the Eighties. That decade’s hits from ZZ Top and Def Leppard have Rockman-treated guitar all over them.
I don’t miss the Fostex X-15 and analog cassette-recording gear. But my systemic hatred of all things app and iKit prevent me from being more than passingly interested in this new piece of ‘retro’ recreated for the digital world. To be totally retro it would have to duplicate the bass hump that occurred on old cassette tape when you did multi-track bounces on these things. And it would somehow have to recreate the warm coat of analog “furz” that resulted when you tried to cram multi-layers of sound onto the old physical format.
Sure it’s cheap. However, the platform isn’t and you can get similarly fiddly 4-track digital recording hardware stand-alones for less.
When Tom Petty (“American Girl”) and Katrina Leskanich (“Walking on Sunshine”) protested the use of their tunes by Michele Bachmann, Ted Nugent stepped into the breach, suggesting “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” and “Stranglehold.” Really. But we already know he’s an annoying tool, lads.
As readers know DD blog has assiduously committed its rock n roll to satirical videos appropriate for the time. The collection is called Tales from the Great Depression. And it will wind up on iTunes and places like that in about a month or earlier, depending on how I feel about paying the Tunecore protection money for the privilege of being in all the official digital stores, sooner rather than later.
Then you’ll be able to get the mp3’s in one place instead of the fun but idiosyncratic task of wading through the Rock n Roll tab and having them for free.
Or you can just go to YouTube and see them all lined up here.
I don’t know of any other uniform collection quite like it although some people must be doing the same thing. The Tea Partiers do a lot of folk music and I’ve touched on it here and here.
It’s almost all bad kitsch and not because of the political content. These things just got no groove, no lyrical zing, or any cool at all. You just can’t be hip singing about the communist living in the White House or how you pine for the old glory days of the Civil War South when you thought all red-blooded Americans were really free.
And theoretically, I’m inclined to like the mild audacity of Rock Solid with Thaddeus McCotter. But, y’know, for a stalwart GOP candidate for President there’s just no evidence he can actually play that red, white and blue Telecaster … loud. So F for Flunk.
There is some good funny music being made on these matters. However, unlike the enthusiastic Tea Party support for its folk music — no matter how bad it is, the progressive side has no such unifying enthusiasm.
According to breaking news GOP Rep. from Michigan, Thaddeus McCotter, will enter the presidential race on Saturday.
DD blog touched upon the quizzical McCotter here. Principally, McCotter is — right now — best known for short guitar-strumming video made with the far right publication, Human Events. Entitled Rock Solid with Thad McCotter, they feature the man playing riffs from the Stones before briefly discussing topics of world interest — like the travails of Silvio Berlusconi.
McCotter still carries a strong whiff of extremist GOP weirdo who just happens to have to be more friendly to labor because he relies somewhat on the union vote in his district.
For instance, he has made a hobby of being in a number of the very bad political documentaries produced by GOP loyalists Ray Griggs and Stephen Bannon. (Bannon is responsible for the Sarah Palin film hagiography, “The Undefeated,” a movie apparently so awful it rates no reviews on Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes despite being regularly in the news.)
McCotter’s list of movies where he has a talking head role is here at IMDb.
The notices on these gobblers speak for themselves.
“This is pure fascist propaganda brought to you by the same people that have been pushing religion and any other mid evil [sic] practices they can come up with,” reads one citizen reviewer of “I Want Your Money.”
“Yay! A 42% Tax cut for the rich!” writes another of the video, on its way to a solid 4.4 on a scale of ten.
McCotter has also written a book entitled Seize Freedom — also his Presidential slogan — which few seem to have read. That is probably about to change.
Two of the biggest obstacles McCotter faces are overcoming Bachmann-mania or the phenomenon of holding one’s nose and supporting Mitt Romney because he’s the least among the extremists. However, McCotter does have his own set of unique quirks.
McCotter is often stilted and, well, weird. It’s difficult to tell if he’s just trying to bring humor to the world or if the Wayne County pol is actually like that all the time.
Q: Mitch Daniels called for a truce on social issues this election cycle. What do you think of that?
McCotter: A truce with whom? This constitutes an unprincipled unilateral surrender to the left that initiated and continues to wage its “culture war??? against Americans’ traditional and cherished way of life.
