He’s most famous for helping to screw up the anthrax case early on by using his reputation and real estate at the New York Times to tar the wrong man. Which is about the same order of pox as Judith Miller.
Davos Nick is the archetype of the hand wringing sincere namby-pamby always trying to purvey the proper amount of sincerity, good will and concern over what he views as the problems of the day.
So he moistens his index finger with a bit of spittle and holds it up to the wind. If there’s a hurricane starting to blow he’ll write something like he did today, on Occupy Wall Street, furnishing the obvious with the authority only a man such as him can provide.
More broadly, there’s a growing sense that lopsided outcomes are a result of tycoons’ manipulating the system, lobbying for loopholes and getting away with murder.
Wow! Banksters have gotten “away with murder.”
But more recent research suggests the opposite: inequality not only stinks, but also damages economies.
Double wow! Inequality “stinks.”
Inequality also leads to early deaths and more divorces — a reminder that we’re talking not about data sets here, but about human beings.
Wow! Wow! Wow! Poor people die earlier.
Some critics think that Occupy Wall Street is simply tapping into the public’s resentment and covetousness, nurturing class warfare. Sure, there’s a dollop of envy.
They’re envious! Woo! Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.
“I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground,” reads the tagline. “Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.”
My, 1,170,184 “Followers” on Twitter. Thatsa lotta lickspittle.
You can be my friend on Facebook. It’s more exclusive.
Yes, people, especially young people, have a right to be angry, and the smart ones are focusing their anger on President Obama, Rep. Barney Frank, former Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, and other anti-free-market socialists … The president is losing the support of educated young people in droves.
Of course, the uninspired, uneducated, unskilled and stoned have been conditioned for generations to expect something for nothing …
Instead of busting their humps working two or three jobs, they have time to protest on Wall Street …
Smart people know that [Mr. Michael Moore[ and [Miss Roseanne Barr] represent a fringe movement of people who are poor because they have made a lifetime of poor choices … Stinky hippies, generational slaves to Fedzilla and the transparent entitled are the problem, not the solution.
Ted routinely ridicules people who went to college. He never got over not being particularly popular in Berkeley or Ann Arbor. However, he did use momentary enrollment in community college to avoid service in Vietnam through deferment.
About once a week DD spies a story in the mainstream on how the jobs are out there, it’s just that Americans are too stupid to do them.
These are all part of a a structural unemployment argument, one based on the idea that most of the mass unemployment is due to jobs and skills mismatches. It’s all working Americans fault because they simply aren’t highly trained enough.
It’s been refuted again and again by many respected economists who look at the plight of the US and call the current morass a demand side problem.
To come up with this argument it has essentially one data point, the say-so of Siemens in America.
Further:
Technology giant Siemens Corp., the U.S. arm of Germany’s Siemens AG , has over 3,000 jobs open all over the country. More than half require science, technology, engineering and math-related skills.
Current unemployment, according to the BLS is 14 million. Another 2.5 million were only marginally attached to the workforce and so were not counted. And 9.3 million people were underemployed.
Three thousand unfilled jobs at Siemens in the USA, if filled, would make up 0.00012 of the shortfall.
If Siemens had 100 times the openings, it would still only be 1.2 percent of the entire unemployment picture.
“Caterpillar and Motorola … has at any given time about 200 open positions,” reads the Reuters piece.
The numbers are fly specks, dribs and drabs, statistically unimportant
in terms of the magnitude of the unemployment crisis.
To continually air the complaint from US manufacturers re these small numbers and the unsuitability of American workers is odious.
“These companies’ inability to fill open jobs suggests that part of the unemployment problem confronting the nation could be more of a structural nature rather than a downturn in the business cycle,” asserts the Reuters article.
The numbers in the agency’s own story do not slightly support this argument. But reporters have never been good with arithmetic.
Americans are not suitable for the new manufacturing positions because they are deficient in “math-related skills” as well as other things, it is said.
Politically, part of this seems to be some high-end private sector manufacturing initiative to get more engineers into the workplace. And since they cannot be quickly furnished by universities, this ties in with Jeff Immelt and the presidential jobs council recommendation earlier in the week to expand hiring for foreign scientists.
Which, of course, has nothing to do with easing unemployment.
A group of students stormed Goldman Sachs’s central Milan offices on Friday ahead of worldwide protests against financial inequality planned for the weekend.
The Italian demonstrations are the latest bout of anger at banks and financiers as outcry spreads throughout the world following the occupation of Wall Street in New York by protesters over the past month.
Students managed to break into the hall of the Goldman Sachs building in the heart of Milan’s financial district …
The content/word cloud generator used to provide “related” links to posts made at Globalsecurity.Org always provides unintentionally great found humor.
When such software is used to crunch the words of your standard dullard it’s not worth a second look.
Now, munching through a DD word mass produces another thing entirely.
Here’s the one the software spat out after analyzing a syndicated copy of my post on the Predator drone virus story earlier today.
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
The only reason the Lloyd Blankfeins and Jamie Dimons of the world survive is that they’re never forced, by the media or anyone else, to put all their cards on the table …
The so-called “Too Big to Fail” financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term “Systemically Dangerous Institutions” – are a direct threat to national security.
Will the pitchforks eventually come out, even symbolically? I have no idea. But a year ago there was no name recognition of anti-Wall Street populist anger anywhere but on Paul Krugman’s real estate.
Right now the plutocracy is wondering if it can just wait it all out. Still might be a safe bet.
Computer viruses/malware on US military networks are not remarkable. Ever since I wrote a book on computer viruses in 1994, so it has been.
Some of them rise to newsworthiness. Most don’t.
Because Wired pushed the news of a virus on a computer network administering Predator drone missions out of Creech AFB in Nevada, a fairly nothing story went … viral.
Every reporter who contacted me was working from a partial script that required they ask if this virus was a cyberattack from some other country.
And that’s because the US press has been amply fertilized with manure-filled stories and claims about how cyberwar and malware pose existential threats to this country. Consequently, because these stories are titillating and guarantee eyeballs on the net, everything that’s published in the area is viewed through the absurd lens of “Could it be cyberwar?”
The Creech drone virus, according to a report in a Las Vegas newspaper today, was a prosaic piece of random spyware aimed at stealing log-in information for on-line gaming. And it should not have risen to the level it did.
It’s most distinguishing feature, then, was that it was a virus made famous through exposure by loose-lippers and gossips at Creech — which operated Predators — to Wired.
That newspaper called upon your host. And as a GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow I explained to its military reporter that computer viruses on military networks have never been rare.
Which is what I’ve told people ever since the news first broke.
In e-mail to reporter Keith Rogers, I wrote: “The military is exposed in the same way as everyone else on the world network.”
Mr. Rogers thanked me for my prompt and cogent public information service.
Note:This Las Vegas agency sues people on the web who quote from it as extortion for the extraction of cash money from those targeted. The story is easily Googled.
At the beginning of the week Hank Williams, Jr. promised a “new” tune as payback for the Fox & Friends imbroglio in which he compared the president to Hitler. Two times.
This precipitated the loss of his big money gig as theme song provider to ESPN’s Monday Night Football. (To see the look on the man’s agent as it happened: Priceless.)
The entertainment press jumped all over the press release announcing Hank’s new song and now you can hear it in the YouTube stream above.
‘Cept it’s not a new song.
Hank unfurled his mediocre country-ish hard rock tune, Keep the Change ‘– an obvious play on the Obama administration, in 2009.
And it’s been flogged on YouTube ever since.
Rewritten only slightly to mention Fox & Friends — it was all about hating on the President (lyric: “we know who to blame”) and how we’re in the United Socialist States of America.
“I’ll keep my Christian name,” Hank sang in 2009. And that’s carried over.
Yep, we’ve all been in danger of losing our Christian names since the Muslim took over in the White House. Any day now I expect to get a card in the mail saying my new designation is Dick Muammar Destiny al Pasadena.
Here’s Hank, from 2009, singing the same song for the drumming up of love from the Tea Party:
The Tea Party generated (and generates) a lot of music.
The stuff for Ron Paul protesting fiat money and the Fed is enough to make you run screaming from the room.
And YouTube arrays much of the most popular material in the genre down the right side of the page for Hank Jr’s live performance of Keep the Change.
So it’s not really a coincidence (occasionally the computer algorithms are spot on) that the next video flashing up right next to Hank Jr’s is this:
As painfully stupid and bigoted as it is, Tea Party music is very successful. It is passed around, linked to, played repeatedly and serves as rallying cry/expression of defiance/social glue for its audience. It is brimming with conviction.
There’s no corollary on the other side of the line.
Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie would have perished due to neglect if they’d found themselves catapulted into 2009 and forced to compete for matching Democratic or progressive attention.
Hank Jr’s Keep the Change is not the only Tea Party tune with the same title and subject.
Country artist Darryl Worley tried for publicity using the same method last year.
It won’t come as a shock to anyone that lots of country music artists and their fans don’t like the president …
However, the country charts have largely shied away from this type of inflammation if we don’t include the short period after 9/11 when it granted a dispensation for those who liked the idea of getting our war on. (Chuck, you can correct me if I’m way off.)
These days there’s no political challenge in Country Music TV’s Top Twenty. And while any analysis of the country audience would come away with the idea that a profoundly anti-Obama song might move significant units, no one with a big reputation has tried to test it.
Until now.
Darryl Worley’s “Keep the Change??? is just such a song, one the singer obviously hopes will set his career on fire. For those unfamiliar with him, Worley’s highest-charting number, the jingo and manipulative “Have You Forgotten,??? benefited from the brief country music get-out-of-jail-free card given out after 9/11 to all redneck boors with hearts of gold …
[Worley] rather calculatingly seemed to believe, perhaps with justification, that if “Keep the Change??? … sells enough to white and worked up rural people who buy it because it massages their fear and loathing, country music [would] eventually be forced to play it …
For a Kalamazoo newspaper, Worley — it is told — “[is] concerned about the state of the nation and the overall emotional well-being of its people.??? And that the song “transcends political ties??? — which must surely be one of the biggest crocks you’ll read today.
“We (co-writers Jim ‘Moose’ Brown and Phil O’Donnell) pick song titles because we know they’ll stir up a stink,??? Worley told the newspaper.
It was a strategy that did not work.
Hank Jr’s repackaging of his Keep the Change is obviously a transparent attempt to monetize an epic career embarrassment on Fox.
But even Hank can’t be so stupid that he would think it could make even a few thin dimes against the pile the Monday Night Football song raked in.
