Like all good citizens of WhiteManistan, Ted Nugent just can’t figure out why African-Americans don’t love him (or them). And hate Barack Obama, the Hitler Commie. That is because it is obvious that it’s the President who is the sworn enemy of black America. Kind of like when Glenn Beck was always trying to get people to buy he was just like MLK.
The destruction of blacks has been engineered by President Obama’s party for at least the last 50 years. The New Deal was a raw deal, and The Great Society experiment didn’t turn out to be so great after all. It has been an unmitigated disaster for black Americans …
The truth is that the Democratic Party has been the engineer of the destruction of black Americans, and everyone knows it except the very people who need to know it the most – black Americans.
The turbo-destruction will continue for black Americans until they realize that dirty Democrat politicians are their true enemy …
I don’t celebrate Black History Month. I celebrate it every day, as my very black-inspired musical dreams …
There is no doubt that my 2013 tour will be the best of my life. With world-class virtuosos paying tribute to our black heroes nightly, it is only fitting that this year’s tour is aptly titled, “Ted Nugent Black Power 2013.??? Say it loud: my music is black and I’m proud!
Practically speaking, Nugent has been singing this embarrassing tune for years, mostly in an unsuccessful effort to combat the image that he’s a bigot.
It’s truly the stuff of genius, blandishments so ridiculous as to reduce one to tetany. And in the face of continuing derision, like all good people of WhiteManistan, Ted just turns up the volume on the stupid.
Yep, he’s certainly very black.
John Sinclair, manager of the MC5, and one of the original “stinky hippies,??? according to Nugent, describing the scene around the Grande Ballroom in Detroit in the Sixties:
JOHN SINCLAIR: That’s what it was like back then … everybody smoked, nobody snitched, everyone was cool — except for Ted Nugent. He was not cool, always an asshole, everybody hated him (laughs).
The Bush administration spent a great deal of time in office building up homeland security defenses against mostly-imagined threats in biological and chemical terrorism.
On the domestic side it did all it could to destroy food safety by getting rid of regulators.
The years of the Bush presidency could be characterized in many ways, all bad, one being the recurring feature of a surprising number off mass illnesses caused by contamination in food products.
In this climate, the Peanut Corporation of American, run by Stewart Parnell, caused one of the biggest outbreaks of salmonellosis in the country’s history. The outbreak killed nine people and sickened hundreds.
By contrast, anthrax bioterrorist Bruce Ivins killed five and made 17 others very ill.
A federal grand jury indicted four former employees of a peanut company linked to a 2009 salmonella outbreak that killed nine people and sickened hundreds, leading to one of the largest recalls in history.
The 76-count indictment was unsealed Wednesday in federal court in Georgia. It charged the former employees of Virginia-based Peanut Corp. of America with conspiracy, wire fraud, obstruction of justice and others offenses related to contaminated or misbranded food.
Named in the indictment were company owner Stewart Parnell, his brother and company vice president Michael Parnell, Georgia plant manager Samuel Lightsey and Georgia plant quality assurance manager Mary Wilkerson.
FDA inspectors found remarkably bad conditions inside Parnell’s processing plant in Blakely, Ga., including mold and roaches, and the company went bankrupt after the recall …
Stewart Parnell, who invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying before Congress in February 2009, once directed employees to “turn them loose” after samples of peanuts had tested positive for salmonella and then were cleared in a second test, according to e-mail uncovered at the time by congressional investigators.
The indictment cited emails sent between defendants talking about contamination in the product.
Stewart Parnell was subsequently eclipsed by Austin ‘Jack’ Decoster, an Iowa egg farmer with a history of violations who caused the biggest recall of eggs in US history when his products delivered Salmonella enteriditis in 2010.
Decoster’s egg farms were directly responsible for sickening 1,500 — 2,000, or more, and the recall of almost 400 million eggs.
DD blog covered some it in the series puckishly entitled Eat Shit Farms, here.
Trivia note: Bart Stupak became momentarily famous for trying to attach an anti-abortion amendment to the Affordable Care Act. He subsequently declined to run again, apparently frazzled by the enmity directed at him from women’s reproductive rights organizations. Stupak is now a lobbyist.
The equivalent of an Internet troll posting, Reuters polled a whole “1,443 Americans over the age of 18,” coming up with the statistic that a majority — about 53 percent of the citizenry wants illegals deported.
Not where I’m from. And cleaving to that stupid notion resulted in the destruction of the GOP in the state.
The piece, here, has John McCain trying to explain things to his WhiteManistan constituency in Arizona:
Republican Senator John McCain, one of the eight senators in the group, had his own encounter with citizens angered by illegal immigration on Tuesday when residents of his state of Arizona complained bitterly at a town hall meeting about the lack of security on the border with Mexico.
One man asked why troops had not been deployed to the border.
“Why didn’t the army go down there and stop them? Because the only thing that stops them I’m afraid to say, and it’s too damn bad, is a gun,” the man said.
Another resident, Keith Smith, got into a testy exchange with McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate whose views on immigration have fluctuated over the years.
“Cut off their welfare and all their stuff and they’ll go back,” Smith said, referring to undocumented workers.
McCain had been trying to explain his position: “You’re not telling these people the truth. They mow our lawns, they care for our babies, they clean … that’s what those people do,” he said.
They pick the fruit and vegetables in the fields here, are the gardeners, the janitors, the house cleaners, and they’re not on welfare.
Why can’t they send “the troops” to the border? Get the guns, Homer! Zeb Colter for President, 2016! This isn’t the land of debris, it’s the land of the free, dammit!
And anyone here think WhiteManistan is too harsh a mock?
A national survey of Americans shows that a majority fear that cyber warfare is imminent and that the country will attack or be attacked in the next decade. In addition, Americans believe both the government and private sector networks are ill-prepared for a surge in cyber conflict.
A poll by Tenable Network Security, which works with the US Department of Defense and military and government clients globally, found that the increasingly strong rhetoric about a “cyber Pearl Harbor??? and cyber attacks being the modern-day equivalent of nuclear weapons is apparently having an effect on the nation’s psyche.
Modern day equivalent of nuclear weapons.
Now you know why I find a lot of people who work in the national computer security machine contemptible.
Anyway, a poll conducted by a cyberwar defense firm, Tenable, whose business is contracts on the taxpayer dime, just happens to find that a majority of Americans believe cyberwar is imminent. I bet you’d have a hard time making that one stick in a random sampling at any burger joint in Pasadena.
This is how it works. Guys who worked at the National Security Agency, whose leader is famous for claims that cyberwar is causing the greatest transfer of wealth in history, disappearing the future of all Americans, leave and go into business selling the same warped story.
All in the effort to grease expanding budgets on cyberwar defense from which they will personally profit.
The shoeshine boys of cyberwar have done this kind of thing for a decade and a half, at least. I just didn’t have an insulting enough name for them previously.
[iDefense went bankrupt and ceased operation a few years ago. Its CEO’s bizarre proclamations, however, deserve preservation.]
James Adams was highly quotable on what would happen in cyberwar. No one in the mainstream press cast even the slightest fishy eye at his claims, most of which were laughably absurd.
Here then, is a small sampling of James Adams …
Pentagon hackers employed in Eligible Receiver “did more than the massed might of Saddam Hussein’s armies, than the Nazis in the Second World War.” From Techweek, 1999.
“iDefense is way ahead of the competition.” From Washington Technology, “the business newspaper for government systems integrators,” November 1999.
“Which brings us to the final rung on the escalatory ladder: the virtual equivalent of nuclear deployment. I offer as illustration Eligible Receiver.” From a speech, “The Future of War, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, June 2000.
As mentioned yesterday, the state of the debate on drone use is zero. There is no debate, none is allowed. While you don’t have to go three yards in the grass roots web media to hear one, all the very important people and the US government cannot be influenced by it.
Yet despite the testy exchanges and the theatrical protests [by Code Pink ladies who were ejected], it’s worth noting that not a single senator said he or she opposed targeted killings. It was perhaps a recognition that drones are here to stay—a permanent part of America’s hi-tech 21st-century arsenal. Indeed, instead of a dramatic moral showdown, the hearing showcased evidence that Congress and the Obama administration could be moving toward pragmatic compromises …
Consider the lethal targeting of Anwar al Awlaki, the American citizen and al Qaeda member who was killed in a CIA drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. Awlaki was actually placed on the kill list before the Justice Department had finished its opinion, though Obama’s lawyers had already weighed in orally. As for due process, it was far more informal than anything Feinstein envisions. One example: before State Department legal adviser Harold Koh was willing to give his blessing to the deliberate killing of an American, even one who had joined an enemy force, he wanted to scrutinize the intelligence himself. So in March 2010, he holed up in a secure room in the State Department and pored over hundreds of pages of classified reports detailing Awlaki’s alleged involvement in terror plots. Koh had set his own standard to justify the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen: he felt that Awlaki would have to be shown to be “evil,??? with iron-clad intelligence to prove it. After absorbing the chilling intel, which included multiple bombing plots and elaborate plans to attack Americans with ricin and cyanide, Koh concluded that Awlaki was not just evil; he was “satanic.???
In one paragraph, the meretricious rationalization cited yesterday, the line of allegation always used to steamroll thoughtful discussion:
Technology has advanced so far, the little tribes of really poor people, even single individuals, can develop weapons of mass destruction.
In this case, the old boogieman, Anwar al-Alaki — now dead, elevated to “satanic power,” out in the desert wastes of Yemen, virtually dead broke and without any infrastructure, allegedly capable of making a ricin WMD.
Castor seeds, which are where one gets ricin, cannot make a weapon of mass destruction. Indeed, no one has ever made a WMD from ricin, or even made a convincing stab at one.
Yet these are the types of horrendous distortions, now used as received wisdom, for the virtual justification of pre-emptive attacks in the desperate and destitute places of the world.
Homeland Security magazine, edited by Dan Verton, had an interesting piece on the issue of domestic drones the other day. It mentioned that lower level grass roots opposition had canceled a police drone program in Seattle.
Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn on Feb. 6, announced the cancellation of the Seattle Police Department’s controversial surveillance drone program after citizens and civil liberties groups voiced concerns about privacy.
McGinn joins a growing list of state and local officials who are buckling under extreme pressure from their constituents and privacy advocates who argue that police departments are moving too far, too fast, on drone deployments without concrete policies and procedures to safeguard the privacy of law-abiding citizens.
State legislatures around the country are also stepping up activities designed to limit or ban the use of domestic surveillance drones. To date, Florida, Maine, Montana, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas and Virginia have introduced anti-drone bills.
Domestic drones are financed by block grants from the Department of Homeland Security. They are part of a much larger phenomenon, one which has seen national taxpayer dollars pay for the military weaponization of small local police forces.
Locally, a good example was the acquisition of an armored car last year by the South Pasadena police force.
All the hardware, drones now included, becomes appealing to police forces because it appears free. That is, the cost is distributed over the entire population. Like food stamps, only the dollars spent on drones aren’t funneled back into the community as food buys at the local markets.
“It’s a dynamic situation that is subject to change,” said Aftergood. “Industry clearly had a head start, with strong support in Congress and a rosy view of the future full of potential applications for unmanned aerial systems. But privacy values are deeply rooted in society and will have to be addressed by all parties. The debate cannot be avoided indefinitely. It needs to be engaged directly.”
Aftergood is correct. There does need to be a debate and there is already a groundswell of noise on the matter.
However, it comes from all the sources the US government ignores. And nothing good will happen until major news sources start covering drones without just going to the usual experts, chosen from defense think tanks, whose job it is to be fuglemen — wingmen — for whatever the national security machine is pushing.
The argument presented by the side of evil, the forces recommending more and more drones, is one in which they are presented as great and inexorable technological advances, things which make war less bloody.
The technology is not spectacular. And the argument obfuscates by not framing it within an expanded context of American and global reality.
This expanded view recognizes that that the US government/military has moved to take on the role of prosecuting special operations against whomever it thinks necessary in all the desperate and poor corners of the world. War on terror is the rationalization.
This has nothing to do with technology. It is to keep the industries of war moving. It is also is linked to a meme which has become pernicious received wisdom: Technology has advanced so far, the little tribes of really poor people, even single individuals, can develop weapons of mass destruction.
I’ve spent close to a decade as something called a Senior Fellow for GlobalSecurity.Org arguing that’s not true, that it’s a construct that has been passed off because it’s a semantic weapon for the national security industry, one used to steamroll thoughtful discussion.
Drones don’t operate in an environment where the purported adversary has any equivalent technology, or usually, even much of an infrastructure. They are used against populations that cannot mount a conventional defense because they are destitute. Or, as in Pakistan where an air defense could perhaps, theoretically, be mounted, allowed by bribing the government into non-interference over the regions of the poorest with weapon sales and cash assistance.
There is a moral issue in that and the United States is not on the right side of it.
I wrote above that the “debate” on drones has not been such a thing. It is not hard to find dismay and counterargument at the grass roots level.
However, the formal “debate,” what little there is of it, is dominated by the hand puppets of the American government and national security apparatus.
Read an absolutely amazing article today. Entitled “Droning on about Drones,” it was published in the online version of Dawn, Pakistan’s oldest and most widely read English-language newspaper, and written by one Michael Kugelman, identified as the Senior Program Associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
In this piece, the author’s thesis is that all this fuss about America’s drone policy is overdone and perhaps a little hysterical. Yes, he admits, there are some figures that suggest that as many as 900 civilians have been killed in drone strikes between 2004 and 2013. But, he notes, that only averages out to about 100 civilians a year. Apparently, we need to put that number in perspective:
“Now let’s consider some very different types of statistics.”In 2012, measles killed 210 children in Sindh. Karachiites staged numerous anti-drones protests last year, but I don’t recall them holding any rallies to highlight a scourge that was twice as deadly for their province’s kids than drone strikes were for Pakistani civilians.”Nor do I recall any mass action centered around unsafe water. More people in Karachi die each month from contaminated water than have been killed by India’s army since 1947 . . . 630 Pakistani children die from water-borne illness every day (that’s more than three times the total number of Pakistani children the BIJ believes have died from drone strikes since 2004).”
Adds Taibbi: “So there it is, folks. Welcome to the honor of American citizenship. Should we replace E Pluribus Unum with We Don’t Kill as Many Children as Measles? Of course people aren’t mad about bombs being dropped on them from space without reason; they’re mad because anti-Americanism is alluring!”
There’s nothing to add.
Well, there is actually. You can expand the argument to justify drone use just about everywhere in the impoverished world.
Malaria kills [five figures] each year [some country in Africa. Drones, by contrast, have only killed 140.
Roll your own, arguing drone fatalities as something less horrid than many of the world’s most famous diseases. And therefore OK.
“Celebrate freedom and common sense by purchasing more guns and ammo, and give away NRA memberships to everyone you know … The beauty of President Obama’s violence task force headed up by VP Biden … is that Americans are now better armed than any society in the history of mankind. That’s what freedom addicts do. When our government even hints that they are going to ban something, Americans rush out and cause the sales of that product to skyrocket. AR-15s and other mis-identified ‘assault weapons’ are virtually sold out.”
He’s all heart. If smallpox could be a person, it would choose to be Ted.
Meanwhile, President Obama is leading this country to financial ruin, borrowing over a trillion dollars a year for phony “stimulus??? spending and other payoffs for his political cronies. Nobody knows if or when the fiscal collapse will come, but if the country is broke, there likely won’t be enough money to pay for police protection. And the American people know it.
The media try to make rank-and-file Americans feel guilty about buying a gun. The enemies of freedom demonize gun buyers and portray us as social lepers.
We are the largest civil rights organization in the world, and we have been part of the fabric of America ever since 1871.
We will not surrender. We will not appease. We will buy more guns than ever.
The President can’t even get the minimum wage up to what it should be if it had been adjusted for inflation. But this is what our cyberwar shoeshine boys were saying today:
One threat is that another nation could perpetrate a Stuxnet-style attack on the US. Stuxnet, the powerful cyberweapon unleashed on Iran’s nuclear fuel centrifuge facility at Natanz, is reported to have destroyed at least 1,000 of the machines and set the program back as many as two years. Such weapons, targeted at civilian systems, could likely wreak havoc on the US power grid. — the website that used to the newspaper called the Christian Science Monitor
The [executive order] won’t scare potential cyber enemies, says Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS institute, a cybersecurity educational organization.
“I expect all of those attack communities that might have been worried [about the order] are breathing a sigh of relief and shaking their heads in wonder that the United States government leaders could be so completely in the thrall of corporate interests that they would leave their military and financial future in harm’s way,??? he says.
“We are in a cyber war. Most Americans don’t know it … and at this point, we’re losing,” said House Rep.[ Mike Rogers, R-Mich., on the Intelligence Committee.]
The United States military/intelligence structure attacked the Iranian nuclear program with malicious software, most notably the Stuxnet virus.
The argument made by the cyberwar shoeshine corps has morphed that reality into a threat against the United States power grid.
What if a Stuxnet was loosed on us?
It takes a lot of hypocrisy and mental gymnastics to be so self-serving.
Officials within the US government and an assortment of cyberwar flacks have since gone public with their belief that Iran is behind the cyberattacks that made some big banking websites run unevenly, sometimes. But probably not when you were there.
The President took a few moments in last night’s State of the Union to address infrastructure and cybersecurity. It was the usual shoeshine, assertions that something terrible will happen if steps aren’t taken, allegations of a looming menace that means nothing when stacked up against major economic issues.
The mythology of cyberattacks turning off the power, poisoning the water, and — most laughably — attacking the financial system (ie, Wall Street) have been piled so deeply over such a long time, a substantial number of people now believe them.
President Barack Obama on Tuesday signed the long-awaited executive order designed to enhance the security posture of the nation’s critical cyber infrastructure. Obama made the announcement during the State of the Union address.
“America must also face the rapidly growing threat from cyber-attacks,” Obama stated. “We know hackers steal people’s identities and infiltrate private email. We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets. Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, and our air traffic control systems. We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy.”
The new executive order, however, does not have the force of law. And some analysts see it simply as the latest attempt by the administration to increase pressure on Congress to pass meaningful cybersecurity legislation.
“The administration has been building up to issuing an executive order on this for months,” said George Smith, a senior fellow at Globalsecurity.org. “And, no, it won’t have any impact on infrastructure cybersecurity. None of the Obama administration’s executive orders, in anything for that matter, have any teeth or any practical consequence. They’re essentially blandishments and suggestions that are ignored or meant for window dressing. It’s an attempt to shape the debate and push legislation.”
And that’s exactly how Obama left the issue in his State of the Union speech.
Pabulum.
The country would be better served by the President helping to reduce the power of the minority culture of gun nuts with real steps in new law and control. At the end, that was easily the most powerful part of his speech.
[The] cable news networks have, so far, maintained a near-blockade on Nugent clips, and according to Bill Press, wasn’t featured in any of the crowd shots from the speech. The only exceptions, so far, have been CNN and MSNBC, who each aired Nugent snippets during the 5 am hour Wednesday morning, one of which, naturally, contained the word “fecal.???
It wasn’t as if Nugent didn’t make himself available, either. Politico (Oh no! They couldn’t resist either!!) reported that Nugent held court with reporters, telling them that Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI), who was paralyzed in a shooting accident, had “Shit for brains??? because he was critical of Nugent’s attendance at the address. He also denied threatening President Obama.
NBC News’ Luke Russert later asked Nugent if he thought that was “an appropriate thing to say about a sitting member of Congress who’s in a wheelchair????
