Yesterday I went to the DMV in Pasadena. If you’ve ever been to a DMV office in southern California without an appointment, you know there’s a lot of waiting.
Like many businesses, the DMV has put up flat tv screens to divert you. One runs the “DMV TV Network,” which made me laugh. It features little informational notes on good driving and traffic law interspersed with little quizzes like:
“Which of the following will wake you up best?”
A. energy drink
B. coffee
C. apple
The correct answer is … apple! DMV tv helpfully explains its natural sugars help the regulation of your energy level, which is fairly accurate.
Also, apples do not contain unnatural “chemicials [sic].”
Well, their hearts are in the right place.
Also displayed, weekend box office results.
Zero Dark Thirty, the movie about the hunt for bin Laden, has made $4 million, only twice as much as the already failed Sylvester Stallone gobbler, Bullet to the Head.
I’ve infrequently said Americans have no taste for movies from the endless war, no matter the hype associated with them.
You can’t satirize America. Not even with fictitious grindhouse movie posters. (Which rule and you should recommend to others.)
What to do with the profane man who was visited by the US Secret Service last year under suspicion of making threats against the president or inspiring others to do so, who has called the president a coyote in the living room that needs taking care of, who has called the president a communist in need of fixing?
Invite him to the State of the Union address as your guest in good standing with the neo-fascist party.
From the wire:
On Tuesday, Nugent will attend Obama’s State of the Union address as a guest of Republican Texas Rep. Steve Stockman …
“I am excited to have a patriot like Ted Nugent joining me in the House Chamber to hear from President Obama,??? Stockman said in a statement. “After the address I’m sure Ted will have plenty to say.???
Having plenty to say is what got The Nuge in hot water in April 2012 at a National Rifle Association convention. His controversial comments even rated the outspoken gun-rights advocate a visit from the Secret Service.
They have no common decency, amply demonstrating it time after time.
The U.S. Navy SEAL who shot and killed Osama bin Laden is speaking out for the first time since the May 1, 2011, raid on the al-Qaida leader’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
In an interview with Esquire, the former SEAL—identified as “The Shooter” due to what the magazine described as “safety” reasons—said he’s been largely abandoned by the U.S. government since leaving the military last fall.
He told Esquire he decided to speak out to both correct the record of the bin Laden mission and to put a spotlight on how some of the U.S. military’s highly trained and accomplished soldiers are treated by the government once they return to civilian life.
Despite killing the world’s most-wanted terrorist, he said, he was not given a pension, health care or protection for himself or his family.
“[SEAL command] told me they could get me a job driving a beer truck in Milwaukee,” he told Esquire.
Plus, he said, “my health care for me and my family stopped. I asked if there was some transition from my Tricare to Blue Cross Blue Shield. They said no. You’re out of the service, your coverage is over. Thanks for your 16 years. Go f— yourself.”
Not even good for driving a beer truck, which would seem recession proof.
Unfortunately, there are millions more already in line.
The good news: The Esquire notice will get him a book deal and some offers. If he can’t write, a ghost will be furnished. Hardly anyone else gets that opportunity.
Funny how the Ted Nugents of the country never want for work.
Ted Nugent appears to have failed out of the opinion pages of the Washington Times, replacing it with an identical column at the conspiracy and birther news site, WorldNetDaily. It is difficult to imagine being too insane and right-wing for the Washington Times. After all, writing the same thing over and over about the president being a Chicago-style gangster, a fan of Mao Tse-Tung and someone using the “Saul Alinsky playbook” to dismantle America never gets old with the fan base. Or perhaps Times editors noticed Ted was giving banner interviews, identical to his his columns for them, for a competitor, WND.
So this week at WND, Nugent delivers another interview with the same old stuff, including his new vehement assertion: The president is a commie who appoints commies!
Who uses the word ‘commie’ now? Anyone, besides white people over sixty? Do young people even know what ‘commies’ were or where they lived?
If there’s anything that paints one as an old fool, it’s probably ranting about ‘commies’ in 2013.
“Then when you scrutinize the self-evident truth of God-given individual rights, the Founding Fathers wrote it down, not because they got together and had a good idea. They knew that the king denied these self-evident truths and these God-given individual rights.
“So we wrote down the self-evident, truth-based, God-given rights that we the people in this new land, free of kings, free of emperors, free of tyrants, free of slave drivers, that we will exercise our God-given, instinctual, self-evident, truth-based right to self-defense from any evil force that threatens our gift of life from God and especially power-abusing monsters in government.???
Nugent said he also doesn’t buy President Obama’s claim that he’s proposing “common-sense??? gun restrictions or Obama’s claim that he is a great respecter of the Second Amendment.
“I say sure you are, Mr. President, and I’m a gay pirate,??? mused Nugent. “One just has to study Barack Obama’s voting record.
“The commander in chief will go to the Vietnam Memorial Wall and will put on his community organizer, ACORN, Van Jones, gangland, Chicago, gangster-politic scam best and pretend to show respect for 58,000 heroic American military warriors who gave the ultimate sacrifice fighting communism. And then President Obama will go back and appoint members of the Communist Party as his czars.
“He will continue to associate [with] communists, publicly admitted communists after visiting the Vietnam Memorial Wall.
Ted Nugent did not fight in the Vietnam War. ACORN no longer exists, although many Tea Party types when polled after the November election evinced belief it had been the cause of the president’s victory. And many of the Founding Fathers, whose work Nugent loves to cite, were slave-owners.
Which a lot of people who’ve had high school history and remember it know.
In a side note, Ted Nugent is emblematic of why the Republican Party was rejected by voters in November. It became a party that thinks exactly like him, if — on occasion, and only on occasion — more politely.
Al Qaeda’s propaganda arm recently announced the release of a “encryption plugin” for use by its jihadis.
When you’re finally to that, fifteen years after the encryption debates, you can see how far behind and failing the terrorist organization is.
The encryption plug-in is potentially linked to an alleged al Qaeda “resurgence,” one the vast majority of Americans will have missed. Whenever they draw attention to themselves, or — at least — their loosely affiliated groups do, they are destroyed, after mercilessly brief accidental success. (See Mali, where the “al Qaeda affiliate” war was a menace only to the locals until the French foreign legion ran them out of Timbuktu recently.)
Putting things in perspective, the al Qaeda that existed post-9/11 for a few years is smashed. History moves on. No one gets a second act although fringe groups persist.
Al Qaeda, when it was much stronger, was always a laughingstock in cyberspace, its websites easily penetrated and overrun. It was seeded with spies, from national counter-terrorism agencies to amateurs.
It couldn’t even handle the roll out of its comic book designed to terrify Americans, Inspire.
Inspire’s first issue, as .pdf, was purloined by British intelligence, broken into and its content replaced with unreadable encrypted rubbish. Then it was re-uploaded onto al Qaeda servers were it spoiled the debut of the publication, becoming an object of ridicule.
I was interviewed for Homeland Security Today on the encryption matter.
The Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF), the underground propaganda arm of Al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist organizations, on Feb. 6 released a new encryption plugin for use on a wide variety of instant messaging platforms, raising concerns that al Qaeda may be close to achieving one of the key steps in a potential resurgence — secure communications.
The new encryption tool, Asrar Al Dardashah, was first reported by the Middle East Media Research Institute’s (MEMRI) Jihad and Terrorism Studies Project (JTTM). A complete English translation of the announcement was provided to Homeland Security Today.
With the release of the Asrar Al Dardashah plugin, GIMF promised “secure correspondence” based on the Pidgin chat client, which supports multiple chat platforms, including Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk and Jabber/XMPP.
“The Asrar Al Dardashah plugin supports most of the languages in the world through the use of Unicode encoding, including Arabic, English, Urdu, Pashto, Bengali and Indonesian,” stated the announcement, which was posted on several top online Jihadist forums and GIMF’s official website …
George Smith, a senior fellow at Globalsecurity.org, said the loosely organized Al Qaeda network and its affiliates have a lot of work to do on internal security before the addition of encryption will make a difference.
“The use of encryption software in something as loosely organized as the Al Qaeda and general jihadi networks would only benefit them substantially if they could clean out all the infiltrators, informants and guarantee that everyone was on the same page and used it properly,” said Smith. “That’s an order they most likely will never be able to fill.”
Encryption can’t revive a lousy organization whose time has come and gone.
Readers may notice the presence of someone from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Thomas M. Sanderson, who provides what one expects from such an organization. Keep in mind, all the old national security think tanks aren’t such things at all. They’re places staffed by people paid to dispense whatever shoeshine the state-of-perpetual-war and enemies everywhere hermetic bubble calls for.
They’ve been that way for a long time, warehouses (or Keynesian jobs programs) for the overflow of national security industry drones.
So you get a claim which is contrary to reality.
“Sanderson, who recently worked on an Al Qaeda futures study for the US Special Operations Command, said the ability to engage in encrypted communications ‘is one of the key factors in a potential Al Qaeda resurgence.’ ” it reads.
Having not appeared in the leading newspaper of crazy, the Washington Times, for almost a month, Ted Nugent may have failed down to the right wing news and conspiracy website, WND.
Today, World Net Daily announced a new Nugent column, the Ted Offensive. And only Ted Nugent could be stupid enough to attempt to cop the name of the North Vietnam offensive launched on January 30, 1968, one that informed the United States it would lose in Vietnam.
Ted Nugent, coincidentally, did not serve in Vietnam. But he was not a a simple draft dodger as many assume. His selective service classification indicates he was given a deferment for community college and a later one for an unspecified problem that made him unfit for duty.
But back to the Ted Offensive.
Unsurprisingly, it’s lousy, more of the unconsciously horrendous publicity the right is so good at — screeds that convince everyone not in the tribe that the GOP, the National Rifle Association, Ted Nugent — are insane.
What Sen. Feinstein, VP Biden or President Obama want is more control over Americans. These socialists and Marxists don’t care about mass murder. What they are want is more control, their boots on our necks …
Gun banners will go after handguns next. Liberal propaganda ministers will beat the drum that handguns are more evil than so-called assault weapons, that handguns are only good for killing other human beings.
Banning guns is the means to an end. The end is control, not freedom. They know that they can do whatever they so choose to a disarmed America.
It’s a plot.
The Obama administration and the liberals will end freedom in America, using the methods of a harmless dead man, Saul Alinsky, an obscure dead man who wrote a book Glenn Beck once told his audience would be the blueprint for destroying freedom and old WhiteManistan Ted Nugent’s America of pink tiger-striped AR-15s.
Despite now notorious repeat appearances on CNN (they keep having him on because he’s a cartoon of a ranting bad man) and network television, the last twelve months have not been kind to Nugent.
Readers will have noticed much of national security has taken an extended holiday. Cyberwar took off for a long time because the people who love to talk about it and make all the claims planted in the news, the upper tier, were enjoying Xmas and a few extra weeks sipping champagne in their chalets.
Al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction have taken a permanent holiday. It is difficult to take seriously discussions on the ease of making biological weapons, or the Internet ricin recipe being dangerous when American white gun crazies have shot up more people in the last 12 months than jihadis in the US post-p/11.
All this is because much of the old national security threat matrix is shoeshine — talk to guarantee full employment in that jobs sector.
The real problems of the US are a political party that has turned neo-fascist, predatory American multi-national big business, inequality, an economy that doesn’t work for way too many citizens, and the continual real threat posed by a runaway gun lobby that exists only to stimulate the business of small arms manufacturing.
Talks of cyberwar and a cyber Pearl Harbor seem to be a regular fixture of news reports in the last few months, with prominent U.S. administration officials like Janet Napolitano or Leon Panetta regularly touting the threat of a cyber attack on the United States. But not everybody is buying it. For one, Howard Schmidt, the former chief cybersecurity advisor to President Barack Obama, is skeptical.
“I don’t share the viewpoint that we’re on the brink of disaster every time a new worm comes out or a new DDoS (distributed denial of service) comes out,” he told Mashable. In fact, he even disagrees with the terminology that’s being used. “I don’t like using the word cyberwar, and I don’t like using the word cyber 9/11, cyber Pearl Harbor and all these other things,” he said …
Schmidt said he’s not discounting the threat, in fact, he is well aware of the potential disruption that cyber attacks could cause. For him, the worst case scenario is an attack that takes out power, something that could have cascading and potentially very damaging effects. It’s exactly for this reason that he also warns that using cyberweapons or malware against another nations should be a measure of last resort.
“You can use fire in a conflict if you’re not going to burn. If you’re going to burn, you better not care about what’s going to burn,” he said. “And in cyberspace you think about how vulnerable we are in the United States and generally in the developed countries, that could have a worse effect than what we’re trying to solve to begin with.”
Of course, Mashable itself is shoeshine. It exists only because of the need for grease — and a class of publicity workers for the upper tier in US tech society, providing comment and news on material always implied to be revolutionary but of virtually zero value when thinking about the problems that have blighted the economic prospects and health of hundreds of millions in the United States.
Electronic Pearl Harbor talk is now almost twenty years old. Over fifteen years ago I flatly stated that “electronic Pearl Harbor — not likely.” The people who are writing about it now were in rubber pants when the foundations of the meme were put in place.
Howard Schmidt is an old-timer. He’s been around long enough to see that cyberwar has never made the United States skip a beat while plenty of other things from the real world have.
“[Operation] Red October is rumored to be either a Russian or a Chinese operation,” reads Mashable.
Six months from now it will be something else. Just as it’s been for the past fifteen years.
A secret legal review on the use of America’s growing arsenal of cyberweapons has concluded that President Obama has the broad power to order a pre-emptive strike if the United States detects credible evidence of a major digital attack looming from abroad, according to officials involved in the review.
That decision is among several reached in recent months as the administration moves, in the next few weeks, to approve the nation’s first rules for how the military can defend, or retaliate, against a major cyberattack. New policies will also govern how the intelligence agencies can carry out searches of faraway computer networks for signs of potential attacks on the United States and, if the president approves, attack adversaries by injecting them with destructive code — even if there is no declared war.
“While many potential targets are military, a country’s power grids, financial systems and communications networks can also be crippled,” reads the Times.
The financial system was crippled, by its own corrupt work and bad faith financial speculation in 2007.
What happened? The economy tottered, the world was thrown into a depression and the US government stepped in to keep the banks from failing.
Cyberwar could do that? That’s shoeshine hard at work.
“Meet the Data Brains Behind the Rise of Facebook” reads the title and you get a picture of said brains arrayed, all guys, all smiles, trying to look as hip as can be, like a new rat pack or a famous all boy pop group.
Wired and the Facebook programmers want you to believe the worldwide data handling that goes into coordinating the nuisance ads inserted into your news feed along with all the likes and posts, is something remarkable.
Nope fellows, they’re not the new Manhattan Project in 1,000 words. They’re not even the global effort that makes the new flu vaccine every year, just guys who communicate the jargon of software platforms, big data and server clusters.
“[Someone] even graced the Facebook data team with its own theme song,” reads Wired.
The National Journal has published a deep piece on the obsolescence of the “Reagan Democrat.” More precisely, it discusses the hardening reality in which the Democratic Party doesn’t need to rely on white conservative voters to win the White House anymore if it continues to strengthen its progressive multi-cultural and younger coalition.
With the GOP and the times, white conservative voters turned inward into a tribe of neo-fascists susceptible to mass paranoia, easily motivated to hatred of everything and everyone not exactly like them.
On issues from gay rights to gun control, immigration reform, and climate change—all of which he highlighted in his ringing Inaugural Address last week—Obama is now unreservedly articulating the preferences of the Democratic “coalition of the ascendant??? centered on minorities, the millennial generation, and socially liberal upscale whites, especially women. Across all of these issues, and many others such as the pace of withdrawal from Afghanistan and ending the ban on women in combat, Obama is displaying much less concern than most national Democratic leaders since the 1960s about antagonizing culturally conservative blue-collar, older, and rural whites, many of whom oppose them …
[The] ongoing racial and ideological sorting of the electorate has rapidly reduced the Democrats’ dependence on those voters. In 2012, Obama lost more than three-fifths of noncollege whites and whites older than 45; he carried only one-third of noncollege white men, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee since Walter Mondale was buried in Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide. Yet Obama nonetheless won a solid victory by posting strong numbers with minorities (a combined 80 percent), the millennials (60 percent), and college-educated white women (46 percent overall and more in many key states); moreover, each of those groups expanded its share of the total vote. (For the first time, white women with college degrees cast more votes last year than white men without them.)
Similarly, Democrats last November regained House seats in districts that are more racially diverse than the national average, while continuing to suffer losses in those more heavily white: After 2012, Democrats hold just 31 of the 143 districts in which whites constitute at least 80 percent of the population.
In the Senate, the Democratic majority still relies on a significant number of members from states that lean Republican in presidential politics. But, overall, the pattern of the party’s presidential and congressional support in 2012 largely fulfilled the dreams of liberal strategists from the early 1970s, who believed Democrats could build a more ideologically forceful party if they reduced their reliance on conservative whites. As Richard Nixon’s landslide defeat of George McGovern in 1972 demonstrated, a coalition of minorities, young people, and socially liberal upscale whites was far from a majority. Four decades later, amid the headwind of a grueling recovery from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, Obama emphatically proved the opposite. The result is that the president, to a striking extent, appears unshackled from the fear of alienating conservative white voters …
AN internet geek from Burnley who was caught with an Al-Qaeda manual and the Anarchist’s Cookbook has been told he should spend less time online.
But Mr Justice Fulford, sitting at the Old Bailey, ruled that Niall Florence, 21, was not a terrorist but a ‘young and naive computer addict’.
Florence was auctioning off copies of the Anarchist’s Cookbook, the infamous 1971 guide to bomb-making, lock-picking and credit card fraud, on the e-Bay website.
And he sold 25 copies, at £1 each, before police swooped on his parents’ home in St Cuthbert’s Street in December 2011 …
Police also found an Al Qaeda jihadist training manual, during the raid, and instructions on how to make the poison ricin.
Florence was about eleven years old when the original suspects in the London ricin trial were arrested.
Florence received a suspended sentence on convictions for “collecting a record of information for terrorist purposes and one count of disseminating terrorist publications.”
The judge admitted he recognized Florence was not a terrorist and “posed no threat to the public.”
