Why, living under the perpetual smog column from the superhighway that bisects my beloved Pasadena!
And Thursday is the morning for four hours of apartment complex leaf blower action.
A new acquaintance recently visited Pasadena for a national convention of art museum librarians. The weather, as usual, was great and she remarked in a message to me that being very fair, she was going to put on sun block before hitting Colorado.
I told her not to worry much about sunburn. In twenty years, I’ve never been sunburned anywhere within a mile of the highway, at best, reddened a little. Can’t happen. In the middle of summer, average days, the mountain disappears. Reflective particulates, an invisibility cloak.
Now, Santa Barbara — on the other hand. Fifteen minutes anytime after 11:00 am, fried.
The Nuge Immigration Plan (NIP) takes five years for even illegal immigrants to become Americans. Until then, they should be treated like indentured servants, meaning that they have to earn their citizenship.
The NIP is not an amnesty program. Amnesty is for left-wing mollycoddlers, losers, bureaucrats and hippies. Occupy that.
We need a real full-length, undefeatable border fence built. All illegal men in America should be required to work on building the fence,
to be completed in one year. We would pay them minimum wage, provide food and shelter, and provide them English and
American history classes at night. Everyone wins.
“The most racist thing our government does is to print literature in Spanish,” he adds.
Like 99 percent of WhiteManistan, Nugent apparently believes illegal immigrants in the US do nothing but soak up government benefits. As someone who’s lived in southern California — no longer any part of WhiteManistan — for over two decades, I find this simultaneously stupefying and hilarious. It is precisely why the GOP is dead here.
[Pablo Pantoja] has a long, impressive political resume, but most recently he was the State Director of Florida Hispanic Outreach for the Republican National Committee. Not any more. Pantoja is now a Democrat.
In his own words (shared with permission):
From: Pablo Pantoja
Subject: From Republican to Democrat
Date: May 13, 2013 5:57:11 PM EDT
Friend,
Yes, I have changed my political affiliation to the Democratic Party.
It doesn’t take much to see the culture of intolerance surrounding the Republican Party today. I have wondered before about the seemingly harsh undertones about immigrants and others. Look no further; a well-known organization recently confirms the intolerance of that which seems different or strange to them.
Studies geared towards making – human beings – viewed as less because of their immigrant status to outright unacceptable claims, are at the center of the immigration debate. Without going too deep on everything surrounding immigration today, the more resounding example this past week was reported by several media outlets.
A researcher included as part of a past dissertation his theory that “the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ.??? The researcher reinforces these views by saying “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.???
Although the organization distanced themselves from those assertions, other immigration-related research is still padded with the same racist and eugenics-based innuendo. Some Republican leaders have blandly (if at all) denied and distanced themselves from this but it doesn’t take away from the culture within the ranks of intolerance. The pseudo-apologies appear to be a quick fix to deep-rooted issues in the Republican Party in hopes that it will soon pass and be forgotten.
The complete disregard of those who are in disadvantage is also palpable. We are not looking at an isolated incident of rhetoric or research. Others subscribe to motivating people to action by stating, “In California, a majority of all Hispanic births are illegitimate. That’s a lot of Democratic voters coming.??? The discourse that moves the Republican Party is filled with this anti-immigrant movement and overall radicalization that is far removed from reality. Another quick example beyond the immigration debate happened during CPAC this year when a supporter shouted ““For giving him shelter and food for all those years???? while a moderator explained how Frederick Douglass had written a letter to his slave master saying that he forgave him for “all the things you did to me.??? I think you get the idea …
The current Republican Party, the living heart of WhiteManistan, makes idols out of psychopaths like Ted Nugent. And the national media environment rewards him for it.
But there are costs to continually hating on everyone unlike you.
More limited in scope and apparently more capable of interesting real publishers are secession novels. Call it a semi-literary genre for WhiteManistan readers without quite enough spine to actually fire on their local Fort Sumter.
In another way of speaking, Tom Clancy knock-offs for neo-Confederates.
Anyway, the Wall Street Journal did a brief review of a few which envision the secession of Texas.
One book with a major publisher, St. Martin’s Press, is “Don’t Mess with Travis” by Bob Smiley, which envisions a Texas governor driven to secession after he discovers a federal plot to siphon off the state’s natural resources and ship them to California.
“We wanted to show the absurdities on both sides of the aisle,” says Mr. Smiley, a television writer in Los Angeles and former researcher for the late William F. Buckley Jr. Of secession, he adds, “It obviously remains something people in Texas think could and maybe even should happen.”
“Alan R. Erwin learned how seriously some took the idea in 1979, when he wrote a pioneering work of Texas secessionist fiction, ‘The Power Exchange’—and found that some Texans considered him the leader of a real revolution,” adds the newspaper near the end.
“I kept telling them, ‘You need to read my book, because we don’t win,'” Mr. Erwin said of the actual [Texas] secessionists,” to the WSJ.
Makes me think I should turn WhiteManistan into a short story.
Discuss.
Note: You really should appreciate that I did such a good job with the surf rock. Because I care about those kinds of details.
You don’t really think a few lines of computer code are going to crash the world down around are ears, do you? I’m disappointed, I’m disappointed in you, Sherlock …
I knew you’d fall for it. That’s your weakness. You always want things
to be clever. — Jim Moriarty, The Reichenbach Fall
Took a while to get to it but the New Yorker ran such a thoroughly insipid piece on the matter of cyberwar, it deserves mention for its slapdash collection of pasted-together assertions and idiotic anecdotes.
The distinction between a war with guns and a war with bits is blurring.
(But did the New Yorker writer ask for the opinions on the matter from those bombed or shot?)
Throughout the conflict in Syria, rebels have used YouTube to foment outrage and to tell their stories. A sentence can tell you that blood flows in the streets, but a handheld camera can show it.
The government in Damascus meanwhile has sent out malware and published its own videos …
The so-called Syrian Electronic Army spun the U.S. stock market into a panic by hacking into the Twitter account of the Associated Press …
More recently, hackers broke into the Twitter feed of The Onion [and posted something inane] …
The Internet has helped to open up [Iran] in recent years, as Evan Osnos has written. But the government remains far more lion than wildebeest.
(As Evan Osnos has written. Of course!)
On shutting off the Internet: It’s terrible for business, creates chaos, and enrages the world.
(Did shutting off the Internet in Syria enrage you or appear to enrage many of your friends? Do you think it enraged the President?)
Last year, the security firm Renesys published a study on just how hard it would be to shut off the Internet in countries around the world. Sixty-one were at “severe risk …”
Cyberwar explained, allegedly. Or, rather, cyberwar discussion as a squirt of intellectual air-freshener for the posh.
“Nicholas Thompson is a grandson of Paul Nitze, one of the subjects of his most recent book, which gave him unprecedented access while researching his book. In March 2013, Thompson received a 21st Century Leader award from the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. He is also an acoustic guitarist and has released three albums of original instrumental music.” — Wikipedia
“This biographical article is written like a résumé … Please help improve it,” reads the site.
It’s hard to believe a guy volunteered to tell this story to the New York Times (although the personal business stimulus may be valuable):
SAN FRANCISCO — In the month since two men violently shoved him to the ground and stole his iPhone 5, Dalton Huckaby has almost completely stopped calling his mother. It usually takes him a full day to text his friends back. Nothing personal, but Mr. Huckaby is just too frightened to take his replacement iPhone out in public.
“I never thought this would happen to me,??? said Mr. Huckaby, 39, a personal trainer, who since the robbery, which he called an iCrime, has become the kind of person who patrols his neighborhood streets in San Francisco warning strangers about the dangers of using their smartphones out in the open.
“Happen to see about the horrible violence you incurred …” reads the Facebook page.
The New York Times has advice to keep you and your iPhone out of the grasp of predators:
BE LIKE A DOLPHIN Dolphins sleep with one eye open, to stay semi-alert to lurking predators and unexpected danger. If you need to use your phone in the wilds of the subway or sidewalk, do so discreetly, reserving at least a portion of your cognitive capacity for minding what is happening around you. Avoid leaving your phone on the table at restaurants, bars and coffee shops where it can easily be snatched …
That’s the weekend’s top Culture of Lickspittle entry. And while street heists for consumer electronics are unfortunate, they’re not uncommon. And I doubt that using one example as intellectual air freshener for the haves and its servant class is particularly helpful.
Particularly with the art and phraseology that came with this one.
“It took a well-coordinated and very busy industrious criminal gang — a directed mob,” said George Smith, senior fellow with Washington, D.C.-based think tank GlobalSecurity.org.
“If you have such a similar mob you can put together, you can think about trying to duplicate this type of thing,” Smith said. “But you’ll have to have some startup capital, since it’s not quite something you can just walk out the door and assemble off the cuff.”
“The picture of two of the New York errand boys flaunting their stack of bundled cash in the car won’t strike anyone as being from the high end of innovation and thinking,” Smith pointed out.
Hiring local petty criminals to do the dirty work also increases the risk of exposure, said Sean Sullivan, a security adviser with the F-Secure security firm in Helsinki, Finland.
“The need to have lots of money mules to withdraw all the cash seems to be the big complication in getting away with the crime. That leaves a trail for law enforcement” …
Or, as a commenter on Slashdot wryly observed, “This is not how bank fraud should be done. The right and proper way is to become too big to fail, too big to jail, rig the LIBOR rates, create systematic rigging, award oneself huge salaries and bonuses, threaten worldwide economic collapse, hold governments to ransom and get huge bailout money.”
Global banking, apparently particularly in the Middle East, can’t secure itself. And it is probably quite prone to criminal recruitment of insiders.
The larger issue looming is how does one secure a financial system the average person, or worker, has no faith in?
In the US, bankers and giant banks are now among the most hated. How do you save or batten down a system when attacks on the system are met with public indifference?
I’d remarked in November that Roscoe Bartlett’s removal from the House of Representatives had crippled the Cult of Electromagnetic Crazy. His caucus leader replacement, Trent Franks of Arizona, is a birther nobody even the most crazy in the GOP pay no mind.
This week the Cult had another spike put through its zombie head with the revelation that the Heritage Foundation’s “immigration study” was co-authored by a man, Jason Richwine, easily tied to a white bigot organization on the web.
I’m not going to go into the details. It’s big news on the political blogs.
But over the years electromagnetic pulse doom, aka the astro-turfing lobby for bombing Iran and buying more missile defense, has also been one of Heritage’s hobby horses.
Heritage Foundation was never a think tank. It’s just another propaganda mill funded by wealth to provide convenient studies and experts for the worst GOP impulses.
So anything that blows it up, like this, is very good.
Wheee! The Heritage Foundation is engaged in frantic damage control; not only did its big anti-immigration-reform report turn out to be a steaming heap of, um, bad research, but one of the co-authors turns out to have a serious white supremacist background.
It would be a terrible thing to happen to a serious think tank. But Heritage isn’t a serious think tank, which means that all of this is just a bit of overdue poetic justice.
Remember, Heritage came up with the ludicrous claim that the Ryan plan would cut unemployment to 2.8 percent, then tried to scrub the result from its records. It produced ludicrous “studies??? purporting to show that small farmers and businessmen were victims of the estate tax. And there are many, many more examples.
So, adios, Heritage and buddies in the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy. It’s been almost twenty years and I’ll miss you. But only a little.
Infamous plastic 3D gun-printing schnook Cody Wilson had more good things happen to him this week when a division of the US government ordered him to take down his digital gun plan for violating the ITAR.
It was promptly rehosted on the Pirate Bay. And I am sure his many libertarian supporters banged their keyboards in joy while opening thier Bitcoin wallets for more philanthropic donations to the cause.
Anarchy! Liberty! Death to all fascists! Except us.
Wilson, who continues to call his operation a non-profit company, as if it’s performing a service to mankind had this to say to one of the tech rags:
“This is the conversation I want,??? Wilson said. “Is this a workable regulatory regime? Can there be defense trade control in the era of the Internet and 3D printing????
“The future of distributed technologies in the Internet is that no one has control of the information,” he told Mashable. “This is more than guns now, man, this is about the Internet, this is about information.”
Well, I don’t know, Cody. Can you make highly enriched uranium on your 3D printer? Perhaps a short range ballistic missile?
All right, let’s make it easy. A small plastic cluster bomb. Something that fairly easily explodes into bits of plastic shrapnel when triggered.
