07.26.13
Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 3:37 pm by George Smith
Police Chief Mark Kessler, now briefly Pennsyltucky’s most famous citizen, has the attention of all the medium-sized newspapers in the region. And the Southern Poverty Law Center which noticed his attempts to take a militia-style group nationwide earlier this summer.
From the Morning Call:
Gilberton police chief Kessler told NBC News on Wednesday that he expects to lose his job, but believes his speech is protected under the First Amendment.
From the Harrisburg Patriot-News, an editorial:
Kessler, 41, bald, outspoken and as hard as the coal that’s scraped from the ground in the massive fields on the east edge of town, is literally a force of one. He also serves on a local school board.
He’s also active in gun-rights circles. He appears on a radio show on the conspiracy-minded website “Infowars??? [run by crazy Alex Jones.] And he hosts his own website where he’s organizing a militia-style group called The Constitutional Security Force.
He also pushed a resolution through the Gilberton borough council authorizing him to take any measures needed to prevent the “unconstitutional enforcement??? of changes to federal gun laws.
Let’s be clear, there’s something seriously disturbing about the idea of a gun-toting, F-Bomb spewing, conspiracy-theorist, police chief/school board member who may or may not have anger management issues being anywhere near a position of power.
But there’s also something weirdly Pennsylvanian about the rhetoric that sprays from Kessler’s mouth as fast as the rounds he fires from the borough-owned weapons in his videos.
Let’s dispense with hard coal romanticism bit. I grew up there and hard men mining hard coal were pretty much all gone by the time I was in my early teens.
The rest is fine, though, and reading it I thought of responding to it from the perspective of having been there and now being here.
What is to be said to my old tribe back in Schuylkill County?
Well, I had some points to make:
Dear Schuylkill County:
I’m writing to you from today from the sunny streets of Pasadena in southern California. But I grew up in Pine Grove and spent almost half my life in Schuylkill Country. I’ve been gone now for over two decades.
However, I can’t imagine any police chief in a small town in the area in the early-70’s, when I was a teen, being anything like Mark Kessler. I didn’t know anyone, in a place where plenty of people had guns, who had a couple assault rifles firing full auto. Didn’t know anyone with even a remote chance of going nationwide with profanity as a brand, a stars-and-bars patch on his shirt and the assertion that “libtards”, uh, take it … well, watch the videos.
The place was strongly Republican and Gus Yatron was the representative in our nation’s capital for a really long time. He was an uncontroversial man, quiet, not known for much of anything. He would have been appalled at someone like Mark Kessler. I suspect everyone who ran things in the small town of Pine Grove, only twice and some as large as Gilberton, would have been horrified. Sure, there were raging jerks but they were kept out of any positions of power or authority.
If you could place Mark Kessler’s videos in a time machine and send them back to Gilberton forty years ago I bet you the people would watch and be convinced the country had collapsed and been overtaken by complete violence and anarchy.
Police Chief Mark is a symbol of national progress, I suppose, and not of any good kind. You can respect the freedom of speech and still believe a person like him needs to be ejected from any position of government-mandated responsibility at once. You can’t excuse away a personal website that just looks like a recruiting advertisement for a militia, one that declares the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms unconstitutional. How does that work with local law enforcement, anyway, since the ATF is a specific enforcement agency of federal law? What happens when, theoretically, the ATF comes to Gilberton?
I can tell you that in southern California, Mark Kessler would have been history as a policeman or sheriff, probably less than a day after his videos went viral. Then maybe he could have a career in private security.
Yes, Schuylkill County and Los Angeles County might as well be as far apart and different as Earth is from Jupiter. But I think we can probably agree that a warm heart is of much greater value than curses, the middle finger and a demonstration spray of hot lead meant to intimidate.
I feel sorry for the people in Gilberton. Perhaps they did not know Chief Mark Kessler like this. But now that they do they should realize, too, that government and its ability to authorize someone to have an assault rifle that’s used to get in the face of others is not good government. Law enforcement that uses its position to try and recruit a militia is not, by any definition, good law enforcement.
Doesn’t matter how small and close-knit your town is, it’s just bad and you’re the worse for it.
On Police Chief Mark Kessler’s website he calls the Southern Poverty Law Center an “anti-American group.”
If you know what the SPLC and what it does, track the violent right, you have an inkling as to why.
Earlier this summer Kessler and his Constitutional Security Force became an object of interest:
In preparation for that feared day when the federal government comes for citizens’ guns — a fear that animates much of the antigovernment “Patriot??? movement — a police chief in Pennsylvania has formed a militia-like group to stand against federal authorities he believes are intent on destroying the Constitution. The group, the Constitutional Protection Force (CPF), has already grown to 38 chapters in 38 states, with each dedicated to “meeting any attempts by the federal government to forcibly disarm the public,??? one website claims.
Behind the effort is Mark Kessler, police chief in the tiny borough of Gilberton, Pa …
Of course, it remains to be seen just what will become of Kessler’s militia — if it will grow or dissolve amid the ever-tendentious fight to pass gun control legislation. But in the meantime, the CPF has attracted widespread attention, and support, from a growing faction on the radical right.
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Posted in WhiteManistan at 11:52 am by George Smith
PARIAH: “To afflict everyone else.”
North Carolina’s voter suppression bill got final approval in the Senate by a vote of 33 to 14 late Thursday afternoon.
The House Bill 589 aka vote suppression bill was passed in the rules committee on Monday and got the Senate’s blessing for the third time this afternoon. Comparatively speaking in Pope’s North Carolina, three days is a long time to debate and pass a bill that contains three pages on voter ID, to eradicate non-existent rampant voter fraud, with another 53 pages on matters that wouldn’t stop voter fraud even if it did exist. The only thing this bill achieves, as Democratic Senator after Democratic Senator pointed out is suppress the vote …
One intersting twist was made by a Republican Senator who claimed that this bill doesn’t suppress the vote, because when other states did it in 2012 – voting in their states went up. That’s because people recognizing that Republicans were coming for their votes so it was a matter of using it or losing it. It was not because these laws made voting more accessible! — PoliticsUSA
“I didn’t want to be right,??? Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says about her prediction that striking a key prong of the Voting Rights Act will lead to a wave of minority voter suppression, “but sadly I am.??? — ThinkProgress
There are literally too many shitheels in USA 2013 to keep up.
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07.25.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:47 pm by George Smith
Wonderful story in the NYT on the “New Audio Geeks”!
They spent years stealing MP3 music, helping make recorded music not pay, and now hate the sound quality. Now they prefer old record players with high end speakers and amps, on which to play used vinyl which pays zero in royalties, or stream Spotify, which pays half a penny a tune to artists. I’m dumbfounded by how cool this is! Now that we’ve used digital tech to destroy the economic model of pop music for the sharing economy we can go back to record players and enjoy the piles of remains in true audio fidelity!
Excerpted:
For a while, Mr. Svizeny, a guitarist and avid music consumer, engaged in the MP3 arms race, ripping songs from Napster and other file-sharing sites and importing them to his iTunes account. “The sound quality didn’t matter at all,??? he said. “Just the music.???
But Mr. Svizeny’s attitude has since changed. He no longer owns an iPod and rarely, if ever, downloads music, he said. At work, he listens to Spotify, the music-streaming service. At home, he plays LPs, inspired, he said, by his father’s collection of Black Sabbath and Frank Zappa records. “I could buy a terabyte hard drive and store countless MP3s, but it’s lost value to me,??? Mr. Svizeny said. “I’d rather hold a physical thing.???
With vinyl, he added, “You’re experiencing music in a different way.???
Mr. Damski went through a similar evolution, from having more than 50,000 songs on his hard drive to “abandoning??? iTunes, he said, in favor of Spotify and the scratchy joys of vinyl. He likes the physicality of LPs, and the way they make it hard for him to skip songs. He also enjoys what he called the “Easter egg hunt??? of used-record shopping, otherwise known as sifting through bins of Olivia Newton-John and Al Martino releases, hoping to find a rare gem from the Beach Boys’ bearded phase.
In true audiophile fashion, it now pains Mr. Damski to listen to low-resolution music played through the microspeakers of a smartphone or a computer. “I wanted to hear a Kinks song the other day that wasn’t on Spotify, so a friend looked it up on YouTube,??? he said. “It sounded so bad.???
“You have a whole generation getting music over the Internet, from streaming, tablets, iPhones,??? a maker of high fidelity equipment told the Times. “It’s introduced many more people to music,??? all of them “potential audiophiles.”
I listen to CDs through the DVD player going into my old Samsung analog television. I am so not where it’s at.
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Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 12:33 pm by George Smith
From PARIAH mag cover star, Ted Nugent, at WorldNetDaily:
As I celebrate the greatest R&B rocktour of my gravity defying career, the Ted Nugent Black Power Tour 2013, paying homage and gushing love every night for the black musical geniuses that inspire all great music, like I have for more than 50 years, it pains me deeply to see the return of such nasty, unnecessary racism erupting across America today.
And before the racism scam industry unleashes their predictable, soulless lying hatred at me, my musicians include my dear black friend Johnny Gunnel and Marco Mendoza, a Mexican-born American. For like everybody I have ever known, and the George Zimmerman family as well I believe, there does not exist a racist fiber in the bones of any Nugent or Nugent associate. Not by any stretch of the imagination, contrary to the real racists out there. I have never met a racist, but I see and hear them on TV all the time, more and more lately …
Did you happen to mention that the misguided, I believe racist prosecution team’s prime witness, one Rachel Jeantel, displayed pretty much every self-inflicted bad choice that really oppresses blacks?
Obesity is also a major cause of death for blacks. That no one disciplined Rachel to get the most basic education to be able to read or speak clearly is the root of unemployment for blacks.
In light of this wisdom, the banner of Ted’s column is UNINTENTIONALLY THE BEST ON THE SUBJECT, EVER!
One can only bow the head in admiration. What a publication! What a guy!
And this is the best iJunkcast ever.
Listen to it all if you dare! Take the DD challenge! Proffer your reaction in fifteen to twenty words or less in the space below! Win an Escape from WhiteManistan No-Prize!
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07.24.13
Posted in WhiteManistan at 5:25 pm by George Smith
PARIAH: “Your Scream of Rage in an Unfree Land!”
Police chief Mark Kessler puts the sleepy patch of Gilberton, Pennsylvania, on the map! The birthplace of a new nation!
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Posted in Ricin Kooks at 3:45 pm by George Smith
American Gothic, 2013:
A Texas woman accused of sending ricin-laced letters to high-ranking officials, including President Barack Obama, has given birth prematurely while in custody, according to her attorney.
Shannon Guess Richardson gave birth to a boy named Brody on July 4, nearly four months ahead of her due date, said Tonda Curry, her Tyler, Texas-based attorney.
The baby weighed less than 2 pounds when he was born at a Texas hospital and “is in need of a lot of medical treatment,” Curry said.
“I’ve been told he’s in need of heart surgery and of course has issues with his lungs not being fully developed,” Curry said of the baby, who is still hospitalized.
He’ll have a fine time at the hands of school yard bullies nine or ten years from now. An Independence Day child, yet.
Obscured by the ricin cluster there actually has been another ricin indictment in the US. The reason it has not made the press is because the accused did not send a letter to the president, it apparently being only part of a domestic poisoning scheme.
From the wire:
Attorneys for an El Dorado woman arrested last month after authorities said she tried to hire someone to poison her husband [with ricin] entered an innocent plea on her behalf Friday in a Bernalillo County, N.M., court.
No other news. Every day like sunshine, more and more examples of coast-to-coast American fucked-up-itude. National exceptionalism, the global brand.
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Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 1:43 pm by George Smith
Confederate flag patch wearin’, swearin’, sub-machine gun firin’ Gilberton, Schuylkill County, police chief Mark Kessler, gone famous for the next 48 hours for his major-lapse-in-judgment video.
Gilberton is about half an hour from where I grew up, part of the North Schuylkill school district, where Kessler is a member of the local board.
Kessler uses his police permit to fire restricted sub-machine guns on private property as a personal statement. I’m reasonably sure this will draw attention from the feds, particularly since his personal website, chiefkessler.com, boldly proclaims:
Thus, ALL laws made by Congress, ALL regulations made by the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco (BAFT), are unconstitutional as outside the scope of the powers granted to Congress and to the Executive Branch by our Constitution. Regulation of arms and ammunition is NOT one of the “enumerated powers??? delegated to Congress or the Executive Branch.
Furthermore, all pretended regulations made by the BAFT are also unconstitutional as in violation of Art. I, Sec. 1, U.S. Constitution, which vests ALL legislative powers granted by the Constitution in CONGRESS. Executive agencies have no lawful authority whatsoever to make rules or regulations of general application to The People!
The website appears to be an attempt to recruit for a militia-styled group, the Constitutional Security Force. Ladies, Chief Mark is also looking for models for a “girls of the CSF” calender. Go, dear readers, before it all comes down.
Kessler is also a fan of the Holocaust-denier rock band, Poker Face, out of Allentown. (You can read about Poker Face on this blog, from the archives. I particularly liked the old post — Amusing Fuhrers.)
Chief Kessler is a gift from WhiteManistan, someone custom made for my definition, heevahava, one like many many others, but still an embarrassment of riches for those who follow the American demographic of insurrectionist neo-Confederates bent on patriotically saving the country and Constitution (with a capital “C’) from tyranny.
The white power right horn-of-plenty is all there on his website. Today he’s a star, the burgermeister of Gilberton and the North Schuylkill school board director still not quite grasping what national publicity has done. And the big public relations problem that’s about to fall on them.
From the Morning Call newspaper:
Despite the ensuing media stir and calls to Borough Hall the video generated Tuesday, Mayor Mary Lou Hannon said she saw no reason to discipline Kessler, who said he made the video to draw attention to gun rights. Hannon noted he did it on his own time and violated no laws.
“Each member of council, each employee and each citizen is not only entitled to their own political opinions, but also the right to express them,” she said in a prepared statement. “We will not take action to quash free speech, whether or not each member of council or any member of council agrees with it.”
Charles Hepler, school board president in the North Schuylkill School District, said he had not seen the video. He declined to comment because the board has not had time to review or discuss it.
So, using your photo in police chief’s uniform to recruit members of a Constitutional Security Force while declaring the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, a federal law enforcement agency, unconstitutional is just “drawing attention to gun rights” Mayor Hannon?
[Horselaugh.]
Yes, and the North Schuylkill board of education endorses Civil War 2.
Gone, eventually, even deep inna hart of Pennsyltucky.
And now for a musical interlude, entirely appropriate, given the circumstances.
It took about a week for Kessler’s video to get noticed. Surf out and you’ll see he’s already disabled comments although he has taken time to monetize it with overlay advertising. So hurry, it may not be long until he’s granted exactly what he wants, a visit from the tyrannical government to inquire about the sub-machine guns.
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07.23.13
Posted in Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 7:06 pm by George Smith
Because of his well-publicized comments on the Zimmerman trial, Ted Nugent has become the object of a picket to get him out of a gig at Toad’s Place in New Haven, Conn.
The local newspaper, the New Haven Register, came down firmly on the matter. It is the first time I’ve seen a mainstream daily newspaper have the stones to call Nugent a bigot in no uncertain terms. The newspaper runs down the laundry list of Nugent-isms, many of which you have read here. His public record is quite clear.
Excerpted:
Ted Nugent is not welcome in New Haven, and Toad’s Place should cancel the Aug.6 concert he is planning here.
It’s not a question of censorship. It’s about the type of people to whom Toad’s Place, as an institution in a community whose values are the opposite of Nugent’s, chooses to provide a platform.
Nugent is a racist, misogynistic, homophobic hate-monger who has demeaned and even threatened violence against the people who live in our community …
Toad’s Place wouldn’t (we hope) choose to host a lecture by David Duke or a concert by the KKK’s house band. So why do its managers think it’s acceptable to support someone who is saying the same kinds of things …
And this is the key to making people pay a penalty for empowering Ted Nugent in the marketplace of ideas. It’s possible for the New Haven newspaper, the city, and a big picketing group, to hurt Toad’s Place. Maybe not enough to stop the Nugent show this year but enough to guarantee he won’t be back again.
I worked for a newspaper. You hand out enough bad press and you can afflict those who need and deserve affliction.
Media Matters has put together a video chain of Ted Nugent words over the last few years.
Nugent’s speech may be protected but he’s also a certified shit-heel, someone who if he were not famous would be treated with no more deference than a guitarist in a white supremacy punk rock band. In a real democracy, not American democracy, he would be a pariah.
And there’s the thing in 2013 America. It made Ted Nugent’s public hate into a money-maker. He is as much a creature of CNN and the Washington Post as he is of the extreme right wing.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 3:48 pm by George Smith
Let’s repeat, again and again until it is crystal clear, Facebook is not your friend. The corporate American web is not your friend. Both practice malicious design in programming for the automation of grasping.
Today’s procedure:
Use Facebook Graph Search to unlike stuff you never should have ‘liked’ in the first place. Type “Photos [your name] likes.” Unlike the embarrassing stuff and pics on ‘friends’ pages who have always ignored you. Collegiality is mostly dead in cyberspace. Your likes of others, unless you actually have a chatting relationship with them, serve only to increase the perception of their popularity. It comes at your expense, too, because Facebook ranks material on this basis. So if you’ve ever wondered why nobody sees your stuff but you see all theirs, this is one contributing reason.
Type “Companies [your name] likes.” Untick most or all of them. Liking companies on Facebook will never do you any good. In fact, it’s bad. Facebook just uses it to insert things you don’t want to see into your “news feed” while it’s hiding your stuff from other people. You do know that, don’t you?
Now type “Movies [your name] likes.” Untick everything if you have more than a few but leave all the boring middle of the road crap that in no way describes you to marketers. Trust me. (There’s another way to go about this although it’s a little more work. Let’s call it signal jamming. You emit a signal for Facebook algorithms, one to be harvested for business. What if your signal makes no sense? Make a list of favorite movies choosing titles from, say, the Al Jolson catalog, or films of the vintage of “Gold Diggers of Broadway.”)
Tip 2: How to find proof Facebook hates you.
Look up at the ‘people you may know’ bar that Facebook uses to push potential ‘friends’ at you. Today or tomorrow you’ll see someone in there, or more than a few, who you either detest outright or who are laughably wrong. Go ahead, check their profiles. See? Facebook algorithms, those you get to “use,” are just to make you stupidly click shit that will never be of benefit.
In line with today’s Tech Tip, readers can tell from the next story that US military police and counter-terror units globally use Facebook’s Graph Search to spy on you, looking for keywords having to do with their units, bases, or other things. And they have no reading comprehension.
“As a joke, a German man recently invited some friends for a walk around a top secret NSA facility [on his Facebook page],” writes The Spiegel. An American military/counter-terror unit assigned to provide security for the NSA facility scans Facebook, netted the timeline post and sent the German federal police to the fellow’s door.
While he got a droll story out of it, if he’d been in the states they might have disappeared him for a bit until it was all sorted out.
The tale is here at The Spiegel.
Corporate American web design mainstreams malicious behavior.
One of the best examples are films, or overlays, which show between you and the sight soon after you browse to them. They serve no other purpose than to get in your face with demands for money, information or to deliver even more advertising on top of the revolving ad content the site already delivers.
A few years ago nuisance overlays were mostly the tool of web bottom-feeders. Now they are everywhere. They are on YouTube videos, forcing you to repeatedly dismiss them. They are dropped into news videos only minutes old. Want to see something about a local fire alert? First you’ll have to watch an advertisement for women’s shoes or a smartphone.
They come with the corporate American web business belief that the company has a right to demand something of you — money or attention to an advertiser, forcefully using what amounts to a denial-of-service attack (if one that can be dismissed, eventually), for the privilege of being there. These are the ethics of a sociopath. (And if you’re reading this and use them, you’re the enemy, too. Enough with the ‘buts’ and excuses. The moment of trust has passed.)
DailyKos, for example and despite the reality that some people of conscience work for it, nails you with an overlay dun passed off as a sincere blandishment every single time you access the page.
There is not much that can be done to eliminate them. You can abandon use of a site or refuse to ever buy something from it or contribute to it because of its use of overlays, making overlay films, on an individual level, counter-productive. You can also just take their stuff and not credit, which is a tactic I feel is justified by any type of push that is effectively denial-of-service or the phenomenon of the infinite download — another type of malicious web design in which a site never stops serving content and unresponsive scripting to the client.
The continuous use of such overlays to harass people constitutes systemic bad behavior rationalized by a corporate philosophy that holds Net users in contempt. When you see them it is a signal you are thought of as someone who ought to be bullied into parting with something, usually money, daily.
This should be enough to tell you that we’re well past the point that some future revision of the web will make the digital automation of mass grasping go away. Instead, it’s time for people to start thinking about ways in which they can show counter-hostility to such American business activity.
American business, from content generation to entertainment and corporate services, has destroyed most of the reality and philosophy of the open web. It should eventually find there is a cost attached to that level of greed, cynicism and bad faith.
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Posted in WhiteManistan at 10:05 am by George Smith
From the Inky:
HARRISBURG – State agency officials raised concerns that strict new voter-identification requirements would disenfranchise voters, according to documents presented Monday in Commonwealth Court.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers produced several memos and other documents that showed state officials expressed reservations that legislation to limit the kinds of acceptable IDs for voting might prevent some groups, such as the elderly and disabled, from voting.
Officials with the Department of Aging and the Department of State, which oversees elections, suggested broad options – such as granting all voters over 65 the right to absentee ballots – as a “good solution to ensure that no qualified elector is disenfranchised because of illness [or] disability” that prevented him or her from obtaining proof of identity.
Among other things, this will eventually result in the public hanging of the GOP. Now people know what it means and they won’t have their vote taken away by wealthy white men who hate people who aren’t. People will show up at the polls and dare the party to not allow them to cast a vote while others walk by. And it will be the end of them.
Another avenue not yet discussed much is the potential for poll workers who may just ignore voter id requirements when they know it may block someone who has voted regularly for years. Poll workers, after all, live in the same cities and communities.
In the end the GOP strategy is unworkable. It only inspires others to work toward the exclusion and destruction of the party. It truly is the party of white male pariahs.
And from the neo-Confederacy, North Carolina, today:
Just when you thought the 2013 session of the North Carolina General Assembly had hit rock bottom, it’s about to get a hell of a lot worse. Click here to see the worse-than-anyone-would-have-ever-imagined voter suppression bill that has emerged in the state Senate. The new 57 page proposal will be heard this afternoon at 2:00 pm in the Senate Rules Committee.
According to good government advocates who have gotten a chance to examine the proposal after obtaining a copy last night, the bill includes dozens of disastrous provisions …
One of the proposed measures are particularly poisonous, patently for the enabling of the citizens of WhiteManistan to disempower all others:
[a] voter can be challenged by any registered voter of the county rather than the precinct
That’s called a straight invitation to a brawl, the GOP’s way of waging its cold Civil War 2 out in the counties.
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