07.16.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Psychopath & Sociopath, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 5:09 pm by George Smith
The rest of the country is now sort of hipping to the fact that newspaper reporters, tv men and music journalists calling Ted Nugent just a good speaker with colorful opinions, for years, has had a regrettable result.
This:
But George Zimmerman and his entire family, innocent of any wrongdoing, have lost everything and will be in debt for a long, long time for having to fight the trumped-up charges that he “profiled??? and/or set out to murder the poor, helpless, dope-smoking, dope-peddling, gangsta wannabe, Skittles hoodie boy.
No link, from Nugent’s column at WorldNetDaily, the second in two days on the same matter, only with the hate speech turned up louder.
It is hard to imagine a copy editor who is a decent human being not walking off the job upon being assigned a column containing that. Certainly, of all the copy editors and editors I’ve worked for or known, none would have stomached it or bought any arguments that it had worth as controversial free speech.
It’s just pure cruelty.
The mainstream media made Ted Nugent a more successful character. He’s as much a creature of CNN and network news as he is of fringe extreme right wing websites. Music journalists who have to deal with him every weekend on his summer tour of dumps hardly touch him other than to print whatever he says.
A few days ago, at the Phoenix New Times, the terrible alternative news weekly company that bought the Village Voice and its properties years ago:
Nugent: Clearly Democrats have a solid lock on racism by scamming dishonest policies that continue the slavery of dependency that has hurt the black community more than any other … Historically it was the Democrat Party that fought against civil rights on all fronts, even infesting the evil subhuman KKK. The truth is very ugly and hurts, doesn’t it?
Ted Nugent is this summer’s public standard-bearer for malice delivered fresh from WhiteManistan every week.
There’s a cost for mainstreaming hate speech as bread-and-circuses entertainment and the final line on the bill for it isn’t in sight.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 3:46 pm by George Smith
Tech Tip 1. Start unliking stuff in your movies, music and tv tracks. Facebook’s Open Graph search in league with corporate America and random busybodies will only use it against you. No good will come of it. Seriously, do have any real ‘friends’ who like you for your canonical list of movies and books? Your corporate ‘likes’ are of no value to you. Why should anyone else get value from them? You think Facebook and corporate America will get friendly with you some day and just dispense a benefit in return, one you never saw coming? While you’re unliking stuff, use your smartphone and call your doctor to say you won’t be needing any more refills on the prescription for stupid pills.
Tech Tip 2. Block someone. FB is not a democracy of free speech. Mark Zuckerberg would secretly laugh at you for thinking so. America is not about free speech, it’s about corporate fascism. And neither is your “timeline” about free speech. It’s your virtual backyard micro app, one you have slight control over. So when a stranger you’d never share a drink with starts getting on your nerves in a “share” comment line and doesn’t take a hint, block. Block with vigor, block with elan. It makes you feel good, too. Refresh the page and watch their silly little face or avatar replaced by a blank silhouette. Now they can’t see you! It will take a moment for them to grasp what has happened, just as they were sharpening another rudeness. It will spoil their fun for a bit and you’ll have enjoyed stepping on someone. Trust me. I’m a professional.
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Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 12:12 pm by George Smith
By reason of insanity or something.
From the wire:
A Texas woman has been charged with federal violations for allegedly sending ricin-laced letters to the president.
Shannon Guess Richardson, a 35-year-old New Boston, Texas, resident, was named in a three-count indictment by a federal grand jury in the Tyler Division of the Eastern District of Texas …
Richardson contacted federal investigators claiming she had found a suspicious substance in the refrigerator and ricin-related internet searches on the couple’s computer, the article says. Investigators say they found evidence that she sent the letters herself.
Richardson’s lawyer, Tonda Curry, told the Associated Press that her client will plead not guilty and that the government must show that the woman had “the requisite mental state??? to prove her actions were a crime.
I’ve not commented on the US government’s spying on the mail program, inadvertantly revealed in one of the indictments hadn’t down in the ricin cluster.
Two reasons: There was no need of it in either the Dutscke or Richardson cases. Dutschke allegedly wanted the FBI to come to Tupelo, MI. And Richardson summoned the agency, allegedly putting a return address on the letters that placed them near her home.
Reason number two: Bruce Ivins, the anthrax mailer, would not have been caught by the program although it was put in place because of him. Ivins drove from Frederick, MD, to a mailbox drop in Princeton, NJ., to send anthrax.
So what is the net effect of the massive spying effort? Virtually nil.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 9:56 am by George Smith
Economics Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz neatly explains corporate American rent-seeking behavior in a New York Times piece examining the Supreme Court’s ruling that an American company cannot patent existing human genes.
It involved a company called Myriad and patents on two genes thought to be at the root of breast cancer. With the establishment of its patents, the company established a monopoly on potential early breast cancer diagnosis, pricing a very basic need in such a way that only the privileged could afford it.
Stiglitz defines and explains:
[Some] of the most iniquitous aspects of inequality creation within our economic system are a result of “rent-seeking???: profits, and inequality, generated by manipulating social or political conditions to get a larger share of the economic pie, rather than increasing the size of that pie. And the most iniquitous aspect of this wealth appropriation arises when the wealth that goes to the top comes at the expense of the bottom. Myriad’s efforts satisfied both these conditions: the profits the company gained from charging for its test added nothing to the size and dynamism of the economy, and simultaneously decreased the welfare of those who could not afford it …
Myriad’s effort to patent human DNA was one of the worst manifestations of the inequality in access to health, which in turn is one of the worst manifestations of the country’s economic inequality. That the court decision has upheld our cherished rights and values is a cause for a sigh of relief. But it is only one victory in the bigger struggle for a more egalitarian society and economy.
This fits nicely with a larger discussion I’ve been attempting here over the past months.
Yesterday, I briefly touched upon how the tools of technology (in a specific case involving YouTube, those made by Google) allow the establishment of rent-seeking behavior by mega-corporations as massive owners of intellectual property.
Google/YouTube’s arrangements do not increase the size of the economic pie available to all. But by enabling corporations to take entire control of content created by others that may use only a part of their intellectual property in the artistic endeavor, simply by flicking a software switch to scan for IP property signatures within uploaded files, it has enabled easy rent-seeking on the backs of others.
Individuals at the user level on Google properties have no access to such power. And, in fact, find that for practical matters their content is almost impossible to monetize from their end.
On the other hand, corporate tech software has enabled the global control of the aggregate pie so that it can be squeezed of whatever is available. Yes, Google is now evil.
Rent-seeking — from the archives.
Systemic rent-seeking strikes at the very heart of democratic institutions in 2013 America. And that is because, fundamentally, it is about disenfranchising the many for the monetary benefit of those with all the capital.
Because it is quickly producing a less stable society, and in the case discussed by Joseph Stiglitz shows an easily provable damaging effect on women’s health, it can kill people. In the long run, it is an obvious security threat.
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07.15.13
Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 4:05 pm by George Smith
The man the WaPost devoted a Sunday magazine feature to, delivering the pure milk of human kindness for which he is known and revered:
“And so it was for a few weeks until the race-baiting industry saw an opportunity to further the racist careers of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the Black Panthers. President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, et al, who then swept down on the Florida community refusing to admit that the 17-year-old dope smoking, racist gangsta wannabe Trayvon Martin was at all responsible for his bad decisions and standard modus operendi [sic] of always taking the violent route … [No] one can possibly dispute the recent surge in black racism increasing throughout Barack Obama’s presidency … The only racism on that night was perpetrated by Trayvon Martin.”
No link.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 3:34 pm by George Smith
More accurately, the owners of capital are the only ones capable of leveraging benefits from the new technological order. Jaron Lanier has apparently written a book on it, as have others. But most don’t have to read a book to have it explained because they’ve experienced it first hand.
Take, for example, YouTube, the use of visual and audio content, and digital rights tracking.
YouTube/Google runs a scanner that the big mega-corporations contribute content signature IDs to. (They also use personal reporting, aka the “fink button.”) When one hits a match, your video is flagged. At that point a number of things can happen.
It can be simply tracked and later monetized with overlay advertising.
Or the holder may ask it to be flagged and removed, at which point the user gets a penalty stroke.
In practice, the monetization part allows the holders of capital, or the owners of copyright, to extend ownership to creative and novel pieces which use only a portion of their content for purposes of entertainment, enlightenment or fun socio-cultural art.
So if you have recorded a song and made a little video for it, something a minute and a half to two minutes long, which partially cuts from a famous movie as a bit of humorous tribute, you can have it taken off you by the faceless super-corporation that owns one piece of it.
The average person, little people, have no way to monetize their creative work in cyberspace in this manner. They simply don’t.
And this opens up new streams of revenue, streams which require no work except content matching, for those who are already among the 1 percent.
That is the power of the Google digital ecology. It distributes the risk of digital creation to all the grains of sand in the world making content. And reserves the monetization of all of it to itself or business partners.
It’s no model for a viable future unless by such a future one means a handful or super-corporations and business entities that get almost everything from the virtual economy while everyone else sees nothing.
The reason for that is simple. The average person doesn’t have the capital to make a difference, except through blind luck. The numbers, in terms of raw popularity and ranking in search, are just never there. However, by controlling the entire pool of such things through the digital tools of universal aggregation, you can extract worth from everyone else without returning a thing. Except maybe a threat in a digital notice.
Search DD and “Rumble” to see an illustration. Note overlay.
Fair dinkum or not? You tell me.
Rigging counts and the winner-take-all virtual economy — from the archives.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 11:08 am by George Smith
From Krugman, today, on the GOP push to kill food stamp programs:
But these days almost half of food stamp recipients are non-Hispanic whites So [food stamps are] not all about race … What is it about, then? Somehow, one of our nation’s two great parties has become infected by an almost pathological meanspiritedness, a contempt for what CNBC’s Rick Santelli, in the famous rant that launched the Tea Party, called “losers.??? If you’re an American, and you’re down on your luck, these people don’t want to help; they want to give you an extra kick. I don’t fully understand it, but it’s a terrible thing to behold.
List of states, by population, from least to most, that total the number of people on food stamps in the US:
Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, Iowa, Connecticut, Oregon, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Kentucky. That’s 26. Counted here last year.
Image collection for “food stamps.” Illustrative and not in any good way.
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07.14.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 12:05 pm by George Smith
Still no escape from WhiteManistan. America’s original sin, the foundation belief that the chosen make their own rules, obviously needs more disassembling. A lot more.
The rest I leave to Frank at Pine View Farm, who calls it another result of America’s original sin.
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07.12.13
Posted in War On Terror at 12:53 pm by George Smith
Plate 7, Do Not Use Weapons of Mass Destruction! Printed art on music CD, Uncle Sam & the JDAMs. Image of actual leaflet dropped by the USAF over Iraq just prior to the invasion. About 80 copies were made, some were sold by mail, some in Pasadena, and some at Amoeba Records in Hollywood.
Full size.
Psychedelicized.
Old Fine Art from the War on Terror — the series.
Keys: OFAWOT
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 10:09 am by George Smith
Plate 6, Hoagies for Guantanamo. Seven years ago this summer, politicians and retired military men launched a public relations campaign to assert the US was not mistreating prisoners at Guantanamo. In one instance, the alleged good treatment included the serving of hoagies from Subway.
Full size.
“Much of the international community views the Guantanamo Detention Center as a place of shame and routine violation of human rights. This view is not correct. However, there will be no possibility of correcting that view. There is now no possible political support for Guantanamo going forward” — US Army Gen. (Ret.)Barry McAffrey, republished from the FAS Secrecy blog.
Senator Dick Durbin (D – Ill), attesting to the professionalism of the US army men in handling one detainee. Big smile: “They handed him a Subway sandwich. He lit up and started talking.”
The US is still torturing prisoners at Guantanamo. It’s called force-feeding.
Old Fine Art from the War On Terror — the series.
OFAWOT
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