07.07.13
Posted in WhiteManistan at 9:40 am by George Smith
For sheer pathetic embarrassment there is little that tops a bunch of middle-aged white guys in the south waving confederate flags in 2013. Let’s march on the court house, boys! Who’s with me? Yearrghhhh!
From a Roanoke, VA, newspaper:
Supporters of a Sons of Confederate Veterans anti-ordinance rally held at Hopkins Green in Lexington wave flags to protest a Lexington City ordinance that would effectively ban flags, such as the Confederate flag, from flying from public lamp posts.
The city did not wish to be vexed by pests using its property and banned all non-governmental flags. A Federal Court affirmed the ordinance.
The comments are worth browsing, coming as they do from always the most eloquent and vigorous of WhiteManistan.
“When will this crap cease, the battle flag is a Christian symbol and it represents valor, honor, family, duty, and it has nothing to do with slavery,” protests one citizen. “The war for Southern Independence was economic because Lincoln knew the south was a rich nation, and losing cotton would be detrimental to their economy …”
And then it really gets in gear.
Damn Commies!
H/t to Frank at Pine View Farm for the eagle eye.
One paradox associated with the benighted who treasure the Stars and Bars is the belief that it marks them as rebels. This is seen throughout lily white country music, more prominently among the young artists who use it in videos as touchstone for fans.
Because it’s common it’s actually a sign of dim-witted conformity: Please like me because I’m part of the social club (albeit, one of a clueless tribe working at being seen as people who deserve being shunned.)
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07.06.13
Posted in Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 11:15 am by George Smith
I’ve refrained from commenting on the Washington Post’s feature-length profile of Ted Nugent for the 4th of July weekend because of its nature as a troll piece.
The purpose of a newspaper troll piece is to put something up so ridiculous and annoying it guarantees eyeballs from around the web.
And so it is with the piece on Ted Nugent. Reporter Steve Hendrix visited Nugent in Waco, using the opportunity to get the man to admit he’s thinking of running for President.
Of course this is a lie. Even Nugent knows he couldn’t get elected, except in a region that puts people like Louie Gohmert in office.
It’s almost worth wishing for because a Ted Nugent for President run would hasten the GOP’s total collapse. Ted Nugent’s appeal is in rallying the crazy stupid, stupid crazy, and mean — of WhiteManistan.
Hendrix writes this, at one point:
There are Web sites devoted to collecting and sorting and linking to the vast litany of misdeeds and accusations Nugent has accumulated over the rock-star decades: his recent no-contest pleas to deer hunting with bait in California and taking one black bear too many in Alaska (he says both prosecutions were politically motivated) …
That would be here, for one, where Hendrix picked up the information on Nugent being tossed from a big summer festival in Michigan back in 2003 for flinging slurs — one of them being the “n-word” — on a radio show. It was published on DD blog, along with a packet of old clippings about the matter, three years ago.
A correction the Post added to Hendrix’s Nugent profile best captures its meretricious quality:
An earlier version of this article incorrectly says that he raised five children. Nugent fathered nine children, three of whom lived at home with him. This version has been corrected.
Perhaps the correction could have added the majority of Nugent’s children were illegitimate, although the story makes it obvious once you dig through enough of it.
The article makes one good, if obvious, point. Ted Nugent is catnip for the mainstream media. He is one of America’s most visible raging assholes and there’s a lot of money in that.
Nugent-like characters are not uncommon in American history. Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn and Gordon Liddy come to mind. In the past, however, their nasty character eventually achieved a counter-productive critical mass, doing them in. That doesn’t happen now, more just means more.
Yes, by all means, Ted Nugent for President! He’ll be the only person ever to run for the office who was investigated by the Secret Service for potentially threatening remarks made in reference to the current office-holder. When the Secret Service arrives at your door, everyone knows it’s to hand out the John Wilkes Booth Memorial Medal of Good Citizenship.
Could you think of a better qualification in the Republican Party? Bring on the merriment that the world might be made richer with the laughter.
Will really rally the missing women, Hispanic, gay, African American and youth vote.
No link. Too easy.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 10:21 am by George Smith
A day old feature from the Toronto Star is here.
McAfee was in Canada for a seven-day shoot on a documentary of his life, “Who is McAfee?”
As well-publicized as he’s been it’s hard to imagine something of such short work winding up well-received.
However, McAfee is a good self-serving interview and tells the newspaper he is trying to carve out a new niche entertainment:
He plans to stick around for a year or so, working on his new “career??? in entertainment.
“The end product is something that hopefully might educate me or at least might validate my own opinion of myself,??? says McAfee. “I don’t mean opinion of good guy/bad guy, but opinion of what’s actually happening in life.
If he keeps making videos like the last, it could work well.
McAfee has acquired a new companion, a 30-year old stripper from Miami. The old young gals from Belize now left behind.
McAfee’s new flame was photographed for USA Today here.
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07.05.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 3:08 pm by George Smith
A Buffalo family was not pleased to find they had sold castor seeds to accused ricin mailer J. Everett Dutschke.
From a Buffalo newspaper, an interesting story, in which an alert couple notified authorities they’d sold castor seeds to him:
Earlier this year, [Ross Miller of Elma, NY], [a] 44-year-old artist and small-businessman assisted the FBI as a witness in a case involving letters that were poisoned with a deadly substance called ricin and mailed to President Obama, a judge and a Republican senator, Roger F. Wicker of Mississippi.
Miller, who has been visiting loved ones in East Aurora and Elma this week, said he was shocked and upset to learn that someone may have used beans he sold to make a substance intended to hurt or kill public officials.
“We were very upset. It was irritating and nerve-racking. I found it offensive that somebody would use a bean product that we sold them to try to kill someone,??? Miller told The Buffalo News.
The Millers, meanwhile, had been following news reports in the case. They realized that ricin could be made from ground-up castor bean shells …
“We’d been … hoping that nobody used any beans that were bought from us to make ricin,??? Miller said.
“We checked our records to see if we’d ever sold any beans to anyone in that part of Mississippi. My wife keeps extensive records, and she found out that we had sold some beans to??? Dutschke last year.
He was a faceless Internet customer who spent about $20 on about 100 castor beans the Millers sent to him.
The realization that they may have sold beans used to make ricin that was sprinkled on a letter to the world’s most powerful leader scared and deeply concerned the Millers …
[The Millers, after making inquiries, were put in touch with] W. Chad Lamar, the federal prosecutor in Mississippi who was handling the ricin case …
“The Millers’ information was very helpful, especially after Dutschke had denied ever buying castor beans,??? [a lawyer friend of the Millers] said.
The Millers told the newspaper their craft business will no longer sell castor beans. They were not very profitable, anyway, Ross Miller informed.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall at 2:13 pm by George Smith
CAHY — or my abbreviation for Corporate America Hates You, its open hostility to people — is recognized as real. Awhile ago I wrote about it, in the economy of strangle:
In Sunday’s New York Times, a front page piece on how corporate America has shifted to staffing with part-time employees, to avoid benefits and the payment of wages:
While there have always been part time workers, especially in restaurants and retailers, employers today rely on them far more than before as they seek to cut costs and align staffing to customer traffic. The trend has frustrated millions of Americans … reducing their pay and benefits.
“We’re seeing more and more that the burden of market fluctuation is being shifted onto the workers, as opposed to the companies absorbing it themselves,??? said Carrie Gleason, the executive director of the Retail Action Project, an advocate for retail workers …
Here is seen the maximizing of profit by compressing wages and having government programs in the tattered safety net picking up the slack. This from corporate America, where the prevailing sentiment during the last four years is that socialism and entitlement has run rampant.
However, the kind of entitlement spending that allows corporate American to pay people so poorly that there aren’t yet food riots [because 48 million working people are compensated with a food stamp benefit] is apparently OK.
The answer isn’t near at hand.
It will be generational as the current climate of corporate predation can’t be changed, only slowly replaced.
And the only way it can be supplanted is through the strengthening of labor after decades of attack from the private sector. And law requiring that people must be paid a living wage.
At PBS today, a discussion on the inexorable decline of labor in the US, accelerated by “innovation” that does not achieve any social good.
The PBS piece explains how capital has stayed the same globally, but an explosion in labor availability and ease of using it, has radically reduced what people can earn.
The piece also dallies with what this means for the future and none of the prognostications are good.
Near the end of it, a couple statements stick out, both having to do with a recognition that social norms have changed and not in any good way. Destruction of union power and compensation became normalized and, increasingly, technology driven.
From PBS:
Gary Marcus, a psychologist at NYU: “I have a question for those of you here that are more optimistic about the future. What specifically do you think might be the future economic domains in which there might be large-scale employment? I’m not interested in the cases where there’s a cool new job that really, really smart people who read Wired magazine can do. What I am interested in are new occupations that hundreds of thousands of people could do, in game-changing ways like when the automobile industry once opened up.”
Thomas Kochan, MIT: “In terms of a market failure, it’s the reality that it’s not in the interests of any individual firm in the United States to try to solve the jobs problem. So, we’ve got to figure out a way to deal with that…and the only way that you solve this is by getting people and institutions and organizations to work together, to engage these issues collectively.
“It’s about an institutional failure over the last 30 years. With the decline of the labor movement, you’ve seen a lot of institutions go downhill equivalently. We don’t see the kind of dialogue, we don’t see the enforcement of our social norms and social policies that discipline corporations, and that really provided the kind of collective spreading of wage patterns and wage norms across the society.
“We’ve got to rebuild those, but we can’t try to rebuild them in an old-fashioned way. Now we’re in a more digital economy, a more knowledge-based economy, and we need to invent the new institutions that will cut across and aggregate these interests to address these challenges. We’ve got to get the education community working with business and employers, working with labor and civil society.
“I’m not a believer that technology is going to naturally eliminate jobs and cut income, but if we don’t do anything about it, if we just leave it, as we have, to individual market forces and to individual corporate actions and to individual technology innovations, then that’s probably where we are headed.”
Hanan Kolko, a labor lawyer: “Until this social norm of trying to crush unions and workers in general is changed, you’re going to have more and more instability for working people. And it’s a very bad thing for the economy, because at the end of the day, if there’s not enough aggregate demand, there’s not going to be enough people with money to buy the stuff to keep our economy going. This is a structural change in the social norms of our economy that makes me pessimistic about the future.”
Last week the blog addressed it in a response to an LA Times piece on “concierge apps,” or trivial technologies that exist to pit all-against-all in free-lance labor bidding wars, driving earning power downward for the sake of superfluous vanity work. (Paradoxically, while this was published the Times was going through another wave of layoffs brought on by a poor profit picture brought about by the digital sharing and content-is-free economy.)
These are technologies which do not increase the economic pie. They only fractionate it in favor of the holders of the technology and at the expense of low-wage workers who cannot defend themselves from it.
As far as innovation goes, it is not a future.
Specifically, we can talk about Uber, the Silicon Valley cab-summoning app that serves limousines and free-lance drivers to the top most and that part of the upper middle class which retains work as high-button servant labor.
Los Angeles sent Uber a “cease and desist” order to stop operations in the county and the company ignored it.
The LA Times piece provided precious little about the problem a company like Uber professes to solve using smartphone innovation.
That problem is claimed to be transportation dysfunction and lousy cab service.
First, transportation is hard in LA County because of its sheer size. It’s an automobile economy.
There is a need for shuttle service to airports. And, indeed, there is an effective network of shuttle companies. They work and anyone who has lived here a long time has come in contact with them.
Uber cannot improve upon it. The job remains the same whether summoned by smartphone app or through the old fashioned way of simply calling them by voice.
Shuttle drivers don’t get rich. They are not parasites who need cutting down by digital innovation. But what Uber purports to do in such things is just use technology to summon a swarm of free-lance workers to undercut business and undermine costs. This is not expansion of an economic pie.
It is the same with cab drivers. Do you know anyone who is one making as much money as a Silicon Valley tech company CEO?
So concierge apps be damned as progress. Parasitic apps for chiseling the cost of labor is a much better description.
Companies like Uber, or TaskRabbit, call themselves leaders in the emerging world (and here is another Orwellian tech industry term) of the sharing economy.
If it is so much about sharing, how come most in American society receive so little benefit?
The destruction of payment for recorded music was the first grand achievement of the sharing economy. Sean Parker, for example, one of the founders of Napster, is now wealthier than Croesus, so much so that when he’s pilloried for excess he shows everyone he really is that venal by writing about how his posh wedding was ruined.
More descriptive of the sharing economy, a White House economic advisor recently wrote a widely, ahem, shared essay on how the old pop music industry was gutted by technology, turned into a winner-take-all struggle in which only the biggest names thrive.
This was placed within the larger context of how inequality is very high in the US, and rising, as those with access to the means of the sharing economy employ it to take larger and larger pieces from an economic pie through divestment from fair compensation for labor. More gallingly, the Internet does not create fabulous opportunity because perceptions of popularity mean a lot when society is grossly unequal. In other words, algorithms that put something in the first page of results because of counts of various things make everything below the top few rungs displayed untenable.
Now you can surely say that Apple and iTunes store funneling digital music purchases through a country with a legal mechanism for tax evasion is innovation. And Google’s development of YouTube as a service that provides a great deal of free pirated music with the salve that by attaching a link to a copy of it at the iTunes store is certainly some kind of wee innovation. But you can also call such things parasitic or predatory.
Last, from the Guardian, “In the digital economy, we’ll soon all be working for free – and I refuse”:
[In] Jaron Lanier’s new book Who Owns The Future? … he argues: “Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be customers.” Lanier, a computer scientist and a musician, is rightly called a visionary because he sees what is happening, when everything is live-streamed but no one knows the name of the person who made the music any more. Content is free.
Governments play up the idea that a digital future creates jobs rather than eats them up. Culturally, there is now a fantasy world of start-ups and blogs and YouTube TV where a very few people manage to make money but most work simply for “experience”…
He describes a winner-takes-all world, with a tiny number of successful people and everyone else living on hope. “There is not a middle-class hump. It’s an all-or-nothing society.”
But the digital economy operates as a kind of sophisticated X Factor. Someone will make it, sure. For more than 15 seconds even, maybe. But most won’t. This is why Lanier says the internet may destroy the middle classes, the people who can’t outspend the elite. And without that middle group, we cannot maintain a democracy.
This is why it is easy to root for the downfall of Uber.
The California Public Utilities Commission could see that the company is not really tech innovation at all, that what urban parts of the state do not urgently need from a company like Uber and its rivals is more poorly paid free-lance cab and shuttle drivers. The place won’t fall if it never gains traction.
I can compare a world class innovation in the US, with the alleged world class innovation of free digital music content.
There are three electric guitars that are historic technology: The Fender Telecaster, the Fender Stratocaster, and the Gibson Les Paul. The three defined pop music around the world, the first two being invented by Leo Fender and co-workers in California.
Leo Fender did not invent the idea of an electric guitar. Technically, he was not even the first to bring one into market. But he was the first to produce a genuinely great iconic model that revolutionized that market.
The invention of the Telecaster and the Stratocaster electrified pop music creation in the United States. It created jobs, entire large industries. The pop music industry, from the Sixties to the Nineties, simply would not have existed as it did without Fender innovation and all the companies it did business with and competed against.
Electric guitars were not about fractionating the economy, using widgets to chisel labor costs downward, or make millions of people claw against each other for the privilege of almost-unpaid work. (Despite what you may have experienced in struggle for a major label contract.)
The coming of the electric guitar did not take everything the majority had and throw it in the trash for the profit of a small slice at the very top.
When you see terms like concierge app or the sharing economy, you should choke. They always mean a lot of people are about to lose big.
Corporate America Hates You — from the archives.
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Posted in WhiteManistan at 11:09 am by George Smith
In Civil War 2 today, WhiteManistan lost a small one when Missouri’s governor vetoed a nullification act.
From the wire:
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has vetoed legislation that would have made it a crime for federal agents to try to enforce gun control laws.
Nixon, a Democrat, stated the Constitution gives federal law “supremacy” over state law. The proposed law would have made it a misdemeanor for federal agents to enforce national regulations pertaining to guns in the Show Me state when they conflicted with “the people’s right to keep and bear arms.”
On the other hand there is North Carolina, a state moving assertively to win a title as the new heart of American sedition with new legislation requiring voter ID, new legislation to curtail abortion and law to fight the non-existent problem of shariah in the US.
From the WaPo:
Candidate McCrory tried to occupy a middle ground on the hot-button issue, saying he would not sign any further restrictions on abortion into law. But as governor, McCrory has been following the lead of conservative Republican veto-proof super-majorities in the state House and Senate. A wave of proposals — from voter-ID restrictions to cutbacks on unemployment payments – has resulted in push-back from protesters who continue to show up inside and outside the state capitol in Raleigh each week.
Hundreds more made their way to Raleigh to shout “shame??? at the state Senate’s actions this week. The GOP majority attached new abortion restrictions to a bill that would ban North Carolina family courts from considering foreign laws [GOP/Tea Party code for “shariah law”] and passed it by a 29-12 vote.
The bill would require abortion clinics to meet standards similar to those for outpatient surgery clinics, and critics say majority of the state’s 16 licensed abortion clinics would not qualify …
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07.04.13
Posted in Rock 'n' Roll, WhiteManistan at 8:23 am by George Smith
Have a good 4th. Eat hot dogs or something. I will.
It has the John Philip Sousa feel. I asked him for help when I wrote it.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 5:47 am by George Smith
Or, shit WhiteManistan thinks.
It was obviously not as much fun being on the Union side.
From a USA Today piece on the re-enactment in Gettysburg, yesterday:
Kevin Farrar, a Confederate re-enactor from Lovettsville, Va., said it was “mind-boggling” to think of the mile-long march that Confederate troops endured under heavy fire. “It’s like the beaches of Normandy,” he said.
[Um, no, wrong on too many levels.]
No photo subject was more popular than a smartly dressed Gen. Robert E. Lee, played by Don Vanhart, a 58-year-old surgical technician from Maine, N.Y.
One noticeable feature of the recent faddy Gettysburg stories is that in interviewing the folk of WhiteManistan, they’re mostly only interested in talking about the South.
In reading Shelby Foote’s three volume history of it (I’m on the first book), the author states that after about the first six months, troops on either side which had been in battle were on equal footing.
This, counter to the common myth that the Confederate soldier, used to hunting more and “living outside,” was superior to “the pasty-faced mechanics” of the Union.
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07.03.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 11:12 am by George Smith
From the web:
???The 18 Best U.S. Cities for Bros???–comes courtesy of real estate website Estately, and puts Bethlehem at No. 17:
Bethlehem made the list primarily because a high school student there was hospitalized after suffering an allergic reaction from an overexposure of Axe Body Spray. However, oh little bro town of Bethlehem, you are much more than a toxic cloud of spray-on brodor. You are home to Lehigh University, a small school whose cultural life revolves around its fraternity scene, with a brolific 37% of male students in a fraternity. The lacrosse team was ranked 13th in the country last season and The Daily Beast considers it the #19 party school in America. Your caucasians are plentiful (65.4%), the marijuana abounds, and white baseball hats turned backwards can be seen all over campus.
Clueless. Lehigh wrestling is nationally famous.
“The most storied athletic program at Lehigh is its wrestling team,” reads Wiki.
And, of course, Dwayne Johnson is Bethlehem’s most famous son.
“The Rock will layeth the smackdown on your candy ass!”
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07.02.13
Posted in Crazy Weapons at 1:51 pm by George Smith
Since Roscoe Bartlett was run out of Congress leaving the cause of electromagnetic pulse doom-stopping in the hands of legitimate rape caucus member Trent Franks of Arizona, the old Cult of EMP Crazy has been gravely damaged. But like the twin phenomena of zombie dramatic cable television and movies, it always staggers forward, always has an audience.
Franks is known now mostly for joining the GOP legitimate rape thing a couple weeks back. This marking as a barely sentient human being means there’s very little chance that anything he sponsors on electromagnetic pulse defense will go anywhere.
The old Cult of EMP Crazy knows this liability so they’ve taken their cause and their merchandising to “the states.”
From a recent edition of POWER, a trade magazine on the global power industry, comes an article on the now always looming (for 20 years) threat of electromagnetic pulse attack:
So [F. Michael Maloof, a columnist for the right-wing crank newsite WND.COM] says he’s been traveling to U.S. states to encourage state and local responses. “This is a new states’ rights issue,??? he says. “People can take action at the state level. I’m traveling around suggesting people get together with their local emergency response agencies and coordinators??? to plan for an EMP contingency.
Indeed, here is an example of taking the story of electromagnetic pulse doom to the states, in this instance a lecture for a South Carolina Tea Party meeting, archived on YouTube.
Caveat, it’s hard to watch, a real WhiteManistan sleeping pill. But in the first few minutes readers may note that it’s a road show including old Cult of EMP Crazy chieftain, Frank Gaffney, who has made a career during the last few years going around to Republican do’s in red states to warn about the contamination of the US justice system by shariah law. Gaffney, it’s fair to say, has had great success in this, being one of forces behind the appearance of ridiculous anti-shariah legislation in a few red states.
For his part, F. Michael Maloof has been involved in the selling and merchandising of his book on electromagnetic pulse doom.
From POWER:
In his book [A Nation Forsaken], Maloof describes a hypothetical attack on Washington, D.C., that completely disrupts the nation’s capital and surrounding areas, including communications at the Pentagon. The attackers, he writes, use “small, rifle-sized arms that shoot not bullets but radio frequencies, weapons that can be built for about $400 with easy-to-obtain parts. Think of one of those Super Soaker water guns.
Maloof also describes how a terrorist cell with a primitive EMP weapon in the back of a panel truck could easily bring down a passenger airplane landing at Washington’s Reagan National Airport. “At the cost of a few thousand dollars in material and know-how, this homegrown terror cell kills more than a thousand people—several hundred passengers on the planes, the rest in the buildings that take the full impact of the crashing planes.???
DD readers know the Cult of EMP Crazy is a primary part of right-wing rural kook demographic known as “preppers,” citizens of WhiteManistan assiduously preparing for the fall of America, aka The End of the World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI).
Preppers have turned electromagnetic pulse doom into kitsch art and literature, the meme now having generated hundreds of unreadable novels on survival after electromagnetic pulse attack through the technological miracle of Amazon’s CreateSpace.
On the art side we now have prepper electromagnetic pulse doom song and video. It is brief.
And it’s been awhile since we checked in on one of the best known preppers, the Patriot Nurse.
It’s quite a grab bag.
I didn’t spend much time commenting on Maloof’s electromagnetic pulse terrorism scenarios. The reason being, they’re all moldy oldies, having been run up the flag pole numerous times, starting about two decades ago.
From the old Crypt Newsletter, a bit of satire from a feature called the Joseph K Guide to Tech Terminology, ca. 1997:
Victor von Doom: a.k.a Dr. Doom, an arch villain in the Marvel Comics universe often portrayed handcrafting a variety of directed energy weapons — ray guns — with which to smite enemies; now used by Crypt Newsletter as a catch-all designation for computer security snake-oil salesmen and assorted crackpots spreading freaky tales of non-existent electronic [pulse] rays.
Usage: Victor von Doom, a faculty member at the University of Gobble-Wallah in Brisbane, Australia, warned frightened businessmen that a raygun capable of surreptitiously smashing networked corporate computers from a distance of half a mile could be easily fashioned from parts including a cattle prod, two potato knishes, one TV antenna and four car batteries.
Another definition from the old Joseph K Guide is updated for your enjoyment:
Booz Allen Hamilton: Contractor for the Pentagon which most Americans have never heard of; or, a secret corporation that relies almost exclusively upon taxpayer dollars for profits.
Usage: “The ideal Booz Allen Hamilton business product always involves classification so that outside audits, fraud investigations, accusations of illegality and meddlesome oversight can be side-stepped,??? a company vice-president patiently explained to the new hire.
It used to be the definition for Science Applications International Corporation, which is still around, but not as much in the news as BAH.
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