11.05.13
Posted in Decline and Fall, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 2:10 pm by George Smith
This would have never happened back when I started in the early Nineties.
No one would have been talking about ricin. And on the outside chance they were nobody would have thought much of it.
From Aiken, South Carolina:
Two Aiken High School students have been accused of conspiring to make ricin, according to the Aiken Department of Public Safety.
The leader of a school group notified police about some suspicious activity that took place while the group was on a field trip to the zoo and botanical gardens in Columbia, according to an incident report. The two students were heard discussing making ricin, a highly toxic protein produced in the seeds of the castor oil plant.
The students told their group they wanted to go to the botanical gardens at the zoo in order to find a castor oil plant, which is used to make ricin, the report stated. Other students confirmed the reports.
Each of the students told officers it was the other’s idea to find the plant and make the ricin, according to the report. The students’ parents were also contacted regarding the incident.
No charges will be filed, reads the newspaper, although the state and federal governments were contacted.
The students had no materials. “[An official] said the castor oil plant [at the botanical garden] was never touched,” it added.
The country is radically different than it was fifteen years ago.
Does anyone think this has been for the better?
What does it say about the nature of the national security megaplex and how average people and thought have been warped by it when two teenagers on a field trip make trivial talk about ricin, they’re overheard, reports are made and the federal government contacted?
And, worse, this is no longer seen as profoundly abnormal.
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Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, Extremism at 12:01 pm by George Smith
The probability that any predicted national security catastrophe, or doomsday scenario, will occur is inversely proportional to its appearance in entertainments, movies, television dramas and series, novels, non-fiction books, magazines and news.
Or, put another way, the probability that something bad will happen, as described or predicted by experts or any government, intelligence or quasi-corporate/government assessment agency, asymptotically approaches zero as it attains widespread use in popular entertainments. (And that’s usually very early in the development cycle.)
Originally, here.
The all-encompassing blackout causing the country to lapse into barbarism and chaos is a national meme, albeit one that is only a grail for a very particular demographic: Paranoid right-wing WhiteManistan. (Include the Tea Party.)
Here’s another segment that encapsulates the odious nature of it: The well-prepared white father figure in Army man clothes defending his perimeter from someone crummy-looking who comes looking for help.
National Geogrpahic television caters strongly to it.
Starting with Doomsday Preppers, the network has regularly pandered to the audience that believes the country is about to meet an end, usually revolving around the sudden loss of all electricity. It supports a significant industry, one that peddles supplies, bug-out bunker building materials and home combat training on how to shoot or maim interlopers coming for your stuff after the collapse.
Has anyone seen this? I missed it and don’t get cable. (It does appear to have been posted to YouTube.)
I invite comments. Leave a review or an opinion below.
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11.04.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 4:38 pm by George Smith
Would Germany grant Edward Snowden asylum? My hunch is, in the end, they’ll still be afraid of antagonizing the US security megaplex.
But there are cards on the table for it now.
The Spiegel has the best article on the matter.
There’s continuing satisfaction that nationally and globally, way more people know who Edward Snowden is than NSA director, Keith Alexander.
That should tell you much on which side of history the matter is on. Put another way, nobody’s going to ever make a movie about the NSA director but they’re probably already entertaining pitches for a Snowden adaptation in Hollywood.
(Just about anyone can make the observation that America’s top generals no more make gripping historical characters than CEO’s of Wall Street financial institutions. You know, as icons: Patton, MacArthur, Eisenhower, maybe Omar Bradley, and that’s about it. The reasons for this are fairly obvious. They fought for something globally important. Today’s top soldiers can’t really make that argument in any way that doesn’t involve some tortured reasoning and a host of caveats.)
Keith Alexander is the past and while there is literally no practical way to roll back the national security megaplex, time will render his reputation to a footnote or asterisk.
Alexander will retire to the private sector and on signing become instantly very wealthy working as a chief for the cyberdefense arm of one of the big weapons manufacturers.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 3:14 pm by George Smith
The New York Times devotes a story to Mrs. Jeff Bezos’ negative review of a book about the empire of Bezos.
America’s plutocrats are vain and egotistical. This is unsurprising. There’s a long record of those who have everything vehemently objecting to anything not done exactly to their liking:
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has yet to make a public peep about “The Everything Store,??? a major biography of Mr. Bezos and his company that was published last month.
But his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, has made her displeasure known — on the book’s Amazon.com page.
In a scathing 922-word review posted on Monday, Ms. Bezos described the book, written by Brad Stone, as “a lopsided and misleading portrait of the people and culture at Amazon.???
The review is 922 words long, informs the Times.
“Ms. Bezos, who grew up in San Francisco, is the author of a novel, ‘Traps,’ that was published by Knopf in March,” writes the Times reporter.
The news of Ms. Bezos’ displeasure has all but obliterated any links about her novels — there are two — in Google search results.
We’d all like book contracts. I know I would. And I can make a good case why I should have the opportunity to write a new book.
I am also reasonably sure that more people have read what I’ve had to say over the years than have bought “Traps.” And it’s still not an astounding number.
The empire of Bezos, the tech industry’s equivalent of giant hogweed — from the archives.
Earnings on Mechanical Turk today: $0.75
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Posted in Uncategorized at 9:24 am by George Smith
Tom Friedman, no link, likes talking to wealth in Singapore and then use his column to explain how the US should be more like it.
Singapore, the wart on the tip of Malaya, has about the same level of inequality as the US, is a beehive, and relies on a servant workforce of foreigners.
Other than that I can’t think of anything remotely edifying about it in terms of human progress. It’s into being a tax corporate haven, right? Didn’t it invent caning people for spitting chewing gun on the sidewalk, too?
It’s unfortunate they never had terrorists, we could have bombed them and they would not have been able to retaliate.
Years ago before I was broke I was invited to give a lecture in Singapore on a subject in terrorism. I learned Singapore academicians were cheap, except when apparently paying the freight for celebrities like Friedman, and that I’d be in the air for a day to get there. I would have sooner signed up for three free root canals and a carbuncle lancing and cauterization.
One can understand why a Tom Friedman would love Singapore, finding it advanced and progressive. It’s a corporate wealth totalitarian state with the population but not any of the culture, advantages or history of Los Angeles County. The US is a corporate fascist state, too, of course, but not yet (see below).
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11.03.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall, Made in China at 5:22 pm by George Smith
Today, a short return to a common subject here, the bifurcation of “American” goods, following the rise of inequality, a study in contrast.
The video is of major US guitar and western guitar brands being made in China. You can ascertain the different brands by headstocks. But it’s an omnibus factory that does work for virtually all the majors.
On the other end of the stick, you have guitars made domestically in the Fender “custom shop,” in this video (do view part of it to get the flavor of worship and the custom manufacture of “worn” high-end instruments), for the haves/lawyers/bankers and upper middle class shoe-shiners not yet totally obsoleted by economic decline and digitization.
Here, the Culture of Lickspittle is in the fawning over he who already has everything, Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top.
American companies that have outsourced a great deal of manufacturing regularly complain about Chinese theft of their intellectual property. In fact, as readers know this was one of NSA director’s Keith Alexander’s big claims/hobby horses before the Snowden affair shut him up on the matter.
Does corporate America deserve concern and sympathy, even action, over this? Not anymore, I’d argue.
There is now a good business in the sale of Chinese counterfeits, guitars sold as cheaply as the licensed copies of the big names made in China, but with “Made in USA” and copies of the US trademarks on them. With Gibsons, they’ve come to be called “Chibsons” and there are quite a few videos on YouTube by WhiteManistan dudes who’ve bought them. Unsurprisingly, Chibsons are made by Chinese salesmen gone off the range who’ve availed themselves of the training and parts available from Gibson’s licensed manufacturing of Epiphones in China.
They are not of the same quality at all as the domestic-made high-end models. But it doesn’t really matter because people who buy them know what they’re getting and seek them out, primarily because they are cheap copies, with infringed trademarks that look like the high end goods.
Fundamentally, you should not care if corporate America loses its intellectual property to China. It made that deal along with one to sell out American labor for the sake of shareholders long ago. What’s the morality or even reason to support intellectual property for domestic goods made for the upper tiers because that’s where the purchasing power is?
I say there’s a fairness in encouraging a global environment in which American corporates are increasingly ripped off. Sadly, it’s far from crisis level yet. And the idea that NSA, or the intelligence and defense structure be empowered to defend them is appalling, the equivalent of protecting the gold of kings in a feudal society.
(First published, in shorter form, on Facebook.)
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 10:11 am by George Smith
Sixty one visitors on Saturday which seems to indicate almost no one reading anything here. Are there reasons to keep up? This is an ask for help. Leave a comment.
On Facebook, where conversation does take place.
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11.02.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall, Rock 'n' Roll at 8:08 am by George Smith
The beating of people who are down is normal now, something not worth an uncomfortable shrug.
It’s evidence of a raw malevolence in the national spirit, something that’s only increased during the presidency of Barack Obama, put there through prolonged hardship, the rogue GOP and too many centrist Democrats who have always found it convenient to be indifferent.
And, as it worsened, many people turned off, turned away or became inured.
“One in seven in Pennsylvania are on food stamps,” reads a Pennsylvania newspaper this week. “At the stroke of midnight on Halloween, food-stamp benefits were cut throughout America for the first time in history.”
“This is nothing short of catastrophic,” Bill Clark, an executive director of a hunger relief agency in Philadelphia, told the newspaper. (Hat tip to Pine View Farm.)
Similar articles were published around the country, a couple in the Los Angeles Times, some well in advance. But nothing was done and, apparently, nothing can be done.
But you could see it coming. And here’s the WhiteManistan Blues Band’s recollection, Malevolent Nation, in a brace to tunes set on YouTube over the past three years.
The virtual guitar case tip jar.
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11.01.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall, Rock 'n' Roll at 1:15 pm by George Smith
It’s all that’s left. Look close at the Amazon Mechanical Turk screens.
Here’s the tip jar by the virtual guitar case.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 7:39 am by George Smith
“Republican hostility toward the poor and unfortunate has now reached such a fever pitch that the party doesn’t really stand for anything else …” reads Paul Krugman’s column today.
People in poverty deserve it, because of the bad choices they’ve made and the belief that the market always rewards those with merit. There is a war on the poor and it’s the “defining issue of American politics.
“47M Americans hit by food stamp cuts today,” reads USA Today.
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