02.11.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:02 pm by George Smith
Seen on Craigslist today while looking for a job in Los Angeles County:
We are a literary marketing company that helps authors/publishers increase book sales.
We are looking for individuals who can boost the positive “Amazon book review” postings on selected titles. You will be given the reviews. No need to do any writing. The books are of all genres, but some are erotica so you should be fine with that. You must have an active Amazon account (meaning having purchased anything from there) and a computer with a unique I.P. address (no Kindles/phones, etc.).
Need a handful of people to post reviews on about 10 books/day (should take less than an hour total). You will be paid $5/book ($50 total/every day). Payment is by Paypal on a daily basis.
If legitimate, not a scam, the payment is a better wage than one can earn on Jeff Bezos’ Mechanical Turk digital sweatshop, which also features employers offering workers penurious amounts (anywhere from 0.1 cent to a penny a word) for reviews as commercial astro-turfing for the web. (Of course, it could just be more sharing economy sucker bait in which the worker posts phony reviews to Amazon and is never paid at all.)
Trivial statistics:
Number of workers killed in Empire of Bezos fulfillment houses
during 2013 shopping/holiday season: 2
Number of kidney stones suffered by Jeff Bezos while on vacation in Galapagos Islands over New Year: unspecified
And Andrew Leonard of Salon needed the New Yorker to be told this?
In this week’s New Yorker, George Packer employs 12,000 words to answer a huge leading question in the headline: “Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books????
The answer, as just about anyone will guess without even reading the argument to follow, is no. Amazon’s relentless, Wal-Mart-like price pressure on publishers, its monopolization of both the means of production and the distribution mechanism, and its ongoing annihilation of the very concept of a “printed??? book are all combining, argues Packer, to hollow out the traditional publishing industry. This will ultimately, concludes Packer, be to the detriment of the culture at large, as there will be no economic model capable of supporting the kind of serious fiction and nonfiction that takes years to gestate, research and craft.
Here is the New Yorker piece. It’s long. The message, now common, although very detailed: Amazon and Jeff Bezos are despised by book publishers. Bezos is not particularly interested in selling books, just in selling everything at the lowest price the market will bear. He wishes to out Wal-Mart Wal-Mart.
The practice is always the same. The use of the tools of software to pit all against all in the American economy, pressing pay, compensation, everything down. Amazon’s business is not unique, just its monopolizing and controlling market weight and the company, in respects much like Google, is trying to do everything including book publishing (which has been a failure [1]) as well as streaming music, video and tv production.
But with all the gatekeepers in publishing and content creation removed by Amazon’s creative disruption — editors and/or choosers, replaced by sifting and matching algorithms adjusted only by the thumbs up and thumbs down provided by customers, trolls and astro-turfed digital review, look at the wonderful things you get!
Like all these self-published novels, printed on demand or delivered for Kindle by Amazon!
The unique genre of electromagnetic pulse attack on America white survivalist romance fiction, set free from the literary dungeon run by the elitist editors in America’s old publishing houses!
Jeff Bezos brought in Business Insider’s Henry Blodget to educate the Washington Post’s journalists on the nature of web journalism. And, presumably, what works for Business Insider.
Which is nothing but clickbait.
Business Insider is a web-site/aggregation sink of “news,” almost all of it reprinted or regurgitated, usually very poorly, from somewhere else. It is safe to say it employs almost no journalists, if any. And the point is to produce the most pandering content using “workers” who do it for free or mostly so.
On Henry Blodget, from “Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator,” in 2012:
In April 2011, Business Insider editor Henry Blodget put out an advisory to the PR world. He was drowning in elaborate story pitches and information about new services. He just couldn’t read them all, let alone write about them. So he proposed a solution: The publicists could write about the product launches of their own clients and Blodget’s site would edit and publish them … In Blodget’s overzealous drive to create traffic for his site, he didn’t mind misinforming. He didn’t care who wrote it as long as it got page views. He was willing to let PR and marketing professionals and people like me write about their clients — which he would then pass off as real news and commentary to his readers.
This is in line with the world of Jeff Bezos where the role of most people as workers is to be paid nothing or almost nothing for goods and services that pander to the whims of masses of consumers.
Getting Blodget, a former stock peddler for Merrill Lynch who was charged with essentially selling fraud by the SEC in 2003 and one of America’s millionaires on the basis of such, to lecture the Post’s editorial staff (Bezos now owns the paper) is reminiscent of billionaire Sam Zell foisting Lee Abrams on LA Times journalists as an “innovation” expert. Abrams made a fortune ruining FM radio with rigid and idiotic formatting that pandered only to advertisers and the lowest common denominator in audience.
(Indeed, it is a wonder that Bezos bought the Post. What does he like about journalism? It’s a legitimate question. Bezos never cooperates with journalists, the exception being 60 Minutes when it agreed to do publicity for his drone delivery fantasy, and is intensely secretive.)
Zell’s philosophy, if readers watched the videos from his time as owner of Tribune, particularly the one from the Orlando Sentinel, was to deliver to consumers what they wanted all the time, stories and pictures about puppy dogs, for instance, rather than expensive coverage of Iraq.
The Lee Abrams/LA Times relationship is another laugh-a-minute horror tale from the Zell era.
A small part of it, the end, is summarized at the LA Weekly:
When news hit Times staffers Friday that Abrams, a former radio industry guru who was the company’s “chief innovation officer,” resigned over a memo that included a spoof-newscast video of nude women titled “Sluts,” there were cheers in the newsroom …
We’re bummed. Frankly Abrams provided some of the most entertaining content to come out of Tribune, gems such as:
“We ARE in the age of the eye.”
“Imagine Newspaper CONTENT is a major artist. Currently they are performing in a old but reliable venue. What happens if the artist (Content) moves into a new super venue? Fans will love it–the music (content) will sound clearer…better seats…etc…If you create anew venue (look) and you do it RIGHT, people will love it.”
And who could forget:
“The front page is four large and visually stunning maps … ”
This is the video Abrams distributed in e-mail to LAT journalists.
The problem was in the implication that it, along with other videos in the e-mail, was the type of journalism/publishing the Times should be doing.
At the time, from the LA Times:
Tribune Co. Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams, who earlier this week sent a companywide e-mail that contained content deemed inappropriate for the workplace, resigned Friday.
The e-mail, the latest in a series of free-form jottings Abrams sent weekly to company employees in an effort to inspire a rethinking of print and broadcast conventions, included links to satirical video parodies of newscasts. One, which included profanity and nudity, he labeled “Sluts.”
Note:
[1]. The one place Amazon has run into a wall is in publishing. Credit people, small business book retailers and later big traditional bookstore chains, for that. Amazon started its own physical book imprint. It has been an example of epic fail, most generously occasionally described as of middling success.
Amazon’s titles have been kept out of many stores.
Around 2012, perhaps a bit earlier, Ed Park, an editor of mine at the Village Voice, went to work for Amazon as a literary editor, shepherding and selecting various works for the company.
A year or so ago I recall him using his Facebook news feed/timeline to promote a book by novelist Benjamin Anastas.
This was at the time the retailer boycott was just beginning to freeze out Amazon titles.
At the New Yorker, the feature on Amazon says of this:
Benjamin Anastas, a novelist who couldn’t find an American publisher for his third book, told a friend that he was going to publish his fourth, a memoir called “Too Good to Be True,??? with Amazon… finding no copies of his new book in most stores was akin to watching himself disappear, and Anastas said that he would think twice before publishing with Amazon again.
Amazon Publishing, which had been releasing mysteries and other genres in bulk, hoped that Kirshbaum would attract big-name authors and publish best-sellers. But top writers proved surprisingly loyal to their gatekeepers, and Amazon had to spend a lot of money on two dubious projects: a million dollars for “The 4-Hour Chef,??? by the self-help guru Timothy Ferriss, and eight hundred thousand dollars for “My Mother Was Nuts,??? a memoir by Penny Marshall, the “Laverne & Shirley??? star. In hardcover, Ferriss’s book has sold a fraction of the numbers of his two earlier self-help books; Marshall’s has sold seventeen thousand. Nearly all of Amazon’s other books have fared worse: “Actors Anonymous,??? a novel by James Franco, has sold fewer than five thousand. (Amazon claims to have sold many more copies of these titles as e-books.) In the past year, Amazon Publishing has barely been a presence at auctions, and several editors have departed …
The celebrities will always be all right, even when their material takes a bath. They’ve banked their bonuses.
For everyone else, Jeff Bezos has you covered. Get yourself over to Mechanical Turk.
The Empire of Bezos — from the archives.
Oh, and do please please read the posts on digital sweat-shopping again. They so aptly describe a flavor of the spray from our Culture of Lickspittle.
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02.10.14
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle at 3:41 pm by George Smith
From the wire, Iran is allegedly sending two ships toward the US east coast:
Iran’s military doctrine is based on asymmetric warfare, relying on a multilayered strategy the employs many kinds of low-tech weapons and a willingness to accept casualties, says Michael Connell, director of Iranian Studies at the Center for Naval Analyses, which conducts research and analysis for the U.S. government.
In the Persian Gulf, Iran hopes to employ dozens of midget submarines, land-based missile launchers and speedboats, in a strategy meant to confuse and overwhelm an adversary with superior technology and firepower, Connell wrote in an assessment of Iran’s naval doctrine.
Bolton said Iran’s ships may not pose much of a threat now but their mission shows the Islamic Republic is building up its capabilities for the future.
Bad time of year to do it. They could run into some lousy weather.
Previously, I’ve briefly mentioned why the US military invented the buzz-term, asymmetric, to define threats.
Bluntly, it’s a simple fraud that encompasses the fact that every enemy in the world that we might ever face, now and going forward, will always be grossly inferior due to gigantic differences between the US military budget and everyone else’s.
So any enemy that has much less money to spend on ships, jet aircraft, tanks, advanced weapons systems, anything (which is to say, again, everyone) is always said to have developed, or to be developing, an asymmetric strategy.
A strategy that attacks some slightly-real or imagined Achilles heel, turning the enemy into a credible threat, a puny David ready to take down the goliath of American military power.
It’s a sophistry of liars, always consisting of made-up crap, sometimes simple but never particularly complicated, for the rationalization and discussion of how any type of relative weakling, be it a group, a tribe, a handful of hackers, a poorer nation, or maybe even angry bees, allegedly can threaten the existence of the world’s pre-eminent military power.
Over the last twenty years its been embedded in every discussion of potential threats against the US. The enemy, a pauper, will ALWAYS attack asymmetrically.
And so today, and perhaps in the next few, too, we’ll get the infrequent spectacle of some puny detachment from Iran being a harbinger of bad things to come. Never mind the southern side of the Persian Gulf is outfitted with overwhelming US military striking power and that one of our reliable toadies, Bahrain, hosts the Fifth Fleet.
I always get a kick out of showing the threat of Iran’s midget submarines.
I don’t know if I would feel confident submerging in one of them. How about you?
And how about this squadron of “stealth” flying boats!
I think one of them would be pretty popular on a summer weekend afternoon at Lake Hopatcong in New Jersey, don’t you?
And whatever this is, hoax or real, I like it!
Or perhaps they will be sending this and it will have a Scud in it with an atomic warhead and next week I won’t be able to post to the blog because electromagnetic pulse will have wiped out US civilization.
This is the Kharg, an Iranian navy oiler, by the way. If it doesn’t look Iranian built, it isn’t. It was built in the United Kingdom a long time ago.
And I am sure a few dozen of these would do really well against the USN and USAF.
No pictures of a couple of their heavier units, like a Kilo sub. They didn’t build it. These things would be the first to go to the bottom in a shooting war.
Asymmetric or not.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Fiat money fear and loathers at 1:13 pm by George Smith
From the pipes:
Bitcoin’s value has dropped sharply after one of the largest trading exchanges said there was a flaw in the virtual currency’s underlying software.
MtGox said it had halted transfers to external Bitcoin addresses on Friday after detecting “unusual activity”.
It said an investigation had revealed it was possible for thieves to fool the transaction process so that double the correct amount of bitcoins would be sent.
Bitcoins fell from $700 (£427) to $540.
A spokesperson at the BitCoin Foundation said the problem was the exchange’s, not Bitcoin’s.
Today, Mt. Gox resumed processing BitCoin transactions.
Additionally: “The use of Bitcoin for alleged money laundering led to the arrests of two men in the US last week … Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle told Bloomberg in a statement that the ‘arrests may be the first state prosecutions involving the use of Bitcoins in money laundering operations.’ ”
The price of a BitCoin in Pasadena, today — $576 (Note trader has limited purchase to about a quarter of a Bitcoin.)
Thought exercise: How much have the Winklevosses lost in the last week on their BitCoin holdings?
Also simmering, Russia becoming hostile to BitCoin.
On-line public relations for BitCoin fanatic and fiat money fear and loather, Overstock’s Patrick Byrne:
Patrick Byrne says the zombie apocalypse is coming, and there’s one thing that can save us: bitcoin.
He tells me this during a phone call from his car, a black Tesla Model S that’s winding its way through the mountains above Salt Lake City, on its way to Byrne’s home in the Utah ski country. Byrne is the CEO and chairman of Salt Lake’s Overstock.com …
He has long warned that our economy is hurtling toward another massive recession — what he calls the zombie apocalypse — and he believes bitcoin can shelter us from the fallout.
If the digital currency reaches its true potential, he tells me, it might even avert this apocalypse all-together. “Someday, either zombies walk the Earth or something close to that,??? says Byrne, the son of the man who built the GEICO insurance empire …
“It can make our country more robust,??? says Byrne, a disciple of the Austrian school of economics, which holds that our economy should rest on the judgments of individuals, not a central authority …
Conveniently, from E. J. Dionne, today — on the Austrian school of economics:
Those who follow [Austrian economists] Hayek and Mises would have us forget this history, or rewrite it beyond comprehension. They would also have us overlook that Hayek’s “own historical justification for apolitical market economics was entirely wrong,??? as the late Tony Judt put it in “Thinking the Twentieth Century,??? his extraordinary dialogue with his fellow historian Timothy Snyder, published in 2012, after Judt’s death.
Hayek believed, Tony Judt said, that “if you begin with welfare policies of any sort — directing individuals, taxing for social ends, engineering the outcomes of market relationships — you will end up with Hitler.???
But to the contrary, postwar initiatives along Keynesian lines are precisely what prevented both the resurgence of fascism …
“Years later, when I spend a few days with Byrne at Overstock headquarters and sit down for dinner at his home, a jewel of a log cabin just outside the ski resort of Park City, Utah …” writes Cade Metz for Wired.
Patrick Byrne, explaining what he believes in, poorly:
And when this Robespierre forces you to submit to him, he’s “forcing you to be free???, in Rousseau’s phrase. And that goes on through Hagel and [Marx] where the . . . you know it’s the …. And it’s [Lenin] where it’s the vanguard … party; Hitler, where it’s [das Volk] …. It’s the prerogative of . . . It’s the people . . . Real freedom is frowned on, and subordinating yourself to the work of the people …, [arbeit macht frei] as they said over in the concentration camp gates. And somewhere along the way, the intellectuals from the continent, I think, lost this sense of freedom, as this basic idea of people choosing their own ends in life. And it’s not . . . it’s . . . it’s a . . . it’s a . . . When I listen to people talk in politics, I go right back to this route. And it’s pretty easy to see that for most of them, they’ve just taken the wrong fork. They are, in one way or another, defining liberty and freedom as subordinating yourself to the ends that they . . . that someone else has chosen for you. And that . . . that’s valueless …
In fact Voltaire read a book by Rousseau where he . . . where when he read this stuff, he wrote Rousseau a letter where he said, “Dear Monsieur Rousseau, I’ve had the pleasure of reading your book against the human race.??? Well he had it exactly right. This philosophy . . . this continental philosophy from Rousseau, Kant, Hagel, Nietzsche, you know, Marx, [Lenin], of course – it’s anti-freedom. It’s . . . it’s [a] philosophy against the human race.
American plutocrat libertarians, a class unto themselves.
Make me a believer. I’ll try anything once. Escape from WhiteManistan, now accepting BitCoin.
Donate Bitcoins
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02.07.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:08 pm by George Smith
Fiore.
Vimeo sucks with their privacy restrictions. But the song and animation are worth enduring the website.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 1:51 pm by George Smith
Sam Zell, one time owner of Tribune, and by extension, the Los Angeles Times, joins the Pity the Billionaire riffing:
Billionaire real estate investor Sam Zell agreed with capital pioneer Tom Perkins that wealthy Americans are being unfairly criticized and said that the 1 percent work harder.
“The 1 percent are getting pummeled because it’s politically convenient to do so,” Zell said, an interview Wednesday on Bloomberg Television’s “In the Loop” with Betty Liu.
People “should not talk about envy of the 1 percent, they should talk about emulating the 1 percent. The 1 percent work harder, the 1 percent are much bigger factors in all forms of our society” …
[Zell] sees envy of the rich and class warfare as growing problems in America, blaming government regulations for a widening income gap.
Zell, under even the slightest examination, is easy to despise. A couple of my friends worked at the LA Times under the time of Zell and he was uniformly loathed.
As soon as he arrived at the newspaper he made it clear he hated journalists.
At 4:11 in this video taken at the Times, he curses and alludes to an incident a week earlier at another newspaper in the chain, the Orlando Sentinel.
There was laughter at his response. Believe me, no one was laughing after they saw the video of the incident.
Zell took possession of the newspaper chain using an elaborate financial maneuver no one really understood at the Los Angeles newspaper. It involved looting the pensions of Times employees in an elaborate scheme as part of the takeover and transformation of the newspaper into a private entity.
Employees became so incensed at Zell they eventually launched a civil suit. Poynter explains briefly:
A federal judge has granted preliminary approval of the $32 million settlement — announced in August — for former Los Angeles Times auto writer Dan Neil and Tribune employees. The final hearing is set for January 30. The plaintiffs contended that the leveraged buyout that resulted in creation of an employee ownership plan violated federal pension law. Tribune staffers became owners of the company when it was taken private by Sam Zell in 2007. The company filed for bankruptcy protection one year later …
The lawsuit, which was filed in November 2008 following the purchase of the Tribune Co. by Sam Zell and his company, raised claims on behalf of participants and beneficiaries of the Tribune Company Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). The lawsuit challenged the Leveraged ESOP buy-out of the company. The complaint alleged Defendants breached their fiduciary duties by causing the ESOP to pay more than fair market value for the Tribune stock purchased in April, 2007 by Sam Zell.
In 2012 the case was finally settled:
In the long legal fight over Sam Zell’s dubious use of employee funds to acquire control of Tribune, the good guys have won, more or less. A federal judge in Chicago gave final approval today to a $32 million settlement that will put some money back in the retirement accounts of Tribune employees, present and past.
In 2008, Pulitzer Prize-winning auto columnist Dan Neil and some colleagues in the Los Angeles Times newsroom (as well as in the great LAT scattering that has occurred under Tribune and Zell) took a courageous step and sued the keeper of their paychecks. At issue was the hinky financing that leveraged their employee stock accounts to allow Zell to get control of the company …
The Chicago judge approved the settlement tentatively reached last October. The roster of plaintiffs and the respondents have evolved through the years.Tribune, for instance, is no longer on the suit, though the company will apparently be chipping in some of the settlement.
It was obvious early that Sam Zell was a disaster for the newspaper business. There were lay-offs, more beratings and predatory behavior by Zell and his lieutenants at the top of the corporation.
It is perfectly described in this piece, Zell to LA Times — Drop Dead:
Zell was known for constructing complicated deals, especially ones in which he personally had very little at stake. For the Tribune deal, Zell put a paltry $315 million of his own money into a purchase offer of $8.2 billion. To raise the other $7.9 billion, he proposed making Tribune an S corporation owned by a nonprofit ESOP (Employee Share Ownership Plan), which would be exempt from federal income taxes. The ESOP could then borrow the rest of the money needed to buy the stock owned by the Chandlers, the McCormick Trust, employees, and other shareholders in order to complete the sale and take the company private. If the deal went through, Tribune managers would be rewarded with large “success bonuses.” The investment bankers and advisors, for six months of work, would take in about $160 million.
The deal would saddle the company with $12-13 billion in debt. In other words, everyone stood to gain except the newspaper, the company, and their employees, all of whom were risking a great deal and, in the case of the employees, without their consent. The deal from hell went through. Exactly 12 months later the company would file for the largest bankruptcy in the history of the American media industry. Over 4,200 people lost their jobs in the three years that followed.
Zell, then, is with the standard now set for the American class of billionaires. He looted the company and the Los Angeles Times. As the Times and Tribune’s other newspapers struggled, executives at the top of the Zell pyramid reaped millions in bonuses. Bankruptcy and unemployment were the result.
The only satisfaction was the clawback from the employee-led civil suit and a ruling that Zell would be the last on the creditors list to be paid in the corporation’s emergence in 2013 from bankruptcy.
Sam Zell, in his own words
Sam Zell calls someone a mofo.
Sam Zell on politics and the markets, back in 2012:
“The game is being stacked against me.”
“Stop the class warfare crap. Stop this politics of envy.”
“[People] are disincentivized if they don’t have to pay for their health care, that’s another thing they don’t have to worry about.”
“I succeed because I take the risks.”
“The [national] standard is how can we keep the greatest number of failing teachers in place.”
Sam Zell on Occupy Wall Street:
“I don’t see any justification for taking over private property. I don’t see any justification for creating health issues and attracting all kinds of people who, more than anything else, want to get on television…
“I would have evicted them on the first day.”
“We decided to set up a plant in the United States … we can’t find the workers.”
“The government, by definition, is the most incompetent producer of any kind of services”
[Do you want them to get out of education?]
“Absolutely.”
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 12:25 pm by George Smith
Robert Reich says in e-mail to share this:
“Opposing a minimum wage hike, blocking unemployment insurance, cutting food stamps, keeping millions from accessing Medicaid …. I believe these positions are part of a concerted effort to keep struggling folks down that represents nothing less than a war on the poor and working class.”
Fair enough.
But in the video – below – he never mentions who “they” are even though everyone knows. The Republican Party and its 1 percent paymasters.
Always name your enemy, so watch and sing “Jesus of America,” which does it well.
Share, share, share, share, share.
You know how the culture of lickspittle sharing works in America. The conveniently important and famous get all of it.
Brother, can you spare a BitCoin?
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Fiat money fear and loathers at 9:54 am by George Smith
BitCoin fans, hard at work, create problem for big BitCoin bank:
The price of Bitcoin dropped on Friday after one of the leading exchanges that handles trading of the crypto-currency halted withdrawals.
Mt. Gox, which calls itself the most established Bitcoin exchange, said all Bitcoin withdrawals “will be on pause.” It did not say when withdrawals would resume but said it would provide an update on Feb. 10.
Mt. Gox said an increase in withdrawal requests caused “technical” problems.
“To understand the issue thoroughly, the system needs to be in a static state …”
The price of Bitcoin in Pasadena, today — $763
“The price of a Bitcoin dropped to $701.56 on Friday, down 8.2% from $764.35 the previous day, according to Coinbase, a Bitcoin digital wallet and online platform,” reads USA Today.
Make me a believer. I’ll try anything once. Escape from WhiteManistan now accepts Bitcoin.
Donate Bitcoins
From a New York Times profile on Charles Shrem, the 24 year old BitCoin millionaire recently arrested and charged with money-laundering by the US government:
The charges were surprising given that Mr. Shrem often appeared at Bitcoin events talking about how to trade Bitcoin legally. At a Bitcoin conference last year, he boasted that BitInstant was “going to be the shining city on the hill.???
Would Ronald Reagan have loved BitCoin?
Perhaps the Winklevoss twins could answer that. They helped raise a $1.5 million dollar investment in Shrem’s business.
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02.06.14
Posted in Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 3:01 pm by George Smith
It’s easy to figure out how Ted Nugent’s brain works.
Take the writing of his weekly column. When not calling someone a famous Nazi, metaphorically recommending death or arrest for various members of the administration, or illustrating how communist tyranny is being imposed on everyone, he gets up in the morning, thinks of something dear to his heart, and claims that the dear-to-heart something is responsible for some great national miracle.
In today’s column at WorldNetDaily, Nugent credits hunters and fisherman with cleaning up America’s dirty water in the seventies, specifically Lake Erie:
When I was growing up in that once grand city of Detroit, Lake Erie would occasionally ignite spontaneously …
The perfect “we the people??? ballet of whistleblowing sounded the alarm when real conservationist/environmentalist, you know, hunters, fishermen and trappers, with real boots on the ground, witnessed in the swamps and on the water our beloved muskrat, waterfowl and fish populations drop to unacceptable levels. We quickly stepped up to remedy this very dangerous condition that threatened our hunter/gatherer lifestyle.
We simply refused to accept the status quo of the industrial revolution mistakes …
It wasn’t that long thereafter that Lake Erie got cleaned up so well that it once again became the world’s top walleye and small mouth bass fishery.
It’s a nice story, pike fisherman and muskrat trappers fixed staggering industry-driven water pollution.
Except that’s not how it happened.
It was the hated federal government and the Clean Water Act that did the job.
From one of Ted Nugent’s hates, the EPA:
Fires plagued the Cuyahoga River beginning in 1936 when a spark from a blow torch ignited floating debris and oils. The largest river fire in 1952 caused over $1 million in damage to boats and a riverfront office building. By the 1960s, the lower Cuyahoga River in Cleveland was used for waste disposal and was choked with debris, oils, sludge, industrial wastes and sewage. These pollutants were considered a major source of impact to Lake Erie, which was considered “dead” (devoid of fish) at the time. On June 22, 1969 a river fire captured national attention. Time magazine described the Cuyahoga as the river that “oozes rather than flows” and in which a person “does not drown but decays.” This event helped spur an avalanche of pollution control activities resulting in the Clean Water Act, Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and the creation of the federal and state Environmental Protection Agencies.
After the Clear Water Act of 1972 and other local initiatives started enforcement, Lake Erie gradually improved. Fishing recovered, mayflies, absent for close to four decades, returned.
However, a different and not uncommon problem in modern America, also caused by mass human action, has now arisen: massive algal blooms caused by agricultural run-off.
A 2013 report from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
In 2011, Lake Erie experienced the largest harmful algal bloom in its recorded history, with a peak intensity over three times greater than any previously observed bloom. Here we show that long-term trends in agricultural practices are consistent with increasing phosphorus loading to the western basin of the lake, and that these trends, coupled with meteorological conditions in spring 2011, produced record-breaking nutrient loads. An extended period of weak lake circulation then led to abnormally long residence times that incubated the bloom, and warm and quiescent conditions after bloom onset allowed algae to remain near the top of the water column and prevented flushing of nutrients from the system. We further find that all of these factors are consistent with expected future conditions. If a scientifically guided management plan to mitigate these impacts is not implemented, we can therefore expect this bloom to be a harbinger of future blooms in Lake Erie.
“And so it continues today with all my hunting, fishing, trapping friends as dedicated stewards to monitor the health of wildlife and wild habitat as the ultimate barometers for quality air, soil and water, and, therefore, overall quality of life,” continues Nugent.
The breast swells, a tear is seen in the eye. Then one last recommendation.
“Now wouldn’t it be great if only enough Americans could put forth such effort to cleanse our government of all that political pollution?”
One newspaper excerpt, October 2012:
In recent summers large blooms of toxic algae have returned. In 2011, the worst year so far, there were days when the algae was so thick that Unger couldn’t take his customers fishing. He once drove his 27-foot Sportcraft boat 14 miles straight north from Cleveland before he gave up and turned back. “I never got out of the algae,??? he says.
Ted Nugent does God’s work in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, informs public Maryland, New Jersey and New York are no longer states in America:
“I’m doing God’s work exposing the soullessness of the left, the evil agenda of the same liberal Democrats who engineered the destruction of the greatest city of America my birth city of Detroit. They did it on purpose and now we have a commander in chief who is actually following the recipe for destruction of Detroit for the whole country.???
As he has done in the past, Nugent called Attorney General Eric Holder a gun runner and President Obama an avowed racist.
He accused the Obama Administration of imposing communism on America. “That’s the redistribution of earnings, giving hard-earned money to people who didn’t earn it.
“This is ‘Planet of the Apes’ stuff,??? Nugent said. “This is so indecent, so criminal, that Americans who get up early and work hard are absolutely shattered by the abuse of power and corruption.???
He said Maryland, New York and New Jersey — all of which have legalized same-sex marriage — were no longer America.
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02.05.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 12:29 pm by George Smith
The Super Bowl, the game part, was unwatchable at any speed, a hours long slow-motion disaster in televised pro sports.
The commercials were primarily big budget blow jobs and fantasies to some place I used to live in.
Let Asia assemble your phone!
If your skin crawls it only means you don’t live in WhiteManistan.
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02.04.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 4:27 pm by George Smith
Ol’ EMP Crazy, now stocking 50 pound bags of corn from Sam’s Club and expanding his refuge in Appalachia in advance of the imminent end of America.
In 2012, notorious electromagnetic pulse kook Roscoe Bartlett was run out of the House, losing election to a Democratic candidate in a redrawn district. So, naturally, the first thing one thinks of at a famous web publication — Politico: Hey, let’s do a profile on what happened to Roscoe!
I’m not gonna rewrite everything I had to say at the time Bartlett bit the dust and the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy suffered a blow from which it has yet to recover.
Instead, I quote from the archives:
As long as I can remember Bartlett has been in congress, warning about how an enemy — North Korea, or terrorists, and now the special foe — Iran, will destroy American civilization with an electromagnetic pulse caused by a nuclear weapon detonated over the United States.
The Cult of EMP Crazy, aka as the missile defense/bomb Iran lobby, would have been nothing without Bartlett. Year after year after year Bartlett pounded the issue from the House, as often as possible, even causing the formation of a commission, now years past, to study the threat. [It concluded] the nation could be trivially returned to the age of horse and buggy. (Or as I used to like to put it, the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.)
As a consequence, Bartlett is the inspiration for now hundreds of vanity-published books from the survivalist crew, all distributed on Amazon, all exactly the same – about the end of western civilization by EMP …
Despite all the lobbying, Bartlett was never able to put into action any legislation to deal with electromagnetic pulse doom. But the lobby itself is loud, vociferous and incessant, writing books, articles and opinion pieces, casting movies and commercials, even spanning the Atlantic Ocean to plague the Brits.
Bartlett, for his part, has an obscure career waiting in the prepper/survivalist movement, where everyone is convinced America is about to end, anyway …
Since Roscoe Bartlett has been at his cause for so long, one might legitimately ask what is the man’s legacy?
Striking fear into people who are not particularly perceptive is one of his signal achievements … Bartlett’s unstinting work aimed at describing the total end of US civilization in an instant is particularly resonant within the Christian right …
Roscoe Bartlett, [and this can be said with absolute certainty], has been around longer than PEZ candy, parking meters and penicillin.
The Politico story is here, and excerpting only a little:
Every couple of weeks, the survivalist octogenarian shaves off his white beard, dons a suit and heads to the capital, where he serves as a senior consultant for a cybersecurity company called Lineage Technologies.
Bartlett, a small-government, Tea Party-style Republican, had spent two decades as the U.S. representative for Maryland’s 6th congressional district.
Bartlett’s warnings of catastrophic electromagnetic pulse attacks and solar flares fell on deaf ears and earned him a reputation as a crank …
In speech after late-night speech on the House floor, Bartlett hectored the nearly empty chamber: If the United States doesn’t do something to protect the grid, and soon, a terrorist or an act of nature will put an end to life as we know it.
Bartlett loved to conjure doomsday visions …
Since it was a feature in Politico, it immediately generated copycat coverage in other places, including — surprisingly, the LA Times.
I’ll not repeat from it save to say it includes about everything from the now twenty year-old script/meme. The reporter, one of the Times’ newer employees, was probably in grade school when it started.
Readers know electromagnetic pulse doom now falls firmly within the boundaries of DD’s Law:
The probability that any predicted national security catastrophe, or doomsday scenario, will occur is the inverse of its appearance in entertainments.
Thus, in the case of Roscoe Bartlett’s vision, zero.
There’s a crappy television series, Revolution, on it. Many movies have been made with electromagnetic pulse doom as a central feature of plotting. And do savor the hundreds of vanity-published novels on it, all published through Amazon, establishing a weird genre of adventure and romance fiction for the paranoid prepper far-right in WhiteManistan. (If you click the link to Amazon in the old post, you’ll see the number of books nobody without a mental problem of some kind reads has greatly increased.)
The generic script: The US will collapse soon, through an unspecified series of disasters which include (but are not limited to) total electrical grid failure, rampant bioterrorist-spread disease, and the death of money. Only those in the country, on farms with their own fruit trees, vegetable crops, chainsaws for cutting firewood, elevated water supply, and Bible-reading skills will survive.
Having been familiar with it for so long, I’ve observed there’s a joy in the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy. It’s a creepy enthusiasm for the end of US civilization so the true believers can retreat to their bunkers and bug-out hideaways, well-stocked with guns, ammo and military surplus camo-wear, awaiting the arrival of the starving and diseased scum from the cities who they can have the pleasure of ordering off their property. And then shooting, if not promptly obeyed.
It’s the same joy one senses in the believers in Rapture. Those saved by Jesus in the final score-keeping rejoice in knowing the non-believers will then be subjected to an infinity of misery.
In any case, there are never any Democrats allowed in the bunker when the end comes. It will be a great ritual of purification.
With Bartlett gone to Croatan, or more accurately, a private compound and artificial lake in West Virginia, the mantle of official Congressional electromagnetic pulse crazy fell to the certified idiot from Arizona who goes by the name of Trent Franks.
At which point long-time Cult members knew they had a serious problem.
So they took the electromagnetic pulse doom story on the road to Tea Party meetings in red states, where it is now offered with an entire menu of favorite right-wing hates: The need to end entitlements, the need for legislation to counter “voter fraud,” the need to install anti-shariah legislation at the state level, the need to expose the takeover of the US State Department by the Muslim Brotherhood in the guise of Hilary Clinton aide, Huma Abedin; the treachery of Benghazi…
In response to Politico’s Bartlett profile, Glenn Beck’s Blaze joined in.
Dealing with Iran instead of immediately proceeding with plans to go to war is a Neville Chamberlain moment:
Buck Sexton interviewed on his radio show Saturday former CIA director Amb. R. James Woolsey, now the chair of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Woosley gave a damning critique of the Obama administration’s handling of the Iranian nuclear agreement.
Woolsey, CIA director from 1993 to 1995, told Sexton that Obama’s dealings with the Iranian government have been “roughly equivalent to Neville Chamberlain’s at Munich in the 1930s.???
When Sexton asked Woolsey about Iran’s potential to have a nuclear weapon ready to deploy that the U.S. couldn’t stop, the ambassador said one could be ready in “six months to a year.??? But he added that the Iranians don’t need something sophisticated in order to trigger an electromagnetic pulse, which would be “devastating.???
On that note, Woolsey told Sexton that an EMP poses a security threat in the U.S. as well.
Complete with an old picture of Hitler at Munich.
Takeaway: Like so many things in the socially-crippled US, the paranoid and steeped-in-authoritarianism mythology of electromagnetic pulse doom was turned into a highly-professionalized and tenacious industry, built on the exploitation of a thick seam of WhiteManistan kook-ism and its love of end-times stories in which the virtuous are saved and the sinners destroyed. It’s a profitable business. Just take a look at Roscoe Bartlett’s spread in Appalachia.
Roscoe Bartlett — from the archives.
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