“Ten or 30 rounds, what difference does it make???? one fellow tells the newspaper. “I can change a clip in 1.5 seconds.???
Another keeps a thirty-round magazine-equipped AR-15 in his house for protection. In case a couple of squads attack, one presumes.
Keep your hands off, gun grabber, or a “sizable population” will start a revolution, another tells the Times.
Perish forbid, I would never think of grabbing their junk.
I don’t have to write much about WhiteManistan anymore. Why bother? The newsmedia has to wrestle with the ways of the good Americans, daily.
In the meantime, do enjoy a fond look back at PARIAH, the magazine that caught the spirit of it way before the big dailies had their noses rubbed in it. It was ahead of its time.
Art, ruin, revenge and white supremacy — all wrapped up in a magazine that coulda shown up Garden & Gun.
Take a week or two reading mass opinion polls on terrorism while consulting with your multi-millionaire advisors carried over from the husband’s administration:
[Hillary Clinton’s strategy to battle terrorism] will include shutting down the terrorist network’s recruitment efforts online, stopping would-be jihadists from getting training overseas, preventing foreign fighters from coming into the U.S., discovering plots before they can be carried out and supporting law enforcement officers who respond to such attacks, according to a campaign official. She will also call for empowering Muslim-American communities here in the U.S.
“Discovering plots before they can be carried out” — groupspeakthink for more domestic and international surveillance as well as not subtle entrapment operations.
“Shutting down the terrorist network’s recruitment efforts online” — high-button cant for futile whack-a-mole, identical to everyone else’s futile whack-a-mole plans.
“Stopping would-be jihadists from getting training overseas” — reused boilerplate for more spying on Muslims domestically and more signature strikes and bombing of poor people in the Middle East and Africa.
“She will also call for empowering Muslim-American communities” — phony concern and happytalk meaning more surveillance of Muslim-Americans, semi-gentle shaming of them for “not doing more” and signaling to white paranoid America that she’s on the job. When reading or hearing the word empowering remember the true meaning — which is disempowering.
What it boilds down is that, again, Hillary Clinton is merely reactive. She looks at trends and formulates a position that coddles what is believed the mass wants. In this case, ginned up by fear after the San Bernardino shooting, to respond with more scrutiny and pressure on Muslims in America.
Nothing Clinton has suggested is new. It’s just the application of more domestic spying, a signal that she’s prepared to be tough, build the national security state, just like everyone else, and continue the endless wars and strikes that have inspired increasing radicalization, abroad and at home.
Amid a new round of debate over gun control, Californians have already bought a record number of firearms in 2015, including major spikes in sales on Black Friday and the days after the San Bernardino attacks, an analysis of new federal and state data show.
Firearms purchases in California triggered 1.51 million federal background checks in the first 11 months of the year, breaking the previous annual record of 1.47 million set last year.
And December typically brings even more firearms purchases than any other month, whether for holiday gifts or getting ahead of new gun restrictions the new year might bring.
The gun dealers’ holiday season got off to a rousing start.
The newspaper interviews the head of a gun dealers trade group. And gets the standard book on the subject:
“Every single time the politicians start talking about firearms bans or increasing regulation, folks start to realize, ‘This is a right that if I don’t exercise it, I may lose it,’ “ said Craig DeLuz, spokesman for the California Association of Federal Firearms Licensees, a gun dealers’ trade group. “It’s not the sole motivator, but it’s a significant motivator.???
As he was shopping for some ammunition Saturday at San Jose’s new Bass Pro shop, longtime gun owner David Palava said the sales spike “is not hard to figure out.???
“Thirty years ago, guns were a hobby,??? said Palava, 62, of East San Jose. “Now they seem more necessary. … We have terrorists here being imported by our government.???
The government is the enemy.
And this is even as it has failed, or barely even tried, to do anything at the federal level on gun control. Insane booms in gun sales have occured at regular intervals and after every fresh massacre. The presidency of Barack Obama has also been fuel for increasing mass gun buys. Racism is the inspiration.
The other, the newspaper reads: “The number of background checks conducted each year in California — which fluctuated through the early to mid-2000s — has risen steadily each year since 2008, when President Barack Obama was elected and rhetoric about ‘gun-grabbing’ politicians began to fly in earnest.”
The newspaper asked the gun dealer, DeLuz, which California laws his trade group found “most egregious.”
These are “prohibiting concealed-carry permit holders from bringing guns into schools or onto college campuses; banning the sale of kits to convert legal magazines into high-capacity magazines; and increasing the period of time for which a person is prohibited from having a firearm because of a mental illness or threat of violence …”
“The Turner Diaries” is America’s premier piece of hate fiction. Published in 1978 by a white supremacist neo-Nazi for a large audience of white supremacist neo-Nazis, a lot of its eliminationist tone and philosophy, minus only the male romance fiction on dispatching all enemies, is noticeably mirrored presently in the Republican Party, the National Rifle Association and gun fanatics. Years ago, the book was often found at gun shows.
“The Turner Diaries” was literature for an underground white supremacy hate group. Today, the GOP, the NRA, gun fanatics, the American authoritarian right are a collectively large white supremacy hate group.
“Light the motherf**ker on fire,??? is the latest thing caught on videotape at a Trump rally yesterday.
“I would not only not piss on him if he was on fire—I’d throw gas on him.” said another raging white guy about the President, in a Frank Luntz focus group on the enthusiasm for the strongman.
“The Turner Diaries” tells the story of a violent overthrow of a “tyrannical” government and the mass revenge killings of black people who have been given advantage and positions over white men by a predatory government, according to the author.
However, lots of groups, races and classes are in for the deadly reckoning: Jews, any people of color, white people who marry or consort with any people of color, academics, elites, foreigners and, of course, government workers. The list of those marked for retribution and executed by the book’s freedom fighters basically encompasses everyone who isn’t Christian, white and a gun owner.
An excerpt:
All that brave talk by patriots, “The government will never take my guns away,” and then nothing but meek submission when it happened.
On the other hand, maybe we should be heartened by the fact that so many of us had guns then, nearly 18 months after the Cohen Act had outlawed all private ownership of firearms in the United States. It was only because so many of us defied the law and hid our weapons instead of turning them in that the government wasn’t able to act more harshly against us after the Gun Raids.
“The list of persons to be raided, it turned out, had been compiled primarily from firearms sales records which all gun dealers had been required to keep,” it continues.
Ten days after the San Bernardino shootings, thousands came to the Del Mar Fairgrounds to check out the latest deals on firearms and stand in line for discounted bulk ammunition.
While the shootings, which killed 14, were a common topic of discussion Saturday, there were a mix of interests and motivations at the Crossroads of the West Gun Show, which runs through Sunday. Some, like [a fellow from Poway], said recent talk of further gun restrictions from federal and state-level politicians following the San Bernardino shootings made them think now might be the time to buy.
“It definitely makes you wonder how long before it’s time to pick up and move because they’ve already infringed on so many of our constitutional rights,??? [the Poway fellow] said.
The Sheriff’s Department has reported an uptick in the number of applications for concealed weapons permits in recent weeks. A federal appeals court is still considering whether to open up concealed carry to all law-abiding citizens in the state …
[Another man from Pacific Beach] said many who come to the show are simply concerned with the trends they see in the world, from the ongoing drought to terrorist attacks at home and abroad…
“People are worried about having things taken away from them.”
“Sound City,” the Dave Grohl produced history of the studio in Van Nuys that defined the sound of hit classic rock, was a story waiting to be told. That Grohl rose to enable it is a big credit.
However, once Grohl’s intro is past in the first fifteen minutes, the real meat of the documentary takes flight. (Look, someone has to tell you. Dave Grohl is a bore. He’s very sincere but his real role is — cheerleader. Not historian.)
“Sound City” is an oral history, one demonstrating the success of insider network effects as amplifiers of business and the actually pretty small world of very white super hit classic rock in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties.
Producer Keith Olsen tells a lot of the story. Don’t know who he is? If you have a good record collection from 1970-1989, check the backs of the albums. You’ll see that name.
Olsen custom-ordered the much talked about/glorified Neve console used at Sound City for $75,000 in 1972. And he also produced the Buckingham Nicks (that’s Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks) record there, an insubstantial LP that, coincidentally, hooked Mick Fleetwood. (Another hook was the studio’s “big room,” which rendered a perfect drum sound.)
The multi-platinum success of the “Fleetwood Mac” album featuring the duo made Sound City. A surviving owner opines that seven out of every ten records you heard on rock radio during the period were cut at his studio. The place’s other founder even managed and developed Rick Springfield.
Springfield, a subject of a similar documentary (“An Affair of the Heart”), is on camera a lot, telling how Keith Olsen had Neil Geraldo, fresh from Pat Benatar’s “Crimes of Passion” (yes, “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” one of the defining hard rock tunes on radio of the era, if you don’t think so, flunk, I’m the pro on these things), do the guitar playing on his smash first album as well as the solo on “Jessie’s Girl.”
RCA sent a check to Sound City for 1 million dollars as a result of it, “Working Class Dog,” and its hit single. And Springfield met his wife, a front office girl, there.
When you really want to get right down to it, Rick Springfield was white suburban/exurban/rural middle class girl America’s sweetheart during his run. Well, multi-platinum’s worth of them, that’s millions, anyway. Sound City did that.
But by the mid-to-late Eighties Sound City was almost out of business. Digital recording was what kids and the industry wanted. The big contract band bookings, after some hair metal in the early-Eighties, dried up. Olsen built his own digital recording studio next door, left and told the studio’s new manager, Shivaun, the old place was doomed.
Then lightning struck for a second time. Nirvana booked the place for their major label debut, “Nevermind.” Recorded in 16 days at Sound City, it went straight to number one and a second wave of success breathed new life into the corpse.
The movie tries to cast the idea that it was the super-special meticulously over-engineered and hand-crafted Neve console and devotion to analog, analog, analog tape that made everything unique and the best. There’s some truth to that.
But it’s not the entire story. It was not just the circuits and accidental architecture of the building. Not just hardware, but people. Networking effects among the connected and some cosmically astounding luck (literally, Mick Fleetwood is shopping at a hippie grocer in Laurel Canyon when someone from the studio is in line with him) with hitmakers had a bunch to do with it.
The ending comes more quickly after the second fade-out. The digital world destroys Sound City for the last time. Grohl phones in to try and save something, buying the Neve for his studio.
Here “Sound City” goes off the rails.
Everyone attests that some tunes by Stevie Nicks, Rick Springfield and few others, newly recorded with the Foo Fighters and Grohl, have preserved the memory of Sound City. Nope, the music is spirited but crappy. Stop, Stevie, that song, whatever it was, sucks, you yell at the screen. They even manage to make Paul McCartney, screaming and playing a cigarbox guitar on some lousy hard rock tune called “Dear Mama,” unbearable. It wasn’t just the equipment. The magic that made Sound City is gone.
Cut.
Four out of five stars if you edit out the last fifteen minutes where the Neve is with the Foo-fighters and company. Three stars if you watch the whole thing.
“Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Long Lost Rock and Roll??? is the most depressing documentary about popular music. And that’s because of our part in it, yes America’s, which I’ll get to in a bit. It’s also the best documentary on rock and roll this year.
In a nutshell, it’s about the evolution of pop music in Cambodia prior to Pol Pot and the genocides in the killing fields.
After independence from France, Cambodia had a small prospering middle class in Phnom Penh, the capitol of a nation that was primarily rural, it’s people rice farmers in the fields. An emerging prosperity literally amplified people who considered music part of the soul of the nation. Encouraged by the monarchy of the Sihanouk regime, it built a music scene around the National Radio, city dance halls and bars …
I watched “Spymasters: CIA In the Crosshairs” last night, Showtime’s new documentary about the CIA’s conversion into a paramilitary operation, rather than an intelligence and spying one, in the war on terror. Naturally, I stole it. [1]
Near the end, all the CIA’s directors, including Obama’s, insist the US can’t kill its way to victory. And that droning doesn’t work because it makes more enemies, even in countries that aren’t droned. At this point, it’s rather like telling us that eggs come from a chicken.
One woman, a senior counter-terrorism analyst named Gina Bennett, says at the end that terrorism isn’t even a threat to the existence of the US.
But no one explains if that’s what they believe, why do they keep ordering up more now that they’ve destabilized most of the Middle East? Your head would explode if it hadn’t been dynamited several times years ago over Iraq. Which they concede they screwed up big time, too.
There’s one fellow in it who rides a big motorcycle. I’ll omit his name and you’ll see below why I don’t want him Googling me.
He organized all the waterboarding for the CIA and looks like he wants to smash your face with a set of bass knuckles all the time he’s on screen.
He’s is softened somewhat by Leon Pannetta, one of Obama’s CIA directors, who works hard to create the impression that he’s a good Catholic and snuck off to church to work through his rosary a couple times after each drone strike he OK’d.
I also learned our waterboarding was not like Nazi waterboarding because we used a third less water, or something.
And you’ll see a quick shot of what might have been bin Laden’s coffin, with a brass plate labelled “Geronimo,” although according to Seymour Hersh the special forces men threw his remains out over the mountains.
Plus, George Tenet is a big and permanently angry churl, America’s grizzly bear. And you’d be like that, too, one supposes if you’d messed up as often and as big time as he did. Although, actually, it was apparently good for his career. Which is also why it’s good to be at the top of the CIA athough we are told CIA director wives don’t think so. It’s great job security. You can set the world ablaze, cost hundreds or tens of thousands of lives, never get fired (well, except for David Petraeus and that was over a girl), be world famous and do very well.
1. I’ll review just about anything. Just send it or suggest where it can be stolen.
Three years on, almost to the day, and gun massacres are the US of Fail’s locked groove. Of all angry white male America’s obsessions, hoarding ridiculous amounts of assault rifles (sanitizingly referred to as “long guns”) and ammunition is about the strongest. So powerful, it scares the civilized world.
Growing up in southeastern Pennsylvania, my neighborhood had many gun owners. No one in my family owned one but I didn’t have a problem with anyone who did.
Four decades on, that’s all changed. News stories that reported gun background checks through the roof on Black Friday show the expanse of the raging white gun nut revolt at everyone else’s expense. Now everyone expects gun sales to explode after a massacre. The people in this story on the front page of the New York Times aren’t your friends.
They’re the enemy, a collective hive mind that’s insane.
“It is all part of a weapons boom that has been building for weeks,” reads the newspaper.
And the people behind it look in the mirror each morning and never see the nuts person staring back at them. Nothing reaches them except twisted alarms and stories inspiring them to buy more.
So, by all means, go, go, go to more gun shows. Buy more. Say you’re afraid, real afraid, to reporters. Make a “political buy,” just to show your solidarity in defiance of the president, the “gun grabber” who’s never actually grabbed any.
I’m glad I don’t know any of you. You have an incurable mental illness. And if, by chance, I bump into any of you in the future I’ll cut you a break and silently go the other way.
You could hear a swarm of helicopters off to the west (agh!) east from before lunch until just a little while ago. About an hour in, it hit the news.
Despite what the President will say, no matter what comes from politicians and the famous, this is our normal, our exceptionalism, the thing for which we are best known. We’re trapped with it.
First off, technical problems from my hosting service. Those of you who’ve been reading long enough know the provider sometimes springs these on its clients. Then it denies the problem. And after it’s badgered enough with screen shots of error messages, it slowly responds.
It’s the way of American corporate business, especially on the net. Now that I’m old I’m less inclined to deal with it in a timely manner.