Feel free to share. None of my “friends” would on Facebook. Being all upper middle class good liberals, this is anathema.
TRUMP … MUST … NOT … WIN … OR
As explained from the wires, by Hillary Clinton in Purchase, NY, yesterday:
AP: Clinton said she regretted that the young Sanders supporters “won’t listen to anybody else??? and didn’t want to hear “the contrast between my experience, my plans, my vision, what I know I can get done and what my opponent is promising…???
“I just wish that there were an opportunity to actually talk and listen to each other because we’ve got to unite when this primary contest is over.”
Explain it a few more times. I still don’t get it. Include more slurs and aspersions as to personal character.
April Fool’s Day is long obsolete in the country where every day brings a fresh bounty of reality-based jokes. What follies we commit, gifts to everyone.
Everything in this, the honest-to-God truth. Trust me, I’m the professional when it comes to the matter.
Colt 45 is targeting its glory days with the return of its iconic ’80s spokesman Billy Dee Williams.
The Brian’s Song and Star Wars actor served as the malt liquor’s brand ambassador for five years starting in 1986, when Colt 45 was the biggest name in malt liquor. Now Williams, 78, appears in a new 15-second video, released Monday, that teases an upcoming TV, print and online marketing campaign in which he is the star …
“It works everytime,” he said. From my perspective, 24 ounce cans.
Continuing:
In his ads, Williams holds a 16-ounce can. But malt liquor is also sold in larger sizes, such as 40-ounce bottles, which were made popular in the ’90s, when rappers such as Ice Cube served as spokesmen for various brands, including Pabst-produced St. Ides.
Researchers at UCLA and elsewhere have found that malt liquor marketing targets minority consumers, including blacks and Hispanics. The 2005 paper titled “Malt Liquor Beers, And The People Who Drink Them, Are Different,” published in the Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research journal, found that malt liquor drinkers in L.A. were more likely to drink more alcohol, be homeless, unemployed and receive public assistance than other types of drinkers.
Ice Cube turned out pretty good. And, yes, it’s true, I have been known to be unemployed. FU, kindly.
Excerpt’s from George Orwell’s review of “Mein Kampf”:
“What he envisions … a continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of ‘living room’ (stretching to Afghanistan or thereabouts), a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder.”
“He had crushed the labor movement and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything.”
“[His] is the fixed vision of a monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the temporary maneuvres of power politics.”
“[The slogan] ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.”
What the mainstream media and Gawker didn’t get over the weekend in having a good Twitter laugh about tricking Donald Trump into quoting Mussolini: The people who are going to vote for him don’t care. In fact, they’ll find it affirming, (1) because they don’t really know anything about Il Duce if they knew about him at all, and (2), they’ll agree with Trump, it’s a quote that’s great for re-tweeting.
So no prize to Gawker or anyone else smirking when there’s a 50-50 chance the election will throw them to the Devil and merciless statistics in November.
But as much as the Republican Party created Trump, it shares parentage with the transpartisan national security complex. Politicians, generals, CIA directors, think tank warriors and terrorism “experts” have been dinning a message of fear into our heads for a decade and a half, a fear that works on many voters like catnip on a feline.
The author continues:
The fear, of course, can only be exorcised by a policy of nonstop militarism. Congratulations, patricians of the Beltway: However disdainful you are of the vulgarian Trump, you helped put him where he is today …
I’d estimate the odds at about fifty-fifty that this country ends up with something resembling a fascist political system, if not in 2017, then at some point in the next decade. We may never hear it called that: The prestige media have up to now mostly maintained an embargo on words like “fascist” or “authoritarian”; it will be fascinating to see at which point in the coming year – if at all – the embargo is lifted. No, we won’t have black uniforms and goose-stepping. In the US cultural vernacular, it would be more like Lee Greenwood played on an endless loop, with patriotic ceremonies even more lugubrious and hypocritical than the ones now at professional sporting events.
So when you read those stories about how Michael Hayden went on Maher to claim the military wouldn’t follow some of Donald Trump’s orders were he President, to these you should say: Bullshit it won’t.
The Wehrmacht’s general staff, those that survived, was said to have many principled men who detested the Fuhrer. And that made such a difference.
The point to be made is not that the United States is like the Third Reich.
When it fails big time, it will do so in a way unique to itself, of its history. But people haven’t changed. Americans, US military men, don’t have some special DNA or secret patent trumping the regular human condition. They make the same historical mistakes, again and again, always thinking we’ll be different this time because …
Yes, Trump is about racism, Islamophobia and making America great “again.” But you’re missing the point if you don’t see that supporting him is also about saying fuck you to the political class, if not the political system. Of course, there are more constructive ways to do this. — Barbara Ehrenreich, on Facebook
The revenge vote is going to be strong. Four decades of slump is a long time to have been keeping a lid on the growing rage. Hillary Clinton will never understand it.
Over the weekend a number of news organizations ran with short stories on the Malware Museum at the Internet archive, a listing of some old MS-DOS computer viruses that came with visual or audio effects. The hook is you can now view these old programs without endangering yourself.
True, but only in a sideways manner. MS-DOS viruses were 16-bit. They don’t run on modern systems. And even when you are free to download them (working DOS and boot sector virus code is still archived widely around the web), your browser will stop you first (Chrome in particular), Windows Defender second, and your installed anti-virus program, third.
So what’s been done at the Internet archive is the piping of the screen effects of some old computer viruses, shown by old MS-DOS programs made to do just that and run in DOSBox, a set of programs that allows you to run old 16-bit PC programs on a variety of modern platforms. (Mostly, DOSBox was made so you could play old and obsolete games.)
Getting down to the nitty-gritty, the programs on-line at the Malware Museum were typically made by anti-virus researchers. The resulting screen displays make much of it clear. Often what was done was a surgical removal of the display code, or an emasculation of those parts of the virus responsible for replication and the destructive part of the payload, rendering the code inert.
What is and was lost in most of the short pieces on the matter is that the old PC viruses with visual or sonic activations did not give you the entertainment all the time, or sometimes even very frequently. They were set to various triggers, date or time counts. The reason for that, generally speaking, was simple.
The virus that gave itself away with a performance trick was a virus that was going to be removed.
In the early Nineties I wrote a file virus called Acme. It searched out .exe files on your hard disk and copied itself beside them, taking their name, except as a .com program, taking advantage of the DOS operating system rule that when the name of a program was given, the operating system would load the .com version of it in preference to the .exe. This guaranteed Acme would execute before the file it was a mimic for.
When Acme could find no more programs to infect it would play a few musical notes in an endless loop. This guaranteed it was always discovered. And, eventually, I got a call from some kid who had infected the family’s PC, which would now do nothing but play music. The virus was easy to take off a system without harm once you knew what it was.
All the programs at the Malware Museum date from the very late-Eighties and early Nineties. The displays are from file-infecting viruses and boot sector viruses, the latter which were the most easily and widely spread. The reason again was simple: Vectors. Vectors, another word designating how diseases, real world, or digital, are spread.
With old PCs, one vector was shared disks and diskettes. A virus that infected the first sector on them stood the best chance of being spread around. Another vector was infected program files. But infected programs, or utilities, apps they’re called today, were only effective in spreading computer disease if they came in contaminated packages or shareware, the latter of which was largely distributed online, often through networks connected by telephone lines.
So when an old virus infected diskette or floppy was left in your PC overnight until you turned it on the next morning, the first thing that happened was that your hard disk was infected. And after that, every subsequent data disk put in the machine was contaminated and able to spread the program.
The good news is that you can peruse a pretty sizable collection in the Malware Museum now without worrying that they’ll wreck your machine. Like the night-forgotten PC games it has collected over the years, the malware plays within browsers. To a point, they’re even somewhat interactive …
Like The Next Web notes, some of them are even kind of gorgeous in their own spartan way now that they’ve been pacified.
The last part’s stretching it.
And the graphic chosen shows one of the displays, clearly labeled as a virus demonstrator.
And one of the issues of the old newsletter delivered a set of programs called Urnst’s Scareware. It was a set of four of the common virus displays, sans all the crap that warned users they were just virus simulators.
Urnst’s Scareware is still available on the net. And the programs are labeled as computer viruses, although they are not.
If you try to download the file your browser will get in the way. Danger! Danger!
Even if you bypass the warnings, Chrome will snatch the download away from you, forcing you to call up its downloads “history” and “recover” the file. At which point it plaintively asks if you want to get hurt, “plenty.”
Even if you say yes, Windows Defender will then take the download off you.
And then you must call up Defender and turn it off for a minute. (This, in and of itself, is a bit amusing if you know the history of anti-virus and Microsoft. When Urnst’s Scareware was distributed Microsoft Anti-virus was about the worst anti-virus program, ever. It was a sort of crippled version of a program offered by Central Point, a company that was bought and killed by Symantec in the mid-Nineties. Today, however, Microsoft is very much better at anti-virus. Windows Defender is actually good.)
On display, the effects for the Den Zuk boot virus, the Ping Pong and Cascade viruses. Not included, the Jerusalem virus payload mimic, which instigated a minor system slowdown and a slight disruption of the old ASCII screen with a small empty patch.
Finally, the reason why I made Urnst’s Scareware. So you could scare people without hurting them! Not all of the programs in the Crypt Newsletter were quite so benign.
So you think you’re pretty hot stuff when it comes to tech, huh?
A small detachment of the White Gun Bully of America Army has started the rebellion and asks for your help in continuing the war against tyranny in the outback of Oregon. Grab your AR-15s and ammo, your Don’t Tread on Me yellow flags, jump in your truck and help fan the spark seen round the country into a mighty flame.
It’s time for heavily armed middle-aged white men in camos and funny hats and who are really angry at everyone not like them to take back a national forest state park established by famous dictator Teddy Roosevelt.
I know, as a sovereign citizen who believes in the natural rights of our people, you’re ready to fight. As incentive, we’re handing out free copies of The Turner Diaries, each signed by the Bundy family and their patriotic lieutenants.
Here at Retired from WhiteManistan, we’ve seen it all for years, about two decades worth. The White Gun Bully of America Army is now at full wax.
And it should come as no surprise that one of the ring-leaders is a member of a demographic covered at length here: White people who self-publish end-of-America fiction featuring doom through electromagnetic pulse and the subsequent ritual of purging of all the infidels that occurs when the leftover real Americans fight for what’s right. And their families.
Lavoy Finicum is one of the leaders of the cohort that has taken over Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, according to TPM.
And Mr. Finicum has written an end times novel entitled Only By Blood and Suffering, one that falls in with the hundreds of other self-published books, by right wing white supremacists and preppers, about the fall of the United States after an electromagnetic pulse attack throws the country back to the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
It is an allegedly five star book.
One reader enthuses:
After reading more than 650 such novels, I can say without a doubt that this author is much more than a great author. He is a great philosopher and his knowledge of mankind and history is vast. I agree 100% with him that this novel could come true. He KNOWS the good and the evil in man. He is man of honor, and his portrayal of evil is startling. All this happens in America. Everyone should read this book and KNOW that we may be looking at our future! The Federal agencies that have STOLEN our freedoms while we have been asleep have done and in time of national disaster such as an EMP will act just as depicted. Already the Government at all levels is ignoring the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. I am risking my freedom even posting this review, but I do not care! I am old and remember when we had more freedom and were mostly left alone. Read this novel and see our future should a terrorist country take down the grid (which the Feds refuse to harden, but spend our taxes on non-essential projects.) The author is a TRUE PATRIOT in the manner of our FOUNDING FATHERS.
Another, equally fulsome:
Only By Blood and Suffering is both entertaining and eye-opening. It is one of those truly impactful books that stays in your thoughts for a long time after reading it. I was able to visualize everything that happens in the book very well and that for me is the mark of a good book. The first half of the book is captivating, as it relates the various accounts of family members journeying home during a crisis. “Preppers” will love the survival experiences and dilemmas described. If you’re not a prepper, reading this book will turn you into one. The hopeful aspect of this book is that we can prepare in advance and ease the difficulties that inevitably will come, and this author completely succeeds in that effort.
The main theme of this book is the fight for freedom. Finicum doesn’t just tell the reader why this is important, but he shows over and over again how slippery and dangerous this threat is and how to regain it. This book is uplifting and realistic (while still being appropriate for all readers).
The second half of the book focuses on the hero and freedom fighter, the father and his strategic defense of his home and family. I highly recommend this book to anyone, those who love apocalyptic literature, of course, but especially to those who wouldn’t consider themselves avid “end of times” readers, because I sense the cause for which the book was written, was to truly warn and help those who are in the dark about these things.
“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.