The only thing that will save you — the you being the old white paranoid people in the studio audience — will be an old flivver, a water filter, and the electric generator whatsis he taps on. Plus, one the power fails and society breaks down, all the criminal drug addicts will raid your retirement homes for your medications and pills. Really!
All these people are delusional Christian right wing extremists, a big part of the Republican Party.
Ted Cruz, Republican Presidential hopeful (from USA Today— no link) :
If this deal goes through, we know to an absolute certainty people will die. Americans will die, Israelis will die, Europeans will die. If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, the single greatest risk is they would put it on a ship anywhere in the Atlantic and they would set off what’s called an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse. It would take down the electrical grid on the entire Eastern seaboard, and kill tens of millions of Americans.
Fourteen years ago Osama bin Laden showed the world the United States had a glass jaw. After one very hard hit, the world superpower would appear to rise up, united only to see its people and leaders fail in spectacular fashion as they abandoned all principles they thought they stood for.
Fourteen years later, we’re subdued and fearful owners of a combination corporate dictatorship national security state equipped with an armored car-driving paramilitary police force and surveillance apparatus designed for the suppression of civilian participation. Add to that an embedded racial apartheid, one that puts African Americans and the poor in prison for profits, targets of extortion in the way of organized heists disguised as fines for petty infractions and legitimately resentful of their terrible officials.
The largest military and national security complex in world history was erected. And it’s only strategy, with the only exception being the recent agreement with Iran , is attacking much poorer nations with overwhelming force, selectively bombing impoverished regions of misery and lawlessness, launching pinprick military raids/assassinations and creating or exacerbating failed states.
A small example, yesterday, from Fox News and overseas sources (delivered by mercenaries probably on the US payroll, yet), reasonable evidence that ISIS can manufacture small amounts of mustard gas in Syria, for use in mortar shells and improvised bombs aimed at local militias opposed to them.
And who brought it about? We did when an illegitimate war was launched, one that destroyed Iraq and destabilized the entire region, a place where we’re still bombing people, making things worse, stirring the pot, training lousy local fighters who desert, and arming the same with weapons that eventually get turned over to even worse people.
One Kurdish soldier said that of 52 mortars ISIS launched at his team during one attack, three released yellow smoke that caused their skin to immediately water, discharge liquids, blister and create large wounds. Soldiers exposed to the gas vomited and experienced extreme abdominal pain and severe burning and itching eyes. Other mortars discharged a silver glittery substance that stuck to their skin like glue. The Kurdish soldiers said the Iraqi military also said ISIS used these chemical weapons on their forces.
The attached photos, if genuine, show wounds that appear to be caused by a blistering agent.
The nature of the story appears to show that only small amounts, militarily insignificant, are being produced and put into mortar shells, in and of itself a hazardous undertaking. The primary aim would appear to be to cause an additional measure of terror and demoralization.
The incident also appears to describe a failed improvised weapon, I’m guessing — something sticky and flammable — styrofoam or styrene dissolved in an organic solvent until thickened, to adhere. In this case, there was no ignition.
And what are we looking forward to in 2016?
More of the same, almost certainly.
Why, here’s the alleged leading candidate of the Democratic Party, being distasteful and awful, as it turned out, in making what she thinks is an off-camera joke about the killing of Moe Gadaffi.
Hilarious. Failed states and refugee crises.
Still the best song that applies. Shoulda been a contender.
Incidentally, it’s the only rock video to show anthrax mailer Bruce Ivins entertaining in a Maryland bar AND his vanity-pressing white label single, “Pass Me By.”
Ivins’ anthrax mailings touched off the biggest investment in bioterror defense in world history (we’re always number one in these dubious achievements), all to counter a threat, the predicted scope of which has never materialized.
The best and only bioterrorist minted during the war on terror? Our man! Paid for by the US taxpayer.
Also eyeball the video for the “puffer machine.” (We’ll check you now, for purity!) Designed for the detection of explosives at airports, many were bought. None of them worked and it was subsequently canned.
Let’s take a moment to honor the regular Labor Day tradition in which public demonstrations, opinion pieces and the news are used to shit on workers.
American politicians, corporate leaders and plutocrats, from big-names to nobodies, line up with bits and little dances in which they pretend to praise the meaning of the day by calling your attention to something, somebody, or some group having to do with labor. And those named deserve your hate because they stand in the way of business and the corporate Bund!
The enemy can be teachers. Or unions and dues. It can be a riff on the fun big lie: the country was built on small business; yea, verily, small business is our lifeblood.
It can be praise for a billionaire who has been very bad to American workers in pushing legislation that has made them into ants for stepping on. It can be straight bootlicking for corporate wealth and ease. There will always be a scapegoat and it will always be maximum bullshit served with a big helping of mean passed off as concern.
Let’s see who’s first out of the gate this year!
Bruce Rauner, GOP governor of Illinois:
Big Labor union bosses in your state enjoy a special privilege allowing them to expand their ranks through compulsion. Union bosses can impose a monopoly bargaining contract which virtually always includes a forced-dues clause that requires every employee (even the ones who did not vote for the union) to pay tribute to the union bosses, just for the privilege of having a job.
While forced unionism is just plain wrong; coercing workers into subsidizing union officials also holds back a state’s economy …
So as you celebrate the coming three-day weekend, consider the benefits of Right to Work.
From a small newspaper in Minnesota, the standard let-us-all-now-praise-Labor-Day thing ending with the sentiment that there can be no jobs without business and so it is always necessary to think about what can be done to make thing’s better for corporate America:
Monday is Labor Day — a day to celebrate the achievements of our nation’s working men and women…
[But, but, but, but…]
Yes, Monday is a time to celebrate work. But work cannot take place if there are not jobs, and there can’t be jobs without business and industry. When business and industry create jobs, it spurs the creation of more jobs and the growth of the economy.
If our nation’s and our state’s leaders are serious about creating jobs, they need follow local officials’ lead to be business- and industry-friendly…
With Wisconsin joining the ranks in March of this year, there are now 25 Right to Work states in America; states that have outlawed Big Labor union bosses’ ability to force workers to pay them fees as a condition of employment.
The absence of forced unionism gives Right to Work states an economic leg-up.
Perhaps not coincidentally, this appears to be a canned anti-labor Labor Day column, also used by GOP governor Rauner. Admire the efficiency. One anti-labor piece penned by some chamber of commerce enemy of the people can be cut and pasted with different by-lines.
My Uncle Del once told me, “Bobby, I’ve never worked a day in my life.??? What he meant by that was that he loved his job, found it fun and liked his co-workers. He was a quality control inspector at several aircraft manufacturers from when he left the Army Air Force after WWII until he retired. What I took from his comment was that if you find a job you love, you’ll never have to work. That’s why it’s so important to be incredibly honest and ask yourself what do you really like to do? Do you want just money, or a profession that serves your soul as well as your pocketbook. If you’re lucky, get an education and training, work hard and pay attention and one day you’ll be able to say the same thing my uncle did.
We know it’s Labor Day, but let’s talk about day labor.
One thing we know for certain about the local day-labor market: Employers will continue a don’t-ask, don’t-tell hiring practice for unauthorized immigrants regardless of what the law says. The question is whether Dallas will continue tolerating the existence of disorganized, unwelcome ad hoc recruitment centers on street corners and convenience-store parking lots, or adopt the more orderly concepts used by Garland, Plano and other cities.
This newspaper has long supported the expansion of government programs like e-Verify to hold employers to the letter of the law. A major magnet for illegal immigration has been the willingness of employers to look the other way, even when they suspect they’re hiring an unauthorized immigrant.
Day-laborers, well, they suck, because they’re illegal, hang out in parking lots, snarl traffic and are often homeless.
With the approach of the Labor Day bookend of summer, this series of columns on the economy, employment and immigration (all written in early July to avoid Internet dead zones while traveling) will include more specifics on 1) immigration’s impact on wages, 2) the boon to Democrats through illegal immigration, and 3) the diminished state of economic freedom in America…
I hope Republicans will see through candidates that verbally kowtow to the pro-immigrant activists. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, for instance, is not intimidated, as he calmly insisted to a hysterical illegal worker, that America’s laws apply to everyone and immigration laws, particularly, do not exempt anyone.
Democrats, to a man or woman, won’t reject the illegal immigration activists because, as I have correctly asserted, these groups are on path to be lifelong Democrats; many of them come from pro-authoritarian, anti-private gun ownership cultures and are easily persuaded to accept government hand-outs (I mean benefits). Democrats already benefit from illegal aliens in Congress—I’ll explain how next week.
At its August meeting, the Board of Directors of the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce, without objection, voted to strongly oppose increasing the minimum wage in Pasadena. Citing two studies performed for the Chamber and a peer-review of that work, Board members, representing small, medium and large businesses in diverse sectors of our local economy, cited potential negative impacts on the local economy, risks to employment, impacts on the local retail, hospitality and healthcare industries, as well as youth employment, in making their decision. Pasadena Chamber Board members clearly understood that imposing the Los Angeles minimum wage model in Pasadena would harm workers, local small businesses and pose a threat to our local economy.
Of course, there are pro-labor Labor Day opinions this year, some prominent. There could hardly not be. It’s no longer possible to ignore how badly workers, and the civilian populace in general, have been treated.
Nevertheless, I’d expect more of the usual anti-labor sermonizing passed off as holiday ice cream through the weekend. Add them up if you can stand it. Be on the watch for the opinions of the presidential types, particularly on Monday. If they weren’t surrounded by security at all times, they’d face barrages of dog excrement for their philosophies.
What do you think will be on the menu?
How salt-of-the-dirt (sic) American small business is? More right-to-work-for-less? Should we take the miraculous lessons of [some Silicon Valley tech tycoon]? Are not more tax breaks and bribes needed for corporate America to make jobs? More illegal and legal immigrant bashing? How great is it to live in America this weekend, shopping for goods in Labor Day promotions, made overseas by slave labor? A pack of lies and fraud from the American Enterprise Institute? How many fabricated stories from the six and seven figure earners about how their dads or moms opened a penny-candy store with nothing but hope and a prayer? Perhaps the old sidestep: More Americans will be driving this weekend than ever and don’t drink because the police are conducting a special Labor Day crackdown?
Once sharing meant giving someone a slice of your pie, gratis. Now, fittingly, in America it has gone modern, meaning to take a slice of someone else’s pie, through technology, and sell or rent it to yet another person while putting your sharing hand in both their pockets.
AirBnB is one of the great companies of the sharing economy and it has powerfully enabled people with a smartphone app or a laptop. So much so that it’s now easy to find AirBnb owners drunk on their own urine-passed-off-as-Kool Aid: Why, we’re so great and have done so much for world cultural understanding, founder Brian Chesky ought to win a Nobel Peace prize!
Here’s how the AirBnb operation works from personal observation.
AirBnb-enabled entrepreneurs live in a rented apartment nearby. They subsequently rent another apartment in the same complex and sublet it through AirBnB. It has a weekly retinue of guests, signed up for one or two day stays.
And a parking bay is a key thing since such space is important in LA County.
Which is how it was noticed and, one presumes, how many AirBnb places appear in the midst of housing that was formerly long-term rental. The complex has a set of renters who have year-long leases, as do many — it was standard pre-Airbnb — and while renters sometimes change vehicles or allow a friend to use their spaces, they don’t drive two or three new, often hire cars, a week.
The most clever bit about this is the way the sub-letter/AirBnB sharing economy entrepreneur used and uses a refurbishing the apartment owner and management company applied to the place before they rented it as an attractive feature. It is a nice place!
And so one sees the sharing economy isn’t that at all.
Is AirBnB’s Brian Chesky ripe for a Nobel Peace prize? Well, a good deal of what AirBnb does has now been described in news pieces as process that doesn’t smell so good.
AirBnb has directly aggravated a shortage of long-term housing Los Angeles County, one of the most expensive places to live in the country:
The last time he advertised one of his apartments, longtime Los Feliz landlord Andre LaFlamme got a request he’d never seen before.
A man wanted to rent LaFlamme’s 245-square-foot bachelor unit with hardwood floors for $875 a month, then list it himself on Airbnb.
“Thanks but no thanks,” LaFlamme told the prospective tenant. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
But he understood why: More money might be made renting to tourists a few days at a time than to a local for 12 months or more.
As short-term rental websites such as Airbnb explode in popularity in Southern California, a growing number of homeowners and landlords are caving to the economics. A study released Wednesday from Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, a labor-backed advocacy group, estimates that more than 7,000 houses and apartments have been taken off the rental market in metro Los Angeles for use as short-term rentals.
While this may be described in many ways, one of the words that doesn’t come to mind is sharing.
Using trivial network communications technology and the web to grab a piece of the economic pie is a fair way to characterize it. Predatory, is another. Of course it is more attractive to rent to transient stay tourists on the upper side of the wealth curve than it is to long-term residents, particularly if there is no process in flipping to a hotel/motel arrangement other than entering a listing in a database!
For the LAT, the landlord who turned down the AirBnB-armed customer said he has had no trouble finding qualified long-term renters in the county. His open slot was filled in 24 hours.
A similar long-term housing shortage in Manhattan has been aggravated by AirBnB.While browsing at Vroman’s this week I saw a book by the American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks, “The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier and More Prosperous America.” On the cover it has a nice little heart painted on the American flag.
It made me laugh.
Brooks writes for the New York Times opinion page. As an accidental concern troll. I’ve characterized his work — stupid armchair philosophies insisting Christian faith, fulfillment and happiness come naturally from existence as a capitalist small businessman.
To hear him tell it, [AirBnB co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk] started the business because it was fascinating and fun. And most of all, he says, because it could help ordinary people who needed an affordable place to stay or had some excess capacity in their homes. That’s right — Nate sees Airbnb as a “helping industry.???
Some will howl at this …
Ordinary people, especially vulnerable people without power and privilege, find Airbnb empowering and useful. It lifts Americans up …
Any of us can work in a helping industry. That includes teachers, nurses, stay-at-home parents … The blessing of our free enterprise system is that any of us can sanctify our work. We just need to ask if what we are doing truly lifts others up.
The fundamental problem with Arthur Brooks, if you’re read a lot of his columns at the Times, is he never really acknowledges how thoroughly American big business and its free enterprise have worked over the majority of Americans over the past few decades. There’s never a single atom of this harsh reality. Just lots of material on how Americans allegedly hate negativity, how things should be approached with a gentle smile for maximum mindfulness and joy at one’s work. How a positive attitude is always what is needed. And how people, or more specifically, a poverty-stricken woman sleeping on a friend’s couch, has now potentially reached the beginnings of nirvana as a small business person by renting out her old bed.
Never mind there’s no evidence that a majority of American’s want to be small business people. Or that most Americans do not work for small businesses, if they work at all. And that such a person, sleeping on a couch in a place they didn’t have to rely on previously, is just another sand pebble on the empty beach of the desperation economy.
Another example from the digital grasping economy, avarice powered by algorithm, personalized again, on WhiteManistan Vacation, one of my satirical bits on YouTube. With rotating Google overlay ads slapped on it because I used 30 seconds of low-resolution tv trailers for the new and old Hawaii Five O programs, the latter which hasn’t been in production for decades with most of its actors long dead.
And in the doing, illustrating how Google, with corporate America, uses its alleged innovation to chisel even the most lowly slivers of value from anyone, anytime, anywhere when they use one of its platforms.
A big 287 views. Do you think they’re getting just the right amount of blood from the stones?
Coincidentally, I’ve taken reader anon’s advice and started using DuckDuckGo.
Note: One cannot entirely escape the grasp and grift of the corporate dictatorship even there.
On a simple search for “Dick Destiny,” a return comes with an embedded ad for my thirty-year old record. Drill down for it on Amazon, another company with which I refuse to do business (for many intelligent reasons described here), and see that two copies are for sale by vendors. One for 22 USD, another for over sixty. The latter is at Play It Again Records in Bethlehem, PA, just a block or two from Lehigh and the first record store I stocked with it back in 1985.
This week’s personalized joke from the digital sharing economy came to me courtesy of Google and Price Waterhouse Cooper.
Years ago I was partially sold hoodwinked into putting Google AdSense into my blog posts at GlobalSecurity.Org. For the sake of revenue sharing.
I started sometime in 2009 and quickly discovered the ads were the Internet’s dog shit, or worse, low level nuclear waste.
At different times they hawked military challenge coins — cheap badges for military men and hanger-ons with less brains than 99 cent cans of minced clams. Ammo boxes. Water storage containers for those convinced the end of civilization was nigh. Fake degrees in intelligence work peddled by schools that exist only as post office boxes in a strip mall. Ads for what appeared to be a prostitution ring specializing in Chinese women. Police training, in 2011. (How to shoot African Americans and the miscellaneous poor, I presume.) Ads for offshoring American manufacturing jobs to the Baja and harmonica lessons.
Nobody in my audience, and I did have one, would click on such things. I came to think, too, that only people with something seriously wrong inside would. And now that’s old news. We’re well into an era of giant, nuisance, multi-media scripting ads that chase you around the web, hog your resources, try to hijack your browsing for the benefit of corporate America, make websites unusable, spy on you, and frequently deliver viruses and extortion software as a bonus.
I stopped paying attention to the Google AdSense account in 2011.
In practice, “revenue sharing??? with anything Google means Google gets all the share.
That’s because AdSense, as a model, makes no sense for individual writers. Even if they plaster it all over their pages.
The ads are always woefully inappropriate. The algorithm that chooses them is dumber than dirt. And the click throughput is marginal to non-existent.
Now, if you exist everywhere all over the globe, as Google does, it works. For everyone else, it’s just giving Google free space.
I wouldn’t have actually looked at this closely — in the back of my mind the little voice always said it was a scheme of trash — if the Adsense things hadn’t suddenly stopped running on the SITREP posts.
This was because Google halts them if it decides you need to update your tax information.
When I looked at the problem on my Google dashboard, this is what I discovered.
Google doesn’t pay until a $100 threshold is reached. However, long before that milestone, it will summarily badger you to keep updating your settings with verifications of phone numbers, personal identification numbers and additional tax filing information.
Anyway, in 18 months of SITREP contributions, AdSense had earned me a big $15.00.
At the rate AdSense was making money for me, it’d be a mere seven years before Google cut my first check. Laughable and worthless don’t even begin to encompass it.
This week, in the mail, a letter from Price Waterhouse, commissioned by Google, to service all their AdSense accounts with money in them, cash that is about to go into escheat to the state because it hasn’t been claimed.
PWC informed that Google had accumulated 90 dollars in AdSense revenue. But that the threshold for cutting a check was 100 dollars, which made my original estimate about never being paid almost spot on.
I could have this money, PWC said, if I checked the box on the return letter saying that I was the owner and, in addition, logged into my AdSense account to close it.
How many people do you think recall the passwords and credentials accounts they haven’t used in almost half a decade? How many, do ya think, even have the same computer?
Did you know Google Alphabet has a company named Calico? It’s going to find the cure for old age, cancer and neuro-degenerative diseases. With less senior scientists than you’d find in one of the departments at a big university.
And it will be done with an electromagnetic pulse attack as a consequence of same-sex marriage and abortions.
“What is going on with America?!” rails Jim Bakker. Yes, him.
It’s an idea, a wish for an apocalyptic trial of purification, that’s been bubbling up from the base of the Republican Party and extreme right for years.
Ninety percent will die in the aftermath. And they’ll have had it coming because — gay, abortion, unbelievers, non-Christian — and all that.
Get prepping. Keep your horses. Find an old flivver. (From RightWingWatch.)
Eventually, all of the potential GOP candidates will have to speak of their position on electromagnetic pulse attack, whether they secretly believe in it or not.
Unintentionally shown, in two minutes on the nightly news.
1. Made in America, in this context meaning generally priced out of reach of the Americans Leo Fender originally aimed his guitars and amps at. Extra points off: Leo Fender is dead and spent his last years working a company, G&L/Music Man, in competition with Fender.
2. Failure to mention the affordable instruments are all made in China and Mexico.
3. Gross misuse of “Born In the USA.”
4. Antagonizing display of gazillionaire classic rock musicians who can buy whatever they and who many people are now mighty sick of seeing all the time.
5. “Handmade,” used as if Americans in custom shops are the only people in the world who can, ahem, hand make stuff.
Colonel Ty Seidule, chair of West Point’s history department, in the above video, explains with some verve and elan, what the Civil War was plainly about.
Good one for him and West Point for allowing the historian’s perspective.
Unfortunately, Seidule and West Point could have made it themselves WITHOUT attachment to “Prager University.”
Prager is not a university at all. In fact, it’s just the video arm of Dennis Prager, another old right wing extremist, perhaps semi-popular in some circles, but still way out on the nasty margins of American society in beliefs even if dressed up in the image of an avuncular old white guy, pretending to be a voice of pure reason through good speaking talent and vocabulary.
Global warming is a hoax, continued. We need more carbon dioxide because it promotes plant growth, like in a greenhouse. Therefore, the world will become more green, this is good, and “we should celebrate C02.”
The wealthy pay too much in income tax. Those in the lower class pay little or none. The wealthy pay too much in payroll taxes in order to support Social Security payments for those who don’t pay nearly enough.
It just goes on and on.
Ty, you made a great video. Firm in a voice of irrefutable truth but civil, elegant and straight-forward.
But you and West Point don’t believe global warming is a hoax, right?
And you don’t believe the the US military won the Vietnam war and it was because of Democrats and hippies that it didn’t come out that way in the final assessment, right?
But here you’ve associated with the extreme right in modern American politics. Yes, there are indeed millions who subscribe to the fucked-up belief system of the modern Republican Party and its handfuls of associated libertarian water-boys.
Their brains are broken.
From any scientific, historic, or social high standard, what they believe, and what is pushed by Prager in its five minute video sermons, is poison. History has and will continue to judge it harshly.
You could’ve issued it directly from West Point and generated some press release to all major media. I bet it would have worked just as well.
“After the final agreement with Iran over its nuclear program was announced in Vienna earlier this month, references to one long-gone politician surged on social media: Neville Chamberlain.
“This is not surprising. The late British prime minister, who presided over the ill-fated Munich agreement with Adolf Hitler in September 1938, is the metaphor of choice for all who prefer confrontation to mediation …
“[When] President Obama had a brief, friendly encounter with Cuban leader Raul Castro on the sidelines of a memorial service for the late South African President Nelson Mandela in 2013, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was less than impressed. ‘Neville Chamberlain shook hands with Hitler,’ the outspoken senator reminded listeners during a radio interview.”
— something from the Washington Post (no link)
Angling for a techno-thriller book contract
“Flash to 2015: Secretary of State John Kerry negotiates Iran’s nuclear bomb aspirations. Ayatollah Khameini celebrates the deal as Iran’s most important victory since deposing the Shah. Khomeini’s revolution has finally succeeded.
“Flash to 2017: We now comprehend how Kerry’s deal was another Neville Chamberlain-like capitulation to a clear and present danger …
“The converging Obama/post-Obama presidencies were clueless; international progressive policies collapsed unceremoniously into the dust bin of history. Quickly, other Middle-Eastern states “acquired??? nuclear capability. Israel defended itself as best it could; the U.S. was forced to defend Israel. Europe and Asia chose sides; WWIII had begun. Khomeini’s triumphant Islamic revolution marshaled on under the cover of Shiite terrorist hegemonies and cozy military-oil arrangements forged with Russia, China and North Korea.
“Regrettably, the KKK of WWIII, Ayatollahs Khomeini, Khameini, and the Kerry deal, had unleashed a destruction not seen since the days of Hitler and Hiroshima. The 55 million dead of WWII would seem a pittance compared to total, world-wide nuclear holocaust.”
“President Obama and now five members of the Supreme Court have set themselves above God by declaring same-gender marriage as a civil right. Fortunately, one of the branches of government, Congress, has not done so — at least not yet.
“In the beginning of man, God ordained that marriage was a sacred covenant between a man and a woman. Jesus confirmed that.
“I believe the United States of America is going to face a devastating judgment. Some say it will be a catastrophic stock market crash on September 30, 2015. I believe it will be an electromagnetic pulse attack from Iran.”
Dealing with WhiteManistan is a test of endurance. In the end, one that you’ll always lose.
A substantial part of white America is out of its mind in rage, fear and racism. And there’s no way to fix it.
Thought questions: How many people in the US who utter the name “Neville Chamberlain” could locate the old Sudetenland on a map of modern Europe, if asked?
How many of the same have actually read a copy of The Rose and Fall of the Third Reich from cover to cover, know who the author is, or have even heard of the title?
