Over the weekend one of pro-wrestling’s greatest heels, Roddy Piper, died at 61. His obituary is here.
“Mr. Piper also had a brief acting career, starring in the 1988 film They Live, directed by John Carpenter, about a man who discovers, with the help of magic sunglasses, that the world is secretly ruled by aliens,” reads the Times obit.
It’ a bit dry, doing “Mr. Piper” and They Live some amount of disservice.
Carpenter’s They Live is the most prescient of movies on life in the American corporate dictatorship. Disguised as science-fiction.
Piper plays a semi-employed drifter named John Nada in a hot, dusty and bleak Los Angeles. He stumbles upon a pair of odd sunglasses, just like older people wear to reduce glare, and finds they turn the world gray. But they also reveal the ruling class, media personalities on tv, and bankers to be aliens who’ve infiltrated the country and taken over.
All for the sake of looting. Also revealed are subliminal messages embedded in every sign and print surface.
Obey!Consume!
The aliens have given the local oppressive police force little round aerial drones to spy on the populace, too! And, naturally, they’ve recruited the most amenable among the human herd to have a piece of the grift, too, as their well-compensated assistants in the creation of the movie’s vision of a predatory and poisoned concrete and asphalt Eden of capitalism where people have only the freedom to shop, languish and be indentured servants/sleepwalkers.
Wearing the sunglasses for too long gives Piper a blinding headache. Just like life in our rigged capitalist paradise. It was a nice touch.
They Live also has what feels like (if it isn’t) the longest fight scene in movie history, ever. Waged between Piper and Keith David in a Hollywood back alley lot you’ve seen in hundreds of movies, Piper as Nada discovers a box of the sunglasses and wants the David character, Frank Armitage, to try a pair on, to see the aliens.
Armitage refuses. It’s been another horrible day on the construction site and he just wants to give the lunatic wanted by the police, Nada, his last paycheck and get home.
The fight rolls on and on, the two men beating each other to swollen-faced black-and-blue pulps. And, surprisingly, it’s never boring.
In my homemade video for “Rumble,” made a few years back, I excerpted some of the scene at the garage tune’s climax. It begins at about one minute in.
Piper made his primary rep, certainly, as a pro wrestler, where I came to regularly know him in the Saturday tv slots for the bottom-out-of-sight crowd that advertisers shunned.
But which were adored by many young people, including me. And in future years that fan base and attraction would turn pro wrestling into huge money. But by 1988, the time of They Live, it still hadn’t quite arrived although pro-wrestling admiration was widespread in Pennsy’s Lehigh Valley.
“[John] Carpenter called Mr. Piper ‘an underrated actor,'” continued the Times.
That he was. In the long run, Piper’s legacy is as much a result of that one movie as his turn as star of pro-wrestling.
By now it should be patently obvious that the FBI, as well as British national security, are well into operations and investigations on the Dark Web.
In the latest news, Mohammed Ammer Ali has been convicted of buying what he thought to be five vials of ricin from an FBI special agent named “Peter” who was fronting a sting operation aimed at netting people who were trying to by poisons on the Internet.
On the evening of Tuesday 10 February this year, Mohammed Ammer Ali sat down in his computer room to write his daily to-do list. Alongside a reminder to pay the car insurance were the aide memoires: “Get pet to murder??? and “Paid ricin guy???.
What Ali was not to know, however, was that the seller he knew as “DarkMart??? and “Psychochem??? was an undercover FBI agent. And the powder concealed in the children’s toy car was not ricin – it was a harmless substance planted by detectives from the UK’s north-west counter-terrorism unit, who were watching his every move.
At 8am the following morning, a dozen police officers dressed from head to toe in protective clothing burst through the front door of the family’s modest flat above the Salt & Pepper restaurant in inner-city Liverpool, arresting a partially-naked Ali.
A series of raids were carried out simultaneously at other addresses across Merseyside. Acting on an FBI tipoff, counter-terror officers moved quickly to thwart what could have been a major bioterrorism case with parallels to the Wood Green ricin plot in 2002.
There was one problem: detectives could find no suggestion that Ali was involved in any terrorism plot.
A quiet family man from Bolton, Ali had worked for his parents’ newsagents business until he got a job as a software programmer for a local company shortly before his arrest. He was computer mad and excelled at school. Following psychological assessments after his arrest, he was diagnosed with showing personality traits associated with Asperger syndrome.
On the stand, Ali indicated he bought the material on the Dark Web to find out “what all the fuss was about.”
If absolutely true, it was a dreadful class.
Ali also said he had been inspired by the television show Breaking Bad. This adds to the already odd feature of the hit cable show that starred Brian Cranston: The only TV show in history to have inspired a handful of people in the US and the UK convicted on ricin charges.
It includes a picture of Ali with a glowing nose, the result of a substance planted in the toy car containing the vials of harmless powder sent to him by British counter-terrorism forces, the purpose of which was to prove he had opened and handled it.
Ali, reports said, will undergo further psychiatric evaluation before sentencing.
So they are rubes for private sector rip-offs and boondoggles perpetrated by American arms manufacturing giants.
It’s been easy to observe in the semi-regular cant/hype issued over “directed-energy weapons,” or ray guns, always said to be “game-changers” for the future.
“Directed energy brings the dawn of an entirely new era in defense,” Lieutenant General William Etter, Commander, Continental U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command Region, told a conference hosted by Booz Allen Hamilton and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment.
The military has been working on such weapons for decades, but says many technology challenges have finally been addressed.
Of course, this is not correct. The military application of lasers has been stunted by power requirements and almost total lack of effectiveness in what my be called — the real world.
I’ll get to this in a minute.
Continuing from the Reuters piece:
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told the conference the Navy was encouraged by testing of a laser deployed on the USS Ponce in the Gulf, which can destroy small boats and unmanned aerial vehicles, and can also be used as a telescope.
Mabus said the Navy was extending deployment of the laser on the Ponce, and using lessons learned to help produce a 100-150 kilowatt laser prototype for testing at sea in 2018 or sooner.
If you watch the video you’ll see the nonsensical pitch by the BAE Systems salesman.
The Navy’s main problem are the power handling, generation and storage requirements as well as the hazard.
The rail gun is theoretically to be fitted to the Navy’s largest ships, one example being the Zumwalt destroyer, a program that was halted at three ships.
The rail gun, if published news is correct, requires at least half the power-generating capacity of such a ship when it’s under way. In addition, no one likes to talk about the ship-board hazard posed by the charging and discharge of such large power systems during repeating fire.
Conservatively, it will kill people. On board. And then break down.
Theoretically, charging capacitors as large as a house. Oy.
“Pentagon funding for directed energy programs would remain steady at about $300 million a year for now,” reads Reuters.
By contrast, the NRA generates around $300 million/year from its membership. So maybe the military really isn’t that serious about the programs, after all.
But, said Secretary of the Navy Mabus, who will want a job in high management at a US manufacturer of these things when he leaves his position: “[He] said Iran and other countries were already using lasers to target ships and commercial airliners, and the U.S. military needed to accelerate often cumbersome acquisition processes to ensure that it stayed ahead of potential foes.”
Also, the rolling micro-wave non-lethal weapon that doesn’t work except on those willing to be shot by it, men trapped in a room, or a crowd hemmed in by police, usually know as the ADS or The Sheriff, might be useful:
Major General Jerry Harris, vice commander of Air Combat Command, said the Air Force had developed a high-power microwave weapon that could disperse crowds without killing people by rapidly raising body temperature, and the system could be put to use immediately on drones or other aircraft.
The Sheriff was deployed to Afghanistan and was brought back without firing a shot because, essentially, it doesn’t adapt well when people can shoot back. Plus, public relations problems related to the potential for atrocities, torture, ruined careers, things like that.
Late this week, Timothy Egan at the New York Times, wrote “Trump Is the Poison His Party Concocted.” I could also describe it in four words: the Ted Nugent vote.
They say he’s trashing the Republic brand. They say he’s “stirring up the crazies,??? in the words of Senator John McCain. But Trump is the brand, to a sizable degree. And the crazies have long flourished in the Republican media wing, where any amount of gaseous buffoonery goes unchallenged.
And now that the party can’t control him, Trump threatens to destroy its chances if he doesn’t get his way, running as an independent with unlimited wealth — a political suicide bomb.
Trump is a byproduct of all the toxic elements Republicans have thrown into their brew over the last decade or so — from birtherism to race-based hatred of immigrants, from nihilists who shut down government to elected officials who shout “You lie!??? at their commander in chief.
And for years, GOP pols have been proud to also be associated with the classic rock kleagle, Ted Nugent, the only celebrity musician I know that’s ever been investigated by the US Secret Service.
Nugent is the boiled-down essence of the angry extreme right-wing extremist, a nativist and public bigot who regularly puts down everyone unlike him, but reserving his fury primarily for the president, African Americans living in cities and the need to destroy the US government, which he calls Fedzilla. His enemies are all subhuman, bloodsucking punks and Chicago is “Chiraq,” downtown south Los Angeles a place that ought to be machine-gunned from a helicopter.
Ban all gun-free slaughter zones. Ban freedom-haters from public office by supporting and voting for those candidates who support freedom and common sense while punishing those who want to put their boots on the throat of freedom and common sense.
A week earlier he devoted his column to describing what a potential GOP president must be prepared to do:
Only those on dope fail to recognize how foolish those on dope look, sound, smell and act like braindead dopey morons.
The trick is to not be a braindead moron and stay off dope.
The only sheep dishonest enough to vote Democrat are the dopey sheep benefiting from the redistribution scam artists, thereby enslaving the sheep to further engineered dependency …
Job 1: Annihilate anybody and everybody who publicly declares hate or danger to America, Americans or our allies. Unleash the greatest military might upon them with a fury that is inescapable. No more playing “containment??? games. Wipe them out.
Next, end the scourge of bribing Americans and illegal invaders to be bloodsucking, nonproductive leaches [sic] riding on the backs of hardworking, sacrificing American families.
Secure the borders for God’s sake, and for the sake of a safe, excellent American America. Invaders must return home or face painful, extremely uncomfortable punishing jail time. Legal good, illegal bad. Know it, enforce it.
American America! The week before Nugent recommended Trump be given the Medal of Freedom, effectively endorsing him for President.
Like Trump, Ted Nugent is the Republican brand. He has been for years.
And if you’re curious as to what Ted Nugent looks like when his summer tour season is canceled, click here.
Truth be told, every potential Republican Party candidate will have to join the cult. The dangerous GOP base of white American revenge-seekers, paranoids and nihilists demands it. (Some already have. Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Jeb Bush and, I think, Donald Trump immediately spring to mind.)
So, in the National Journal, Cruz buys another ticket for an insane right wing train that’s been riding the rails for virtually the last fifteen years, perhaps longer: Iran will hit the United States with an electromagnetic pulse and millions of people will die.
It’s not just Israel that could be in danger if Iran violates the terms of a nuclear agreement with the United States, 2016 presidential contender Ted Cruz says.
Cruz told reporters Tuesday on Capitol Hill that the “worst-case scenario is that Iran actually uses a nuclear weapon.” Israel could be a target, but Cruz says the United States itself is also at risk.
“If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, one of the most dangerous things it could do with it is load that weapon onto a ship anywhere in the Atlantic, fire the warhead straight into the air, into the atmosphere. If you get high enough and detonate that warhead, it would set off an electromagnetic pulse, what is called an EMP,” Cruz said. “That EMP could shut down the entire electrical grid on the Eastern seaboard, could take down our stock market, our financial systems, but even more importantly could take down food delivery, water delivery, heat, air conditioning, transportation. The projections are that one nuclear warhead in the atmosphere over the Eastern seaboard could result in tens of millions of Americans dying.
Actually, Cruz is a little off on his figures for apocalyptic electromagnetic pulse death. The Cult’s accepted value is usually that 90 percent of all Americans would be dead within a year of the attack.
Ironically, the evidence is overwhelming that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is highly beneficial. CO2 makes crops grow better with less water. A touch of global warming, all that we can possibly expect, is also beneficial, especially compared to global cooling …
The scientific credibility of the global warming has fallen to near absolute zero in the face of the 18-year failure of the Earth to warm. The science behind global warming may have collapsed, but the beneficiaries of government subsidies – scientists and crony capitalist developers of renewable power – are still promoting the theory that is their golden egg-laying goose. Scientific societies, supposed seekers of scientific truth, have fallen so far in promoting global warming as to make the greediest industrial unions look principled and honest by comparison.
[But] a real danger to our national survival that threatens the destruction of the electric grid is ignored. That threat is an EMP or electromagnetic pulse. An EMP can be created naturally when a solar storm on the sun ejects a cloud of particles that strike the Earth. An EMP can also be created artificially by exploding a nuclear bomb above the atmosphere at an altitude between 30 and 500 miles …
A single nuclear bomb, exploded 400 miles above Kansas, could wipe out much of the electronic and electrical infrastructure of the USA. Automobiles, trucks, and railroad engines might be so electronically damaged as to no longer operate. In any case, fuel would be difficult to obtain due to lack of electricity and due to destruction of the electronic control (SCADA systems) of refineries and pipelines. Electricity could be absent for months or years. The novel One Second After is a fictional account of what happens in a small town when an EMP strikes.
Since last year and perhaps earlier, the FBI has been deep into the so-called dark web with special agents posing as poison peddlers on the digital black markets accessed by the Tor browser.
The effort has generated a few arrests and graphically shown the FBI coordinates with British security when those who think they’re buying something like ricin on the — cough — “dark web” are from England.
On the third day of his trial on Thursday, jurors heard that Ali was placed into a protective boiler suit and led to a police van after up to 12 officers wearing gas masks raided the flat he shares with his wife and two sons shortly before 8am on 11 February.
The trial judge, Mr Justice Saunders, urged jurors to treat Ali’s remarks “critically??? as they were made without the presence of a lawyer. He was then taken to a police station where he answered “no comment??? to every question during five days of questioning, the court heard.
Saunders told jurors: “You must bear in mind at all times that it was an interview carried out without the defendant having the benefit of a lawyer there or someone on his behalf during the interview.???
If you read the piece, observers are again informed FBI special agents had mailed the accused man a harmless white powder.
In October last year, [Ali] began trawling the internet for information on poisons such as abrin, ricin and cyanide, the court has heard.
Then in January, going under the online alias Weirdos 0000, Ali contacted a man called Psychochem on the internet black market and ordered 500mg of ricin – enough to kill 1,400 people, the jury was told.
Today, the jury was told that Ali, a computer software programmer, had displayed many traits of Asperger’s syndrome.
Giving evidence for his defence, clinical psychologist Dr Alison Beck highlighted his obsession from a very early age with computers …
Cross-examining, prosecutor Sarah Howes, QC, suggested: “People can be hooked on their computers and not have anything wrong at all.???
The witness agreed it was “not diagnostic in itself???.
Ms Howes went on: “Is it your assistance to the jury that as far as the offence is concerned it was just his obsession with wanting to deal with the Dark Net that was the end in itself????
Dr Beck replied: “I think that so far as I understand it, Mr Ali was motivated with pushing the boundaries of what was possible with the technology.
“The relevance of the Dark Net was to procure ricin and that idea was implanted in his brain having watched the series Breaking Bad.???
She told jurors that he had tried to get ricin through “systematic research??? which was “entirely consistent with Asperger’s mentality???.
Mohammed Ali is not the first man with Asperger’s to be arrested in connection with ricin.
In 2004, Robert Alberg, a man from Kirkland, Washington, with Asperger’s syndrome was arrested.
And in the earlier part of the decade, an autistic man, Robert Alberg, listed in my article The A-Z of ricin crackpots, purchased five pounds of castor seeds with the intent to make ricin and was arrested.
The court recognized Alberg was profoundly impaired and released him under a five year parole sentence. He promptly went back to trying to obtain castor seeds and was jailed.
Alberg was known in Kirkland, WA, as another outsider musician, one who sang songs, now mounted at YouTube.
An old mention of Alberg, from me, at GlobalSecurity.Org, eleven years ago:
Robert Alberg, a Kirkland, Washington, man with Asperger’s Disorder, recently admitted that he “cooked up” a batch of ricin in his apartment, by way of an article from the Seattle Post. The plea was part of an agreement that gave him five years probation, mental health treatment and placement in a group home for the impaired.
Alberg was arrested earlier in the year by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force acting on a tip from Gurney’s Seed & Nursery, which sold Alberg five pounds of castor seeds. The FBI found castor seed mash at Alberg’s residence and jars labeled “caution ricin poison.”
Dick Destiny Band’s The National Anthem, rewritten for our America!
Four years and running, ever more catchy and on the money than, like, ever!
Let’s flush all the excrement about the start up of the exceptional nation, fireworks and fighting for freedom. Take it for what it’s really worth, an excuse weekend to grill hamburgers and get good ‘n’ drunk. That’s what we do! Why, if the revolutionaries saw us now, some of ’em might say:
F—! I can’t tell you guys from the ones we got rid of!
Freedom? You got no freedoms! Here’s your freedom — “freedom” to shop.
Welcome to the United States of Penitentiary
We all get there eventually
We lock up the poor for all the rich
And we do it right, without no hitch.
Share. Paste it on your blog. Send it to someone just to annoy them. We all have it coming.
Come hear me let the Hiwatt off its chain. Dick Destiny Band, live every Saturday in July in Pasadena at Artscape. Google.
The tribe of the old South (which ain’t just confined to the old South) is powerful in its ability to paper over the deepest problems, maintaining the status quo with only the most minor cosmetic changes.
Eliminating our hate flag, if it happens, won’t change a widespread national social and economic system of stealing labor, human rights abuse, marginalization, the maintenance of a labor force kept in poverty, suppression and imprisonment.
And pointing to Dixie’s right-to-work environment and payment of tax abatement bribes to businesses like Google aren’t signs of progress.
“Lured by the South’s call of cheap land and labor and limited regulations, businesses have flocked here from around the world,” reads the Times, hailing rapid change and an allegedly less predatory South. “Small businesses that have exploded into major corporations, most notably Walmart are now throwing their weight around …”
Boy howdy!
Recall, from this blog, the long commemoration of all things Civil War in the national media just a couple months ago, summarized in “Why No Burning of Atlanta Re-enactment?” —
Germany was de-Nazified and rebuilt. And Army General Douglas MacArthur reconstructed Japan, removing its worship of [warlords] and instituting land reform to break up a system dependent on rich owners served by tenant farmers. Emperor Hirohito was not tried as a war criminal. But he was made a figurehead, his status as a deity expunged.
The thought experiment is an obvious one: Construct an alternate history in which the states of the Confederacy went through a similar process. Not one in which an entire mythology built on the imaginary nobility of a lost cause took root, slavery was repackaged through re-branding and immoral legal installations with the cooperation of southern money and industry in the need to maintain a labor force in poverty, of no social status, presumed inferiority and living in fear with no recourse.
Today’s quote, from Ann Coulter, on what is probably a bog standard belief among the dead-enders:
The Confederate flag we’re talking about never flew over an official Confederate building. It was a battle flag. It is to honor Robert E. Lee. And anyone who knows the first thing about military history, knows that there is no greater army that ever took the field than the Confederate Army.
This is what you might call overcompensation from the tribe which, today, is still very aggrieved over defeat long ago.
Anyway, “Pickett’s Charge,” comes to mind. Against a second string Union commander, that was certainly a brilliant tactical stroke.
Without getting into the weeds on military details, I recommend Shelby Foote’s excellent three volume history of the Civil War. Reading it is a serious investment of time but also something of a thorough education. Foote was born in Mississippi.
And from Kleagle Ted Nugent, more expertise on the Lost Cause:
One metro Detroit native who’s been known to sport T-shirts featuring the Confederate flag is “Motor City Madman??? musician Ted Nugent.
But, he said, he wouldn’t raise the flag, or wear it, today.
The Confederate flag, Nugent told WWJ’s Laura Bonnell, did not in any way represent hate in his earlier days as a performer.
“Back when I would wear a Confederate flag on stage — along with an American flag and a POW flag and a ‘Don’t tread on me’ flag — I would be on tour with Lynyrd Skynyrd, and there wasn’t a racist thought to be found,??? Nugent said.
[Colloquially, this is watcha call “a likely story.”]
The issue with the flag, Nugent said, is more about political correctness than anything else.
Nugent said to some the flag is simply about the history of the south, and defended those who defend its continued display.
“I have to acknowledge — I think we all do — there’s an awful lot of information, an awful lot of people out there that believe the stars and bars, the Confederate flag, represents something heroic and something worth standing up for.???