02.14.15
Posted in WhiteManistan at 2:18 pm by George Smith
Thanks to Pine View Farm, I am informed of the burning spirit of patriotism in Conoy Township, about twenty minutes from where I spent three years of postdoc research, deep in the heart of Pennsyltucky.
Much more, and pictures which tell all of it, from the Daily Mail.
And after you’ve had more than you can stand of those tarpaulin-sized trousers, an antidote is furnished by Michelle Rodriguez and her leather pants.
Heevahava-ville will most certainly be totally free of crime unless you count symbolic violence against intelligence.
And there was an old song about it.
Better than tarp trousers.
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02.13.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund at 4:33 pm by George Smith
The buzz lacks staying power.
Stitch Nazis ruling an alternative America. Told ya. Jeff Bezos still not ready to dominate, then screw, sci-fi entertainment.
Life in our corporate Gau gets much better ratings.
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02.11.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Made in China, Rock 'n' Roll at 2:59 pm by George Smith
They don’t make ’em like this anymore. That’s a Washburn A-20v BBR, for black-black-red, ca. 1984-85. I have one, made at the Matsumoko company in Japan (since out of business) for Washburn USA (which isn’t).
The shape and color scheme enjoyed a very brief moment in the sun, one coinciding with Quiet Riot’s Metal Health LP, the first heavy metal record to hit number one in the US charts in 1983, going on to sell 6 million copies.
Although I wasn’t much of a fan, Metal Health was a catchy record. Guitarist Carlos Cavazo and bassist Rudy Sarzo played Washburn A-20s, featured in videos on MTV and guitar magazine advertising.
That’s not why I bought mine. I’d wanted a Gibson Explorer but couldn’t afford it. And I’d played one of the BBRs at a Washburn stand at a guitar show. So I had one special ordered and still have it.
I play it regularly now. It’s a shape and color that went horribly out of style. And it fits me, also horribly out of style at almost 59, perfectly.
Even Carlos Cavazo won’t play his Washburn A-20s in public anymore. He joined Ratt and switched to Gibsons. His friends, he said, talked him out of playing those old things. It’s not hard to guess why.
Still, it sounds and plays great, a poor man’s Gibson with a great jet-black hard finish.
It has “Power Sustain” pick-ups, say the old brochures!
And that’s my intro to today’s post on the American guitar business. In the mid-Eighties, electric guitars were still solidly of the middle class business. Leo Fender made it that way.
It doesn’t take a lot of brains to figure out what happened.
The recession, the evisceration of buying power, and the great thinning of the middle class made the guitar-making industry polar.
One end is cheap guitars made in China or similar Asian labor markets. And the other end is expensive custom-shop artisan instruments for classic rock musicians who can still get paid, but mostly for the upper class and very top people who want them as nice things to have. Investments that impress stupid people.
And there’s little in the middle.
The stagnant economy isn’t the only reason guitars have had a hard time. Classic rock is music for an older generation. Like polka was for me in southeastern PA when I was in school.
It’s not entirely dead, of course. Taylor Swift, the biggest seller in pop rock, is firmly from classic rock roots. All her sidemen play vintage model guitars, the best. But young people, as they should, have different choices. They don’t need electric guitars in any big way.
And the industry bet wrong on that.
Before the collapse, the idea, and it was a clear one if you shopped at Guitar Center or BestBuy or Target, was that electric guitars could be put in every household, like microwave ovens. And so the production of 70 percent of all electric guitars was moved to China, the instruments made cheaply, and sold in cardboard boxes as start-up kits.
And then the bottom fell out of the economy and ruined it. Even $120 guitars-made-in-China weren’t quite cheap enough a lot of the time.
Plus a lot of young people would have rather spent up for a more universal symbol of cool, an iPod or iPhone.
However, you can’t have a guitar business like you did in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties. Guitars are not thrown away. They don’t end up in landfills. You can find them everywhere in pawn shops and used sales. And the very wealthy, who buy the American-made custom shop hot rods? There just aren’t enough of them.
They lack the numbers and the same prole desires of the old middle class.
I see this on-line everyday. Facebook shoves posts from guitar publications and companies into my feed and they’re all about only two things.
First, pictures of expensive hot rod guitars, most of which the middle class, or even people who work in music stores, can’t really afford anymore. And the guitar accessory business, which exploded.
The accessory business, which means guitar effects and foot pedals, can just barely keep prices down on American-made stuff because there’s not much to it in the way of materials.
Fuzz-tones, of which there are at least eighty different brands/makes now, are priced only slightly higher than a rock bottom guitar made in China or Indonesia. And at that price point, a lot of poverty-stricken musicians, which is to say quite a few of them, can still afford the stuff.
And so the American makers of guitar pedals have gone through a boom. Culturally and socially they resemble the demographic of Silicon Valley programmer/brogrammer. Only not paid nearly as well.
They’re all tinkerers. With analog electronics rather than code. They play guitar, naturally, and they’re all white guys who pretty much look and sound the same.
It’s a busy industry that’s forced adaptations on the old industry. Big manufacturers, who have been around for decades, have seen the offerings and co-opted, leased or bought out some of the best of the little guys. Or the luckiest. It’s often hard to tell which.
Dunlop, for example, makes about a score of guitar fuzz/distortion effects under three different sub-company names, MXR, Way Huge and its own. They all feature some overlap, many in details that are of little or no distinction to the millions of people who still listen to classic rock recordings.
But it’s a fit for the hollowed out economy. Small stuff, made-in-America, that young men can still afford to buy a bit of. Gadgets easy to market and advertise, not requiring a lot of development time or much of an investment as the designs have already been made over and over and over again. And lots of choices, like hot sauces or ketchups and mustards at slightly snob up-market grocery stores.
This has established glut as what looks like a permanent feature of the market. There are more things to buy, and more coming all the time, than there is demand.
But despite the inexorably shrinking market for this, YouTube bristles with unpaid advertising for the new state-of-the-art electric guitar and accessory market.
New local bands nationwide can record and make as many videos of their music as they want, never make any headway, never get any numbers without a couple lucky breaks.
But un-boxing and demonstration videos of new fuzz-tones and guitar overdrives often guarantees some kind of audience.
Since American guitar manufacturers moved their production to China they surely cannot be surprised at some of the more interesting ramifications.
Three years ago I did a number of posts on Chinese-made counterfeit Gibson guitars after the Washington Post and other major newspapers actually began running on-line ads pointing to sites that sold them.
The ads were eventually taken down but the business became more vigorous. And why would it not?
Why pay for an expensive American-made Gibson guitar when you can’t afford it? But you can have a nice-looking forgery for hundreds of dollars, with a little luck when it comes to shipping.
There are many people who think this way. Can you blame them? They know that if they try to hock a forgery it will be discovered. They know that in many areas in won’t be up to the standard imposed at the Gibson factory.
But the Chinese are always getting better at the job and, in terms of for personal pleasure and looks, often the difference in quality matters less and less every day.
Why, just look at the video enthusiasms of young American men over “Chibsons,” the name for Chinese Gibson forgeries, on YouTube. It’s real.
How good is that Chibson? How do you tell if you’ve been sold a Chibson? Let me show you the unboxing of my new Chibson! How do you get a Chibson and what can you do to upgrade it?
Boy, that Chibson sure looks nice!
Even Earl Slick plays, markets and recommends Chinese-made guitars! Chibsons and Chenders!
Ask and I’ll tell which one looks good to me.
Two years ago Fender Musical Instruments tried to go public.
Initially, it seemed a natural, even proper, thing. The company of Leo Fender, although he’s long dead, is the tap root of the tree of American electric guitar. It’s a big part of the history of pop rock all around the world.
The attempt failed, done in by the opinions of America’s financial wizards who deemed it overvalued.
“Jeffrey Bronchick, the chief investment officer at investment advisory firm Cove Street Capital, says the stock was overvalued,” read a story from Fortune.
“It is a much more difficult business than what it was being sold as,??? says Bronchick (who also plays guitar, on a Fender),” told the magazine. “It was highly levered, there was a big question mark on growth and it was priced too high …???
For the New York Times, there was the same financial adviser, telling the newspaper he had four Fender guitars, but: “What possible niche is left unexploited by Fender?”
Fender’s margins were under pressure, said the newspaper. “Many of the guitars that are selling these days are cheap ones made in places like China — ones that cost a small fraction of, say, a $1,599 Fender Artist Eric Clapton Strat …”
And “Poof!” went the i.p.o.
Done in by the merciless judgments of those in the financial industry who make nothing but who buy tricked-out American custom-shop goods as investments and baubles. They weren’t believers in the company’s future. What they believed was how nice it is to show off a couple expensively furnished Eric Clapton Stratocasters to wealthy acquaintances at dinner parties, acquisition of luxury goods as a means of keeping score.
Today Fender is owner by a private equity firm. It’s interim CEO is known for being an executive at Under Armour and J. Crew, the latter an upscale women’s wear company.
In 2011, the Fender Museum closed due to lack of interest. A week or so ago there was a garage sale for what was left of its memorabilia.
And in a not very surprising development, Fender announced it would be selling direct from its website, royally pissing off its 70-year old network of bricks-and-mortar guitar store dealers.
Why not? Perhaps it would increase the profit margin, if only by increments. And to the new generation who use smartphone apps of convenience, shopping in a physical store lacks the zing of custom-picking the colors and hardware of a Stratocaster on-line.
Picking up a guitar in a store is old and fuddy-duddy, obsolete. You have to drive to it. You might have to plug it into an amp to see how it sounds and plays. With new computerized machinery to set-up a guitar before it leaves the factory and the service of UPS or FedEx, things are generally OK when they arrive at your doorstep.
And there is the upside: Direct sales taps Fender directly into the mania of unboxing video.
Playing the guitar is entirely secondary to the loving way in which the cardboard shipping box is displayed. Then the slow prying open and gentle removal of packing materials, all captured with full HD digital camera work.
Finally, the climax: The camera shows the un-boxer panning over and turning the as yet untarnished instrument itself. Exquisite!
Perhaps a second video can be made in which the unboxer briefly plays the instrument.
But, really, this is relatively unimportant in the grand scheme because there are always new instruments and accessories to be unboxed. It is the movie-like documentation of the acquisition that is the be all and the end all.
Besides, look at the videos of the Fender guitar un-boxers. They’re nerds with expensive hobbies.
There’s no more rock n roll in the lot of them than there are in boxes of mashed potato mix. But that’s where the money is and you cannot fault Fender for trying to shake hands with the future.
What about Washburn? It has its custom shop in America, for the high-priced models. For the rest of us, there are those made in Indonesia.
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02.09.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:41 pm by George Smith
Many, many people fully understand the sharing economy is a racket, one in which tech industry start-ups depend upon the desperation of labor in an economy that’s stagnant.
Searching for any income, even miniscule amounts of compensation, millions take whatever can be had in service piece work jobs administered by owners who operate networks that makes work-for-hire available through apps.
Everyone is a free-lancer, all are pitted against all.
If you’ve been paying attention you’ve read the intelligence-insulting swill passed off as innovation. There’s the woman who was damaged by the Great Recession, now sub-letting her apartment out for a week or few days a month while she crashes for free on the couch of parents or friends. You’ve heard of a student, perhaps many others, renting a double bedroom apartment they can’t afford so they can sub-let half of it to someone else at a higher rental, generally either breaking the law or the terms of their lease (it would break mine), so they can make money in the sharing economy.
Critical thinkers now have plenty of examples of how the new shyster-ism works.
And you can see it in weekly stories on the sharing economy.
Most recently, very well summed up by a newspaper journalist giving a talk at a TEDx conference in Baltimore, an irony very rich indeed, the TED brand known primarily for its tech industry cheer-leading sessions called “talks.”
“The sharing economy is ‘predicated on the idea that there’s always going to be a huge pool of people who are willing to work desperate hours for no pay and no benefits,’ ??? Baltimore City Paper journalist Edward Ericson told a crowd at TedxBaltimore 2015, here.
Businesses of the sharing economy, notably Uber and Lyft, “have ‘nothing to do’ with making a living.”
The man put it more bluntly in a piece last year (one which I wish I’d read much earlier):
Here is the future: nobody gets any job security. Nobody gets a fair wage while they have a job. Nobody gets a retirement fund or even any guarantee they’ll be able to eat tomorrow. And almost everyone is doing everything they can just to get by—and paying some substantial portion of their earnings to a pimp or “platform” which controls the business they are in …
[Thirty years ago] I did not yet understand then that those having or wanting just a job—just a job with decent pay—would be disparaged as “takers.”
I did not realize that, in 30 years, skilled people would be working basically for free just on the off chance they’d strike it rich in Silicon Valley.
And that, within my lifetime, those who did win that lottery would do so mainly by “innovating” a way to make all their staffers work for no pay at all …
The same week, Robert Reich, narrator and star of the Inequality for All documentary, penned a column confirming the very bad, just more gently, as the “share the scraps” economy:
This is the logical culmination of a process that began 30 years ago, when corporations began turning over full-time jobs to temporary workers, independent contractors, freelancers and consultants.
It was a way to shift risks and uncertainties onto the workers — work that might entail more hours than planned for, or was more stressful than expected.
And a way to circumvent labor laws that set minimal standards for wages, hours and working conditions. And that enabled employees to join together to bargain for better pay and benefits.
The new on-demand work shifts risks entirely onto workers, and eliminates minimal standards completely.
At Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, people “work for pennies,” he adds.
It’s actually worse than that. Robert Reich hasn’t spent enough time getting the ice cold shower on Mechanical Turk “jobs.”
There are people who work for jobs that pay zero, as I’ve chronicled in the Mechanical Turk files, because Amazon’s rating system whacks workers when “employers” choose not to pay, even one cent, because work is deemed inadequate or they can just get away with not paying.
And that once a worker’s rating drops below almost perfection because of it they are disqualified from taking many of even the most parsimonious offerings.
That, in turn, set up a market for jobs that pay zero pennies as people try to work their qualification rating back up by working for nothing.
The growth of the sharing economy is not one of great technology-enabled opportunity, Reich writes. “It only shows how bad a deal most working people have otherwise been getting.”
Which brings us to inclusive capitalism, a cloud of foul air described as new economic perfume, emanating from the camp of Hillary Clinton and her coterie of millionaire groupie economic advisers.
Reich was Secretary of Labor during the last Clinton administration. And I say last because it appears Hillary Clinton has already been proclaimed leader for the single reason that she has more money and oligarch stature than Croesus, her potential opponents being nothing more than uniformly loathsome human beings.
Clinton as President is a prospect that could destroy much of the weak enthusiasm for voting left in this country. Or at least create a great wish for a national barbiturates and alcohol citizen’s ration.
In a review for Inequality for All, I wrote Reich turned glum by the end of the movie, admitting he couldn’t get much done during the Clinton administration when all the factors he identified as causes for the worsening gap between the rich and everyone else began to accelerate.
The Clinton administration, Reich said, had a slogan: “Putting People First.” But that’s all it was and they paid him no mind. Eventually he went away.
So Hillary Clinton’s inclusive capitalism is likely the same meaningless eyewash. Worse, maybe, because it doesn’t even have the word “people” in it.
As a phrase it’s enough to make the eyes glaze over and head droop. Nobody wants to be in an inclusive capitalism. They just want to make a better living.
In its development as a branding buzz term, inclusive capitalism is as shitty as sharing economy.
From the New York Times:
With advice from more than 200 policy experts, Hillary Rodham Clinton is trying to answer what has emerged as a central question of her early presidential campaign strategy: how to address the anger about income inequality without overly vilifying the wealthy [who are her major benefactors] …
Behind many of these proposals is a philosophy, endorsed by Mrs. Clinton’s closest economic advisers and often referred to as inclusive capitalism, that contends that a majority of Americans do not want to punish the rich; they just want to feel that they, too, have a chance to succeed. It also calls for corporations to put less emphasis on short-term profits that increase shareholder value and to invest more in employees, the environment and communities.
Details remain vague.
Inclusive capitalism — something very wealthy people interested in maintaining the status quo will say to gull the stupid and/or get others to leave the subject alone.
More, from the New York Times, a few days earlier:
The concept of inclusive capitalism has expanded over the past 13 years to apply to those at the bottom and middle of the ladder in developed nations, including the United States. The fundamental “inclusive capitalism??? argument is that business enterprises lose profit-making opportunities when consumers have little money to spend. Inadequate purchasing power among the many threatens corporations and poses a direct danger to the top 1 percent, and, indeed, to capitalism itself …
The Summers-Balls report – “The Report of the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity??? – is the most comprehensive summary. This report, which uses the phrase “inclusive capitalism??? more than a dozen times, was published by the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank founded by John Podesta – Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff who in February will join Hillary Clinton’s exploratory presidential campaign.
And in those thirteen years, great things happened.
Technically, you could call the sharing economy inclusive capitalism. Everyone is included if they wish to be.
And from last year, in July, we learn inclusive capitalism was the name of a conference in the financial heart of London, one where important men of finance (and Bill Clinton) convened to discuss what was to be done about the remote possibility of pitchforks:
A stirring through the hall, a focusing of gazes — Carney has the attention of the chief executives, bankers and investors gathered here for a conference on “Inclusive Capitalism.??? His bluntness reflects the fact that, six years after the crisis, the core problem has not gone away: The deep unease and anger in developed countries about the ways globalization and technology magnify returns for the super-rich, operating in a world of low taxation and lax regulation where short-term gain becomes a guiding principle, even as societies become more unequal, offering diminished opportunities to the young, less community and a growing sense of unfairness …
In other words, human beings matter. An age that has seen emergence from poverty on a massive scale in the developing world has been accompanied by the spread of a new poverty (of life and of expectations) in much of the developed world. Global convergence has occurred alongside internal divergence. Interdependence is a reality, but the way it works is skewed. [Keynote speaker Bill Clinton] noted that ants, bees, termites and humans have all survived through an unusual shared characteristic: They are cooperative forms of life. But it is precisely the loss at all levels of community, of social capital, that most threatens the world’s stability and future prosperity.
There is a kind of poetry to it. Global convergence has occurred alongside internal divergence. Ants, bees, termites and humans. Either like something from Being There or a child’s fortune-telling toy.
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02.08.15
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle at 2:33 pm by George Smith
Being one of this country’s national security professionals isn’t much of an accomplishment. It means you exist as a convenience to any of the vast machines — the intelligence community, the arms manufacturers, the Pentagon. Your only purpose is to serve in the furtherance of them.
And it doesn’t matter how disastrous the outcome. It’s obvious being wrong or failure are words which no longer hold any meaning.
Here’s Kenneth M. Pollack in the New York Times this week:
The good news right now is largely on the military front. Iraqi, Kurdish and American forces appear to be turning the tide against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
American air operations have inflicted heavy losses on the group — killing its fighters, destroying its equipment, disrupting its command and impeding its movements …
American military officials in Iraq tell me they are confident that a smaller, revamped Iraqi Army will be ready to begin big operations to retake Iraq from the Islamic State in the next four to eight months. Kurdish and Iraqi forces have largely secured Baghdad and its environs, made gains in the cities of Baiji and Samarra, cut off the road by which the Islamic State was supporting its garrison in Mosul from its base in Syria, and are encroaching on Mosul itself. In six to 18 months, the Islamic State may be driven out of Iraq altogether.
Sound familiar? It should. Six to eighteen months equals one to three “Friedman units.”
“Kenneth M. Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is the author, most recently, of ‘Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy,’ ??? reads the Times’ description of the column’s author.
Publishers have done very well by Kenneth M. Pollack of Brookings. Even though he’s been one of the most spectacularly wrong “experts” on the necessity of war with Iraq and on everything else, he suits the needs of the American war machine so nicely, whatever he writes tends to get a lot of publicity.
And it has never mattered that it has little relationship with reality.
The US government, under the Bush administration, made him a best-selling author for “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq,” a book that can accurately be described as an elaborate rationale for war crimes.
Its existence, and continuing books, are also an indicator that the Brookings Institution, once alleged to be a think tank of some repute, is nothing more than a retirement home for circus clowns who, on occasion, are dragged out to be of use to the country’s war-making apparatus.
Here’s Ezra Klein, alleged to be another person of considerable intellect, trotting out ol’ Evergreen Ken as late as 2013:
Pollack comes off much as he did in his original book: curious and questioning. He worries openly about what he got wrong and what he could have done better.
And here’s my take, one that noted The Threatening Storm was then worth a penny a copy on Amazon. Which seemed and seems high.
I said Ken Pollack is a symbol for our time. I wasn’t fulsome enough. He’s a terrific symbol, the best money can buy.
If you ever read The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam’s famous chronicle of the Vietnam War and the Johnson administration, toward the end he frequently writes about the superciliousness and mocking laughter that came out of the press corps when faced with prognostications and estimates on the enemy and how the war would turn the corner in another few months, or a year, or something.
Pollack writes of the “revamped Iraqi army.” It reads just like numerous claims about the ARVN in the mid-Sixties.
Without a spectacular bombing campaign against the usual enemy with no anti-air capability, it would be just as good.
There are big differences between now and then. Vietnam effectively destroyed the Johnson administration. The Democratic Party was taken down by collateral damage.
In the intervening period the US military learned that to conduct “partial war” at any time, it had to remove itself from oversight and make the number of people who would actually wage war only a fraction of the populace.
It was successful in this. It can wage measures of partial war anywhere it wants around the globe with little or no risk of domestic unrest.
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02.02.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks at 2:16 pm by George Smith
Not exactly.
But did I have you going there for a minute?
Blogs are over, I read somewhere, last week. I figured that’s probably true. And I’m just not designed for the instrumentation of the culture of lickspittle social media; that doesn’t work, either.
I had a few things but threw ’em away.
But today, here’s the latest in America’s strange but true and twisted love of ricin:
A New York City pharmacist who admitted to trying to make weapons-grade ricin and other legal toxins has been sentenced to 6 ˝ years in prison.
Jordan Gonzalez was arrested on drug-related charges in 2013. He pleaded guilty in May 2014 to knowingly attempting to develop, produce and possess toxins and to possessing equipment for producing illegal narcotics.
He admitted he had been assembling equipment and materials to produce ricin, abrin and other toxins at his apartments in Jersey City and Manhattan. Gonzalez also obtained weapons, ammunition, body armor and survivalist-themed manuals.
The outcome of this case is bizarre, particularly with regards to the sentence and the claims made concerning it.
Therefore, it deserves a bit of backtrack.
In May of this year the Associated Press reported on a raid and arrest on Gonzalez’ apartment that had been conducted half a year earlier, in November 2013:
A New York City pharmacist has admitted in federal court in New Jersey he was trying to make weapons-grade ricin and other lethal toxins.
Jordan Gonzalez pleaded guilty Thursday to knowingly attempting to develop, produce and possess toxins and to possessing equipment for producing illegal narcotics.
Federal prosecutors in New Jersey say the 34-year-old admitted he had been assembling equipment and materials to produce ricin, abrin and other toxins at his apartments in Jersey City and Manhattan. Prosecutors say Gonzalez also obtained weapons, ammunition, body armor and training manuals for violent confrontation.
The pharmacist was initially charged in November with trying to manufacture a controlled substance after authorities discovered he had made purchases through an online auction of materials associated with the hallucinogen known as MDA.
AP continues, quoting from authorities, that Gonzalez “purchased thousands of seeds containing ricin and abrin, and materials to extract and administer those toxins to others, including filtering equipment, respirators, glass vials, a spraying device and projectile weapons …”
Gonzalez had, it said, also stockpiled survivalist “documents” on the “collapse of the social order.” The latter, common stuff in 2015 America.
However, in the only evidence pictures from 2015 news on his plea agreement and sentencing that I could find last week, there is only this.
Top line, far right, boxes containing a bottle of what looks like hydrogen peroxide, an unused chemical flask for concocting, an unopened plastic-bubble of tools (a set of drill bits) and a few other things, in bags, unidentifiable.
What’s in the bags? Thousands of castor seeds? There is no way to tell.
Also on display, handwritten notes on “recipes for narcotics.” Boil morphine with acetic anhydride” to make heroin is outlined by authorities.
Here is another story, in the Bergen County Record, on the Gonzalez arrest in 2013:
Federal Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI agents swarmed into the Jersey City Heights today, arresting a pharmacist on drug production charges and then discovering a large cache of weapons, ammunition and acid at a storage facility at the Tonnelle Circle, officials said.
Jordan Gonzalez, 33, formerly of Jersey City and now of New York, was arrested after law enforcement agents descended on a Bleecker Street building early this morning, New Jersey U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman announced today.
He is charged with attempting to manufacture methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA) and possession of chemicals and materials to manufacture a controlled substance, officials said.
Later, federal agents moved to the U-Haul on Tonnelle Avenue, where a large amount the weapons, ammunition and acid was found …
“Several sources said that when officials first responded to Bleecker Street, investigators were looking into suspicions involving the chemical or biological warfare agent ricin. Federal officials would not confirm that and said they had no information to release on the matter. The charges do no [sic] reflect the discovery of ricin,” continued the AP.
The Department of Justice’s statement on the matter, another case involving a joint anti-terrorism task force, is here.
“From Sept. 18, 2011, through March 19, 2013, Gonzalez purchased thousands of seeds containing ricin and abrin, and materials to extract and administer those toxins to others, including filtering equipment, respirators and glass vials,” it reads.
It continues to elucidate an armory of what would be Kurt Saxon-approved survivalist materials appropriate for the usual stories about the imminent collapse of US civilization and the need to defend oneself, or to have arms of all kinds at the ready to pre-emptively attack enemies.
“On Nov. 8, 2013, while living in Manhattan, Gonzalez purchased one kilogram of sodium azide …” reads the Department of Justice. It’s a compound which is not only an acute poison, but also explosive.
In news stories from 2013 it was said Gonzalez bought his materials, or most of them, on eBay. While I did not check, I doubt reagent grade sodium azide can be bought through it.
The Justice statement maintains thousands of castor seeds as well as rosary peas (for abrin) were recovered in the raids.
“The sentence imposed today on Jordan Gonzalez is an appropriate response to his efforts to manufacture and deploy toxins as deadly weapons,??? Paul Fishman, the US attorney in the case, said in the statement. “He was preparing for a violent confrontation that fortunately never occurred …”
Still, the entirety of it and the result, remains unusual.
During the last fifteen years, there have been no fatalities attributed to terrorism (or attempted terrorism, frame-jobs and attention-getting ploys) with ricin in the United States.
From Google, here are the trends in “ricin” used as search over the last decade, tied to headlines, all from results in the United States.
If one pages down, a map of the world, graded by ricin search is shown.
Curiously, Romania is number one.
I was curious about this. Turns out, Romania grows castor and exports the oil for use in organic cosmetics as a premium ingredient, a smoother and skin softener. In Romania, the processing is of “ricin zahar,” or its term for castor oil.
In France, which also lists high in search for ricin, it is known as huile de ricin, where it is also of interest as a beautifying agent.
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01.28.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 2:35 pm by George Smith
From the archives of the Philadelphia Inquirer, now on-line, a review of the first Dick Destiny album in 1986:
DICK DESTINY AND THE HIGHWAY KINGS Arrogance (Destination Records * * * ): It’s less arrogance than devotion that compels Dick Destiny to sing – his howl nearly drowns out the real reason to listen to this record, i.e., the guitar playing, which for all I know may be done by Dick Destiny (lack of credits on the album jacket there, Dick). Anyway, the lead guitarist knows his way around everything from blues to heavy metal and doesn’t condescend to either genre. If the lyrics have no purpose other than to hymn rock cliches – the road, love and rock-and-roll its own bad self – the music convinces me that someone in this band is in it for the passion, not the potential for stardom.
Rated by Inky pop music critic Ken Tucker over Alice Cooper’s Constrictor (“the songs are mostly dull, hostile twaddle”) and Stacy Q’s Better Than Heaven which generated the world-wide smash, “Two of Hearts,” and nothing else.
“Can the singer whose voice is strong enough to remind you of Madonna’s with voice lessons and the performer of one of the year’s catchiest No. 1 singles (“Two of Hearts”) – the song that brought disco back into pop consciousness – sustain such excellence for a whole album?” asks Tucker. “No.”
Oh, snap!
I got three stars doing it the home-made way. They got two.
What’s that you say? Buy Loud Fold Live?
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01.24.15
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 2:27 pm by George Smith
America is ricin happy, mesmerized by the mystique and allure of the poison found in castor seeds. Or at least a very small but unique demographic in it is.
The next item shows the FBI, unsurprisingly, is still looking at black market sites on the “Dark Web.” And, in a first, its agents have conducted a ricin sting, posing as a seller of poisons on one of these sites, allegedly netting a man who wished to buy “ricin pills.” For resale.
Reuters:
A Manhattan man tried to buy the biological toxin ricin from an undercover agent posing as a drug vendor on an online black marketplace, U.S. authorities said in criminal charges unsealed on Tuesday.
The man, Cheng Le, has been in federal custody since he was arrested on Dec. 23 …
The criminal complaint against Le said he used an unidentified black marketplace located within the “dark web,” a space on the Internet in which users’ true identities remain hidden while they communicate. Le allegedly contacted an agent who had taken over an online identity that had been previously used by a trafficker in illicit materials and asked to buy several lethal doses of ricin, a highly potent toxin derived from castor oil plant seeds …
The complaint said Le wanted the agent to send the ricin to a shipping store near his apartment where he maintained a postal box. He appeared to have plans to resell the ricin to buyers looking for ways to commit murder without being detected, and later asked the agent to put the ricin into pill form …
The man was “taken into custody after picking up delivery of a fake ricin pill,” reads a report from the Associated Press.
Apparently it is not widely known that when selling things from the “dark web,” the USPS is not part of the TOR network. And that in cyberspace the old aphorism is still true: Nobody knows if you’re a dog, or in this case, the Department of Justice.
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01.21.15
Posted in Cyberterrorism at 3:23 pm by George Smith
“No foreign nation, no hacker, should be able to shut down our networks, steal our trade secrets, or invade the privacy of American families, especially our kids. We are making sure our government integrates intelligence to combat cyber threats, just as we have done to combat terrorism. So tonight, I urge this Congress to finally pass the legislation we need to better meet the evolving threat of cyber-attacks, combat identity theft, and protect our children’s information. That should be a bipartisan effort. If we don’t act, we’ll leave our nation and our economy vulnerable. If we do, we can continue to protect the technologies that have unleashed untold opportunities for people around the globe.”
Same old.
First, Congress generally won’t pass anything the President recommends, in this case CISPA.
Second, you can’t conflate shutting down networks, “stealing our trade secrets,” and civilian privacies. In the United States the only things that have mattered on the national stage are protecting the properties of the corporate sector, Wall Street and the military; secondarily, ameliorating the embarrassment and liability caused when a huge corporate system is breached and its data spilled.
Everyone else is on their own.
Anyway, you can’t have a secure global network when a limitlessly funded wing of the national defense has, as one of its main functions, the subversion and undermining of network security for its own uses and agenda.
Someday, expect a cyber-Bruce Ivins:
Normally, internship applicants need to have polished resumes, with volunteer work on social projects considered a plus. But at Politerain [a training program for the NSA’s malware programs], the job posting calls for candidates with significantly different skill sets. We are, the ad says, “looking for interns who want to break things.”
Potential interns are also told that research into third party computers might include plans to “remotely degrade or destroy opponent computers, routers, servers and network enabled devices by attacking the hardware.” Using a program called Passionatepolka, for example, they may be asked to “remotely brick network cards.” With programs like Berserkr they would implant “persistent backdoors” and “parasitic drivers”. Using another piece of software called Barnfire, they would “erase the BIOS on a brand of servers that act as a backbone to many rival governments.”
An intern’s tasks might also include remotely destroying the functionality of hard drives.
Volunteer work on social projects. Good joke, that.
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01.20.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 12:47 pm by George Smith
“I have much to learn from you, Obergruppenfuhrer.” If you’re not a younger fan boy of all things science-fiction or a member of the reviewing web press, that’s the line that sticks with you from the pilot of Amazon Prime TV’s The Man in the High Castle. And it comes in a scene where said Obergruppenfuhrer, an “American Nazi” in full SS regalia, patiently explains to an underling that a bloody and comatose man hanging from hooks is being beaten to death so his corpse will appear to the resistance movement as if he never gave up the goods.
“The Man in the High Castle” is a tv adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s old alternative history sci-fi novel in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan win the Second World War and partition the US into three regions — the west going to Japan, the Rockies being a neutral zone, and the east belonging to the Reich.
I read it when I was a teenager and although it won a Hugo Award for Dick in 1962, it’s not one of my favorites among many others of his.
In terms of fortune Hugos didn’t count for much back then and Dick struggled financially up until a very short time before his death in 1982 when money starting coming in due to the sale of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as the basis for the Blade Runner movie.
Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle is beautifully shot, dark and moody. But swastikas everywhere — arm bands on local every government officer, on road signs, even on pay telephones, and Americans dressed in jackboots, Wehrmacht and Waffen SS uniforms couldn’t help but remind me of an old episode of Star Trek, Hogan’s Heroes and Ilsa — She Wolf of the SS.
The plot moves slowly.
All there is to know as backstory is that Hitler is dieing of Parkinson’s disease and when he does, the Reich will end its peace with Imperial Japan, that a resistance is being kept alive by the smuggling of old film news reels entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy which show the Allies winning the war, and that a Japanese ambassador in San Francisco knows something very bad is coming because he casts the sticks and reads the I Ching, a Japanese Ouija board.
“Watching our conquered citizenry suffer under a cruel draconian rule that we’ve never had to endure, even if imagined, was still creepily potent,” wrote one very young and enthusiastic reviewer. (No link).
As far as American dystopia’s go, what’s shown in The Man in the High Castle is bullishly average, particularly against other recent tv series like Fringe and The Strain, the latter which also has a Nazi Obergruppenfuhrer. Besides, it’s not a stretch to think of Americans giving up and tolerating rule by dictatorship as long as they have jobs, cars and get to be on the security force carrying guns, now, is it?
There’s another unintentionally funny part, too. As armed to the teeth as this country is, there’s a conspicuous absence of the tools of “2nd Amendment remedies” in this version of 1962 America. The couple of freedom-fighters, main characters, we see just aren’t of the types that are convincing.
Yes, that’s a bit of nit-picking. But Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle isn’t good. Dick’s book didn’t have much an ending in 1962 and that wasn’t always a liability in many of his stories. However, now the 1962 setting, which was his present, is very dated in the context of American life and that makes The Man in the High Castle look artificial although there’s nothing visibly wrong with the sets. Its America, instead of teeming with people, is abandoned and relatively empty. Even the Nazi-fied period music is poor, more like camp to be precise. “Edelweiss” in NYC or SF in 1962? Please.
There might have been a way to re-imagine Dick’s book but this isn’t it. And considering what’s seen in the pilot, none of it bodes well for this television production, good graphics and Ridley Scott as executive producer or not.
Avoid.
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