05.13.14
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks, Rock 'n' Roll at 11:30 am by George Smith
J. Everett Dutschke, the only alleged ricin maker to ever be a finalist in a Budweiser beer Battle of the Bands contest is in the news again. And I cannot do it justice.
So, here, from the local newspaper:
A man accused of sending ricin to President Barack Obama and two other public officials, then framing an Elvis impersonator recanted his confession at a sentencing hearing this morning after pleading guilty four ricin-related charges …
[Dutschke] reportedly recanted his confession and launched into a rant against Kevin Curtis, the Elvis impersonator he attempted to frame for the letters, comparing him to Barney the Dinosaur. Then Dutschke compared himself to an Olympic gymnast.
Dutschke then said that he would happily empty the contents of the letters he is accused of sending into a peanut butter sandwich and eat it to prove it was not poison.
J. Everett Dutschke — and a whole lot more — from WhiteManistan blog’s incomparable archives.
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05.12.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll, Shoeshine at 12:00 pm by George Smith
At RockNYCLiveandRecorded, a music website edited by Iman Lababedi, an old regular at the long defunct Creem magazine:
Stenography, that is to say, the passing on of favorable publicity and hagiography, is the major business practice of the mainstream media. Having the temerity of daring opinion in relationship to power, or money or whatever the majority feels is great consumer stuff, went badly out of fashion in the last few decades. So Lorde can be forgiven for believing something stupid, but which sounds superficially fair on first hearing, about the original nature of entertainment writing.
Stenography, or the rote passing on of free publicity, is a decades old problem, spread across many genres of journalism.
When I started writing for the Morning Call newspaper of Allentown in the late Eighties it came at a time when the entertainment section’s function was to be exactly that — providing of stenographers for the local arts people and those coming through town.
When that changed to sending in reports that frequently afflicted those deserving of it, it created a substantial short term fit. The assistant managing editor did not at all like getting angry phone calls on Monday morning, the first time he could be reached after the weekend bits had run. There was no e-mail you could just delete. You had to listen to grumpy people on the phone. In his estimation, the job of features section journalists was to make their subjects happy …
Read all of it.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 11:28 am by George Smith
The hobbies of WhiteManistan are easy to define: Anything bunches of angry white guys with weapons can do to scare and intimidate everyone else. And in special cases, the one-on-one gunning down of unarmed but suspected enemies. The hobbies are officially promoted by enacting laws that make it OK for WhiteManistanis to shoot not-white people and/or government workers who make them nervous and which also enable the waving of assault rifles at unarmed civilians in demonstrations of freedom from tyranny.
And nothing says you’re a tyranny-fighting patriot like riding your ATV over a native American historical site in Utah with your posse of like-minded buddies.
From the Salt Lake Tribune, excerpted:
While addressing the rally, [the WhiteManistan sovereign citizen leading the parade] voiced second thoughts about riding the closed trail, fearing illegal action would promote conflict and undermine his cause, which “is being tried in the court of public opinion.”
He proposed riding the canyon rim instead, but rally goers shouted that idea down …
It’s your god-given right to go down and ride through that canyon and to hell with the media,” shouted an armed militia member.
The newspaper noted the armed militiamen in attendance declined to be interviewed.
Do follow the link to see the pictures. My regret, of course, is I didn’t have these to include in my WhiteManistan Vacation song.
Hey, let’s go out and wave our guns at people in the park on Saturday.
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05.05.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 5:22 pm by George Smith
Even stuff you did more than 20 years ago isn’t safe from corporate theft. If there is a way to steal labor, it will be done. Here then for your enjoyment, from the Morning Call, a piece I did as a free-lancer in 1992. The Call, which belonged to Times-Mirror, now Tribune, never had a contract with any free-lance writers.
Digital distribution didn’t exist in any form for it. Free-lance articles were never copied to the wire service from Allentown.
But this piece has existed in the Call archives for 22 years. And while the newspaper has no digital rights to it, that hasn’t stopped it from putting it on the web.
I’m taking it back today.
It’s Not That Tricky To Use The PC For April Fool’s Revenge
Dear Mr. Computer Dude:
My PC plays Rossini’s “William Tell Overture” every time I turn it on. I can’t find anything about this in the manual. Is it an undocumented feature?
— Puzzled
Has this ever happened to someone you know? Like, maybe around April 1?
Time to get even! If you have a PC and a double sawbuck to spare, you’re all set to try your hand at some electronic practical jokes and maybe learn a little about computer security in the process.
The sweetest way to get started on this April Fool’s revenge project is to let someone else provide the stoop labor. Just right for that purpose is a mall bookstore paperback called “Stupid PC Tricks” by Bob Levitus and Ed Tittel (Addison-Wesley; $19.95; 137 pp.). The book itself isn’t very helpful. However, the two floppy disks that come with it are — they contain the makings of a number of clever, cheap and, most important, user friendly practical jokes.
To start, the disks contain a program known as TRIP (as in drugs, not cruise).
Now, what you want to do to embarrass that goldbricking co-worker who’s always playing a favorite computer game when the shift supervisor’s not looking is this:
1. Take a disk that TRIP is on and insert it into your colleague’s work station PC floppy drive. Type A:, then .
2. Now, type TRIP 5.
3. Then type CLS to clear the PC monitor so there’s no evidence of your fiddling.
TRIP is a deeply aggravating trick which installs itself into a computer’s memory and alters the color of all letters on the TV screen in a random fashion at a rate predetermined by the number typed after TRIP.
TRIP is not destructive, but it is quite impossible for anyone to work at a PC with text characters pulsing queasily in different colors. And TRIP is easy to dismiss (but don’t tell any of the victims). Simply restarting the PC flushes TRIP from the system.
More devious and experienced users, perhaps your teen-age kid, for instance, will greatly appreciate TRIP’s potential when tied into a PC’s autoexec file (computer-ese for the routine the PC runs on start-up before it hands over control to the operator.) Heh-heh.
Anyway, executing your master TRIP plan has also neatly demonstrated how easy it is indeed to insert a real rogue program, like a virus, into most PCs. About 10 seconds’ worth of work, all told. This is a point that shouldn’t be overlooked in lieu of the recent hoo-haw over the Michelangelo virus.
A similar program supplied by the Stupid PC Tricks disks is MUTANT. MUTANT installs effortlessly and quickly like TRIP, but instead slowly goads the PC into generating a string of frankly disconcerting clicks and buzzes, including one sound that mimics the screech of a trapped squirrel. MUTANT’s thoughtful delayed activation ensures time for escape, thereby lessening professional risk, too.
One also gets two programs called FOOL and ANNOY which double as apoplexy-inducing pranks or low-level security applications.
FOOL is a bit more complex than TRIP or MUTANT. It consists of two files: the FOOL program and an insult/security database which FOOL refers to. FOOL is activated by typing FOOL and a percentage, i.e., FOOL 25 percent. When this is done, FOOL installs in memory and issues a work-blocking insult on roughly 25 percent of all typed commands.
A typical insult might be: “NAZI SWINE! I’LL NEVER TALK!” while the PC refuses to continue.
It’s easy to see how this alone could get out of hand. However, FOOL has an added feature. By typing the names of any program, for example WP for a word processor, in FOOL’s insult/security file, FOOL aborts the execution of the program.
This is a noxious, intrusive property which has a lot of application in low-level PC security. For example, corporate stiffs, er, administrators, who wish to prevent employees from running certain programs during off hours could easily install FOOL to block access to popular applications like spreadsheets or income-tax preparers.
Certain anti-virus programs work in the same manner. Although slightly more sophisticated than FOOL, once installed in memory they can intercept pre-determined potentially destructive commands which simple viruses, novice computer vandals or disgruntled employees might issue.
ANNOY is not as powerful as FOOL, but far more sneaky. ANNOY installs memory resident, like the more pestiferous computer viruses, and poses as a password security feature for common commands on IBM-compatible PCs. For example, when the user types DIR — the most common command — ANNOY annoyingly pops up and asks for the password. In reality, there is no password. However, the user is unlikely to know this. In addition, ANNOY secretly logs the command to a secret usage file, for convenient snooping later.
All these programs are harmless. However, keep in mind that some people, by nature, are tense and humorless. In these cases, you should be ready to step in with a remedy and judicious application of diplomatic balm.
Next week: Irreversibly encrypting your boss’ payroll file.
“I don’t think people are interested in computers,” Mr. J. Kelly, Assistant Managing Editor, The Morning Call, 1992
Ah, the amusements of MS and PC DOS. If you know the editor of the blog, you’ll know what else was being set to be delivered in the old Crypt Newsletter. (Careful now, it can’t hurt you. But your anti-virus program might not like it.)
There was so much more that could have been written. But it was a newspaper, there were certain sensibilities that were inviolate, and as one person said, readers weren’t interested in personal computers.
Brilliant.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 2:54 pm by George Smith
Over the weekend, instant replay: [WhiteManistan’s] gun owners enjoy bullying others, either through death threats, videotaped outbursts of psychotic rage, or public displays in which they assemble, march and brandish their weapons in front of unarmed civilians. Or all three.
They get off on their pathology, so much so it’s become normal in this increasingly hostile-to-a-civil-life place. It’s natural to the psychotic character of the country, no longer a fringe symptom. Got a problem? If you’re a white guy with guns, show your anger. Make threatening paranoid videos about fighting or shooting the enemies that surround you, a real American. Frighten as many people as possible. Build your following.
From the New York Times today:
But what does it mean, in a democracy that enshrines freedom of speech, to publicly carry a gun as an expression of political dissent? Toting a weapon in a demonstration changes the stakes, transforming a protest from just another heated transaction in the marketplace of ideas into something else entirely. It’s bringing a gun to an idea-fight, gesturing as close as possible to outright violence while still technically remaining within the domain of speech. Like a military “show of force,??? this gesture stays on the near side of an actual declaration of war while remaining indisputably hostile. The commitment to civil disagreement is merely provisional: I feel so strongly about this issue, the gun says, that if I don’t get my way, I am willing to kill for it.
Citizens in a democracy make a certain pact with one another: to answer speech with more speech, not violence. No matter how angry what I say makes you, you do not have a right to pull a gun on me. But now the gun has already been drawn, nominally as an act of symbolic speech — and yet it still remains a gun. A slippage has occurred between the First and Second Amendments, and the First suffers as a result. The moral bravery political protest demands is no longer enough; to protest in response now requires the physical bravery to face down men with guns.
This situation is alarming, but it is also tragic. Asking after the propriety of guns in the public square ignores a basic reality: They are already there, and not just in ambiguously threatening demonstrations.
Further, the gun bullies are the shock troops of the bigot white right: “Since the election of Barack Obama, guns have appeared in the public square in a way unprecedented since the turbulent 1960s and ’70s — carried alongside signs and on their own since before the Tea Party elections …”
Included in this manner, gun bully public face Ted Nugent, calling the president a “subhuman mongrel” at a gun show, his most recent appearance at the NRA convention in Indianapolis embargoed from the press to keep him out of trouble while his new knees set.
“Fuck you, keep buying them guns this video is posted by a idiot …” — standard comment
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 12:23 pm by George Smith
Capital
Cartooned.
The force is strong in the army of lickspittles:
“For the ‘picked last for kickball’ crowd.”
Who wants to get Escape from WhiteManistan a copy?
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05.03.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 12:13 pm by George Smith
A significant and noticeable portion of white American gun owners enjoy bullying others, either through death threats, videotaped outbursts of psychotic rage, or public displays in which they assemble, march and brandish their weapons in front of unarmed civilians. Or all three.
White American gun bullies get off on their pathology, so much so it’s become normal in this increasingly hostile-to-a-civil-life place. It’s natural to the psychotic character of the country, no longer a fringe symptom. Got a problem? If you’re a white guy with guns, show your anger. Make threatening paranoid videos about fighting or shooting the enemies that surround you, a real American. Frighten as many people as possible. Build your following.
Here is a video of a gun shop businessman named Andy Raymond who wished to import and sell a German smart gun by Armatix that won’t fire unless paired with an activating wrist watch. The technology was developed as a safety measure. If the gun is lost or stolen, it becomes useless.
When the news went public of his business venture he was showered with death threats by other gun owners.
Readers know why. In WhiteManistan, a smart gun that deactivates when not paired with a chip is just the beginning of a potential Obama administration and/or UN plot to disarm patriots by mandating they buy such things.
Angry drunk man, or someone playing one, with guns. It’s so unhinged, it’s possibly a spoof. Anyway, it won’t last long.
Andy Raymond [he comes unglued at around seven minutes]:
It’s a great thing for gun rights when you threaten to shoot somebody … If you’re going to shoot somebody, shoot the politicians who made these laws. Take ’em out in the street and gun ’em the fuck down. There’s a goddamn reason we got these fucking things! [brandishes assault rifle]
Stupid hack journalist line of the day, from a website that used to be a newspaper, but which only exists now because its owners bribe Google to put it in the news tab:
The optics of politically motivated gun owners threatening the lives of other citizens over their business activity will likely prove off-putting to a lot of Americans, especially given wide-ranging concerns about the armed standoff between government agents and rancher Cliven Bundy in Nevada over grazing rights and fees. Armed militiamen are still patrolling Bunkerville, Nev. …
The “optics” of “threatening the lives of others … will likely prove off-putting.”
You think? This is tortured journalism so bad it’s actually almost great. But only almost.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 9:35 am by George Smith
Yes, California has parts of WhiteManistan in it, too. And they are just as united, capable and eloquent in Temecula, about an hour so from me, as their brethren in solidly red states.
Temecula has grape vines and golf courses although why you’d buy wine from Riverside County, as opposed to Santa Barbara or Marin, is beyond me.
Temecula also has homeless people, like the rest of soCal, but they don’t like it, they really don’t. So Temecula’s burgomistress, that’s mayor, is exhorting people to not give money to the homeless in Temecula:
“People will know that by giving food, money, or temporary shelter to a homeless person, they are actually enabling the homeless person to continue to live in the creek and use heroin.“
Live in the creek and use heroin.
Surely that is one of the best constructions you will hear this year. A better example the doling out of the pure milk of human kindness would be hard to find. Perhaps it could be the title of a song.
And does it now mean that when you give shelter to the homeless, you must take them to live in “the creek”?
And hear you see the true nature of the grievance.
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05.02.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 9:58 am by George Smith
Fiore gets to the heart of the NRA Convention, a hypnosis session for stoking fear, all to get WhiteManistan to buy more military hardware.
Here.
The NRA is a paranoid death cult. Contrast Fiore’s cartoon with Wayne LaPierre’s speech which starts calmly enough, then goes bonkers. (Advance to 5:44.)
Your eyes may water, too, but not in a good way when you hear LaPierre shed tears over a nation that has “lost civility” at a convention where Ted Nugent was a keynote speaker.
The NRA’s Paranoia TV series, sponsored by miscellaneous gun manufacturers, is truly remarkable.
Enemies Surround You
Military Tactics for Suppression of Captured Enemies Who Used to Surround You
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04.28.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:23 pm by George Smith
From 2012, an interview with one of the founders of Bain Capital, on a book that he and the interviewer thought might rise to the very top, a vituperative argument that inequality was good.
The NYT:
Ever since the financial crisis started, we’ve heard plenty from the 1 percent. We’ve heard them giving defensive testimony in Congressional hearings or issuing anodyne statements flanked by lawyers and image consultants. They typically repeat platitudes about investment, risk-taking and job creation with the veiled contempt that the nation doesn’t understand their contribution. You get the sense that they’re afraid to say what they really believe. What do the superrich say when the cameras aren’t there?
With that in mind, I recently met Edward Conard on 57th Street and Madison Avenue, just outside his office at Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he helped build into a multibillion-dollar business by buying, fixing up and selling off companies at a profit. Conard, who retired a few years ago at 51, is not merely a member of the 1 percent. He’s a member of the 0.1 percent. His wealth is most likely in the hundreds of millions; he lives in an Upper East Side town house just off Fifth Avenue; and he is one of the largest donors to his old boss and friend, Mitt Romney.
Unlike his former colleagues, Conard wants to have an open conversation about wealth. He has spent the last four years writing a book that he hopes will forever change the way we view the superrich’s role in our society. “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong,??? to be published in hardcover next month by Portfolio, aggressively argues that the enormous and growing income inequality in the United States is not a sign that the system is rigged. On the contrary, Conard writes, it is a sign that our economy is working. And if we had a little more of it, then everyone, particularly the 99 percent, would be better off. This could be the most hated book of the year.
Not hated, but ignored although the author, on various pages, seems to have planted the idea it was a great seller.
On Amazon, 23 one-star reviews, all rather well written. Check used prices for a chuckle.
Edward Conard, who you still don’t know, last seen going down with HMS Romney.
Do read the tortured discussion of how his investments improved the aluminum can and, thereby, the price of soda pop for the rest of us.
“I worked with the company that makes the machine that tapers that can … That means the economy can produce more cans with the same amount of resources. It makes every American who buys a soda can a little bit richer because their paycheck buys more.???
Blessed are the job creators, they can always hire way more waiters.
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