07.19.10
Posted in Extremism, Stumble and Fail, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 8:59 am by George Smith
This morning’s post by Digby was depressing but spot on, particularly if you grew up where DD did:
Maybe we need to realize that our old arguments about how Americans are so accustomed to living the good life that they would resist the natural consequence of this new feudalism aren’t going to work. This anti-tax fervor has passed out of the political realm and into the religious. When people would rather that their kids choke on dirt than pay taxes, I’m guessing that pointing out that their unwillingness to pay taxes will result in tainted meat and dangerous drugs won’t convince them. Living in a primitive state is a sign of their devotion.
For a hard core in Pine Grove, Pennsyltucky, in the late Sixties and early Seventies, this was exactly how they thought. However, better minds generally prevailed in the running of the state.
That’s not so any longer and it’s why the peoples of other western nations now laugh at the idea of America. They know that come the November elections, the United States government will — after a mercilessly brief period — go back to fast-tracking the less-than-half- of-the-country-delusion that being the biggest banana republic, ever, is great.
All because the president wasn’t quite strong enough.
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07.16.10
Posted in Extremism, Phlogiston, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 9:03 am by George Smith
If you weren’t some damn Godless commie liberal you wouldn’t think this is so funny!
On a tip from Rick in Pennsyltucky, this laugh out loud essay in the York Daily Record:
Last week, an alert reader called to point out an article in the Arizona Republic about Mexicans flocking to Pennsylvania, apparently hoping to alert the state that hordes of illegal immigrants will soon be overrunning the state and taking jobs from the thousands of Pennsylvanians who dream of, one day, trying to earn a living by picking fruit or mowing lawns.
I almost fell out of my chair. The columnist, Mike Argento, is already making a wry joke in the first graf, one satirically likening Pennsylvania to soCal. Which is actually where illegals fleeing Arizona come.
Argento goes on, at one point revealing:
A bill similar to the Arizona law is pending, introduced recently by some representative from Butler County. Rep. Daryl Metcalfe said, “The purpose of this legislation is to offer every illegal alien residing in Pennsylvania two options, leave immediately or go to jail.”
We’ve always been kinder and gentler here in Penn’s Woods.
The law has no chance of passing and has no chance of becoming law and has no chance of doing anything except elevate Metcalfe in the eyes of his constituents, which, being Butler County, are mostly deer and raccoons.
I guess word hasn’t gotten out about our attempt to join Arizona in hating on the Mexicans yet because nobody is boycotting Pennsylvania over the proposed law …
Tremendous column, you really should read all of it.
Understand that it will generate a certain amount of hate mail in the conservative ‘burg of York, PA.
Southern California has about 10 million people living in it. The entire state of Arizona, much less.
And Butler County, Pennsy, is a flyspeck. But one of those places from the interior which makes outsiders consider the state “like Alabama” between Pittsburgh and Philly (except for Dauphin County, also where African Americans live).
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07.13.10
Posted in Extremism, Imminent Catastrophe, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 9:22 am by George Smith
A brief but amusing article on Wall Street parasites hedge fund guys and advice dispensers deals with their brand of US catastrophism — as opposed to the flavor found lower down the ladder in the extreme right middle class.
It’s still all about defending against the ravening hordes, the poor — those with color or tastes not like yours, coming for your pile. Buy precious metals and secure your self-sufficient farm getaway deep in the countryside. Be ready to fire a “boom stick” at interlopers.
“While there is no lack of survivalists stockpiling cat food and rifles, some of the direst thinkers are now working on Wall Street, where a combination of fear and foresight has many of the country’s money men contemplating their escape routes,” writes a columnist at AOL’s Daily Finance.
Wall Street catastrophists, of course, don’t see themselves as the villains in this play. It’s a view which puts them on the opposite side of the coin of the middle class white catastrophists, who generally view Wall Street with the same fear and loathing saved for Democrats and anyone of color.
There is an industry to cater to both classes of catastrophist. For the white paupers, there are the advertisements on Fox News — seemingly one every fifteen minutes — for the buying of gold with Gordon Liddy as patron saint. For more plans and tips, there are websites galore selling relatively cheap advice and the usual survivalism samizdat literature which has embroidered the fringes of American society for decades.
For Wall Street, the advice is more costly but about the same in terms of practical value. The column tells us drily:
Post Peak Living and Transition United States have both used dark visions to build a compelling business model that can convince the gullible and frightened to fork over cash for useless advice.
And the best quote, by far: “A fan of dark humor, [one doom predicter] previously advised spending stimulus cash on ‘prostitutes and beer, as these are the only products still produced in the U.S.’”
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06.30.10
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Phlogiston, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 5:47 pm by George Smith
Good news, lads! Good news! We can make hydrogen cars for the super rich.
More in from our culture of sucking up, plus wishful thinking added for just the right seasoning.
“Imagine a world where all it took to power a car was sunshine and tap water,” wrote Susan Carpenter of the Los Angeles Times a week or so ago.
But first you have to know the history of the journalist.
Carpenter was infamous for being a Times swell. Her old gig was writing for a discontinued automotive section, reviewing high end superbikes, riding with Peter Fonda, writing about breaking the speed limit and getting her picture into the newspaper.
And I used to bag on her regularly.
Here she’s lampooned for touting a $3,000 electric bicycle, the iZip, made for miscellaneous upper class nuisances, gadget freaks and conspicuous consumers.
And here, she’s dealt with in her leather gear, after pumping her high-end superbike tour of the Old Silk Route in China:
[The] Silk Route highway is empty for Carpenter and her tourmates because most of the locals are too busy scrabbling out a subsistence living to afford driving on it.
And gas is cheaper in China than southern California! Imagine that!
The main hazards on the Silk Route highway, we are informed, are “packs of animals and stacks of rocks. In rural areas, you never knew when you would round a corner and need to slow for yaks or goats.”
“[There's] never a line at the pump because so few people drive in the remote and impoverished outskirts of Xinjiang province.”
So she’s just right to tell readers — “Welcome to the future” — and that a hydrogen generating station the size of a refrigerator is just around the corner, for her wealthy and highly regarded pals, maybe.
Was she perhaps thrilled by Brad Paisley’s latest record, too?
Carpenter’s article centers around the Honda Clarity and it never deals with the details of cracking water for automotive use. All on house current without causing fainting from billing shock.
The latter is dealt with by simply saying it can all be had with solar-power panels and an accompanying electrolysis system.
One of the only figures delivered (there are two pertaining to power generation, neither particularly enlightening or convincing) is that the new “hydrogen fueling system” is “25 percent more efficient than the electrolysis system Honda devised in 2001 and it no longer requires a mechanical compressor or storage tanks.”
While it sounds too good to be true, Carpenter swallows it without comment.
If you were interested in chemistry as a kid you may have cracked water with wall current and a transformer. If you did, it was an unexciting experiment, slow and not much of a hydrogen generator, although you could collect some gas in a test tube, enough to make a pop when lit.
The energy required to decompose the covalent bonds holding water together is not trivial. This is well-explained, in chemical and physical terms, here.
In life, that it’s not trivial is good. If water fell apart easily, life just wouldn’t be possible. It just wouldn’t do to have to worry about unexpectedly and explosively popping from hydrogen build-up.
Carpenter’s article for the Times does not explain any of this. And it is
one of the central problems facing any attempt to bring on a hydrogen-based energy rich economy, one in which the hydrogen is generated from water — with the power not furnished by fossil fuel.
Use wall power generated by fossil fuels to generate hydrogen from water doesn’t automagically do away with the problem of greenhouse gases. It just lengthens the vehicle’s tail pipe away from the house and roads where it operates.
Generating it from solar — well, let’s say no one has even come remotely close to adequately explaining how the entire country, not just sunny soCal, could get enough power from the sun to satisfy current American driving habits on a daily basis.
Like in the middle of winter in eastern Pennsylvania.
And no editor at the LA Times required Carpenter to even take a stab at it.
Instead, most of her article’s testimony is turned over, of all people, to Jon Landau. A member of the mansion set who presumably called in some favor to get his Honda Clarity lease and fueling station permissions.
Landau was the film producer of Titanic and Avatar, so he’d be the guy to go to for an explanation of how the hydrogen economy and automobiles might work.
“There’s no trip I can’t make and get back here [to the fueling station], Landau tells Carpenter.
“Now he drives it more often than his Mercedes S550,” writes Carpenter brightly.
The Mercedes S550 is a $91,000 car, about twenty thousand cheaper than Elon Musk’s electric car for the rich. The cost of the Honda Clarity is ridiculous — $1 million. And this explains the expensive cocked-up leasing program for test vehicles and attached fueling station described by Carpenter, a program which furnished Landau with his auto.
If only we could all have such gigs and opportunities. Welcome to the future. Where the class war’s been waged and you’ve all lost.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Phlogiston, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 2:57 pm by George Smith
One thing Paul Fussell didn’t envision when he wrote BAD in 1991: The universal adoption of mindless sucking up to wealth and celebrity as a regular trait of American character.
Good examples abound in daily newspapers. Entire sections seem to often still be turned over to lickspittle praise of business tycoons or whoever has the predicted number one movie for this week.
But Tesla’s Elon Musk surely rates a mention today for the omnipresence in recent weeks of comparisons to comic book character Tony Stark.
Originally based on the producer of Iron Man 2’s claim that his version of the Marvel Comics character was modelled on Musk. And the latter’s subsequent Stan Lee-esque cameo in the movie.
Here’s a parrot’s collection, repeated ad nauseam, in current ISOO-approved national practice for sucking up:
The [Tesla] IPO is also the first for the eccentric and charismatic Musk, who is the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark character in “Iron Man” and also — ABC News
The funny thing about Elon Musk is that he does sort of remind you of Tony Stark. Minus the Iron Man suit … — the New York Times
Musk helped inspire the film version of Tony Stark, the billionaire in the “Iron Man” movies, director Jon Favreau wrote in Time magazine in April — Businessweek
The script is good for a Hollywood movie, compete with a messy divorce; while Musk himself is the blueprint for the Robert Downey’s character Tony Stark in … — Times LIVE
If Elon Musk and his credentials, his lifestyle, his love for women and sportscars reminds you of the Marvel comic book hero Iron Man’s common man avatar … — Entertainment and Showbiz
With skepticism mounting about the cost and adoption of pure electric cars over the next five years, investors will have to decide whether Tesla represents a high-risk, high-return bet on an emerging technology or a Silicon Valley version of “Government Motors” … Musk, the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark character in “Iron Man” who makes a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo in this summer’s sequel, sees it very differently. — Reuters
But Tesla has its strengths, including some high-profile backers. Chief among them is CEO Elon Musk, the 38-year-old entrepreneur who was an inspiration for the playboy business mogul of the Iron Man films, Tony Stark … Investors will decide for themselves whether it takes Iron Man to lift Tesla off the ground. — AP
Jon Favreau, director of “Iron Man,” calls Musk a modern-day “Renaissance man” … In an article for Time, Favreau said that he and actor Robert Downey Jr. modeled the main character in the movie — “genius billionaire Tony Stark” — after the Silicon Valley star … Musk told Time that his goal was to be “involved in things that are going to make a significant difference to the future of humanity. — Agence France Presse
Now I mentioned “Iron Man” because Robert Downey Jr. based the movie version of Tony Stark in “Iron Man” in part on this guy. Now if that’s not cool enough, keep listening, I’ve got more … We’ll be right back with the real life “Iron Man,” right after this. — CNN
The CNN interview was spectacular for its fawning treatment of Musk, who’s current business ventures wouldn’t really exist without the serious underwriting provided by the US government.
In any case, for CNN Musk said he wanted to be involved in “sustainable energy and … space exploration and particularly the expansion of life to multiple planets.”
This was immediately followed by:
But on that second point, sustainable energy, I think we really see a clear example here with the Gulf oil spill that, you know, the oil is bad in so many ways. Apart from being unsustainable, it also is a huge pollutant of the oceans, of the atmosphere and we need to get off it.
Scintillating.
But the real bell-ringer is “expansion of life to multiple planets,” quite an ambition from a guy who’s actual material contribution to making stuff, right now, is a premium sports car for really rich people and a proposed slightly less premium car for … the wealthy.
And a booster rocket to potentially cart supplies and baggage, and maybe more really wealthy people, to the great outhouse in the sky, the international space station. On the taxpayer’s dime, most — if not all — the time.
For CNN, Musk was emphasizing sustainable energy. And it’s a common trope of the sales pitch for his electric car manufacturing business.
But the electricity has to come from somewhere for a rechargeable car.
And if it comes from a wall plug at home, or any hook-up at an electric car charging station, the current infrastructure in the US still generates it through the burning of fossil fuels. Which means only that the electric car has a really long exhaust pipe — to where the power is being generated.
If it’s going to run solely off elemental hydrogen — which DD may get into later — it inherits a different set of problems. Namely, the relativey high energy needs for cracking water, if you’re not going to use hydrogen derived from fossil fuels.
The technical dimensions are described somewhat briefly here..
Manufacturing a $109,000 (after US government tax rewards) automobile for celebrities doesn’t go far in arguments for solving global warming or eyewash about sustainable energy.
However, this hasn’t stopped top journalists from lavishing praise upon the man who’s giving them celebrity privileges to drive it. Infamously, like Lesley Stahl.
Musk is almost perfect for America in 2010. Someone who delivers little, spends an awful lot, isn’t above ludicrously pleading poverty but — above all — is someone showy and adept at cultivating the right image in the culture of sucking up.
In Iron Man 2, Tony Stark was also a narcissist and a drunk.
In the comic book, as well as in the best parts of Favreau’s two movies, Stark defeated bad guys at no charge. And the people in the street, not just George Clooney or Lesley Stahl — got to enjoy it.
Twelve cents, later a quarter, originally — right here.
More on Musk’s IPO, skeptically, at the LA Times.
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06.23.10
Posted in Satan's Bank, Stumble and Fail, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 3:34 pm by George Smith
DD does not have a camera phone so for this one you’ll just have to take my word.
Desperation hit a new high in Pasadena today.
At lunch time, on the corner of Lake and Walnut — directly in front of Satan’s Bank of Pasadena, aka OneWest — there was a thirtysomething man in a suit with a signboard. The signboard pleaded: “Hire Me!”
It said he had a B.A. and “experience.” “Help me win for my family,” it added.
Right beside him, a man who looked like Santa Claus, except in a hardware store man’s clothes. He has been begging for the last two weeks. And directly across the superhighway, two people have been regularly camped out for it seems like … at least a year or two.
If you’ve never been to Pasadena, the corner of Lake and Walnut is the place to be if you’d like to be seen with your alms cup. It’s high vehicular traffic for most of the day. And there’s are always a good number of pedestrians, particularly at lunch time, when many come boiling out of Satan’s Bank and head across the street to Ralphs or north thirty yards to Teri & Yaki.
Holding up a sign of desperation on this corner is a good tactical move. If you want someone from the local newspaper, the Pasadena Star-News to notice and get interested in your story, it’s high visibility and impact.
After all, no one ever checks out the guy living out of his van on El Molino. Or the half a dozen or so who regularly scrounge through my apartment building’s dumpster.
Who wrecked America: In economic charts.
“Walkin’ for Bum Wine in Pasadena Blues”
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Posted in Stumble and Fail, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 7:42 am by George Smith
Good news, lads! Good news!
The number of millionaire households in the world has bounced back to boom-time levels, according to a new study.
The 2010 Global Wealth Report by The Boston Consulting Group says there were 11.2 million millionaire households in the world at the end of 2009, a 14% jump from 2008. That puts the millionaire count about where it was in the good old days before the global financial crisis.
The U.S. had especially strong growth, with the number of millionaire households rising to 4.7 million — still the largest number of millionaire households in the world …
The global growth at the top — driven by last summer’s rebound in financial markets — marks a stark contrast with the continued malaise at the middle and bottom. As a result, inequality around the world has widened.
From the WSJ.
Also looted from the WSJ:
New-home sales plunged in May to a record low, as buyers faced a lackluster job market without a longtime government subsidy for purchases. Sales tanked by 32.7% from the previous month.
And from a Cinncinnati newspaper:
I don’t support Obama. If I did, I would be a Democrat,” [a socialist political candidate named] La Botz said. “I find it astonishing that people would think he’s a socialist. He’s given trillions of dollars to bankers, billions to General Motors, created a health care system that supports the health insurance companies … his foreign policy is consistent with Bush’s foreign policy.”
Since President Obama was elected, “socialism” is a word on the lips of many conservative politicians, tea party supporters and political pundits. A CBS News/New York Times poll in April showed 92 percent of tea party supporters believe Obama is moving the country toward socialism – while 52 percent of all Americans held the same belief.
Socialists shake their heads – but they don’t really mind the attention.
“If folks like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh make their careers off of using the word socialism as a slur, how bad could it be?” asks 35-year-old Shane Johnson of Corryville, a union electrician who helped revive Cincinnati’s International Socialist Organization chapter this year, which has about a dozen members.
“We should be fighting for full employment. End wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan,” La Botz said. “We should immediately take over BP. What they own is too valuable and too powerful to be in private hands.”
Xavier University political science professor Mack Mariani believes Americans are frustrated with government leaders and skeptical of big business, but he’s not convinced socialist thought is spreading.
“I haven’t seen anything that would seem the Socialist Party is having a resurgence,” Mariani said. “Even though I think capitalism as a concept has taken a hit in terms of public approval … it wouldn’t translate into support for the Socialist Party.”
Which makes Glenn Beck’s recommendations for a book on socialist serfdom and his own Overton Window substantial proof that some deity has a great but very dry sense of humor. Plus, if you’re a believer, anyone who would bless the country with a Glenn Beck is sending the message that we’ve been rewarded with what we deserve.
Reads a Mediaite blurb:
Glenn Beck Makes Anti-Socialist Book From 1944 A Topseller In 24 Hours
Writes Media Matters by way of the Weekly Standard:
The plot of The Overton Window is one big conspiracy theory in which the United States government, Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and the Trilateral Commission are all plotting an antidemocratic coup.
Why would they bother when things are already going so well?
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06.16.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 10:45 am by George Smith
The new story which the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy now regularly shills is that of the angry sun.
The sun is waking up from a long period of quiet — which is true — and erupting solar storms and mass ejections may shatter advanced civilization, it goes.
Just like in “The Road,” the movie nobody went to see (or maybe “The Book of Eli,” another apocalypse-themed flop).
For instance, some insignificant GOP pol from Missouri Michigan thinks so:
“Some of us read the book ‘The Road’ [a post-apocalyptic tale by Cormac McCarthy],” said Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI). “Lots of different scenarios are out there. We need to be prepared.”
And Fox News has covered it, using the screen headline “Solar Flare Could Mean End of Life as We Know It.” All explained by the current dancing bear of ’science’ as infortainment on cable TV, Michio Kaku.
It’s a new meme, a fresh piece of groupthink for non-thinkers.
You’ll see it everywhere because it panders to entrenched American extremist beliefs in tech superstitions and catastrophism. (Bubbling underneath are messages that white people will lose their piles to ravening hordes unleashed by the fall.) And the entertainment industry and parts of the corporate national security biz can monetize this by peddling titillation and fear, respectively.
Which brings us to the Huffington Post, a place where anyone can repeat what someone else said five minutes ago and get it in the Google News feed.
The sun is growing unquiet, writes D. K. Matai. This caused bad juju in lightning bolts:
1. BP temporarily suspended siphoning operations on its Gulf of Mexico oil gusher after a drill ship collecting the oil was hit by lightning;
2. A 62 feet — six storey [sic] — tall statue of Jesus Christ in Ohio came to a blazing end when it was struck by lightning in a thunderstorm and burned to the ground; and
3. A bolt of lightning struck a local gasoline storage tank in North Carolina, erupting into a wall of flames that leapt as high as 100 feet and belched a plume of smoke in the shape of an arch across eight lanes of US interstate highway.
To this stew is added the news of a ‘brown dwarf’ nearing or entering the solar system, the Nemesis object popular with fans of end-of-times tales set for 2012:
Some scientists believe an incoming brown dwarf star, several times the mass of Jupiter, is responsible for disrupting our solar system’s heliosphere. The brown dwarf has disturbed Pluto’s orbit. It is also disturbing the orbit of Jupiter and the rest of the celestial bodies in our solar system. The sun is emitting Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) during the last few months that are having a significant impact on the earth’s geomagnetic axis and electromagnetic field.
Matai runs a company called mi2g. And he used to be infamous for press releases warning about Y2K and cyberterror.
“The chief charge against mi2g is its regular predictions of withering cyber-assaults which, critics say, rarely seem to materialise,” wrote the Register a number of years ago in a piece entitled “Why is mi2g so unpopular?”
However, the disturbed angry sun story is now ascendant.
“Several causal factors are now in play that could bring life as we know it to a stand-still,” writes Nora Maccoby at something called the WIP.
“My husband and I are both extremely concerned about a catastrophic disruption to our electrical grid,” she adds. “Though the government and military have emergency plans in place, when you look at what happened with Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf oil spill response, it is egregiously naive to believe that the government will be able to handle the impacts of an event that will collapse the power grid.”
Iran might launch an electromagnetic strike via ballistic missile. This is the old and common overused story, beloved by the Heritage Foundation.
Or it could be much worse:
While details remain classified, some scientists believe an incoming brown dwarf star, several times the mass of Jupiter, is responsible for disrupting the solar system’s heliosphere, as well as celestial bodies throughout our solar system.
“We have bought property in the mountains, we are working out bartering arrangements with neighbors, and we are planting fruit trees and growing our own food,” asserts Maccoby.
“Deep in California’s Mojave Desert, about halfway between Barstow and Las Vegas, a real estate entrepreneur is counting on a big catastrophe,” reports one newspaper. “He’s building a string of luxury disaster shelters. Investors believe it’s their best hope in the event of natural disaster, terrorist attack or worse.”
“If your house burned down because of wildfires, you’ll have to find other accommodations,” the disaster bunker developer tells the newspaper reporter. “This is a mega-catastrophe facility … ”
“Think nuclear war. Or an electromagnetic pulse attack that knocks out electrical grids across the U.S.”
At $50,000 per person, the bunkers are marketed to those who can’t quite afford them — specifically, I’m talking about chumps. The rich, after all, can buy much more spacious disaster resorts.
Or as the Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday, they buy contiguous and adjacent compounds in Bel-Air.
“The middle class may be able to buy Louis Vuitton bags and nice holidays but they can’t buy two mansions in Bel-Air,” reads one prime quote. “This is the way the global elite differentiate themselves.”
However, the newspaper story on the electromagnetic pulse doom bunker developer reveals a much more prosaic and overstretched class of buyer:
[A] 40-year-old former civilian military employee is married with three kids. [The man] says he wants to be ready, and more importantly he wants his family to be safe. Hodge is trying to pull together the $25,000 needed just to reserve spaces in the Terra Vivos bunker. It’ll cost another couple hundred thousand dollars to actually close the deal. He may dip into family savings, or seek a bank loan. If it sounds risky to put up your family savings for a piece of property you may never use, [the buyer] doesn’t think so.
“Duluth electronics expert talks armageddon on TV,” reported yet another newspaper last week.
It reads:
It’s the stuff of science fiction. A strong blast of energy from outer space knocks out electricity over much of the planet, imperiling millions of lives.
But it’s not fiction.
The danger of geomagnetic storms and a human-produced electromagnetic pulse is the subject of “Electronic Armageddon,” a show airing Tuesday on the National Geographic Channel. John Kappenman of Duluth is one of the experts featured in the program.
Readers may recall Kappenman from last week.
In a post on DD blog:
Common sense would seem to dictate that leaders of corporations ought not to be empowered by the US government to provide threat assessments which stand to directly enrich their interests.
—-
A report just issued by the Energy Department and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, known as Nerc, an industry group that polices the power grid, lists three categories of threats to the grid: coordinated cyber- and physical attacks, pandemic disease and electromagnetic damage.
—-
What [a New York Times reporter] does not mention, or perhaps has failed to notice, is the “report” [had] essentially been written by the small interests which make up the Cult of EMP Crazy, with government workers as their staff.
Three of the report’s authors are part of the bomb Iran/ballistic missile defense lobby.
These include John Kappenman — billed as being part of something called Storm Analysis for the report, William Radasky of Metatech and Michael Frankel of Roscoe Bartlett’s old EMP Commission.
“Electronic Armageddon also looks at the damage caused by the high-altitude detonation of a nuclear device,” reads the Duluth newspaper. “The electromagnetic pulse would have effects beyond those of a geomagnetic storm, including gamma rays that would fry computer chips.”
DD has written about beliefs in catastrophism as it relates to the Cult of EMP Crazy previously. Most recently, here in “Scared Stupid.”
It read:
One of the more dubious ‘gifts’ of the Cult of EMP Crazy – a richly manipulative group, if there ever was one — is the cruel brain haircut it imposes on its lessers. Think of it as a cynical tax on the IQ reserve for the sake of the missile defense/Bomb Iran lobby.
It’s quite the accomplishment. Thanks to the Heritage Foundation’s press machine, GOP voters in a placid place like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, think they have to worry about national collapse.
And here in “Gold, Pemmican, Ammo.”
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Posted in Stumble and Fail, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 9:05 am by George Smith
Everybody’s used to dealing with daily parasites. It’s a feature of living in a country where it’s been decided that it’s proper to not make anything and instead have an economy based on services and the provision of non-essentials and s— from China.
However, every now and then you run into a daily parasite who really takes the cake.
For DD, this usually happens outside Ralphs on Lake. And I’m not pointing at the beggars. Increasing numbers of beggars are a natural product of American business and you should always be nice to people at the bottom for someday you might join them.
The standard Ralphs supermarket parasite is someone with a clipboard who wants you to sign a paper so that an initiative favorable to the wealthy or some big company and inimical to everyone else needs putting on the ballot. Like this one in which PG&E tried to schwick everyone in the state right down to the level of local government.
Yesterday’s parasite, however, was a woman with a clipboard, not asking for signatures, but allegedly conducting a ’survey.’
The question: Do you think Americans work more or less than they did fifty years ago?
It’s a question only an organization full of assholes would sponsor in 2010.
And I was immediately suspicious it was to collect coached or cherry-picked answers for some political survey by a right wing business group, to be unleashed at some future press conference on FOX News, perhaps as incontrovertible proof the majority of Americans really think they have it a lot easier than folks did fifty years ago.
So the socialist Obama government should get off everyone’s back and stop trying to fix things, get back to fiscal austerity and not worry about mass unemployment.
Because mass unemployment naturally means many people are involuntarily working much less than their peers fifty years ago.
Coincidentally, it dovetailed with much of FOX News afternoon broadcast, which devoted itself to the books of Ayn Rand and warning that Obama better be nice to BP or the company would be forced out of business with thousands and thousands of jobs lost.
Anyway, I laughed at the woman holding the clipboard and said I thought Americans definitely had to work more now than fifty years ago.
It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She did not record my answer. So I watched her from the parking lot for a couple minutes as she approached others. And she hardly did any writing at all.
I wondered what she thought about the hardness of her work outside Ralphs and its daily compensation vis-a-vis what her dad or grandpap did for a living. By the way, there was no identification of who was actually doing the poll or why.
From the New Yorker, back in 2005:
In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, it was a commonplace that Americans would soon devote their lives to leisure, not work. The number of hours the average American worked had fallen by almost twenty-five per cent between 1900 and 1950, and pundits saw no reason for the trend to stop. By the end of the twentieth century, the futurist Herman Kahn prophesied in 1967, Americans would enjoy thirteen weeks of vacation and a four-day work week. The challenge, it seemed, would be figuring out what to do with all our free time.
Kahn was wrong. Today, Americans work about as many hours each year as they did in 1970, and, instead of thirteen weeks of vacation, the average American now gets four (and that includes holidays).
This bit, from the paper of Ted Nugent — the WaTimes, in 2009, is also a laugh riot:
American workers who still have their jobs are laboring harder than ever, keeping their companies operating profitably following the biggest rounds of job cuts since the Great Depression …
Because hourly compensation, including wages and benefits, increased by only 0.2 percent, unit labor costs dipped 5.8 percent during the second quarter. It was the biggest drop in labor costs in more than eight years. Over the past year, labor costs have declined 0.6 percent as productivity has advanced by 1.8 percent.
Soaring productivity and plunging labor costs helped to bolster second-quarter corporate profits …
Remember what DD said about an agency of assholes at the top of the post? Who would commission something like the Ralphs survey?
Lots of groups in America, one imagines. Employees of Satan’s Bank — OneWest — right across the street, I should think, if they weren’t so busy capitalizing on foreclosures.
Or people like this — from 2007:
Americans work hard for their money. Too hard, according to CNN. Even worse than even grovelling medieval peasants scratching the land to survive.
That conclusion came from reporter Polly Labarre of CNN’s “In the Money.” In the June 9 broadcast, Labarre argued that Americans are working too much, using her “favorite comparison” to explain “we work more than medieval peasants used to work.”
The “peasant” claim has grown common in media outlets …
But [no organization has] provided basis for the idea that peasants worked less than Americans do now.
And don’t miss Obama vs. BP (And You).
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05.29.10
Posted in Stumble and Fail, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 12:23 pm by George Smith
One of the recurring themes on DD blog is the massively annoying American delusion that we live in a can-do country, that our technology and business and people have an answer for everything.
Always.
It’s rubbish. Reality shows us repeatedly it’s not so, many times over the last decade. From alleged miracle weapons for the Iraq war, to Katrina, to even the smallest pieces of crappenstance like the underwear bomber’s smouldering privates, the world outside has shown Americans definitively what for.
So, another weak piece from this weekend’s New York Times contains two unintentionally hilarious, cosnidering this late date, paragraphs:
Americans have long had an unswerving belief that technology will save us — it is the cavalry coming over the hill, just as we are about to lose the battle. And yet, as Americans watched scientists struggle to plug the undersea well over the past month, it became apparent that our great belief in technology was perhaps misplaced.
“Americans have a lot of faith that over the long run technology will solve everything, a sense that somehow we’re going to find a way to fix it,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. He said Pew polling in 1999 — before the September 2001 terror attacks — found that 64 percent of Americans pessimistically believed that a terrorist attack on the United States probably or definitely would happen. But they were naïvely optimistic about the fruits of technology: 81 percent said there would be a cure for cancer, 76 percent said we would put men on Mars.
They just figured this out, huh?
One of DD’s touchstone books is Paul Fussell’s BAD.
In 1991, Fussell saw the future quite clearly.
“The United States especially overflows with [BAD] because above all countries it is the most addicted to self-praise and complacency — even more than France,” he wrote.
Further in: “And what’s made it worse is the recent rapid accumulation of technology. The current US can be defined as an immense accumulation of not terribly acute or attentive people obliged to operate a uniquely complex technology, which, all other things being equal, always wins. No wonder error and embarrassment lurk everywhere …”
On engineering, and this is very much pre-World Wide Web and instant global communication, Fussell had this to say:
If pressed, Americans may admit that the ideas that have made the modern world have all originated elsewhere — ideas like Darwin’s and Marx’s and Freud’s and Einstein’s and Jung’s — and never in These States. Our forte, which compensates for our weakness in creative intelligence, is held to be in engineering. Perhaps deficient in a comprehensive understanding of values and ends, we are said to be gifted in the management of techniques and means.
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The American achievement — and I know it’s bad taste to mention this — is the Challenger, brought to you by faulty manufacture, inept and dishonest quality control, and lying and evasion for the sake of big bucks.
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People as materialistic as Americans are supposed to be gifted at material operations, but the local urge toward the showy and spectacular constantly invites disaster … Bad design and construction, in fact, appear to be something like American specialties.
Chalk part of the rugged idiot belief that technology will save everything to bad — or at least incomplete — education.
After having spent close to a decade of my best learning years in a research lab and seeing the multifarious ways things could and did go wrong — how the toast often landed buttered side down, despite the best laid plans, I had no personal illusions about what science and technology could deliver in the short term. And that was on small scale shit.
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