Iranium, the movie aimed at getting the bombers and cruise missiles flying toward Iran, rates a solid B when divorced from its obvious politics, mostly for watchability as a History Channel style documentary.
There are much worse ways to burn an hour.
A history of Iran dating from the Shah is delivered first. And at about the thirty five minute mark, the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy shows up, led by Frank Gaffney but also including people you’ve seem from embedded YouTube video at DD blog already.
The Cult explains electromagnetic pulse attack is the way Ahmedinajad will accomplish his stated aim of ending American civilization. And then one is delivered animations of a Scud missile fired over the US from a motorized barge 100-miles offshore. (Or suitcase nukes could be brought across the Mexican border. There is literally nothing that’s out of Iranian reach.)
Nine out of ten Americans dead within a year.
The movie’s only potential show-stopping flaw is Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis whose once good reputation was rotted during the Bush years by various public views taken on war and imminent catastrophe.
The unfortunate catarrhal phlegm gurgling and flapping in Lewis’ throat had me about ready to sick up at one point. It has to be heard. The sound man must’ve been in tears.
The short message of the movie is that Iran is a menace to the entire world. Similar to the Soviet Union and the old popular domino theory, it stands ready to invade/infiltrate/influence countries from the south side of the Persian Gulf to Argentina. Yes, Argentina!
The movie makes it case by relying on the words of its religious leaders and Ahmedinajad. And they have always helpfully come off as both mean and nuts.
Iranium sells itself slightly short by over-reliance on Cliff May. He’s onscreen a great deal near the end, undermining the movie with a lack of recognition factor.
Earlier in the week I commented on how Ed Schultz on MSNBC has implicitly asked viewers to entertain the idea that Wall Street threatened national and world security. Not in connection with the economic collapse — which is the most obvious conclusion which actually can be drawn.
But currently with speculation in commodities, most notably food, causing spikes in pricing, privation and subsequent popular uprising in Egypt.
It was startling to see the conspiracy laid out in the mainstream. It is not, however, nearly as lunatic as Glenn Beck’s claims that the Egyptian uprising is caused by a socialist Muslim conspiracy.
This conspiracy, Beck explained, was aimed at creating a world ‘caliphate’, employing the tactics from an obscure book, The Coming Insurrection, now made famous by his name-dropping the title as a way of working up his audience over the idea that others are soon coming for them.
Beck’s crazy tirades can also be summed up by an illustration taken from the cover of the old short manual of Afghan jihad.
It’s here — a map of the world with an Islamic dagger through it. The manual contains a reference to establishment of a caliphate and it’s probably no coincidence that this has trickled down over the span of many years, now finding lodgment — far removed from any original source — in Beck’s addled head. [1]
I actually watched a couple of Beck’s episodes and by late Friday night — a rerun — he’d lapsed into a poor man’s Jack D. Ripper/Strangelove mumble, going on about how he was giving his audience facts, facts — and was criticized for it by people covering these facts up.
And here’s where my desktop copy of the Strangelove script always comes in handy:
“The facts are all there, Group Captain … I have studied the facts carefully for over seventeen years and they are here … I have studied the facts, Group Captain, facts, and by projecting the statistics I realized the time had come to act … The absolutely fantastic thing is that the facts are all there for anyone who wants to see them.”
In Strangelove, Ripper’s mania is humorously laid out in many ways, one of them being his repetitive obsession with the facts about fluoride. On Fox, however, the network obviously believes it’s appropriate to send something ad hoc but similar out to millions of easily confused Americans packaged as a show of news and opinion.
When you get down to the nut of it, it’s the work of cynical shitheels.
Back at MSNBC, Dylan Ratigan — like Ed Schultz — was on a similar commodities pricing riff. For Ratigan it wasn’t just Wall Street, but primarily the US government — the Fed, printing money and causing a rush into commodities by Wall Street investors.
What’s behind the surge in food prices? The usual suspects have made the usual claims — it’s all about the Fed, or it’s all about speculators. But I’ve been looking at the USDA World supply and demand estimates, and what stands out from the data is mainly that we’ve had a huge global harvest failure …
Why is production down? Most of the decline in world wheat production, and about half of the total decline in grain production, has taken place in the former Soviet Union — mainly Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. And we know what that’s about: an incredible, unprecedented heat wave.
Obligatory disclaimer: no one event can be definitively assigned to climate change, just as you can’t necessarily claim that any one of the fender-benders taking place right now in central New Jersey was caused by the sheet of black ice currently coating our roads. But it sure looks like climate change is a major culprit. And it’s not just the FSU: extreme weather elsewhere, which again is the sort of thing you should expect from climate change, has played a role in bad harvest around the world.
Back to the economics: if you want to know why we’re having a spike in food prices, the data suggest that the key cause is terrible weather leading to bad harvests, especially in the former Soviet Union.
An ‘ah-ha!’ short essay, so to speak.
Footnote:
[1] The precise reference from the ‘manual’ is: “I [the author] present this humble effort to these young Moslem [sic] men who are pure, believing, and fighting for the cause of Allah. It is my contribution toward paving the road that leads to majestic allah and establishes a caliphate …”
“Gaffney favored supporting Hosni Mubarak’s rapidly-dying regime because he’s ‘our dictator’ and [a] check on Islamists.” —Michigan live
“[It] is predictable that, within days – if not hours, America will be formally endorsing a new Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government. This will be an unmitigated disaster … — Gaffney’s homepage
“Frank Gaffney was a hard-line cold warrior bent on confronting and undermining the Soviet Union when he arrived at the Pentagon in Reagan‘s first term. Mr. Gaffney had worked for Democratic Sen. Henry M. “Scoop??? Jackson, an ardent anti-Soviet, and then did staff work for the Senate Armed Services Committee. He knew firsthand that Washington’s neglect during the post-Vietnam era had led to what the Army‘s own chief of staff termed in 1980 the ‘hollow Army.'” —WaTimes
“Neocon loon Frank Gaffney has clearly gone off the deep end, first claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the Obama administration, and now warning his conservative brethren that the Brotherhood is worming its way into their movement, too. — Salon
And on Monday Gaffney will be one of the stars in the documentary, Iranium, a push to get the bombers going over Iran. Iran will knock the United States back to the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with an electromagnetic pulse attack. One year later, 90 percent of us will be dead from starvation or extreme conditions brought on by zero electricity.
Funny as this may read, Gaffney is what’s considered “normal” for the GOP right and at Fox News where he’s a big star.
But this is what passes for journalism, particularly at the altie news blogs. Something sarcastic, meant for a cheap laugh, no interest in bringing light to a subject, even for a paragraph.
Then move along to the next something or someone else to be given a gratuitous kick down for the sake of shits and giggles.
The history of ricin arrests in the US during the war on terror years is worth telling for its illustration of the intersection of the ginned up fear of biological and chemical terrorism and how that has resulted in a process that regularly grinds up and spits out weak and confused people from the fringes of society. And that process is totally unique to America. We own it.
And if you were the survivalist he-man Kurt Saxon and had written the Poor Man’s James Bond — from which Levenderis’ ricin recipe ultimately derives — and your primary legacy was that your idiotic books had contributed to putting a noticeable amount of people in jail, what would you think of yourself?
That you were somehow stubbornly demonstrating the right to freedom of the press? And that this was a shining example to the kinds of people who actually credulously read the stuff?
“A federal grand jury in Cleveland indicted 54-year-old Jeff Boyd Levenderis of Tallmadge near Akron on Tuesday on one count of possessing a biological toxin and one count of making false statements,” reads the Dayton Daily News today.
There’s a book in this and other perplexing and common-sense defying stories unique to the American condition but connected to the war on terror.
Today’s Nugent is hard to untangle. Other than the virulent opposition to Obamacare, Nugent constructs the argument that it must be aborted because it doesn’t abort abortion.
Buried within it is the conspiracy theory that government coverage of abortion is a strategy to win the votes of liberals and the poor because they allegedly get so many of them.
I was weighing whether or not this is what Nugent really meant. On one hand, it might be just an incidental interpretation — because the copy editor gave up trying to straighten Ted’s prose out.
However, on the other, it’s so inflammatory it’s right in Ted character.
The president desperately needs the pro-abortion crowd. He knows they constitute a core base of the Democratic Party, and that he can’t further alienate the extreme left wing who believe in providing shopping carts to the homeless. Even though half of all African-American pregnancies end in abortion, aborted masses of fetal tissue simply doesn’t [sic] matter when there is a re-election campaign to plan. Winning elections at all costs is what really counts.
At their core, liberals have few, if any, moral or ethical principles that matter. They desperately try to spin a good game about so-called reproductive rights, health care, education, crime, illegal immigration, etc., but what liberals really want is more power and control, a principle in line with the commie Three Stooges of Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and the deceased Che Guevara.
The FBI is asking the public for help in the investigation of an unexploded backpack bomb left along the parade route of a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday celebration in Spokane, Washington, the agency said on Tuesday.
The unattended Swiss Army-brand backpack, with wires visible, was discovered on a downtown bench by three city workers who notified police of the device about 30 minutes before the parade was scheduled to begin.
The parade, attended by about 1,500 people, was quickly rerouted while city’s bomb disposal unit was summoned and safely “neutralized the device,” the FBI said.
FBI agent Frank Harrill described the “improvised explosive device” as having a “very lethal design” …
Frank Harrill, special agent in the charge of the Spokane FBI office, would not discuss what specifically made the bomb so dangerous but said the investigation has become a top priority.
“It definitely was, by all early analysis, a viable device that was very lethal and had the potential to inflict multiple casualties,??? Harrill said. “Clearly, the timing and placement of a device _ secreted in a backpack _ with the Martin Luther King parade is not coincidental. We are doing everything humanly possible to identify the individuals or individual who constructed and placed this device.???
Ivan Bush, who has helped organize the celebration march in Spokane for more than 20 years said news of the backpack’s potential was “just painful to see and hear.???
DD has posted previous Tea Party music ported to YouTube. However, this seems to take some kind of cake. Someone should immediately render an oil interpretation of the tableau, suitable for framing, postcards, and addition to the canon of American Gothic.
The comment at the top when I logged my view was fairly descriptive:
This is punk rock for old racists who have? been pissed off at the gov’t since they put an Irish catholic in the white house.
Sample lyric: “Sarah Palin, she won’t listen to their bunk/Sarah Palin’s coming south to hunt some skunk.”
The insulting spectacle of Tea Partiers self-validating by claiming common cause with Martin Luther King, Jr. is a regular event. Bizarre and inappropriate, the phenomenon reached its high water mark last year when Glenn Beck tried to cast himself as a modern day MLK.
That sure worked.
Anyway, now you can go on YouTube and easily find video in which miscellaneous Tea Party bigots drape themselves in MLK, just in time for the government-they-despise-so-much-instituted holiday. Like this marginal piece here.
Today, Ted Nugent has written a new WaTimes column celebrating the memory of MLK and going so far as to imagine, from his point of view, what the man might recommend were he alive today.
But Nugent has virtually nothing to say when he isn’t doing his usual shtick.
However, it’s more educating to sample from Ted’s actual daily thoughts from last year. Just to see how they might compare with the spirit of MLK.
And so, from this old DD post, random excerpts from Nugent’s appearance on the Alex Jones radio show on 7-9-10:
“[much deleted] while we crush the bad and the ugly of Barack Hussein Obama and his legions of pimps, whores and welfare brats.”
This, from an extended riff on the conspiracy mania — a joke in and of itself — that the Obama administration was going to take away the right to own guns:
“Sonia Sotomayor, you racist punk …”
“When and if these Mao Tse Tung fan-clubbers in the White House dare
continue down the road they are going and all hell breaks loose, I
am convinced that the majority of law enforcement and the majority
of military personnel will be on the side of we the people …”
After the last inflammatory bit flirting with the subject of armed revolt, Nugent hastily added a bit about going to the voting booth to enact a “turbo-charged awakening” of political change.
I’ve said that when Ted Nugent doesn’t use incivility and the threat of violence in his columns at the WaTimes he has nothing to say. Without these things he’s an empty fellow.
Which made his last column appear as sent in by a sleepwalker. Or mostly ghost-written by a frantic editor.
I say conservatives should turn up the rhetoric. When honestly identified, the hues and cries from the right are good for America, calls to get America back on track. Only those opposed to such an upgrade would find fault with such rhetoric.
——–
If liberals truly wanted to tone down the rhetoric, they could prove it by stopping the lying. But that won’t happen. Mr. Krugman and other liberals know that if it weren’t for a steady drumbeat of lies and deceit, the Democratic Party would cease to exist.
Let’s be honest. Those on the left don’t want to tone down political rhetoric. They only want to tone down conservative speech to make it more “fair.”
The Democrats are wrong on everything from energy to health care to taxes. What they despise is having their agenda exposed, dissected and ridiculed.
—–
And the conclusion:
In order to defeat liberals on the political-ideology battlefield, conservatives must be clear in purpose and then get after it by targeting (yes, I said targeting) and attacking Democratic nostrums that have weakened America. Expose, isolate and eliminate liberals and their fuzzy-headed policies …
Conservatives have liberals outnumbered and surrounded. Don’t play nice with liberal snakes. Don’t let them escape. Instead, do America a favor and crush liberalism.
Nugent is particularly irked by Paul Krugman, whose twice weekly column and blog must really push his buttons.
The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.
There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.
This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development …
As many analysts have noted, the Obama health reform — whose passage was met with vandalism and death threats against members of Congress — was modeled on Republican plans from the 1990s.
But that was then. Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not … Right now, each side in that debate passionately believes that the other side is wrong. And it’s all right for them to say that. What’s not acceptable is the kind of violence and eliminationist rhetoric encouraging violence that has become all too common these past two years.
Just for good measure, Nugent — again — from early last year at the WaTimes:
In the otherwise universally recognized perfection of the American experiment in self-government, where evil monsters like Che Guevara and Mao Zedong are routinely worshipped by the very imbeciles that these historical murderers would have slaughtered unhesitatingly, to a community-organizer-in-chief whose terminal rookie agenda is maniacally to spend our way out of debt and drop charges against clear and present criminal New Black Panther thugs threatening voters in Philadelphia, to black-robed idiots claiming Americans have no right to self-defense, where pimps, whores and welfare brats party hearty with the mindless fantasy that Fedzilla will wipe their butts eternally, ad nauseam – I am compelled to increase my crowbar swinging to new heights every day. I am the steel ballerina. Let’s dance.
It is not good enough simply to spotlight cockroaches: Ultimately, all caring people must always rally to the requisite stomping party. For us varmint hunters, these are truly the good old days of a target-rich environment with no bag limit. Let the stomping increase to a furious frenzy and cacophony of good over evil. May America create the splat heard round the world. My steel-toed boots are giddy with anticipatory delight. Stomp on into a voting booth near you.
If a business was run the way our bandit politicians have run our government, the owners of the business would be charged with any number of crimes. The same rules do not apply to the political punks who run our country and genuflect at the altar of inefficiency and graft. We need look no further than the robbing of the Social Security Trust Fund to know that dishonesty is the way of life in DC. I’m surprised Barney Frank hasn’t proposed a tribute for Bernie Madoff.
Notice how the left-wing bureaucrat punks in DC support throwing more good money after bad as the solution to our nation’s health care “crisis”? That’s standard operating procedure for left-wing numbnuts who believe Fedzilla is the answer to every problem in America.
These political robber barons will seemingly support anything that keeps feeding the bloated Fedzilla with our hard-earned tax dollars regardless that our dollars are outrageously wasted and that there is little to no accountability how our dollars are spent. The largest crisis America faces is not health care, the war on terror, or Nancy Pelosi’s crazy rants, but rather the lying, cheating punk politicians in DC who trample on our constitution …
Update addendum:
More of Nugent’s 2010 rant on not enough gun carrying US citizens is worth reprinting. This, coming at a time when there is obviously no gun control in the US. Politically, it has been a third rail, thank to the power of the NRA. And it is only the Loughner massacre in Tucson that makes it now possible to see minor current legislation to curb extended magazines moving forward.
Nugent:
Since the 1960s LSD-inspired goofiness of peace and love, I have always been convinced that the gun-control issue has been the tip of the culture-war spear. Why the peaceniks still deny the truth that more guns equal less crime, in spite of the tsunami of global evidence from every imaginable source, is one of mankind’s greatest mysteries …
More phenomenally stupid is the whole world’s denial of the plethora of statistics proven in John Lott’s book “More Guns, Less Crime,” in which the desirable condition of safer streets and communities with drastically reduced violent crime is accomplished most readily where more citizens not only have access to firearms but actually carry them daily on their persons.
From the ultrasafe streets of Switzerland, where every household has a real, honest-to-God full-auto-assault rifle and ammo on hand (and a proud national respect for their fellow citizens, mind you) to the multitude of jurisdictions across America where more concealed weapons per capita are issued, violent crime not only plummets, but personal-assault crimes such as rape, carjacking and armed robbery actually disappear in many instances.
And Nugent is not quite right about Switzerland, in a self-serving way. The reality is more complicated.
From Der Spiegel, three years ago:
It comes as a surprise to many to learn that the peaceful country has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world — lagging [only] behind the United States …
Able-bodied men have to serve in the military and are issued with assault rifles or pistols. They are allowed to keep their weapons and 50 rounds of ammunition at home during military service — which generally goes to the age of 30 or even longer — so that the army can be mobilized at short notice. Many men buy their weapons after they finish their military service, and the arms are often stored in unsecured closets, attics or cellars.
The new public mood is largely in response to a series of shootings involving army weapons. In a 2001 incident which sparked nationwide debate, 15 people died when a man opened fire with an army assault rifle in a regional parliament building in the small town of Zug, shooting 14 people and killing himself.
Around 300 people are killed in Switzerland each year in incidents — mostly suicides and family murders — involving army guns. According to a 25-country survey by the British-based non-governmental organization International Action Network on Small Arms, Switzerland’s total number of gun deaths, including accidents, in 2005 was 6.2 per 100,000 people — second only to the US rate of 9.42 per 100,000.
Gun advocacy in the US has rendered it impossible to research gun control law and statistics on the web. As anyone who tries to do it quickly finds out.
The US gun lobby has not only defeated all politicians but, in this matter, has also bested Google and all Internet search.
Note: The New York Times appears to be starting the move to put an unknown part of its content behind a wall. Readers may notice this if they access Paul Krugman’s opinion piece more than once from the same browser. At which point they are faced with a login prompt.
There is a (perhaps) temporary way around this.
It’s tied to your nytimes.com cookie for now. So if you run your browser in a program like Sandboxie, as DD does, you can simply exit when faced with the prompt and delete all contents in the virtual sandbox. That will destroy the cookie and, as far as the New York Times website is concerned, you’ll look like a new reader the next time you access the material.
Probably won’t work forever, though. And if that bit of information was too much to follow, never mind.
DD thought Jared Loughner’s massacre would present Ted Nugent with a bit of a problem.
Arizona’s gun laws are obviously the most lax in the country. And other armed civilians were at the massacre. There is no opportunity for Nugent to rant about civilians not being able to carry arms sufficient for personal defense.
And there is no way to make a rational argument defending the right of civilians to have thirty round magazines for their handguns.
So Nugent doesn’t get into his usual thing about the soullessness of those who would restrict gun rights. Even though no gun rights have been restricted by the Obama administration.
Nugent’s advice this time out: Be prepared for evil.
Never before has the need for a higher level of awareness and a warrior mindset been more important … Be prepared to stop evil in its tracks and live. There is no other choice.
That’s his message.
Stop evil in its tracks. I think we can agree that’s a good thing to aspire to.
Many would also probably agree that when a Jared Loughner comes to the public event there’s very little even the most alert and warrior-minded among the populace can do until people have suddenly been riddled with gunfire.
Since the massacre has also brought a discussion about violent language forward it should be noted Nugent’s new column contains none of it.
This is in start contrast to Nugent’s usual shtick. His value to his publishers lies only in his regular use of incivility and violent rhetoric. And when Nugent leaves it out of his writings he suddenly has nothing to say.
If you’re a regular DD reader you’ll know how unusual this is for the man.
I’ve made the point that Nugent is the perfect example of the mainstreaming of really unpleasant and mean-spirited extremism, the kind of which was unacceptable in public discourse many years ago.
State wildlife officers have completed an investigation into whether rocker Ted Nugent was eligible to hunt in South Dakota when he shot pheasants on a private preserve near Hot Springs in October.
But they are not saying what they found or what might happen next.
Nugent’s legal status came into question after the Rapid City Journal covered his hunting trip in October. It was later revealed that some of Nugent’s hunting privileges in California had been suspended for an earlier big-game violation there. South Dakota is part of a coalition of 35 states, including California, that honors each other’s license suspensions.
“Nugent was in the area at the time as a featured speaker at a Second Amendment rally sponsored by Citizens for Liberty, a Rapid City area tea party affiliate,” reported the local newspaper.
