Today’s dose of mainstreamed extremism comes through TIME magazine, a publication that exists to pander to aging not real bright white people. So, perforce, its supermarket readers must include retirees/Tea Partiers whose disposition must be taken into account when covering various odious southern reptiles.
In it one learns of the sincere effort to put an old Ku Klux Klanner on a Mississippi license plate. The obese Haley Barbour says he will not allow it into law, which is nice of him.
It’s lede reads somewhat like the announcement of an unusual ladies tea in Cranford, New Jersey:
In 1867, former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest became the first Grand Wizard of a newly formed organization called the Ku Klux Klan. Forrest had been a slave trader before the Civil War; he was also the commanding officer during a battle known as the “Fort Pillow massacre” in Tennessee at which some 300 black Union troops were killed in 1864. (Whether they died in combat or were killed after they surrendered is still a matter of dispute.)
Now, in honor of the Civil War’s 150th anniversary, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) are seeking to put Forrest on a Mississippi license plate. But the state government opposes it.
“Chuck Rand, a member of the SCV, calls any assumption that the Forrest license plate is racist a ‘knee-jerk reaction’ by people who don’t understand the ‘real causes’ of the Civil War,” it reads, sampling the p.r. of the bona fide douchebag without actually getting around to calling him that, so to speak.
Moving right along, DD’s electromagnetic pulse crazy news filter netted an item from Townhall on the Google news tab. It’s not so interesting for the standard Glenn Beck theme that the revolutions in the Middle East may turn into a drive to establish a Muslim caliphate but for the startling advocacy of a US Foreign Legion:
This also means we’ll need a much larger U.S. military, which to minimize public opposition here at home should be mostly individually recruited from freedom loving souls around the world (not from existing foreign armies). This “International Freedom Force??? of 1,000,000 or more would be commanded and supported by our own military.
However, the French Foreign Legion is a small unit — 7,700 men. That’s not really up to the Townhall writer’s ambitions.
Of course, one can imagine all the good will which would meet a Muslim-containing US “International Freedom Force” in, uh, Middle East places to be freed from the “caliphate.”
Anyway, here’s the electromagnetic pulse script:
… an Islamic Caliphate stretching its axis of evil from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, and the radicals gaining a stranglehold on well over half the world’s oil and the Suez Canal to boot. They would then likely extend their reach southward across much of Africa.
With huge natural resources under their control and aided by massive Chinese investment capital and technical support, the radicals would pose an intolerable threat to the economies of the free world. But far worse, with their newfound wealth they would amass a nuclear arsenal that could enable them to either bring the West to its knees by threatening Armageddon, or actually bring about Ahmadinejad’s dream of “a world without America??? and “annihilating Israel.??? And let us also be mindful that but a single nuclear missile, fired from a freighter off our shores and detonated some 300 miles above Kansas, could generate an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would knock out virtually our entire electric grid system and, according to the chairman of the congressionally authorized EMP Commission, kill 70 to 90% of the entire U.S. population from starvation and disease within one year!
One of the leaders of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy was recently in San Francisco as part of a publicity stunt for the new Homefront video game.
The game is a shooter in which the United States is occupied by North Korea.
A publicity item described it earlier in the week:
The event will give fans an exclusive, in-depth look at the speculative fiction fueled by Homefront’s narrative. Scheduled guest speaker Dr. William Forstchen, a published author and leading expert on Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) blasts, will discuss the little known, yet extremely dangerous threat posed by such an attack. Also scheduled to address the crowd is Tae Kim, a foreign relations expert and former CIA Officer who will present Homefront’s fictional timeline and examine how the United States has come to suffer an oppressive occupation by a nuclear armed Greater Korean Republic in the year 2027. The event is scheduled to conclude with a free live performance by The Dillinger Escape Plan, a leading metalcore band.
The year is 2027. Her infrastructure shattered and military in disarray, America has fallen to a savage occupation by the nuclear armed Greater Korean Republic. Abandoned by her former allies, the United States is a bleak landscape of walled towns and abandoned suburbs …
A previous stunt for Homefront — a North Korean-themed lunch truck — has been given the thumbs down by SF locals.
The most recent, a release of 10,000 red balloons — most of which promptly floated into the bay — was given an even more angry reception.
A publicity stunt for a new warfare-based video game sent local environmentalists to arms when a mass of balloons carrying advertisements for the game cascaded into San Francisco Bay.
“When I looked out the window and saw thousands of balloons dropping straight into the bay, I was flabbergasted,” said Rod Fujita, a senior oceans scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund. “I never expected to see something like this in San Francisco, where there’s such concern about the bay and pollution.”
The release of the 10,000 ill-fated red balloons came courtesy of THQ, a Southern California video game company in town for the Game Developers Conference at Moscone Center.
Because the game is set in a near-future where the United States is invaded by nuclear-armed troops from North Korea, the company staged a mock lunchtime rally at Yerba Buena Gardens where the game’s supporters, in the words of the company’s news release, “will take to the streets to demonstrate against the North Korean regime and the treatment of its citizens.”
The staged rally was capped by the massive balloon launch, designed, the company said, to “simulate a method used by South Korea to send messages of hope to the North.”
The “messages of hope” carried by these balloons, however, amounted to an exclusive offer from GameStop video game store allowing gamers to “receive the resistance multi-player pack, featuring an exclusive weapon.”
Even that message didn’t get too far. While the balloons at first soared into the leaden gray skies above the city, wind and rain quickly sent thousands of them plunging into the bay, only blocks away.
“They were just dropping right out of the sky into the water,” Fujita said.
Pictures of the balloons bobbing on the bay quickly made their way onto social media sites like Facebook and Flickr, as angry environmentalists blasted the stunt in e-mails and on Twitter.
“Obviously, we have a problem with polluting of the bay and this is just polluting and littering,” said Amy Ricard, a spokeswoman for the environmental group Save the Bay.
“Your balloon campaign was a stupid thing to do to a city surrounded on three sides by water,” one San Francisco resident said in an e-mail to GameStop. “You should be held accountable for the waste.”
The Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy encompasses not only the GOP far right but also US arms manufacturing.
For the latter, the electromagnetic pulse ray (or bomb) has been the weapon that has been coming and coming but never quite arriving for the last twenty years. And it’s always deadeningly promised as innovation and technical revolution, a total turning upside down of the way of war.
Today, we get an army solicitation for electromagnetic pulse weapons, mountable on armored fighting vehicles.
And guess where it comes from?
Warren, Michigan, in Macomb county — the same place profiled on Monday and the home of General Dynamics Land Systems in Sterling Heights, the corporate headquarters and design bureau for the M1 Abrams tank.
Layoffs for teachers, school security guards, policemen, firemen, librarians and people who keep parks and recreations going in Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties.
But paveway for contracts for notional electromagnetic pulse rays to the usual raft of arms developers, yes!
Even as a minor thing it is nauseatingly depressing in what it says about America as a nation.
U.S. Army tank and automotive technology researchers are surveying industry to find companies able to design and build specialized military batteries for high-pulse-power applications in current and future military vehicles.
Officials of the Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) in Warren, Mich., issued a sources-sought notice (W56HZV11R0199) last week for a high power battery system for pulse power applications.
High-power microwave (HPM) and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons could be used for combat, sabotage, and special forces applications …
The Army is looking for companies able to design and build batteries for high-pulse-power applications in military vehicles … Army TARDEC officials are asking industry for information on innovative concepts, component research and development, and control strategies and architectures related to energy storage systems to produce compact, common solutions applicable to several different fleets of vehicles to meet the growing high pulse power demand.
Companies interested should respond by e-mail no later than 1 April 2011 to the Army …
It is a quest that can never be put down. There must always be money for promised miracle weapons. Even if they’re always either pure snake oil or never quite as billed.
The electromagnetic pulse ray gun was also sought. But in almost twenty years it has proven impractical because the power supply must be as big as a freight train. And even then it doesn’t get much done.
And there remains interest in it as a magic wand to defeat IEDs, an initiative which has had mostly indifferent or unnoticeable results.
From 2009:
“It requires a big truck to even bring the unassembled parts to the test army,??? says an Army overseer, a man with an unusually pragmatic air. This particular device “is not a consideration??? for anything, ever.
Why the print space, then?
Well, consider that any theoretical electromagnetic pulse bombs [and rays] are weapons which no longer have much use. Who would the US military sic them on? Somali pirates? The Taliban in Afghanistan? People living in buildings in Swat, Pakistan? Insurgents or rabble and crowds around the globe? Invading Martians?
One salient feature of the US press is the continued fascination with robots that aren’t quite as wonderful as described. The stories and people in them try to convey the impression that innovation and revolution in American technology are everywhere.
The world is always radically changed by the allegedly eye-popping robots and drones produced for the military.
For everyone else, though, it still pretty much sucks.
The economy may be stagnant, the AfPak war conducted forever with the enemy unimpressed and unmoved by US technological might, record numbers of people may be on food stamps. It’s a sci-fi dystopia from the world of paperback novels. But there are always some sucking off taxpayer dough through DARPA, the same agency that tried to bring us the jumping minefield.
Today’s funny is the Aerovironment hummingbird drone. Produced in Monrovia, not too far from DD, they certainly do know what real hummingbirds look like. And their robot is no f—— hummingbird, no matter how they paint it or make it look.
It could just as well have been made to look like a cardboard core from a roll of toilet paper.
Here’s another lousy video of the “hummingbird.” It only looks like a hummingbird in flight if you’ve never spent a couple hours watching a few. “It looks like a magic trick,” comments one of Aerovironment’s employees.
Apt.
Hummingbirds are everywhere in Pasadena. If you have a yard or hanging feeders, they’re there in force.
They don’t whir. And they are blindingly fast. Not at all like the bit of mechanical jerry-bilt rubbish in the videos.
If you hear a hummingbird, it’s the tiny whoosh and thrum of its wings as it zips by your head. Or the high-pitched tweeting it makes when it’s fighting with colleagues or warning you to stay clear of the feeder. Everyone with hummingbirds in the year sees the silent mid-air dead stops from a full sprint. Or the young cat who hasn’t yet seen too many flailing in mid-leap as the bird stops just out of reach, mocks the mammal with a twitter, and then sprints off at an extreme angle to hit the sugar water anyway.
They don’t do rickety buzz like the Aerovironment toy, like a bad little fan that could run out of juice anytime.
And hummingbirds have endurance. They go all day and don’t look like they’re going to crash if some minder with a joystick isn’t there to see they don’t blutz into the business’s wall.
“The success of the hummingbird drone, however, ‘paves the way for a new generation of aircraft with the agility and appearance of small birds,'” said someone prone to a bit of exaggeration at DARPA.
It is also said insects will be changed into robot warriors.
“Lockheed Martin has developed a fake maple leaf seed, or so-called whirly bird, loaded with navigation equipment and imaging sensors,” it reads.
At least the bomb-sniffing bees and Box ‘o Radar don’t make appearances. They didn’t work out.
Everything about the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy is odious. Accordingly, one of its new chieftains is Trent Franks, a relatively unimportant Republican congressman famous only for his extremist beliefs.
These include:
The president is not an American, global warming and evolution are hoaxes, African Americans had it better under slavery, shariah law is poisoning the precious bodily fluids of the US judicial system, and extended ammo magazines are an American right.
This kind of general world view of the people pushing protection against electromagnetic pulse doom has bearing on the way one regards their argument. Even with the most gentle interpretation, they’re dodgy and glabrous characters. And they are only interested in things the GOP is now notorious for, like blocking progress and siphoning money to the plutocracy and various corporate pals.
So it’s not a surprise when you see a Washington law firm whose business is basically siphoning money to the plutocracy — promoting outsourcing, homeland security and Wall Street financial services — support the Cult’s hobby horse.
Such firms see protection against EMP doom as just another way to suck taxpayer dollars into client coffers, in this case Wall Street investment firms like Goldman Sachs.
A .pdf here explains elliptically why such firms are interested in the mischief being created by Franks.
What it boils down to is simpler than it reads.
Any legislation adopted, and I’ve stated before there’s not a lot of chance Franks’ bill will survive, would nevertheless present an opportunity for further legal amendment. Since it might affect large portions of the power-transmitting infrastructure in the country, the private sector must be involved. Therefore opportunities will exist to divert potentially large taxpayer sums to the usual corporate parties.
It is also unsurprising that the same memo, authored by the Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan legal firm, also supports Susan Collins’ Orwellian-named Cyber Security and Internet Freedom act, previously stalled because of resistance to Internet “kill switch” powers.
Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins’ latest proposal to beef up the country’s cyber security has a new name and language explicitly denying the president the so-called “kill switch” power to unilaterally shut down the Internet.
But so far the legislation’s makeover has failed to win over the technology community, libertarians and civil rights advocates, who worry the bill still gives the president and the government too much power to disrupt Internet communications.
Trent Franks wasted no time in picking up the mantle of EMP crusader and anthrax denier Roscoe Bartlett (R – Maryland), initiating another bill to protect the nation from the fate of being hurled back to the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Readers just stepping in should know the Cult has regularly tried to get bills through Congress, always failing. Bartlett’s last attempt, in 2010, was sent to the dumper by Lisa Murkowski.
In a manner similar to Roscoe Bartlett, Trent Franks is a nuisance as a Congressman. And his new legislation won’t survive, either. But no one will be around to note its passing when someone more significant than the junior GOP pest from Arizona nixes it.
Having the odious Franks as a leader of a caucus to protect the country from electromagnetic pulse doom might be seen as a setback for the Cult. He’s not a man to inspire much interest and collegial enthusiasm.
U.S. Rep. Trent Franks, (R-Ariz.) introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives Friday to protect the U.S. power system from electromagnetic attack. The bill has been assigned to the House Energy and Commerce and House Budget committees.
One commenter writes:
Only a moron like Franks would write a bill like this. Of all the things to be concerned about, a bill about sun spots. How about a bill to decentralize the grid to allow local power generation. How about a bill to create 1000 jobs in Mohave County — jobs that are not real estate agents. Franks is about as irrelevant as a Congressman could possibly be.
The GOP-controlled House now officially has a Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy caucus.
Started by EMP crazy Trent Franks, the official announcement is here.
Franks is a birther and doesn’t believe in evolution or global warming. He is famously known for this quote: “Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery.”
And he accepted the Team B report on sharia law corrupting precious American bodily fluids authored by Frank Gaffney, also a member of the Cult of EMP Crazy, and the infamous William “Jerry” Boykin.”
There’s not much more to say except that you can never be too nuts or odious in the 2011 GOP.
If a thing is backed up by hard science and poses a real danger for everyone on the planet, [like global warming], the Republican party denies its existence. If, however, the threat is something rather abstract to almost all Americans, rests almost entirely on theoretical prediction, is something not likely to ever occur at all, and then only in the context of what would promise to be an all out nuclear war, [like electromagnetic pulse doom], the GOP believes in it very strongly.
So it was written earlier this week in a piece on how the Republican Party has taken years to ensure that it has the vote of every single person concerned about devastating electromagnetic pulse attack.
It is a voting demographic entirely lost to the Democrat Party.
Hey, you think they might invest in research into making something that could be put in the water so that people, like Republicans, would be more open to science?
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.
“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.
