12.16.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle at 2:00 pm by George Smith
I wrote about something called the “sonic pain stick” in 2003 for the Village Voice as part of a column called “Weapon of the Week” in the run-up to the Iraq war. The mainstream media was publicizing alleged miracle weapons that would make the war antiseptic and the “sonic pain stick” by “American Technology Corporation” (could there be a better name!) was one of them. The “sonic pain stick” was never of use in Iraq or the Middle East because it has no application when people can shoot back with AKs and rifle-propelled grenades.
Today it has the more common name, LRAD, and “American Technology Corporation” is the LRAD Corporation. It’s now commonly used on protesters in NYC.
Excerpted from a write-up on a legal protest from the National Lawyers Guild on the cruel use of LRADs in CommonDreams:
Videos of officers using the LRADs surfaced on December 4 and 5 during marches that came after a grand jury’s failure to indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo for the chokehold death of Eric Garner. Crowds can be seen dispersing quickly as loud, shrill, repetitive beeps ring out in short blasts over and over …
Initially developed as a sound weapon for the military, the LRAD’s so-called deterrent tone is meant to hit human hearing at its most sensitive levels. As Amnesty International explains, “LRADs can pose serious health risks which range from temporary pain, loss of balance and eardrum rupture, to permanent hearing damage” …One protester who attended the marches when the LRADs were used told Gothamist that he had residual pain from the sound cannon blast for the next six days …
Moreover, the sound cannons can hurt those not actively protesting. “The LRAD can cause hearing damage, and possible neurological damage, to anyone in its path.”
There’s also an armored LRAD truck that has been made available to city police forces.
In 2003 the LRAD was part of a boom in defense spending for non-lethal weapons to be used in the war on terror overseas. Most of the inventions were never used, one of the primary reasons being they’re easily viewed in public as elements of torture. This because they were and are solely designed to cause increasing levels of pain. (Note: Although this seems not to have mattered in the secret overseas sites where, by comparison, simpler, prolonged and far more obvious mechanisms of torturing and administrations of pain were the rules.)
In 2003, eleven years ago, I wrote this:
New methods of American technical torture continue to roll off private-sector assembly lines in the effort to aid the war on terror. One of the most aggressively pitched is a meter-long sonic pain stick marketed to the Department of Defense by the American Technology Corporation of San Diego.
In a recent full-court press to the media, the company gaily described the sonic baton’s potential to agonize terrorists on airplanes, where flying bullets wouldn’t do. Intended for use at short range, the weapon projects sound intense enough to cause temporary loss of hearing, perhaps nullifying its effect, or possibly shattering the hijacker’s eardrums. It would also probably agonize or rupture the hearing of everyone else in an enclosed cabin, blocking the communication of useful commands like “Get that terrorist bastard!”
The soldiers, weirdos, sadists, and tinkerers enthusiastic about acoustic technology envision strapping the sonic pain stick to an M-16. While it would be no good in situations where people can shoot back or even throw rocks, it certainly could have its uses in rousting frightened women and children from closets in an occupied Iraq.
America’s nonlethal-weapons scientists note that in our country, hearing aids and surgery can mitigate damage to the outer and middle ear caused by such a weapon. However, mangling of the inner ear is permanent. But in poor or just bombed-flat foreign lands, access to health insurance to pay for damage claims, hearing aids, and good surgeons may be hard to come by. Nonlethal weaponeers are also vexed by the fact that once one’s ears are ruined, the sonic weapon loses its bite.
Seriously, at the time, that was what was said to push the LRAD: It could be used on airplanes. And that once your ears are damaged by it, it loses effectiveness.
Needless to say, the LRAD is another weapon designed and manufactured thanks to the taxpayer. It is also fair to add that, technically, the American people ought to be owed a royalty on every one sold. But that’s not how things work. The taxpayer is on the hook twice. Once for funding the development of it. The second time, locally, for equipping police departments that purchase them.
So after being designed and built in different models with different looks and varying degrees of broadcast power, a decade later the LRAD has found its primary role in the hands of the state in suppression of free speech and the right to assemble. And the United States in 2014 is its best market because social unrest, predictably and for just cause, is increasing.
Remember the old bullshit everyone was told when we went off to blast the terrorists in Iraq and everywhere else, the thing you still occasionally hear today?
“They hate us for our freedoms.”
Please pardon the excruciating pain in your ear while you’re exercising your right to peacefully protest.
This collection of images shows the spread of LRAD purchases (as well as LRAD-equipped armored vehicles) throughout the country.
And here.
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12.03.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, WhiteManistan at 4:36 pm by George Smith
Hat tip to Steve Aftergood for pointing out the latest and most pathetic accomplishment of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, aka the House Congressional EMP Caucus. (Which was a name the mainstream media could use to get around having to explain that they were, well, electromagnetic pulse crazies.)
Yesterday it was responsible for passing a bill entitled “The Critical Infrastructure and Protection Act,” which — if you took the title seriously — sounded like big stuff.
However, the title was just to mislead. The “act” was simply a request that the Department of Homeland Security begin more research studies on the threat of electromagnetic pulse attack and potential steps for thwarting it.
Deep in the fine print — the bill would have no regulatory power and called for no no new authorizations.
Translated: A feeble attempt to carve out some high-button welfare funding for the same small coterie of right-wing kooks who’ve flogged the menace of electromagnetic pulse for the last fifteen years. And who still appear as representatives of the disbanded “EMP Commission” and assorted related functions, like the lobbying group EMPAct America, in columns and news pieces at fringe right-wing publications.
The best name for the bill, and an honest one, would have been the EMP Crazy Protection Act.
If you want actual names in the cult, simply read through the archives. It’s literally the chronicle of a ton of dog excrement stuffed in a hundred pound bag.
This legislation, like everything else sponsored by EMP Caucus leader Trent Franks of Arizona, will be dead in the Senate. Not going to get to the President.
Indeed, as far as the Cult of EMP Crazy is concerned it has been all down hill stumbling since its leading light, pol emeritus Roscoe Bartlett, was sent into retirement in 2014. (Although he never actually got anything done, either.)
Summarized from that article, the decade-spanning nature of the whole unpleasant movement:
[The] paranoid and steeped-in-authoritarianism mythology of electromagnetic pulse doom was turned into a highly-professionalized and tenacious industry, built on the exploitation of a thick seam of WhiteManistan kook-ism and its love of end-times stories in which the virtuous are saved and the sinners destroyed. It’s a profitable business.
That niche business is “prepper” survivalism.
It’s the selling of property off the grid where one’s family can ride out the collapse of American civilization, the peddling of the equivalent of heroic romance novels on said calamity, and the taking of the show on the road and getting the ticket punched at Tea Party gatherings in red states where the cult can indulge the fantasy of electromagnetic pulse doom as a states’ rights issue.
Running parallel with “The National Infrastructure Protection Act” was sister House legislation making Social Security safe from Nazis.
All four of them.
No, I am not making it up.
Wrote someone at the New York Times:
This is what our elected leaders are doing? At a time when Congress is ignoring immigration reform, stumbling and bumbling over a whole pack of wars, threatening to shut down the government once again, failing to provide adequate living wages to working Americans and adequate unemployment benefits to non-working Americans, letting the bridges and highways fall apart, and so many other things?
Yes.
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09.24.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 2:35 pm by George Smith
Hot off the wires, a gigantic American arms sale to South Korea, to counter what Reuters calls its “restive neighbor,” North Korea.
We only do the best, most expensive and modern arms packages:
SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korea will sign a deal this month to buy 40 Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter jets for about 7.34 trillion won ($7.06 billion) for delivery in 2018-2021, two Lockheed flunkies people with knowledge of the transaction told Reuters on Wednesday …
The company said the agreement includes a substantial “offset” package, including a military communications satellite that will be launched into orbit and then operated by South Korea, as well as significant technical support for South Korea’s K-X program to develop its own domestic fighter jet.
One of the sources said South Korea would sign a follow-up contract with the United States to allow basic maintenance of the jets within South Korea.
The F-35 could not have been developed, built, tested and advertised without the deep pockets of the American people.
In keeping with the theme of considering arms sales as national group-owned goods that ought to contribute to resource wealth fund, a 30 percent value added tax on the sale would potentially reap the following benefit for Americans:
$7, 000, 000, 000 x .30 = $2, 100, 000, 000
And why should we not have that? Americans have devoted their lives earnings to the nurture of the best environment for arms manufacturing in the world.
From Monday: Give Americans a royalty on arms sales.
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09.22.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror, WhiteManistan at 2:30 pm by George Smith
In the distant past I wrote that Americans ought to get something for contributing to this country’s position as the leading arms dealer to the world. The American people, out of their generous pockets, have underwritten everything that’s made our war machine the biggest in world history. We’ve paid for the development, purchase, maintenance and distribution of the world’s biggest, most expensive and most scary weapons. We have created through direct action, avarice, fear, voting patterns and general indifference the perfect business environment for the development of the globe’s most advanced and coveted killing technology. We continue to support, enhance and advertise it through the prosecution of continuous globe-spanning war. Our toadies and proxies look on with envy, just waiting for great deals on big fancy arms packages, bulk allotments of riot control chemicals, and anything related for use on neighboring failed states, their own people or both.
I wrote about it at GlobalSecurity.Org back in 2011 (gee, look at all those ‘likes’, how did that happen?):
Record numbers of Americans apply for food stamps and unemployment. Every job not in finance or arms manufacturing gets beggared or threatened with shipment to China. Saudi Arabia and Iraq get tanks. More and more tanks. There are never enough.
As a thought experiment, I am going to propose a war-profiteering dividend/tax on US arms sales.
Since the core markets for all these businesses are essentially guaranteed by the US taxpayer and government, it seems only fair Americans ought to be regarded as shareholders. And as shareholders, they ought to be in for some rewards. It’s the American way.
Let’s make the war-profiteering tax significant because, although even though I haven’t researched it yet, the US arms industry is probably quite adept at tax avoidance already. So I make it twenty percent of all profits in overseas arms sales — weapons, tanks, aircraft, ships, guns, ammo, bombs, missiles, rockets, chemicals, computer systems, engineering, construction, software, consulting services and support staff — everything.
Here’s the calculation, using SIPRI’s latest data:
20 percent of 247 billion in sales = 49 400 000 000
Further, I will propose a yearly war-profiteering dividend check for everyone in the United States on food stamps. According to Reuters: “For fiscal 2011, average enrollment is forecast for 43.3 million people.”
Here is the calculation:
49.4 billion divided by 43.3 million = 1 140.8776
Everyone on food stamps, no exceptions, gets a check from the protected US arms industry, for roughly $1,140.88. That would certainly be a help.
One could also extend the dividend to all tax-filers for a given fiscal year although it would probably cut the size of each check by at least two thirds.
The only people who wouldn’t be entitled to checks would be employees of the US arms manufacturing base. They’re already getting dividends as well as security. Of course, none of this has any chance of consideration. It’s all in the imagination, delusional. The protected industry of American weapons production is a third rail. No one will seriously discuss taking any big whacks at it.
Over the weekend, from the wire, a big sale of MaxxPro Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles to our famous ally and functional dictatorship in the war on terror, Pakistan:
WASHINGTON: The US State Department on Saturday approved the sale of 160 mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles to Pakistan at an estimated cost of $198 million.
Islamabad had requested 160 Navistar Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles with spare parts, support and test equipment, publications and technical documentation, personnel and equipment training, US government and contractor engineering, technical and logistics support services, and other related elements of logistical and programme support.
Following the State Department’s determination approving the sale, the Defence Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) delivered the required certification notifying Congress of this possible sale.
“The proposed sale will contribute to the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to improve the security of a country vital to US foreign policy and national security goals in South Asia,??? DSCA said.
In 2011, I proposed a 20 percent tax to be collected on American bulk arms sales, to be paid back to the American people as a royalty.
Because times are worse for many Americans I now propose raising our theoretical value added tax to 30 percent.
30 percent of $198 million is $59,400,000
In essence, it would be a way of giving a small basic income to every American on a national resource we have been responsible for husbanding and making available to the world.
You could consider it as the the citizens of Alaska feel about their oil checks:
(Reuters) – Nearly every Alaska resident will soon be $1,884 richer, thanks to an annual payout from an oil wealth trust fund that has been credited with keeping many low-income families out of poverty, state officials said on Wednesday.
More than 640,000 Alaska residents will receive the payment from The Alaska Permanent Fund next month, which Department of Revenue Commissioner Angela Rodell says is the third largest since the state began paying such sums in 1982 with a $1,000 check.
The sum is more than twice the $900 paid to each Alaska resident last year and more than the collective payments from each of the last two years. But it is still off from a high of $2,069 paid in 2008.
Alaska’s Permanent Fund was established by a constitutional amendment passed by voters in 1976 requiring a portion of state oil revenues be put into a savings account to be available for the distant future …
A value added tax on the sale of arms could easily be thought of as a way of collecting money for a resource wealth fund, to be paid back to the citizenry as a royalty for its long and continuing support of the resource.
In this specific case, the block sale of 160 MRAPs to Pakistan.
It’s a perfect idea. Can you come up with a good argument against declaration of American-made Department of Defense-approved and battle-tested weapons of war as a national resource we’ve all made possible? Didn’t think so. 
Slap a value added tax on the damn thing and use it to pay back Americans. We made it possible. We’re the makers, not the takers. We want our share.
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09.21.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 2:08 pm by George Smith
It worked for the city of Davis in Orange County. And a host of bad publicity notices from around the country have moved San Diego Unified’s police force to schedule the disposal of its newly acquired Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle.
From the wire:
The San Diego Unified School District has decided to return a military-grade armored vehicle donated by the Department of Defense that was intended to be used by city schools police for emergencies such as campus shootings …
“Public sentiment regarding the use of excess military equipment by law enforcement agencies since the civil unrest in Ferguson, Mo., has pointed to the need to be more sensitive to perception,??? [San Diego Unified police chief Rueben Littlejohn] said. “The value that this defensive tool would bring cannot exceed the value of retaining the public’s trust, confidence and perceptions of how we will protect our students.???
Even loaded with teddy-bears, still not a friendly sight. Unfortunately, the Pentagon will quickly pawn it off on someone else.
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09.17.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 1:45 pm by George Smith
A Congresswoman, Claire McCaskill, put online a tabulation of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles sent to American police departments since 2011. Its numbers are linked to police departments with less than ten active duty police officers and, by state, how the total number exceeds the numbers possessed by National Guard units. (Hint: Most state Guard units have zero MRAPs.)
That document is here.
The .pdf has inspired a good number of incredulous and justifiably
ridiculing stories on the stunning reality that the Pentagon has also been shipping armored fighting vehicles to school district police forces and penny-ante community colleges.
Like this one, on Saddleback community college in Orange County, California:
With just nine full-time officers, the [Saddleback College police department] somehow managed to get an army mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicle for…what exactly? Scaring kids who don’t put up their parking permit?
In other news today, such stories have had some effect, motivating Los Angeles Unified to claim it would be divesting itself of a number of grenade launchers given to it by the Department of Defense.
It’s become obvious that the people who run the Pentagon’s 1033 Program, which is how these things have come to be everywhere, have no shame, common sense or any recognition of what differentiates a service for the social good from one that has morphed into something quite the opposite.
Look over the document. Be amazed at the numbers.
There are many reasons to seriously consider the United States as a pariah country on the global stage, one with no serious belief in the rights of human beings other than freedoms to buy stuff and or have large weapons stockpiled and ready to use on them if they can’t. Provision of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles for police forces in piss ant towns, community colleges and for school district police forces fulfills the latter freedom. As for the freedom to shop, you’re on your own and the vicissitudes of the economy.
Statistic of the day, easy:
The Payne County Sheriff’s Department in Oklahoma, with one active duty officer, has two MRAPs, the above, weighing 29 tons, being one.
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09.13.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, War On Terror, WhiteManistan at 11:32 am by George Smith
Chagrined over having to get rid of it.
Today the New York Times ran a story that’s been floating around California for a couple weeks, fallout from the Ferguson riots and the national discussion on he arrival of heavy armored cars on American streets.
The city of Davis was perhaps not the best place to shove an MRAP into, it being the town where a peaceful student protest was painfully put down in now famous imagery of security blithely hosing down young people with pepper spray.
From the NYT:
The police department of this modest college town is among the latest California beneficiaries of surplus military equipment: a $700,000 armored car that is the “perfect vehicle,??? the police chief told the City Council, “to perform rescues of victims and potential victims during active shooter incidents??? …
But the City Council directed [Chief Landy Black] last month to get rid of it in the face of an uproar that had swept through this community, with many invoking the use of similar equipment by the police against protesters in Ferguson, Mo., after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager.
“This thing has a turret — it’s the kind of thing that is used in Afghanistan and Iraq,??? said Dan Wolk, the mayor. “Our community is the kind of community that is not going to take well to having this kind of vehicle. We are not a crime-ridden city.???
Kudos for having the fortitude to make an emphatic stand and statement.
While some police in very large metropolitan police departments can make a case, not necessarily always a good one, about the need for what is a heavy armored fighting vehicle, most of the burgs, which is where many of them are now, can’t.
The country’s medium-sized and small towns do not need combat-tested armor nor are they likely to. Mines and artillery barrages are not coming to this country and the number of deployed MRAPs now far outweighs, out guns and out numbers the potential for terrorism or the need to be ready to put down insurrection with overwhelming force.
Fear is what has driven the spread of the MRAP. The theology is that there is always the potential for some terrible criminal or terrorist assault somewhere in America and that these are the things, along with many others, that must be around to guarantee the safety of the police and the public. It is a nationwide view that feeds itself. Under this logic there can never be an end to the acquisition and stockpiling of weapons.
This well done video, with a point — When Did Americans Become the Enemy — nicely shows the ridiculous (and really now kind of oppressive) nature of the Department of Defense’s giveaways to small town America.
The New York Times includes the argument made by in Los Angeles about the infamous North Hollywood shootout of 1997. Now seventeen years past, two bank-robbers armed with fully automatic assault rifles and kitted in bullet-resistant clothing, engaged the police in a firefight that was carried on television.
In the battle, they were killed. Eleven police officers were wounded.
However, the passage of time and history have shown this is an outlier. Not a sign of things to come but that kind of event that may happen once or twice in a lifetime. (For a laugh, re-watch the movie Predator 2. Released in 1990, it is cast in the Los Angeles of 1997, the beginning throwing the movie-viewer into a pitched battle in downtown Los Angeles, one between machine-gun and grenade armed “Colombians” and an, of course, out-gunned police detachment. Even the North Hollywood gun battle that actual year wasn’t as apocalyptic. And since, Predator 2’s Hollywood interpretation of a future LA looks increasingly anachronistic.)
Newly released information from the DoD shows that Los Angeles County police forces field nine Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles.
The Pentagon’s MRAP program was a consequence of the war based on fraud in Iraq. In essence, it was free money to arms manufacturers globally, if they could come up with vehicle impervious to roadside bombs and large buried mines.
The result of the program was a number of only roughly similar vehicles, the commonality being they were all huge, heavy, armored and expensive, ranging in price from around 700,000 to over 900,000 dollars.
Search Google images and you can see the various models like the MaxxPro or the Caiman, the latter coming in four-wheel and six wheel models, optimized for the US Marine Corps but now plainly visible in police departments.
The Davis MRAP is, I think, a MaxxPro. The link above shows the city of Guthrie’s Caiman. The town, population 10,600 or so, is in Logan County, Oklahoma.
These vehicles are a burden on the taxpayers of such towns, one of the reasons the DoD wanted to offload them while still maintaining ownership. It would seem they must be covered by a special kind of insurance and they must be maintained. Can just anyone in small town America maintain a Caiman MRAP? Where do the spare tires come from and what do they cost?
“The Council’s decision set off waves of concern among police officials across the state and highlighted the fact that California — whose crime rate, like those of many other states, is on the decline — has one of the highest concentrations of surplus military equipment in the nation,” writes the Times.
Ultimately, little will be done, except perhaps at the local level as in Davis, about MRAP distribution. Legislation to control or stop police acceptance of such things will die in Congress, as everything does.
And while the President has indicated he supports looking into whether or not DoD gear to police departments ought to be slowed, will not pursue it. The obvious reason, again, is it will immediately be a political millstone. The other side will predictably tell its base that the President, the socialist foreign-born tyrant, is trying to disarm the police.
The presence of the MRAP is not only a product of America’s Culture of Fear. It’s a WhiteManistan thing, too.
Don’t believe it. Look at all the pictures of them in police departments. Note the majority of faces, when shown.
It is within this context that the decision made by the city of Davis is a remarkable one. For various reasons, one mentioned previously,
occasionally other towns have decided they will disengage, too.
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09.06.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 12:50 pm by George Smith
On the cybersecurity for the benefit of the 0.1 percent beat, earlier this week on a story about JP Morgan Chase being hacked, allegedly by the Russians, probably criminals:
Former NSA/U.S. Cyber Command chief and cybersecurity consultant Keith Alexander said the success of such an attack highlights just how “vulnerable??? the U.S. financial sector is, and how future attacks could result in significantly more damage.
“If you can steal the data — if you can reach in that far and steal it — you can do anything else you want,??? Alexander told Bloomberg. “You collapse one bank and our financial structure collapses.???
The FBI and NSA are also investigating the attack, which left behind evidence of the use of a Russian data center.
This supposedly in retaliation for US sanctions levied over the conflict in the Ukraine:
“How would you shake the United States back? Attack a bank in cyberspace,??? Alexander [told a news service.]
Oh, drat! A bank has been attacked! The “financial structure” could “collapse,” like in 2007, when (ahem) the US government rushed in to save them all, including JP Morgan under Jamie Dimon because they were, er, too big to fail.
It is, as one might say, a likely story. Keith Alexander, and others at the top, have many of them.
And while the US polity has never really recovered from the Great Recession, corporate profits on Wall Street are back to an all time high. It has ended so well. So perhaps “the Russians” aren’t trying hard enough.
Speaking of JP Morgan Chase, this summer, from January in Davos where the wisest and wealthiest go every year to discuss who will be plundered next in the name of economic progress:
JPMorgan agreed last year to pay $13 billion to settle multiple government claims over dealings in mortgage securities at JPMorgan and at two banks it took over during the crisis, Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual.
It also settled other assorted cases for about $7 billion more. Those included allegations stemming from derivatives and electric power trading and sales of extra products to credit card customers.
Dimon said JPMorgan had “two really bad options” in choosing to settle or fight the cases. Going to court could have taken three or four years and the outcome could have been worse, he said.
Defending the financial system from collapse by cyberattack, a noble activity right up there with the in-house putting of anthrax in the mail to spur defense on bioterrorism.
So, explain why you’re working in cybersecurity? Rhetorical. As in banks and masses of taxpayers, that’s where the money is.
There’s no gold in keeping the crooks and malware out of the devices of lessers. The efficient process is to take their cash after it has been passed on to the government.
Bill Blunden, author of Behold a Pale Farce: Cyberwar, Threat Inflation; the Malware Industrial Complex and reader of this blog, had a letter in this week’s Times.
It addresses a story in which NATO leaders were announcing they were drawing up contingency plans against cyberattack:
You report that NATO leaders plan to update their collective defense policy to include a contingency for cyberattacks. The caveat of an agreement like this is that it assumes that NATO members are capable of identifying the actual source of an attack.
Leaked documents reveal classified government programs like Hacienda and corporate services like Ntrepid’s Internet Operations Network, which are leveraged to reroute network traffic and undermine digital trails. Furthermore, logistical signatures can be faked and forensic artifacts can be forged. In other words, when facing off against an organized, well-funded adversary, attribution is largely a lost cause.
Both national governments and private sector companies have made investments to ensure that this is the case. False flag attacks are as old as espionage and relatively simple to execute on the Internet.
In fact, they may not even be as complicated as a false flag attack.
Leaks have recently shown that Keith Alexander’s plumbers at the National Security Agency were responsible for knocking Syria off the Internet. While capable of solving the Rubik Cube puzzle in seconds they are apparently not beyond serious fucking up. Then keeping quiet about it knowing others will be blamed (no link, it’s from a Vox Media property cribbing wire news with clickbait title):
When Syria’s access to the internet was cut for two days back in 2012, it apparently wasn’t the fault of dissenting “terrorists,” as the Syrian government claimed: [It] was the fault of the US government. [In interview, Edward Snowden described what actually happend]: An elite hacking unit in the National Security Agency had reportedly been attempting to install malware on a central router within Syria — a feat that would have allowed the agency to access a good amount of the country’s internet traffic. Instead, it ended up accidentally [rendering] the router unusable, causing Syria’s internet connection to go dark.
At the time, the Assad government was blamed, accused of using the maneuver to close the internet to its citizens and others in the country’s ongoing civil war.
Repeated again, for effect: NSA elite hacking unit.
Mr. Alexander, we are well acquainted with your manner of wrenching the true cause the false way.
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09.01.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 1:19 pm by George Smith
Straight from the straight-faced reporting of the New York Times comes another bit on machine gun amusement parks in and around Las Vegas.
Why? For the pleasure of WhiteManistan, freedom and the universality of the amateur video spectacle of a 9-year-old child shooting her machine gun instructor dead.
If you insist on being hopeful, that what ails the “country” can be fixed, you have a hard time keeping that mask on right now.
The NYT explains. Yes, white machine gun enthusiasts live in California, where they must feel terribly oppressed:
“We get a lot of people from California and other states that [prohibit] guns, and Europe,??? Mr. Sessions [owner of the Vegas Machine Gun Experience] said. “They can own a basic firearm but not a fully automatic gun.???
The range’s most popular package is the SWAT, where for $169 a shooter can fire 50 rounds of the MP5 submachine gun, the M4 machine gun and any 9 millimeter pistol, always with a trained instructor. The deal also includes eye and hearing protection as well as a T-shirt.
“It gives them an opportunity to shoot a couple of machine guns and a handgun and they walk away pretty excited,??? Mr. Sessions said. “We get married couples who come in and split a package. It’s a thrilling experience they can share together that they couldn’t do anywhere else.???
“This is about having people have a good time and putting a smile on their face,” an owner of one of the ranges told the newspaper.
“You have to ease their fears and you do that by highlighting the safety features,??? another told the Times. “If they do anything wrong, you will be there to correct them.”
No, you can’t guarantee you will be there, as instructor Charles Vacca can no longer say.
There was nothing to do but retitle Dick Destiny’s Gun Nut Folk Tune as Suck on the Machine Gun. You can listen to it at SoundCloud. Be sure to read the description.
Yes, Ted Nugent has done machine gun amusements, too. YouTube has evidence. Perhaps this week’s column at World Net Daily will explain the tragedy of The Last Stop as the fault of there not being enough legal machine gun firing zones, combined with a liberal Saul Alinsky-inspired plan to make all machine gun lovers look dangerous and nuts while continuing to build the nefarious apparatus that will deprive all Americans of freedom.
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08.29.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 10:48 am by George Smith
Every time you think you’ve seen the worst from WhiteManistan, someone shows up with a camera video of a 9-year old child accidentally shooting the gun instructor dead at a machine gun amusement part firing range in Nevada.
Because machine gun tourism is an actual thing here.
And, boy, was I on the money with these. If you don’t understand, are driven to rage at the bleak nature and wish to add your thumb’s down, you need a psyche work up. Likable happy tunes about personal liberties can’t be used to describe WhiteManistan. Not by anyone decent.
“Suck on my machine gun!” Another evergreen Ted Nugent quote, one with the same appeal as the Ebola virus.
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