Inspire magazine, while not meant to be an al Qaeda joke, has always been easy to brush off. Its been an example of how al Qaeda has had a serious problem with recruitment filled as it is with wishful thinkers and fantasies on terror that will never come true. Al Qaeda, for practical purposes, is operationally dead. As far as the 99 percent and middle class America is concerned, it poses no serious threat.
Al Qaeda has been whittled down by American might over a decade of war. The US employs more money and manpower hunting it than it needs to destroy a handful of medium-sized nations …
The al Qaeda men writing for Inspire have obviously never actually been to the United States.
They just wishfully think it would be good, and really terrorizing, if someone could like, uh, start a couple fires in wait for it Montana!
Inspire only shows two things that al Qaeda is virtually destroyed and that US war-on-terror reporters are crap.
The men who launched al Qaeda’s English-language magazine may have died in a U.S. missile strike last fall, but “Inspire” magazine lives on without them — and continues to promote jihadi attacks on Western targets, offering detailed advice on how to start huge forest fires in America with timed explosives …
Readers know — not a single William L. Shirer in the entire press army covering the war on terror.
Today:
WOODLAND PARK, Colo. – A stubborn and towering wildfire jumped firefighters’ perimeter lines and doubled in size in the hills overlooking Colorado Springs, forcing frantic mandatory evacuation notices for more than 9,000 residents, destroying an unknown number of homes and partially closing the grounds of the sprawling U.S. Air Force Academy.
Heavy smoke and ash billowed from the mountain foothills west of the city. Bright yellow and orange flames flared in the night, often signaling another home lost to the Waldo Canyon Fire, the No. 1 priority for the nation’s firefighters.
Interstate 25, which runs through Colorado Springs, was briefly closed to southbound traffic Tuesday. All told, officials said, evacuation orders affected as many as 32,000 residents …
Throughout the interior West, firefighters have toiled for days in searing, record-setting heat against fires fueled by prolonged drought. Most, if not all, of Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana were under red flag warnings, meaning extreme fire danger.
In central Utah, authorities found one woman dead Tuesday when they returned to an evacuated area, marking the first casualty in a blaze that consumed at least two dozen homes. Sanpete County sheriff’s officials said they hadn’t identified the victim, whose remains were found during a damage assessment of the 60-square-mile Wood Hollow Fire near Indianola.
The nation is experiencing “a super-heated spike on top of a decades-long warming trend,” said Derek Arndt, head of climate monitoring at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
Massive wildfires are a fact of life in the mid-west and west. Global warming has made them worse but they’ve always been part of the landscape. Sparks from cars, guns, lightning, arsonists, careless campers — many things touch them off.
Southern California has its red flag days every year. There is probably not anyone who lives here who hasn’t seen a helicopter dropping dyed fire retardant or been close to, if not too close, to a big wildfire.
A wildfire crawled through the south side of the San Gabriel mountains the first year I was here. The smoke plume from it dropped ash like a light snow on Pasadena for days. Coals set palms and rooftops on fire.
A smoke cloud from a wildfire near Venture turned the highway into Santa Barbara on a Sunday afternoon into what seemed like midnight to me and a friend a couple years ago.
Massive wildfires destroy lots of property. Casualties always remain low, hardest hit being the firefighters. People usually have time to get out of the way. Terrorizing is a poor way to describe them.
Firestorms that incinerate cities have been caused by massive strategic bomber raids. They were the property of the old US Army Air Force, Curtis LeMay and Bomber Harris of the United Kingdom during World War II.
The bats were kitted with white phosphorus encapsulated in a decaying gel strapped to a foot, put on racks, and packed into a bomb
which opened in mid-air. The only test resulted in a building burned down at the project site after an experimental bomb was released over a target. The bats flew out, declined to go where they were supposed to, flew back to roost at the base — their home, and set a fire.
The bat bomb’s scientist, and the bats, had roots in Pasadena.
“Fletch grinned when faced with my mastiff,” it reads. (The greater mastiff bat is the largest bat in the US.)
Continuing, from Bat Bomb:
(Fletch) had never seen a bat that large. “Man,” he said appreciatively. “Just think what Doc could do with a plane load of those puppies. Where’d you get ‘im from, Africa?”
My friend Don had a wonderful library. Books were a big part of his life and I have been trying to give the many fine ones in it new homes. All those worth having and reading, and there are many, will not be wasted on public school libraries or other similar “charity,” since the actual valuing of books in such traditional places is well and truly dead.
One of the great finds is a two volume set, Reporting WWII. It anthologizes a large number of American news reports from old foreign correspondents hardly anyone, except for other journalists, remember: A. J. Liebling, Bill Shirer, Ernie Pyle and many others.
William Shirer, from Berlin in September of 1940:
The statement of the High Command, obviously forced upon it by Hitler himself — he often take a hand in writing the official communiques — deliberately perpetrates the lie that Germany has only decided to bomb London as a result of the British first bombing Berlin. And the German people will fall for this, as they fall for almost everything they’re told nowadays. Certainly, never before in modern times — since the press, and later the radio, made it theoretically possible for the mass of mankind to learn what was going on in the world — have a great people been so misled, so unscrupulously lied to, as the Germans under this regime.
[Most Germans] I speak to are beginning for the first time to wonder why the invasion of Britain hasn’t come off. They’re still confident the war will be over by Christmas. But then, until a fortnight ago they were sure it would be over by winter … I have won all my bets with Nazi officials and newspapermen about the date of the Swastika appearing in Trafalgar Square and shall — or should — receive from them enough champagne to keep me all winter. Today, when I suggested to some of them another little bet so they could win back some of their champagne, they did not think it was funny. Nor would they bet.
Hitler made a surprise speech here this afternoon, the occasion being the opening of the Winterhilfe — winter relief — campaign. Like the Volkswagen, the cheap “people’s car” on which Germans are paying millions of marks a month in installments though the factory which is supposed to make them is actually manufacturing only arms, the Winterhilfe is one of the scandals of the Nazi regime, though not one German in a million realizes it. It is obvious in a country without unemployment not much “winter relief” is necessary. Yet the Nazis go on wringing several hundred million marks each winter out of the people for “winter charity” and actually use most of the money for armaments or party funds.
There was a short time when the Reich took over Norway — the same is true of Holland — when Germans might have succeeded in winning the goodwill of the people there, who saw it was helpless to struggle against the overwhelming military power of Hitler. But the Germans did everything possible to forfeit goodwill and in a few weeks the sentiment changed. Now in all the occupied countries the Germans are bitterly hated. No decent Norwegian or Dutchmen will have anything to do with them.
The United States isn’t Nazi Germany in 1940. There are also exactly zero William Shirer’s in the national press corps. Life is bleak, though. Forty six million are on food stamps but the United States has the biggest military in world history.
And we get press reports from the war on terror, in ludicrous style similar to anything that so annoyed Shirer in 1940.
A Norwegian man who received terrorist training in Yemen is “operational” and is likely awaiting instructions to attack Western targets, according to a report by The Associated Press, which was confirmed by an ABC News intelligence source.
The AP reported today that officials from three European security agencies said that the man, who was not identified, is in his 30s, a convert to Islam and had completed training from the al Qaeda offshoot AQAP. One of the officials said the man was believed to still be in Yemen, but said that he has no criminal record and would be able to move freely across borders.
“Not even a parking ticket,” the official said, according to the AP. “He’s completely clean and he can travel anywhere.”
A terrorist. From Norway. Who went to Yemen and is now trained to hit us. He has not even a parking ticket, delivered in dead seriousness. Certainly this man must be of the most serious menace to American society. Perhaps he will finally be able to get through with an underwear bomb.
The White House on Monday promised to work with Turkey and other NATO allies to hold Syria “accountable” for what American officials have described as the deliberate downing of a Turkish military jet, apparently in international airspace …
“We stand in solidarity with Turkey, a key U.S. ally,” spokesman Jay Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One. “We will work with Turkey, and other partners, to hold the Assad regime accountable …”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced the shoot-down as a “brazen and unacceptable act” after discussing the incident by telephone with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Sunday.
“It is yet another reflection of the Syrian authorities’ callous disregard for international norms, human life, and peace and security,” Clinton said in a statement.
No matter what’s going on, Michelle and I make time to check in with each other — as partners and as parents.
I call it my Michelle time.
I’m lucky to have her by my side on the campaign trail — and I can’t think of a better guest for my upcoming dinner with supporters.
It’s most likely the last dinner we’ll do together on this campaign, and tomorrow night is the last chance to enter — donate $4 or whatever you can to be automatically entered to join us:
https://donate.barackobama.com/Meet-us-for-Dinner
Thanks,
Barack
From the original sticker price of five dollars, price drop to four. That’s a 20 percent savings, folks! You know you can’t pass up that deal.
From yesterday:
Not coincidentally, various arms of the DNC and the Obama campaign have filled e-mail in boxes with increasingly hysterical solicitations for money. All of these are wrapped around the truth that the Citizens United decision have given the GOP an unlimited supply of crazy billionaire sugar daddies …
The Obama campaign used to ask for 5 dollar micro-payments. Perhaps because of donation fatigue in the mailing list it has been ratcheted down to 4 dollars. But they still apparently believe crowd-sourced serial micro-collection is an answer to oligarchs.
Eat it. Crowd-sourced fund-raising against the little army of American plutocrats. What losers. Seeming almost like a good idea once, notice the almost , then destroyed by reality as the fancy of people who drank way too much of the Kool-Aid on the “social networking” power of masses of nobodies without mega-money, like me, on mailing lists. And it’s irritating.
Just this afternoon, in case being lined up for crowd-milking everyday is easy to overlook:
Hey George —
I just wanted to make sure you saw Barack’s email from this morning. This is the new reality we’re operating under in this election.
I know we can go up against all that spending on the other side and still win. But it’s going to take all of us.
Please chip in what you can today:
https://donate.barackobama.com/June-Deadline
Tonight is also your last opportunity to enter for the chance to have dinner with Barack and me sometime soon. Your donation today will automatically enter you.
Thanks so much for whatever you’re able to give today. It matters.
-Michelle
Irritating, squared. Because anyone with a lick of sense knows that flunky robots write and send these mails, not real human beings. So much heartfelt effort — all three minutes of it.
Today the Grenades feature salutes American equating of merciless finger dexterity with quality. YouTube makes the giant weenie roast of the vanities easy, furnishing thousands of home videos of young people playing guitar along to their favorite heavy metal wanking tunes, proof of triumph in the culture of lickspittle.
Great minds work here. Everyone picks the same tunes to wank off on. Why not? With the music playing in the background as one wanks few care if you’re just another robot in a herd of at least one hundred thousand. If you’re strong enough to tolerate more than a minute of the samples of “the best” you’ll find the YouTube virtuosos often skip parts and flub notes when they think the record is covering them. And virtually none of them have the personality to even look at the camera, if they put their head in the video at all. But, boy, take note they shot themselves in HD!
Modern technology, like the iPhone in the kickoff video, abets. It is specifically made so you can play along with your favorite wanking tune, dub into it, and instantly upload to YouTube.
All in five minutes or less. You can easily see why iJunk, much like Facebook, makes the lame to see and the blind to talk.
A couple decades ago many ninnies said all the tech infrastructure would power democracy of expression. A DD Blog No-Prize for you if you can explain without smirking how the amplification and greasing of witless imitation until it drowns everything else out fits into it. Because make no mistake, YouTube’s Google-powered search specifically rewards slavish rote copying. Video-makers depend on it.
So here we go! (You can rate the excellence of the grenades by the amount of time they take you to wish to poke the player in the eye with a blunt stick. The shorter, the better.)
More bootlicking for iJunk.
This, a very special composite video, showing girls are just as pitiless and rote as guys. That’s progress of some kind. Hang around, if you can, to 3:34, where one of the lasses puts the pick in her mouth during the drum solo.
It’s in HD!
Totally ear-splitting and tinny but over half a million views. I couldn’t get that in ten years.
The same tune, just less ear-splitting. About now you’re wishing Eric Johnson had been run over by a car when he was ten.
A dog barks in this one. How long did it take for you to wish it had savagely attacked him?
Mitt Romney has been able to turn being an unprincipled liar into an asset. He’s done it because the mainstream media finds the sheer volume of his mendacity too complicated to explain. It’s just easier to publish it without comment than come to an editorial decision that would sever the Gordian knot — the equivalent of a tag-line stating “Readers and viewers are warned that everything Mitt Romney says is untrue including the words ‘a,’ ‘and’ and ‘the.'”
And Mitt Romney is not a stupid man. He’s surely noticed which is why he’s not deterred. He has total of control of a tactic that can put him in the White House.
What is the proper response when, even after it’s pointed out that the candidate is not telling the truth, he keeps doing it? Romney actually has a telling rejoinder for this. When a reporter challenged his oft-stated assertion that President Obama had made the economy worse (factually, not correct), he denied ever saying it in the first place. It’s a lie on top of a lie.
Now, it’s certainly true that on the campaign trail, facts can be stretched in many different directions and both parties, including President Obama, frequently make arguments that are misleading, lacking in context or simply false. But it is virtually unheard of for a politician to lie with such reckless abandon and appear completely unconcerned about getting caught …
Romney has figured out a loophole one can lie over and over, and those lies quickly become part of the political narrative, practically immune to “fact-checking”. Ironically, the more Romney lies, the harder it then becomes to correct the record.
It’s also true that one can repost such Guardian comment columns ten thousand times in social media and it won’t make a bit of difference.
Mitt Romney could be president because we deserve him.
iJunk, ensconced as the pricey consumer electronics equivalent of PowerPoint, selling the idea that just be jerking off for five minutes and uploading to YouTube, you can rule the world. Think I’m exaggerating? This, in my e-mail, today — how to make yourself sound like a totally lame imitation of Kraftwerk in 1977.
If Apple thought it could get away with having people on television suck on a piece of iKit shaped like a penis it would probably have FoxConn make some. See, one of the most annoying things about iJunk is the fetishism. One of the fetishes, and a major selling point, is the illusion created that one can rule the world from the palm of your hand. Just whip your fingers over a couple apps, easier than the five finger exercise.
You see this in the Beeb’s Sherlock, a show I like very much IN SPITE of its pandering commercial Apple tie ins.
For the show, there are only two infallibles. The star, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. And the iPhone.
The iPhone is the aim point for all texting between good and evil — the detective, his colleagues and adversaries. Whenever another computer shows up, it’s an iPad.
And one can do anything on those, too, so why does Apple even makes more than one device, since they’re all the same kind of magic wand?
In the climax of season two — The Reichenbach Fall — the start is given over to Holmes nemesis Jim Moriarty who invades the Tower of England during peak tourism hours, engineers a break in at the Bank of England and a prison break at Pentonville — all by swiping his iPhone apps — while he’s listening to his iTunes and chewing gum.
Straight off I wanted Holmes to kill the guy out of hand.
It can bring Britain to its knees because scandalous photos and careless talk are on its disk. It’s a very special piece of iKit, booby-trapped with multiple explosives charges. The finest computer, forensic and safe-cracking technicians in the world cannot penetrate it. Only the intellect of Sherlock Holmes can manage it, deductively reasoning that Adler has made the first four letters of her new boyfriend’s name, his, the password.
There is now something called the gTar, a prototype semi-guitar that serves as a docking station for an iPhone.
Do you hear any rock and roll? Do you hear anything at all that sounds like what Leo Fender made? Or Les Paul? Are there anyone but nerds in the video?
The gTar, an instrument with the feature that it comes with no acoustic capabilities at all, not even requiring the strings to be tuned, which I can tell you is important — psycho-acoustically and feel-wise — in playing an instrument with virtually zero native tone, is not even cheap by the standards of guitars for beginners. Yet iJunk groupies are all over it judging by the project’s funding success.
Indeed, one cannot turn around without seeing iPhones as the Swiss Army knife of life.
This — in today’s mail — on using your iJunk as a digital guitar amp, studio and hit producing machine all in one. Everything sounds perfect but sterile, like fragments of tunes you’ve heard on all the best-selling records, ever, but not quite identical because of digital copyright issues.
There is something missing from the frictionless lowest common averaging technology with pretty imagery of iOS app — humanity. This lack optimizes it for instant gratification, HD video commercials and soundtracks made spasmodically in minutes, uploaded by the tens of thousands to YouTube.
The player’s face is never seen, only the gear, the iJunk and GarageBand icons and trademarks. His blue sneakers are the only personality in the damn thing. I’ve become so averse to iJunk and its culture of lickspittle, just the idea of using GarageBand or Logic Pro for anything gives me a mild headache.
Nearly an hour after his “Every Town Counts” bus tour was scheduled to make a pit stop Saturday at a Quakertown-area Wawa where dozens of protesters and prominent Democrats had set up camp Mitt Romney finally pulled up and bought a sandwich.
At a different Wawa.
That left hundreds of people and dozens of protesters including former Gov. Ed Rendell and former Democratic U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy standing in vain at a Wawa off the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s Quakertown exit, waiting for a bus that was actually four miles away …
After ordering a meatball “sub” whoops, make that a meatball “hoagie,” he corrected himself Romney shook hands with the dozen or so customers who happened to be inside the store and had his picture taken with a group of boys from a local baseball team …
The crowd in the coal town was largely older, polite and sparing in ovations. Phil Jeffries, a funeral director from Weatherly, brought a camera and a concern for small businesses to the rally. A Republican who has voted Democratic before, he thinks Romney could clear the red tape that trips up entrepreneurs.
[It’s worth interjecting that funeral directors are not entrepreneurs in the sense of the discussion. They run depression and recession-proof “businesses.”]
Still two hours before Mitt Romney stood in front of a lone microphone atop a grassy mound just outside the entrance to historic Cornwall Iron Furnace on Saturday, the Burtko family of North Cornwall Township was bubbling over with excitement to see the Republican likely to face Barack Obama for the presidency in the fall.
“It’s not every day something like this happens,” Kelly Burtko said as her children, Emily, 9, and Zachary, 7, watched her mother answer questions.
Kelly’s husband, Barry, said he had heard George W. Bush speak near Wilkes-Barre in front of 20,000 people as he campaigned for a second term in 2004 …
Lebanon businessman Ed Kercher said he was “very impressed.” Romney was a more impressive speaker in person than the candidate he had watched on TV, he said.
“This is the most important election we’ve ever had coming up,” Kercher said.
The stories show what the expected — supporters, older, white and non-college educated Republicans who say they have voted Democratic, in the past. Such assertions are “likely stories,” not at all uncommon for interviews of this nature. It’s only human.
However, the next video — tipped to me at Pine View Farm — illustrates a Dem problem. Pale old white loser hacks, in this case ex-Ohio governor Ted Strickland, are the best to be found?
Young people wouldn’t listen to this guy. Older white people certainly didn’t. Strickland lost to Fox News celebrity and Bill O’Reilly stand-in John Kasich. And there’s no reason anyone else would, either.
The video is a grenade and the DNC never gets these slowly desiccating dog turds off the stage.
It’s painful to watch Strickland, who nobody knows — anyway, stutter his way through a poorly framed message, talking about saving the “auto industry in Ohio,” when everyone naturally thinks, “Detroit, Michigan.” You just have to ask yourself, “What’s wrong with the guy? Can he not even write and deliver one vigorous 90-second rebuttal?”
The answer is no, he can’t.
The party won’t field good people. The only inspirational man is the President and after that the talent goes shallow fast.
It’s one of the reasons, along with the reactionary vote that will hit him due to the disastrous economy in the last four years, I believe the president can easily lose to the unprincipled liar, the astonishingly unlikeable and impossible to admire (unless you’re just like him) person that is Mitt Romney.
Takes his campaign tour to where everyone was fired, my old homeland, southeastern rural Pennsy:
WEST HAZELTON, Penn.Mitt Romney takes his bus tour to Pennsylvania Saturday, hoping to turn the focus back to the economy after a day in which his message was largely overshadowed by President Obama’s immigration decision.
The Republican nominee will begin his day by touring a casting and machine company in Weatherly, located in a rural eastern part of the state. He’ll then make his way west, stopping at a WaWa convenience store in Quakertown and an old iron furnace in Cornwall that is a national historic landmark.
Mitt Romney has nothing in common with the people of the area. The idea of this man at a WaWa in Quakertown, also home of the Q-Mart bazaar, is almost enough to induce tetany. (Follow the link)
Do you think candidate Romney would look good in this? You used to be able to buy them where he’s campaigning.
Romney’s campaign stop is slightly reminiscent of part of Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, about football-obsessed Odessa, TX and the Permian High football team. Staunchly conservative in values, the area was destroyed economically by the mid-Eighties and Bissinger tells the story, since watered down and over-simplified in a movie and television series, of how elevation of high school football to a level dwarfing many collegiate programs held the place and people together.
Through Friday Night Lights Bissinger infrequently cites Pennsylvania, Ohio and a couple other states where high school football holds places together, too, just as in Texas.
The American Dream, Bissinger writes, is destroyed but in these places there is Firiday night football.
Through it the people can still have the very special — an event, a shared experience of tremendous emotion, athletic achievement, and vicarious thrills, anodyne from September to near Christmas, if the team made the playoffs, to a shriveled, diminished life of no future and no opportunities the rest of the year.
Friday Night Lights takes place during the elder Bush’s run for President against Democrat Michael Dukakis.
Nothing has changed between then and now except for the fact that the American economy is much much worse for all except those at the very top.
Unsurprisingly, Odessa was no place for the Democratic Party.
In Odessa, Michael Dukakis was the candidate for “homos,” a “minority of sexual perverts.” He was a socialist who ignited “fear that he would take away the rights of people to protect themselves against violent intruders, fear that he would ruin the economy, fear that the only people who would beneift from his administration would be the poor, while they, the hardworking guts of the country got sold down the river.”
Familiar?
In the book the elder Bush makes a brief campaign appearance in the Odessa area. George H. W. Bush, like Mitt Romney in West Hazelton today, was no more like the people than the all-destroying Martians were like the narrator in H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. (To be fair, Bush had lived in Odessa for a short period after WWII when he was in the independent oil business.)
“Their belief in [George H. W. Bush] seemed ironic, even crazy,” writes Bissinger in Friday Night Lights.
“[The economy] of Midlands-Odessa had fallen apart during the Reagan-Bush administration, and it was hard to think of any other single area of the country that had suffered as much … The statistics were numbing. in 1986 the unemployment shot up to 20 percent. The number of bankruptcies filed with the federal court in Midland shot up 65 percent.”
In the book, the arrival of the elder Bush is met with near hysteria, virtually, but not quite, the same support inspired by the Permian High football team.
“[Bush] created the image of a country that was still as good, as fundamentally sound as it had been in the fifties, when [he] and thousands of others had watched the American Dream blossom before their eyes …” writes the author.
That place no longer existed, Bissinger dryly observed. The GOP candidate created an “amazing illusion.” The people of Odessa wanted and needed it, anything to lift the spirit and assuage the desperation.
And that’s what Mitt Romney, an unprincipled liar and brazenly unlikeable oligarch from the upper atmosphere of the ruling class, works in eastern PA.
Size of check recently written to Romney campaign by kook right wing billionaire — $10 million.
That would buy most of what’s left north of Philly between Quakertown and West Hazelton.
“Some Romney advisers sound especially bullish, with one positing that a big win by their side is now more likely than a narrow Obama victory …” — TIME
Coincidentally, Paul Krugman has a blog post on Texas and the state recession caused by a collapse in oil prices and the S&L banking scandal in the late Eighties, the period in Friday Night Lights.
Bissinger devotes nearly a chapter to discussing the people and the economy of Odessa in relation to it.
