So where is the bin Laden dividend? Besides a week of celebration, the granting of access to the superdog on the trip — Cairo, and a story I declined to read in the New Yorker because it had been summarized so well everywhere else? Where did it go?
To Hollywood, of course. But you knew that [would happen.]
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, says he’s worried that the Obama administration will only be too happy to give sensitive details about the Navy SEAL mission to the Oscar-winning moviemakers behind the project.
White House spokesman Jay Carney suggests that King should have better things to do than complain about a movie.
King on Wednesday sought an investigation by the CIA and Pentagon inspectors general, wanting them to review the administration’s cooperation with director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal…
Peter King is regularly poison. But I’m going to side with him on this one, just for spite because this movie, if it becomes a hit, is just what the White House wants prior to the election.
The president really needs to be getting on with things, not giving leaks to Hollywood for the sake of a Patton-esque movie moment.
LOS ANGELES — The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency says contact with its experimental hypersonic glider was lost after launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the central California coast.
The glider was launched from this Minotaur IV rocket at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
The agency says in Twitter postings that its unmanned Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle-2 was launched Thursday atop a rocket, successfully separated from the booster and entered the mission’s glide phase.
The agency says telemetry was subsequently lost, but released no details.
A similar vehicle was launched last year and returned nine minutes of data before contact was prematurely lost …
The U.S. military is trying to develop technology to respond to threats around the globe at speeds of Mach 20 or greater.
“Respond to threats around the globe at speeds of Mach 20 or greater.”
Bomb the paupers in Somalia, Yemen or AfPak at Mach 20. That’s just what Americans clamor for.
This particular example of the empire’s dog crap was started in 2003, born of the pressing notion that the US needs to be able to bomb anyplace on the planet within a few minutes to an hour or two, max.
If you have gold and your ass don’t smell, we won’t bomb you straight to Hell.
Think of it as a Keynesian jobs program for our men in the arms manufacturing industry who get erections over building things that are painted black and don’t work. Thank heaven for these chaps.
Number of Americans currently on food stamps: about 46 million. Or about 1 in every 6 or 7 Americans require food assistance.
If you need a daily example from the empire on where the real parasitism is, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better example than the “Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle-2.”
“Good boy” alert, but a different flavor, the national security expert in training.
Today, the idea is floated that the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy has been treated maybe a little too shabbily by whatever constitutes the analytic community.
The idea is that it’s sort of bad to laugh at the Cult if you’re unwilling to take the time to write a scholarly piece that soberly dissects the issue.
Yeah, right.
Here’s the key line, republished from the Atlantic (where I dumped on the guy who wrote it, Patrick Disney, a couple weeks ago) at a blog you’d never normally read:
To be honest, not a lot of folks have taken the EMP threat seriously enough to give it a thorough rebuttal … I myself have tried to dive into the issue as part of my graduate research, imagining various scenarios in which an electromagnetic pulse attack could seriously threaten the United States, its allies or its military. And although I still maintain that EMP is, in general, a laughably overhyped “threat,??? the issue deserves better treatment from the analytical community than it has gotten.
According to [Newt Gingrich], EMP may be the greatest single threat facing America today.
Fresh stuff.
Today, there’s more because — apparently — no one paid enough attention the first time:
Under what circumstances would a terrorist be unsatisfied with an old-fashioned, direct nuclear strike against a city? If the goal is to crash the US economy, the terrorist could hit Wall Street …
The national security man-in-training thinking about what would create the most fear.
Hitting Wall Street. First time I’ve heard that. Today.
Ahem. Hitting Wall Street with electromagnetic pulses, be it through bombs, rays or “direct nuclear strike,” is always one of the first things that occurs to people conducting these exercises. Scramble the finances!
Here’s a discussion on non-nuclear electromagnetic pulsing, before the House Joint Economic committee back in 1997.
Years ago I put this on the web as part of the old Crypt Newsletter page and in it, a retired general with six Purple Hearts, Robert Schweizer, goes on about the threat to everything, singling out the “banking” systems:
You can use [electromagnetic pulse weapons] against the banking system so that currency transactions and financial transactions cannot be made … This can be done with going to RadioShack and buying the components. I have in my briefcase a catalog from one of the companies that is putting out these devices that says, “We will show you how to do it. Everything is included. If it isn’t, we will help you get it with diagrams or other assistance.” And, the prices are from $35 to $200 to buy components to go and do a number on Wall Street.
The kind of scenario that one could envision would be the van with a radio frequency weapon in it and no exterior signs or indicators or signatures on it, just driving in circles or up and down the canyons of Wall Street pulsing with this almost limitless capacity to generate high power pulses through the walls of the financial and banking institutions on let’s say, a Sunday morning at 2:30 a.m. And, you can make as many passes as you need.
Again, it’s non-nuclear, but even way back then, the argument touched on the servant’s obsession with protecting the territory of the plutocracy. Schweizer died a number of years ago never having seen a single example of what he was warning about.
But back to Disney, who argues:
But this year has witnessed a shift. The message about the impending blackout has softened. The jihadi boogeyman, who until recently was perched in a rowboat off the East coast ready to launch a scud, has vanished. The new EMP monster under the bed is: solar weather?
Well, no, not precisely. Bad solar weather was a convenience, one that was simply added to the pie. He knows this.
I tried to helpful, suggesting Roscoe Bartlett be put under a shroud on the floor of Congress to symbolically all the Americans who would be dead a year after the electricity vanished.
“March 23 should be designated as EMP Recognition Day,” wrote someone at the Heritage Foundation, at the time.
“An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) produced by the detonation of a nuclear weapon at high altitude or as the result of unusually powerful solar activity (often called severe space weather) could produce catastrophic destruction in the United States,” is the lede sentence.
As I’ve said, the bad solar weather hook is a convenience. And that’s because what the Cult of EMP Crazy chieftains want are only two quite specific things: more missile defense and to bomb Iran.
Tehran’s navy deploys ships to the Atlantic capable of launching long-range missiles. This is not a joke. This is a dress rehearsal for the day an EMP attack ends our way of life … A simple Scud missile, with a nuclear warhead, could be fired from an inconspicuous freighter in international waters off our coast and detonated high over the U.S.
It would wreak devastation on America’s technological, electrical and transportation infrastructure. Masked as a terrorist attack, Iran would have plausible deniability of any responsibility.
The Revolutionary Guards have successfully test-launched long-range ballistic missiles from a ship before, so the statement that they are arming some of the vessels with such missiles should worry the United States. An Iranian navy ship or any commercial vessel operated by the Iranians could easily launch a missile from outside the Gulf of Mexico and essentially cover most of the United States. Much more alarming is the fact that once in possession of a nuclear bomb, Iran could successfully carry out its promise to bring America to its knees by a successful electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on America.
“One nightmare scenario posed by the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States From Electromagnetic Pulse [Attack] was a ship-launched EMP attack against the United States by Iran, as this would eliminate the need for Iran to develop an ICBM to deliver a nuclear warhead against the U.S. and could be executed clandestinely, taking the U.S. by surprise …
Most seem to have noticed there’s been no dividend to the middle class. Bin Laden is offed and everything goes on as usual. The obvious wars continue. Secret operations escalate. The new secretary of defense and the head of the Pentagon go on television to complain that if the triggers on the terrible debt deal are ever allowed to activate, it will ruin them and threaten their ability to defend our freedoms from so many enemies.
All rubbish. They’re smart people and they know the only freedoms defended, not that everything is rotting out at home, are the freedoms to keep sending really big checks to the Lockheed Martins and Raytheons.
So where is the bin Laden dividend? Besides a week of celebration, the granting of access to the superdog on the trip — Cairo, and a story I declined to read in the New Yorker because it had been summarized so well everywhere else? Where did it go?
The White House is also counting on the Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal big-screen version of the killing of Bin Laden to counter Obama’s growing reputation as ineffectual. The Sony film by the Oscar-winning pair who made “The Hurt Locker??? will no doubt reflect the president’s cool, gutsy decision against shaky odds. Just as Obamaland was hoping, the movie is scheduled to open on Oct. 12, 2012 — perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost to a campaign that has grown tougher.
The moviemakers are getting top-level access to the most classified mission in history from an administration that has tried to throw more people in jail for leaking classified information than the Bush administration.
It was clear that the White House had outsourced the job of manning up the president’s image to Hollywood when Boal got welcomed to the upper echelons of the White House and the Pentagon and showed up recently — to the surprise of some military officers — at a C.I.A. ceremony celebrating the hero Seals.
Just like W., Obama is going for that “Mission Accomplished??? glow (without the suggestive harness). At least in this president’s case, though, something has been accomplished.
Dowd can’t quite put her finger on what that “something” was.
It’ll be a great movie to watch, no doubt, after putting the price of the ticket, pop corn and soda on the credit card because your bank account is empty. We got the bad guy. They’ll be catchy and inspirational lines — lines no one actually said — at climactic moments. Some big deals in Hollywood will get to be even bigger deals in the winner-take-all great society. Yay.
Lickspittles Talent Agency represents pundits and journalists, the good boys and girls. They’re those sufficiently camera and photogenic, chosen to “analyze” the issues of the day.
They can be counted on to laugh and tut-tut their way through the terrible news on any given day, safe in the knowledge that their position means they’ll never suffer any of the drawbacks of life out in the ruins.
Everyone in the video is a liberal but you’d be hard-pressed to find even one capable of naked rage or a wrinkled brow.
Snark and laughter at the ignoramuses in Washington, or the Tea Party — they’re all very good at that, though.
Some of the good boys hold multiple positions. They star on TV, they write for the biggest two newspapers in the country, or the two big supermarket glossy news mags, they are fellows at think tanks and professors at university.
They’re a great demonstration of another type of rampant inequality in the US, that of the rigged system, the winner-take-all society, that place were everything accrues to those who simply appear on television or some prime print real estate.
In a country as large and complicated as ours you’re asked to believe all the alleged wisdom on everything worth comment is to be found in a group of somewhat less than fifty people, all of whom earn never less than six figures every year.
Since the video is less than two minutes long, I couldn’t get to them all.
In order of of appearance: Jonathan Alter, Nicholas Kristof, Joan Walsh, James Fallows, Fareed Zakaria, Gene Robinson, Chris Hayes, Melissa Harris-Perry, Chris Matthews.
Add your own to the list in comments if you want.
If you want to know why people often vote for the worst among us, Lickspittles Talent Agency is one answer. You see them on tv, laughing and smirking at the empire crumbling down, and you’ll vote for anyone who appears to be a polar opposite, no matter the cost.
Spite is like that.
Kevin Coyne, the Englishman who wrote “Good Boy,” knew it way back in 1973.
A dose of horseshit from plutocrat Richard Clarke today, one of the fathers of cyberwar and cyberterror furor going back to the Clinton administration.
Clarke opines on the pages of a Boston newspaper. Very little of it is worth reading for value in 2011 America. Arguments about cyberwar are of no interest to the American middle class. National “defense” again it is without value.
What Clarke knows — he’s a smart guy — is that the serious attacks on the country have all been internal. And they have nothing to do with the bullshit meme of cyberwar.
The problems that plague the United States — economic failure on a breath-taking scale — have nothing to do with the issues he’s pursued for the last decade. It’s an astonishing thing to have been shown to be so wrong in the last three years.
The enemy was not the explosion of the wired world. And, in comparison to what has been done to the average well-being of Americans, theoretical cyberwars and Stuxnet viruses are trivial things.
In the US, most journalists on the cybersecurity/cyberwar beat act like insane people. They call up and always want to talk about what a cyberwar would look like and what can be done to forestall or mitigate it.
When I tell American reporters these things they act as if bitten by a poisonous snake coming out of the telephone line.
What? You question the authority of the Clarke’s and Mike McConnell’s of our great nation?
Nope, just asking for some grounding in the real world. Some perspective. Not the opinions from someone used to employing argument from totem pole authority over and over.
IMAGINE IF President Kennedy issued a nuclear war strategy in the 1960s that omitted the fact that we had nuclear weapons, B-52 bombers, and long-range missiles. What if his public strategy had just talked about fallout shelters and protecting the government? As absurd as that would have been, that is similar to what the Obama administration just did with regard to the nation’s cyber war strategy …
[Generals] have bemoaned the inability of the civilian departments and the private sector to defend critical US networks (like banking, electricity, and transportation) and have suggested the military may have to defend those networks.
During his confirmation hearings, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta voiced concern about the possibility of a “digital Pearl Harbor’’ that would cripple our electric power grid, banks, and transportation networks.
There it all is. The plutocrat obsession with attacks — always mentioning banking and electrical power — the former which gives away the concern that the paupers could come for their stuff. And so they need military grade protection.
You can ask people to mull over a simple thought experiment having to do with the US economy.
Yesterday, the news was very bad. The stock market tanked due to lack of faith in the stability and wisdom of the US government and economic health of the nation, so reliant upon it. The Chinese — who are often mentioned as those who could launch a cyberwar on the US — issued a dressing down on the matter.
As tightly intertwined as China is with the US, it absolutely must export to this country, of what possible value would be an attack from that country on our economy and financial system in cyberspace?
Assuming such a campaign could be mounted (and I doubt that it actually could), it would be a disaster for them. Yes, try to damage the purchasing power of your biggest customer even more.
That’s just rubbish thinking.
But that’s the Richard Clarke view. Clarke knows absolutely nothing of what matters to or affects average Americans.
Republicans have succeeded in imposing their vision of a country without real economic hope. Their message has no public appeal, and Democrats have had every opportunity to stand firm in the face of their irrational demands …
The Democratic Party, no less than the Republican Party, is at a very serious crossroads at this moment. For decades Democrats have stood for a capable, meaningful government – a government that works for the people, not just the powerful, and that represents everyone fairly and equally. This deal weakens the Democratic Party as badly as it weakens the country. We have given much and received nothing in return. The lesson today is that Republicans can hold their breath long enough to get what they want.
Sniveling will be adequate to describe all subsequent Dem appearances on TV.
Foolish news item — no link — on the Kingdom of iSteve having more cash on hand than the US Treasury affords me opportunity to tell my favorite hate-on-iKit story.
The genius of iSteve is partially in the offshore manufacturing of a trinket that destroyed the US recording industry. But that was only trivial business.
The real majesty in innovation, observed up close, was in how the iTrinket induced the drummer in DD band (he’s older than me) to throw away all his perfectly good vinyl and start freeloading the same stuff, except in lower fidelity, off Limewire until they closed that down. (This, a compulsion implanted in hundreds of millions of others.)
The sheer brilliance of this was squared by the observation that he uses iTrinkets as jukebox front ends for an expensive high living room stereo set which plays the music at much lower fidelity than the recordings he used to have in his vinyl record collection.
Apparently he can’t hear the difference. But I can. What was warm and inviting has an ever present patina of coldness attached to it now.
Yesterday, I smilingly suffered through some said-to-be-famous nerd playing Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean on a ukulele, delivered through this iKit stereo. It was so excruciating and annoyingly arch, I wanted to scream. But I bit the tongue. It had sold hundreds of thousands of copies through the iStore, I was informed. Or maybe I just dreamed that it had made that much and, instead, it had just been freeloaded from Limewire or some other pirate site before they were censured.
iKing, as I’ve written before, is perfectly positioned as mass artisan manufacturing for the future world plutocracy. It has all its stuff made by Chinese labor, material things whose primary value is that of status symbol baubles among lower upper class shoeshiners to the plutocrats.
The plutocrats, I’m guessing, still buy expensive tube amplifier sound systems. Or maybe not.
iKing, mass maker of phones which will run more apps than there are people in Pasadena. And at least ten of them involve putting iKit in your mouth or pretending it’s something that it isn’t which you haven’t the skill to actually use.
Ah, kids, I remember reading many years ago how iSteve developed the vaccination which granted immunity to smallpox … Wait, whadda you mean …
Little Tommy Friedman had a piece in Sunday’s NYT on how two investors/hedge fund managers going under the rubric, Americans Elect, were going to reinvent democracy on the Internet by spiking the primary races with new third party candidates.
Whenever Little Tommy writes that something is good for us, it’s just the opposite. If Little Tommy says something is right and good, it is wrong and probably evil, too.
Today’s frontpage story in the LA Times covers Americans Elect.
“Its status as a social welfare group has enabled it to keep private its financiers even as it tries to qualify as a new party,” reads the subhed on-line.
I’d say seeing “social welfare group” in this context means if you have a good rubber club, it’s time to keep it close by.
“Although it is attempting to qualify as a new party in California and other states, the group’s legal designation is that of a nonpolitical, tax-exempt social welfare organization,” writes Matea Gold for the LAT.
“Under that designation, Americans Elect has been able to keep private its financiers, raising questions about what forces are driving the massive undertaking.”
Yeah, sunlight being so bad for grass roots organizations striving to reinvent democracy. On the Internet.
“One of the main financial backers is [CEO] Elliot Ackerman’s father, Peter Ackerman, a private investment executive who made tens of millions of dollars working with junk bond trader Michael Milken in the 1980s,” continues the Times. “At least 11 of the 50 board members work in finance, including Kirk Rostron, who places investments for hedge fund managers and is one of a handful of publicly identified contributors to the group.”
DD visited the website. Here’s the “about” page. Overlooking the staged stuff, children are more honest and direct when explaining what’s up with the homework.
“Kellen Arno, an associate at Carlsbad-based Arno Political Consultants who is running the national field operation, said that in California alone it had employed 1,500 signature gatherers,” reads the Times.
I met one of them at the Pasadena Ralphs. He couldn’t or wouldn’t explain what they were about or even make clear the name of the organization backing him. Canvassing for signatures outside the local supermarket in Pasadena is virtually always the domain of big corporate assholes and/or those looking to set back democracy. Suckers sign up.
The right thing to do is the “talk to the hand” routine unless it’s Girl Scout cookies time. (I got asked for a Pabst once, too, by a homeless man. That was OK.)
Screw Americans elect. I recommend blowing them off the web with a good old-fashioned ddos strike.
Everyone needs another libertarian rich man’s collection of cats paws like they need a puff adder in the bedclothes. One Tea Party is just fine as is.
