02.22.11
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Extremism, Ted Nugent at 4:58 pm by George Smith
DD is surprised it took Ted Nugent almost a week to begin hating on the Wisconsin teachers. His contempt for unions, particularly those serving the middle class of his old home state, Michigan, is well known. And his loathing of auto-workers is probably one of a few reasons the person once known as the Motor City Madman is now living near Waco, TX.
While he can still fill the occasional theater near Detroit, most of the people in the state no longer have any use for him.
A few minutes ago, from Uncle Ted, at the WaTimes:
So many teachers in Milwaukee have called in sick to protest this widely supported bill that Milwaukee schools have shut down. The teachers should be fired or at least forced to sit in the corner and wear dunce hats and apologize for this juvenile stunt … Wanting their fantasy cake of unaccountability and eating it too, the unions and their ignorant, brainwashed sheep are whining and protesting …
What kind of lowlifes would call in sick when they are not? Look and see.
Previously, I’ve tried to explain the spite of Ted Nugent. Most of it revolves around his disappointing story. His career declined, as so many do, through no fault of his own. So he reinvented himself as a blighted old white man with a bullhorn.
A couple months ago, I described it thusly:
Suggesting churches give up what he implies is loot in gold and silver is an unusually new and surprising low, even for someone like Ted Nugent.
When I started the Ted Nugent tab … I wondered what had shriveled him so much.
Here was a guy who had everything in the Seventies (and for a chunk of the Eighties). And as his career declined he folded like cardboard. Unable to reinvent himself gracefully in old age, he turned into a mouthpiece for the extreme right’s most vicious social policies, nothing more than a convenient gasbag for the Washington Times, or someone good for three minutes on Fox News.
Nugent fled Michigan for Crawford, Texas, starting a column for the Waco Tribune, where he was also run off for being uncharitable and rude.
Those who have read the entries on Nugent in this blog have seen the man in his words, ranting on obscure Internet radio programs and television shows. There he is, the strict law-and-order dude and mighty hunter, complaining bitterly and vituperatively over trivial troubles that were entirely his own doing in California. Opining that he’s been victimized by various conspiracies.
What motivates Ted Nugent is vindictiveness … He never recovered from losing his place at the top of the heap, a process all rock stars must inevitably go through. Many handle it with struggle and embarrassment. Others deal with it quietly and gracefully. A few die from it.
However, Ted Nugent decided he’d take it out on the values of the people who put him in the arenas during the high tide of classic rock. And he lost even more, gaining only a reputation as a panderer for people with fortunes which make his place in life look very small.
.
Here are some Ted quotes, amazingly published for Labor Day:
Unionized public employees with their sweetheart deals at taxpayer expense are one significant reason why some cities and states are in such dire financial condition.
Unionized public employees have better deals than the taxpayers who are funding them. Federal employees make twice as much as their private-sector peers. This is all beyond bizarro.
===
Unionized public employees with their sweetheart deals at taxpayer expense are one significant reason why some cities and states are in such dire financial condition.
And here’s some standard Ted contempt for auto-workers:
Taxpayers should not be held accountable to bailout the automobile industry or any other industry for that matter. There is constitutional authority for the decades of poor management decisions, forecasting and labor deals that have put GM, the U.S.’s largest automobile maker, perilously close to going belly up.
======
While the [United Auto Workers] may believe GM, Ford and Chrysler are in business to provide automotive workers a salary and other costly benefits, the reality is that car companies are in business to make a profit. Period. Write that down.
The UAW’s costly benefit demands over the years coupled with weak automotive management who historically caved into the UAW’s demands put the automotive bolts, so to speak, to the shareholders and, to a certain degree, has put the Big Three on the path to possible extinction.
====
Bailing out GM with billions of taxpayer dollars is the wrong approach. GM is not too big to fail. What GM may be is too unprofitable to stay in business.
Have you gotten the idea that Ted’s pretty much a lost cause in Michigan?
It is not just the middle class Nugent despises. There’s literally no one (or nothing) too small or weak for him to hate on.
Here Nugent goes after cats. Seriously.
Predictably, here he attacks Social Security.
Here Nugent hates on some old lady whose methods, he says, are used to attack him. Really.
And here’s Ted as an MC for Don Blankenship, Coalstock and Massey Energy. A few months later all those men died in a Massey mine and Blankenship became one of the most vilified corporate figures in the country.
It’s impossible to exaggerate the wild mean spirit of Ted Nugent since he limns it so well all by himself.
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02.17.11
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Made in China at 12:37 pm by George Smith
Fresh off the news, President Obama is bowing before consulting the two smartest men in the world today, Nobel laureate/Pulitzer prize winner Mark Zuckerberg and King of All Music, Steve Jobs.
The goal: How to create more jobs.
Jobs, whose name is most appropriate because he has made many many jobs in China, will probably tell the President the problem is the large number of no-skill sitting around people in the US.
“Stop counting them, Mr. President!” he may advise. Future growth lies in more Harmonica or You’re Fired! apps and what not, particularly now that one of the rival cell phones brags it has 60,000 of them. Sixty thousand!
Nobel laureate/Pulitzer winner Mark Zuckerberg may tell the President that to create jobs … we must unleash the creative power of every American to make more social networking sites.
Neither of these guys are interested in making jobs for all these baggy and lumpy no-skill sitting around people. Which is only right.
Did you know Dick Destiny is on Facebook? I look just like Brett Favre.
Ha-ha! Those Facebook peeps are so clever.
Did you know that it’s easy to create a fake account of someone who’s not you on Facebook? And that if the person who is not you discovers it and complains by sending e-mail to Facebook they don’t even read it until the Attorney General of a state gets involved?
These are all just minor slip-ups, however. If they weren’t, Mark Zuckerberg would not be a Nobel laureate and Pulitzer winner.
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02.15.11
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 2:40 pm by George Smith
Unsurprisingly, more damning e-mails recovered from HBGary Federal by the Anonymous hacking group put to the lie CYA declarations that only one rogue employee, Aaron Barr, was involved.
Hundreds of e-mail show Barr’s collaboration with employees at Berico Technologies and Palantir.
Palantir, naturally, stands to lose something from this scandal.
It’s website brags about how the company was started by computer experts who value privacy and civil liberties above all. A claim that can now be regarded as insincere eyewash in light of the current attack on WikiLeaks/Glenn Greenwald scandal.
In a denial issued soon after the scandal began to break in the mainstream news, Palantir CEO Alex Karp issued a statement — here — attempting to separate the firm from the imbroglio.
Karp, on the matter:
Palantir Technologies provides a software analytic platform for the analysis of data. We do not provide – nor do we have any plans to develop – offensive cyber capabilities. Palantir Technologies does not build software that is designed to allow private sector entities to obtain non-public information, engage in so-called “cyber attacks??? or take other offensive measures. I have made clear in no uncertain terms that Palantir Technologies will not be involved in such activities. Moreover, we as a company, and I as an individual, always have been deeply involved in supporting progressive values and causes. We plan to continue these efforts in the future.
The right to free speech and the right to privacy are critical to a flourishing democracy. From its inception, Palantir Technologies has supported these ideals and demonstrated a commitment to building software that protects privacy and civil liberties.
The hacking group Anonymous provides a searchable database of HBGary Federal e-mails here.
Using it, it is an uncomplicated process to uncover Palantir employees working on the proposal to attack WikiLeaks, coordinated with the Hunton & Williams legal firm, the deal started by Palantir connecting the group with the Washington lawyers. The aim — to pitch the attack capability to Bank of America or, more broadly, apparently corporate America as a grand market ripe for services attacking critics.
Some samples, the first on the attack proposal from Palantir employee Matthew Steckman:
On Dec 3, 2010, at 8:52 AM, Matthew Steckman wrote:
> Updated with Strengths/Weaknesses and a spotlight on Glenn Greenwald…thanks Aaron!
>
This next e-mail, from an employee — John Woods, at Hunton & Williams:
On Dec 2, 2010, at 3:55 PM, “Woods, John” > wrote:
Richard and I am meeting with senior executives at a large US Bank tomorrow regarding Wikileaks. We want to sell this team as part of what we are talking about. I need a favor. I need five to six slides on Wikileaks – who they are, how they operate and how this group may help this bank. Please advise if you can help get me something ASAP. My call is at noon.
Here is another, describing the proposal as an “A Team doc”:
A-team doc
We need to blow these guys away with descriptions of our capabilities, IP, and talent. Make them think that we are Bond, Q, and money penny all packaged up with a bow.
Matthew Steckman
Palantir Technologies | Forward Deployed Engineer
And there is an e-mail indicating the project was green-lighted through Palantir CEO Alex Karp:
Apologies for taking this long to get back to you. Eli and I had to run this way up the chain (as you can imagine). The short of it is that we got approval from Dr. Karp and the Board to go ahead with the modified 40/30/30 breakdown proposed. These were not fun conversations, but we are committed to this team and we can optimize the cost structure in the long term (let’s demonstrate success and then take over this market :)).
The “40/30/30 breakdown” refers to the way profits would be shared on any deal through Hunton & Williams.
And here is a haphazard e-mail discussing pricing for the attack proposal. It varies from 2 million to 200,000/month.
Rob Rosenberger at vmyths/security-critics adds a post on the Barr matter, as well as another, here.
He writes:
Now comes a new era for the computer security industry … outrightalleged criminal activity within its ranks …
The global computer security arena is now so profitable and so willing to prostitute itself — with customers so eager to spend money and reporters so willing to write stories — that it shouldn’t surprise us to find outrightalleged criminals with a digital store front.
Addendum: Alert readers may raise their eyebrows. It’s been a long time since anyone referred to me and used my middle initial.
And the only reason it was employed on the Internet was because the publisher of my book on virus-writers insisted upon it in 1994. A few years later the man ran off to live in Belize and seemingly vanished by jumping up his ass.
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02.09.11
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Stumble and Fail at 11:39 am by George Smith
Palantir Technologies, a private sector spying firm for corporate America, got pantsed, along with others (HBGary Federal, Berico Technologies), today for targeting Anonymous, WikiLeaks and Glenn Greenwald.
The firm doesn’t realize the unsympathetic bad press about to fall on it for putting Salon’s Greenwald in their confidential slide presentations here.
If anything, the story emphasizes the utterly creepy and rotted nature of such companies and the people they work for, in this case apparently Bank of America. Which is already a much hated American corporate institution.
“Traditional responses will fail; we must employ the best investigative team, currently employed by the most sensitive of national security agencies,” reads one exposed company e-mail, presumably referencing the planning of a private sector-led attack on WikiLeaks.
If anything, it makes one want to cheer Julian Assange’s promise to expose a big US bank. If this still holds true, he should do so with even greater speed and vigor.
The picture now in play is of the squealing pig private intelligence firms, crying to US law enforcement for protection and redress, after proposing and launching a campaign against the hacking group Anonymous and WikiLeaks.
“Palantir was built by technologists serious about protecting privacy and civil liberties,” reads the company website.
So planning to spread disinformation and bad rumors about Glenn Greenwald, who writes almost exclusively about civil liberties being trampled, has something to do with protecting civil liberty?
Ha-ha. Good luck with that one.
Take a look at these fellows. You’d have to go a long way to find a bigger vanity-riddled bunch of nerd dandies.
They all wear the same team frock!
More at Firedoglake and Digby.
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02.08.11
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Extremism, Stumble and Fail, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 9:01 am by George Smith
This quote from the New York Times piece channeling a recent article in the journal, Science, is all you need to know:
“With 15 to 20 percent of biology teachers teaching creationism,??? he continued, “this is the biggest failure in science education. There’s no other field where teachers reject the foundations of their science like they do in biology.???
When I was in high school in the Seventies in very conservative Pine Grove, PA, this was not an issue.
One might say it has evolved, driven by extreme religious right GOP efforts to use science as a wedge issue, not only because its findings conflict with its ideology but because people can be rallied by insinuating their faith is under attack by the other side which believes the hated “elites.”
PGAHS had a fine biology lab and equally good instruction. It prepared my entire class, most of which was headed toward a college education.
One of the academics interviewed by the Times did not think more education was an answer. And that’s because the right rejects evolution outright.
“At least 25 percent of high school teachers in Minnesota explicitly teach creationism,??? says one professor to the Times.
This would have presented me with a dilemma in 1972.
Walk and try to find a school where there wasn’t a creationist (PGAHS had only one high school biology instructor) or have my time wasted.
And when the president went on television to say we need more interest in science I just laughed. If people who were in a position to do something about that in this country now we would be able to reverse this atrocious statistic and run the creationists out of town.
The paradox is that American science hasn’t been up to this job. For many years the denial of science was taken as just a laugh-it-off kind of thing in University-land.
Who’s laughing now?
One has only to review the history and continuing existence of Michael Behe in the biology department at Lehigh University, my old alma mater, for a working example.
So we don’t live in a country where just more rational discourse has any effect. We live in a country that is in decline, that has lost a self-correcting capability, and this is one symptom of it.
When half the political establishment detests science and actively works to undermine it, it’s a driver of decline.
Over at Armchair Generalist, Jason Sigger has embedded a bit from Bill Maher. Here five trivial people, Maher included, argue global warming and evolution.
At this point there are only two solutions to the behavior.
The nice one is that you don’t give the Republicans an opening. You don’t invite them if you plan to discuss it. It’s not entertainment. It’s just more of the problem.
If Republicans — or any random heevahavas — get to open their mouths they present myths and falsehoods, now packed with the maddening implication that it’s they who have the scientific outlook because it is they who have evaluated all the data and are now being criticized for it.
They cling to the idea that the rightness of something is determined by the number of people who adopt it. And since their tribe is the one to adopt non-belief in science, that is what’s right.
The not-nice solution is to wind up and knock the grinning Georgia politician’s teeth out when he starts up on cable television.
“It’s a mystery how these people get dressed in the morning,” concludes Armchair Generalist.
They are a collective disgrace.
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02.06.11
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Made in China, Stumble and Fail at 9:38 am by George Smith
DD, through wearing of the senior fellow hat at GlobalSecurity, received a query from a reporter at the biggest newspaper last week. Could I talk about Egypt and the Internet?
No, not really. I indicated I didn’t have interest in the story that Facebook and Twitter had been significant to the Egyptian uprising.
I did see that US-made M1 tanks were laying smoke screens and refraining from shelling and machine-gunning crowds.
Which doesn’t jive with the regular make-stuff-up things passed off by US media.
Mark Zuckerberg, bringing freedom and democracy to the downtrodden everywhere through a click. When-oh-when will he be awarded a Nobel prize?
Naturally, since it’s always about how fantastical/egotistical we can be re social media coupled with how much fun it is to point out all the rest of the lumpy useless sitting-around unskilled people who aren’t, we have Tom Friedman rubbing it in, as usual:
When China can make Egyptian Ramadan toys more cheaply and appealingly than low-wage Egyptians, you know there is problem of competitiveness.
Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Tunisia today are overflowing with the most frustrated cohort in the world — “the educated unemployables.??? They have college degrees on paper but really don’t have the skills to make them globally competitive. I was just in Singapore. Its government is obsessed with things as small as how to better teach fractions to third graders.
Being good with fractions has nothing to do with making crap toys cheaper in China where the government subsidizes its businesses, manipulates its currency and manufacturing is built on labor costs that are a fraction of ours.
And Singapore is a small island. Think of it as a wart on Malaya, always held up as an annoying beacon of progress. With little to support any such claims other than it’s a place, much smaller than soCal, where the kids do far better on tests and the beggars are a bit less obvious or something. Where all that good science comes from.
“What science?” I hear you ask. My point exactly.
I was asked to give a bioterrorism lecture — for free — at a Singapore university called Nanyang a couple years ago. Passed. I’m wise to the link between competitiveness and the keeping costs down through knuckle-whitening parsimony thing.
In the same section as Tom Friedman’s regular riff on how we are useless unless we start inventing our own little private TwitterFacebooks, was Frank Rich, being the naysayer:
Three days after riot police first used tear gas and water hoses to chase away crowds in Tahrir Square, CNN’s new prime-time headliner, Piers Morgan, declared that “the use of social media??? was “the most fascinating aspect of this whole revolution.??? On MSNBC that same night, Lawrence O’Donnell interviewed a teacher who had spent a year at the American school in Cairo. “They are all on Facebook,??? she said of her former fifth-grade students. The fact that a sampling of fifth graders in the American school might be unrepresentative of, and wholly irrelevant to, the events unfolding in the streets of Cairo never entered the equation.
The social networking hype eventually had to subside for a simple reason: The Egyptian government pulled the plug on its four main Internet providers and yet the revolution only got stronger. “Let’s get a reality check here,??? said Jim Clancy, a CNN International anchor, who broke through the bloviation on Jan. 29 by noting that the biggest demonstrations to date occurred on a day when the Internet was down. “There wasn’t any Twitter. There wasn’t any Facebook,??? he said. No less exasperated was another knowledgeable on-the-scene journalist, Richard Engel, who set the record straight on MSNBC in a satellite hook-up with Rachel Maddow. “This didn’t have anything to do with Twitter and Facebook,??? he said. “This had to do with people’s dignity, people’s pride. People are not able to feed their families.???
Re Maddow and MSNBC: There was still plenty of Twitter and Facebook blow-jobbing.
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02.04.11
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Satan's Bank, Stumble and Fail at 2:17 pm by George Smith
From Krugman:
… the fragile ego of Jamie Dimon, who is not only wealthy beyond count but has also received a lot of fawning press. But it’s apparently not good enough.
Reuters’ Jamie Dimon special.
Re fawning press, the New York Times magazine comes to mind.
America’s Least-Hated Banker, by Roger Lowenstein.
The comments at the foot of the Reuters piece do not support the mag’s thesis.
Related: Let’s Lynch Lloyd Blankfein.
John Young at Cryptome discusses the lofty and important New York Times and its disdain for nerdy, smelly and impolite Julian Assange. And some of the lines scream for republication:
As a clue, [Bill Keller] jokingly noted that the information security set up among those working with Wikileaks was likely penetrated by governments — an exculpation often deployed by informers. Rusbridger joined the humor by grinning at Keller and admitting “we” lack technical skills against that — separating noble wordsmith editors from sneaky outlaw hackers like Assange …
“I am not a lawyer,” Keller said idiotically evasive, said he had been advised to not tell about the Times’ legal defense, then went on to expostulate in carefully lawyerly-guided rhetoric the public benefits of reputable MSM against anarchistic information bomb-throwers. Rusbridger kow-towed to Keller as if dangled by his lawyers’ strings to cow behind The Times officially-constructed bulwark to escape complicity in the Wikileaks (and its kind) prosecution, and to be protected by legislation underway to formalize that arrangement to coddle obsequious press …
Cryptome made a 1.5 hour-long video (to be posted shortly) for grit against the slick campaign version to be publicized by Columbia. It begins with Cryptome being twice threatened with ejection for violating rules of who was permitted to record the highly-scripted campaign to protect the press from those who break rules, umm, commit crimes, like Wikileaks.
Columbia University and its School of Journalism are long-time suppressors of dissent under guise of fostering loyal opposition to official power (John Young of Cryptome is a dissenting graduate) …
Brav-o!
Young notes the New York Times spammed a sales push for its book on WikiLeaks simultaneously with the announcement of a 26 percent drop in income.
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01.19.11
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Phlogiston, Rock 'n' Roll at 8:31 am by George Smith
From yesterday:
Long ago I used to be a rock critic. Then I was downsized, expired for oldness and not having the same tastes and attitudes as the more mentally limber.
Proven by science, in this data crunch done every year by one of the contributors to the Voice’s Pazz & Jop Critics poll.
Conformity with the tastes of others is defined by “centricity” here.
DD ranks 706 out of 711. Readers will notice that contributors can share rankings, so the total in the list doesn’t equal the full number of music critics contributing to the music poll.
Joe McCombs achieved a perfect zero “centricity.” Someone named Julia Simon is the most conformist in the lot.
The 2010 Pazz & Jop statistical analysis, in its entirety, is here.
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01.18.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle at 11:26 pm by George Smith
Upholding the Huffington Post’s reputation for worthless flake news on anything remotely related to arms developer megacorporations, aerospace and technology, this article on prototype images Northrop Grumman, Lockheed and Boeing in collaboration with NASA are using to soak the taxpayer this year:
Get ready for the next generation of passenger airplanes.
NASA has taken the wraps off three concept designs for quiet, energy efficient aircraft that could potentially be ready to fly as soon as 2025, joining these planes of the future (and these). The designs come from Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and The Boeing Company. In the final months of 2010, each of these companies won a contract from NASA to research and test their concepts during 2011.
Click that link.
Yes, that s— looks just like what Nick Fury will be getting into to fly across the heartland in a few years. Perhaps with 100,000 pounds of JDAMs or a couple hundred troops in a military exercise on the way to Diego Garcia. While we go to work for nine dollars an hour at an athletic apparel and sneakers store selling stuff made in China.
And the third one, a sop to toss at commercial flight, will never happen.
Onward, forward and upward. More delusional garbage, please!
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12.15.10
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 1:10 pm by George Smith
Fox News network “experts” and pundits, as well as others in the mainstream media, have been very busy conflating WikiLeaks with cyberwar. They do this while willfully ignoring the obvious — that if WikiLeaks were actually conducting a cyberwar against the US, then the newspapers also publishing its materials are doing the same.
And that when Michael Moore went on MSNBC last night to say he was offering his servers to WikiLeaks if they were needed, then he was also lining up to conduct it against this country.
So a Sunday opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer, brought to my attention by Pine View Farm, is typical in its stupefying quality.
In a more intelligent world, one where critical thinking and rigor were valued, its writer, Trudy Rubin, would be someone to be ridiculed. Not someone empowered to blurt whatever received wisdom has been placed in front of her during the past week.
Rubin begins (try not to laugh):
WikiLeaks has woken Americans up to the concept of “cyberwar.”
“Cyberanarchists” are attacking the websites of multinational companies that cut off services to WikiLeaks after it published classified State Department cables.
What follows is a push for Richard Clarke’s last book on cyberwar, now a bit stale in sales terms.
DD covered it, most notably here and here.
Rubin also delivers the standard Clarke argument, now well over ten years old in the public domain, that our enemies — hackers, terrorists, nation states — will strike across the Internet, blowing things up, turning other things off. Airplanes will fall from the sky, pipelines won’t pipe, and the most recent addition (gasp!) — banks will fail as Wall Street is struck.
The latter is so attractive as a meme, let’s savor it again. Banks will fail. Wall Street will get hit.
And what, exactly, would be wrong with that, all things considered?
And this is how the WikiLeaks document dump has been transformed into a cyberattack on the United States.
Any real or potential threat against the aims and desires, or business conducted as usual by big American agencies, is deemed to be evidence of a global attack, something that needs to be met with vigorous force, hysteria and advertising. As well as increasing levels of stupidity and hostility.
At which point the American government chooses not to lead, but to pander, either by being reactionary, unthinking and always willing to find ways to quickly toss taxpayer dollars into businesses which return very little in basic value to the middle class.
“Air Force Blocks Sites That Posted Secret Cables,” reads one headline in the New York Times today.
Incidentally, Clarke’s appearance in Philadelphia was part of his usual peddling, this at a speech/seminar for the locals.
“Clarke also recommended a bigger government commitment to cyberresearch and an effort to craft an international accord banning cyberattacks on civilian institutions such as banks,” concludes Rubin.
Heavens, yes, we gotta protect the banks from cyberwar — like that promised by Assange for the new year. After all, look how much they’ve done for us.
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