12.10.14
Posted in Bioterrorism, Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks at 8:00 pm by George Smith
In the last twenty years, nobody has ever been released on bail in a ricin case. That’s NOBODY.
Get arrested for making castor powder. Go to jail. Stay there. Eventually, prison. It’s what happens to everyone in this small uniquely American demographic.
All that changed this week when Preston Rhoads of Oklahoma City was bailed on $200,000 and left to house arrest in the home of parents:
OKLAHOMA CITY – A man who was accused of plotting to kill his pregnant girlfriend with ricin has been released from jail.
Preston Rhoads was granted a $200,000 bond on Friday.
He will now go home to his parents’ house in Ada, where he will remain under house arrest.
Rhoads was charged with two counts of attempted murder and two counts of solicitation to commit murder in April.
Police received a tip that he was looking to hire someone to slip his girlfriend ricin in order to kill his unborn child.
Earlier, on Preston Rhoads, from the archives:
Today, Preston Rhoads, 30 of Oklahoma City, makes the second young American in 60 days to have been tabbed as influenced by Walter White, Breaking Bad and its secondary plot of ricin poisoning. Rhoads is the fourth young man arrested this year in connection with ricin-kookism, already up one from three arrests in the 12 months of last year.
The first [this year] was young Danny Milzman, a student at Georgetown University, of whom much has already been written here …
Wire news reported: “Test results have confirmed ricin was a substance found in the home of murder-for-hire suspect Preston Rhoads.
“A law enforcement source confirmed with News 9 the substance tested 100% positive for the deadly toxin. However, the substance was only found inside the home and police officers were not exposed.
“Oklahoma City Police and FBI agents say Rhoads was planning a murder before they searched his home on Thursday. The FBI says it processed his place for hazardous materials after finding the unknown substance, now identified as ricin.”
As in the case of Georgetown student Danny Milzman, Rhoads — although much older — was described as a perfect son by distraught friends and family members.
And, indeed, what profiling material exists upon the net supports this view.
Smiling faces of many friends [adorned] his Facebook page. And a self-made video of Rhoads on Vimeo shows an affable young man describing his career and education as a creator of digital art.
This year there have been more ricin cases than ever, up from 2013, which was also a bumper year in this small but nationally famous trend.
In 2013, three people were arrested and two already convicted in ricin, cases, all three which involved mailing castor powder to the president.
This year there have been five young men arrested in ricin cases this year: Rhoads, Danny Milzman of Georgetown University, Nicholas Todd Helman of Hatboro, PA, for a contaminated scratch-and-sniff card sent to a rival, Jesse Korff of Labelle, Florida, for ricin production and sale of abrin, the latter on which he has pleaded guilty, and — most recently, University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh student Kyle Allen Smith.
Smith remains in jail as does Nicholas Helman whose case was complicated by alleged additional death threats made while jailed. Danny Milzman pleaded guilty to making ricin, received a sentence of one year and one day, and will probably be released in January.
Much more on these cases can be found in the Ricin Kooks tab.
The archive of ricin case lore produced by this blog is comprehensive. Nothing else exists, anywhere, like it.
It makes troubling, confounding, and strange reading since the phenomenon of ricin-makers, or castor powder tinkerers, is almost entirely American. No other culture, no other western civilization, has anything like it. It is American exceptionalism in pure form.
While the numbers of people involved in it are small they always make national news.
Why are certain people drawn to pounding castor seeds? It would take a book to explain it.
Initially it was born of the belief in the far right in this country, now virtually universal in many quarters, that one had to be armed to the teeth to fight off tyrannical government, the encroaching UN, or anyone who might be coming for your stuff if civilization collapsed.
That cultural DNA inspired, and still inspires, a voluminous production of samizdat literature on weapons and the making of them from whatever is at hand. Poisons, like ricin, were and are part of it.
But today, ricin-making, that is the alleged easy production of a weapon of mass production, is part of American culture as accepted wisdom and entertainment. Movies and dramatic television (party like Heisenberg/Walter White!), books — fiction and non-fiction, and many related things now regularly stew American audiences in the lore of ricin.
The result: A civilization that thinks it knows a lot about it, the a lot being all rubbish.
No fatalities have ever been attributed to ricin in the war on terror. Indeed, there have been no ricin murders during the same period. Occasionally, castor bean mash is used for suicide. From the information that can be found, most attempts are unsuccessful.
One made the news earlier this year.
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Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle at 2:19 pm by George Smith
This is how we spend our money: Video promotions of big laser guns that can destroy a couple flimsy toys, floating or flying. Mounted on a giant naval vessel in the Persian Gulf. Oh, and set to a synthetic rock soundtrack that wouldn’t have made it on MTV in the Eighties.
The empire’s idea of cool brainlessly set to old shooter video game rock: So bad, virtually beyond words.
From the publicity:
“Laser weapons are powerful, affordable and will play a vital role in the future of naval combat operations,??? Rear Adm. Matthew L. Klunder, chief of naval research, said in a statement Wednesday. “We ran this particular weapon, a prototype, through some extremely tough paces, and it locked on and destroyed the targets we designated with near-instantaneous lethality.???
The laser performed flawlessly through a range of adverse weather conditions and took out moving targets both at sea and in the air, including small boats and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Operated via a “video-game like controller,??? the system is designed to go from non-lethal to lethal output to stun or destroy “asymmetrical threats??? like small ships and UAVs.
Asymmetrical threats, of course, meaning skiffs and plastic boats with a machine gun or a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on them, manned by paupers, preferably smaller and almost always not-white.
With the largest military in world history the US isn’t capable of winning wars anymore. And that’s because its war-fighting strategies, for all the firepower, manpower and money spent, are appalling to the rest of the world.
Sure, it can wreck things and reduce cities and infrastructure to rubble globally.
But you can’t win when the disdain of the entire planet is on you. Fritzing poor people with billion dollar extravagances in misused technology is always going to be a very public disaster. Almost as brilliant as adopting torture.
Keywords: Ponce, laser, gun, LAWS
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12.06.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund at 1:39 pm by George Smith
Tech industry start-ups love the operation of the sharing scamming economy.
At its base is a smartphone driven global network that reduces people to pieceworkers. That is poverty level pay work akin to jobs from the 18th and 19th century, only made new through the smartphone and the desktop for the 21st.
Old piecework slavery is now called being a micro-entrepreneur. Perhaps micro because the compensation is microscopic.
From the San Jose Mercury News we get a press release for it, dressed up as business news, tipped by Frank from Pine View Farm.
The essentials:
What’s often known as the “sharing economy” — represented by legions of Airbnb hosts, drivers for Lyft and Uber and countless other micro-entrepreneurs — has increasingly gone mainstream, creating thousands of jobs and new business models in the process.
Now Peers, a San Francisco-based organization that has advocated for sharing economy startups during various regulatory battles, is pivoting to focus on a growing issue: the myriad needs of the workers involved.
How does someone who earns money as an independent contractor deal with taxes? What happens when a car-sharing driver gets in an accident? Is there a mortgage broker who will work with someone who has income from three sharing economy sources? And how does a sharing-economy worker plan for retirement?
“There’s a new class of worker, and by some estimates it’s 2 million workers globally making $10 billion a year,” said Shelby Clark, executive director of Peers. “We think there are major gaps for workers in the sharing economy, and we want to create solutions.”
Solutions, indeed. What the fugleman from Peers is counting on is nobody in the readership pausing to do a brief calculation.
So let’s do it for them.
If you consider Shelby Clark’s figure of earnings accurate even though there is no reason to do so, 10 billion divided by 2 million equals $5,000/year.
In the United States, where the cost of living is high, that optimistic new piecework wage, technology enabled, boils down what’s left of the middle class to well below the poverty level.
Where can you live in the US on $5,000/year?
Certainly not in southern California.
Piecework jobs have always existed. Corporate America has a love affair with them because they do away with labor protections, paying of benefits and decent pay for a days work.
Most recently the Economic Hardship project, a journalism effort led by author Barbara Ehrenreich, developed this story, published in Elle called Hypereducated and on Welfare.
The people in the story don’t need the sharing economy and smartphone apps to provide work, to lift them up. They already have work that takes up all their time, provides no security, no benefits, and leaves them broke.
An excerpt:
Much political rhetoric these days is devoted to the importance of broadening access to college—and there is plenty of evidence that it’s still better financially to have a degree than not—but in the postcrash world of 2014, a good education may not keep you from hovering near the poverty line. The number of people with graduate degrees receiving food assistance or other forms of federal aid nearly tripled between 2007 and 2010, according to the U.S. Census. More specifically, 28 percent of food-stamp households were headed by a person with at least some college education in 2013, compared with 8 percent in 1980, according to an analysis by University of Kentucky economists.
In the US, people earning the kind of money theoretically attributed to the sharing economy are eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit, EBT (food stamps), WIC (women, infants and children food program) and the Obamacare Medicaid expansion.
These services make up part of America’s poor social safety net. But altogether they are much better than any clip job services offered by tech industry start-ups.
People beneath the poverty line certainly can’t pay mortgages and they don’t get and can’t afford to pay extra for workman’s compensation, another cracked rip-off proffered in the Mercury News piece.
Pay day loans, dollar stores and food banks are what people who drop into the $5,000/year category use. These services exist for the poor. There is no improvement to be gained from trivial Silicon Valley start-ups entering the same area.
Indeed, how would a smartphone app that deducts a fee for use fit into a dollar store economy other than as another fee squeezed from the working poor?
In the Nineties when I first moved to southern California I had a job sifting quarterly federal tax returns for the Internal Revenue Service.
Normally, this had been a civil service job. But the IRS had outsourced some of it in California to Manpower, making you a more poorly payed contract worker. A pieceworker. With no benefits.
Like the snake-oil salesman of the sharing economy, Manpower offered the contract employees what it call “benefits” and “services.” You could buy a health insurance policy through them, deducted from your wage, already reduced from what full civil service employees with benefits received.
It was a junk insurance program that paid zero except a bit in a catastrophic illness which inevitably would lead to your death. These types of policies, theoretically, were outlawed by Obamacare.
And earlier this year I posted on the tech business, Captricity, that received a contract from the FDA that reduced digitization of documents to piecework performed by crowd-sourcing on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Think of it this way: It was the exchanging of civil service labor with pieceworkers earning nickels and dimes for the same process.
From it:
Marvel at the promotional video uploaded by the Empire of Bezos to showcase “Amazon Web Services.??? It’s awesome in that it has the FDA’s Chief Health Informatics Officer, Taha Kass-Hout, going on for four minutes about the miracle of “turning manual submissions from the public into machine-readable information with 99.7% accuracy??? without once mentioning Mechanical Turk or that the work is performed by digital sweat-shopping.
Instead Kass-Hout relates how the FDA had a “19th century problem??? of backlogged paperwork …
It’s truly Orwellian, releasing a stink of vague obfuscation so that people who don’t know a thing about what’s going on in the background are led to believe it’s just another marvelous technical wonder on the road to the glorious future…
The Obama administration has put on a public populist face, one that chides the Republican Party and corporate America for allowing inequality to balloon and the compensation of workers to flat-line. And here is the man from the FDA, talking about a technical work-around that simply relies on paying people virtually nothing for record transcription work.
Implemented by a crappy and very small tech firm in the Silicon Valley, one that laughably maintained a blog with a post entitled “Evidence-Based Research to Combat Global Poverty.”
“We think there are major gaps for workers in the sharing economy, and we want to create solutions,” the person from Peers tells the Mercury News reporter.
“The Peers website allows people to find work in the sharing economy and manage their new lives as micro-entrepreneurs,” continues the newspaper. “Peers links to scores of sharing economy startups, including Vayable, where you can earn money by leading cultural experiences for travelers, and Urbansitter, a platform for nanny and baby sitting jobs.”
Much like TaskRabbit, another sharing economy start-up and old-fashioned Craigslist. And, of course, a tech platform that allows you to earn cash for stuff you don’t need anymore has always existed: It’s called eBay. Or the yard sale, of which there are many, in Pasadena.
Poverty wage workers have always been provided with services with which to liquidate their lives. Clip job service additions courtesy of the tech industry are not progress, innovation or wonderful.
“How does a scamming sharing economy worker plan for retirement”? asks reporter Dana Hull.
Pieceworkers can’t plan for retirement. How does one have a retirement on a couple insecure free-lancer jobs, with no benefits, that earn, at best — $5,000/year, plan for retirement?
It’s utterly ridiculous.
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12.05.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 10:31 am by George Smith
The new Confederacy, much like the old.
Frank at Pine View Farm points to an honest but devastating analysis of the problem of WhiteManistan.
Excerpted from Racial Divide: The Tragedy of America’s first black President, from Der Spiegel:
The American problem has many different facets, but it is accurate to say that it is mostly white men who shoot young African-Americans in the service of the state.
The [Republican Party’s] most radical supporters viewed Obama’s speeches and proposed legislation as nothing more than a black man’s attempt to exact revenge against the country’s white majority. Even if they don’t always say so, Obama’s opponents have always felt that his actions represent a threat to white people, whether he launched a federal investment programs aimed at economic stimulus or proposed making the healthcare system a little fairer.
You’ll notice the map from Der Spiegel showing a majority of African Americans still living in the old Confederacy.
And that is where they have now been virtually completely eliminated from power. They have elected representation but that representation is minority, for practical purposes, banned from legislating or having any say in government in 2014. That’s an apartheid state within the state.
That poison, the toxin of old Dixie is spread throughout the country. No state, not even California, is totally free of it.
What Der Spiegel does not mention is that the party of Abe Lincoln is the party that has inflamed the white tribe against the first African-American president, the agency that has concentrated and focused the belief that it is American white people who have been victimized by the president, that it is they who have been subjected to a systemic racism.
This goes back to the end of the Civil War. The armies of the south were defeated, its territory overrun, its agriculture and trade in ruins. And it engendered a burning resentment, a sense of victimization that could not be erased.
This is well described in this bit from the documentary Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story.
Lincoln was assassinated and Reconstruction slowly failed.
Today, the Republican Party is, whether broadly recognized or not, the party of John Wilkes Booth.
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12.04.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 2:08 pm by George Smith
To support Loud Folk Live.
In a country as fucked up and dismaying as the United States in 2014, it is genuinely a record to notice, an antidote to the Culture of Lickspittle.
Now, an anti-thesis, a standard and soul-destroying thing packaged as fun, something to encourage people to do for the good of their employer:
Last week [Rock & Roll Fantasy Camp’s] award-winning TEAM ROCK STARS Team Building/Entertainment Program hosted a great group from ESPN/Disney at the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip.
The group arrived at 4 p.m. and following an all-star band performance of Queen’s “We will Rock You,” they were surprised to learn that they were going to be broken up into groups to rewrite the lyrics of the infamous song with their own lyrics about their company sales meeting. ESPN’s meeting planner’s commented, “In the past 9 years, this team building program was the most innovative, creative and entertaining. Rock Camp blew us away!??? And her division president was all smiles and agreed with her comments. — “The best team building program out there.” — PEOPLE Magazine
“Your dream lives.”
That’s $250 dollars/person for any corporation that wants to see some of its employees rewrite the lyrics to “We Will Rock You” as praise for the business. And then to compel them to sing it on the Sunset Strip at the House of Blues.
Such an exercise is designed to be dignity-destroying.
But this is not and is orders magnitude better! Loud Folk Live tunes — The National Anthem, Rich Man’s Burden, Puta and Jesus of America — at the links.
Five bucks for a digital copy sent to your e-mail — cheap, LOL satirical, catchy, toe-tapping, as well as lots of other wholesome things.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 10:29 am by George Smith
Seriously.
There’s a really long list of people who need a shit ton of reparations, don’t you think?
Predictably, WhiteManistan’s klassic rock kleagle, horrid’s horrid, explains it’s “a scam:”
Only to these off the cliff denial cultists does “Hands up, don’t shoot??? make any sense, even though no one can site [sic — jesus, there’s no limit to the talent] an instance where a black man had his hands up and got shot by a white cop.
In the world of the racist race-baiting industry, no one will ever let facts get in the way of their scam …
And though each and every black life indeed matters to everyone I know, clearly they don’t merit a protest, an inquisition, a grand jury probe or the time of day …
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12.03.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 3:35 pm by George Smith
Every week, the country flirts more and more with massive breakdown in the trust of police forces, justice and fairness. Real bedrock stuff.
Good people everywhere are appalled. Yet nothing is allowed to change. Systemic paralysis reigns. The body is poisoned, its ideologies and beliefs corrupt, but the rotting status quo is maintained.
The President knows it and said so. Count on WhiteManistan, once again, to do virtually everything wrong in the next few days.
From Reuters, on the lack of indictment of a black man choked to death in New York, for the crime of being black and selling cheap cigarettes on the sidewalk:
A New York City grand jury has decided not to charge a police officer who killed an unarmed black man with a chokehold while trying to arrest him for illegally selling cigarettes, the local district attorney said on Wednesday …
Staten Island resident Eric Garner, a 43-year-old father of six, died on July 17 after police officers tackled him and put him in a chokehold. The city’s medical examiner ruled the death a homicide.
New York City police prepared on Wednesday for protests that could potentially paralyze major roads and tunnels in the city.
Daniel Skelton, a black 40-year-old banker, told the news service: “A black man’s life just don’t matter in this country.”
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12.02.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund at 3:13 pm by George Smith
As usual, it’s the perfect season for shining American character, its reverse-Robin Hood-ism, you know, the theology that teaches it is virtuous to grind tax the poor while rewarding the wealthiest.
Here:
Since Romney’s defeat, some Republicans have gently urged their party to ease up … their campaign to force low-income workers to pay more taxes. But adding the cultural-legal panic to the preexisting class-war panic was apparently enough to turn the GOP’s grudging acceptance of the low-income tax breaks into full-scale opposition …
So first Republicans made the tax breaks for business permanent, while allowing the tax breaks for low-income workers to expire at the end of 2017. Since they would no longer be tied to tax breaks for the more affluent constituencies that have influence with Republicans, this would mean they would almost certainly expire. Families earning $10,000 to around $25,000 a year would lose nearly $2,500 a year — a punishing blow to the working class.
The Democratic Party, lousy with high-button body lice OK with giving more to America’s superior class expressed admiration for the idea, Harry Reid and Charles Schumer of New York being its biggest endorsers. The President threatened a veto and, the New York magazine writes, the Democrats “beat a hasty retreat.” For now.
But you know it is always the perfect season the pure milk of American kindness.
And it is best heard in the magnificent sermon delivered at the beginning of Jesus of America from Loud Folk Live.
It is here and you should tick up the numbers and take time to irritatingly jam it down the throat share it with everyone you feel to be a deserving friend!
It’s also the shopping season! Why, just yesterday was Cyber Monday in which everyone was urged most urgently to buy on-line in a deluge of e-mail and web advertising blandishments.
So you can have the e-version of Loud Folk Live for a measly 5 bucks and have your own personal version of the sermon here.
[He] is not the one who fed the poor loaves and fishes. This is not the Jesus who liked lepers. He found the liberty, the land of liberty and freedom; we told him what to do.
Jesus of America says don’t feed the poor; if you do, they’ll come right to your door. They’re gonna wind up like stray cats, around your door on the floor, begging for loads of kibble and rich food. Everyone knows they’re just selfish animals.
That’s what Jesus said.
Remember, wealthiness — next to Godliness, that’s what Jesus teaches. Jesus of America says “Guns, not butter!” The rest is all for naught.
Jesus of America says never feed the poor, they’re just too lazy, they’ll never work at all. Jesus of America says tax the weak and sick! They’re always going to be that way, never worth a lick.
— from the Book of WhiteManistan, 1: 1-5
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12.01.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, The Corporate Bund at 4:03 pm by George Smith
In this week’s chapter of computer security news from corporate America of no value to 99 percent of the people who live here:
Security researchers say they have uncovered a cyber espionage ring focused on stealing corporate secrets for the purpose of gaming the stock market, in an operation that has compromised sensitive data about dozens of publicly held companies.
Cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc, which disclosed the operation on Monday, said that since the middle of last year, the group has attacked email accounts at more than 100 firms, most of them pharmaceutical and healthcare companies.
Victims also include firms in other sectors, as well as corporate advisors including investment bankers, attorneys and investor relations firms, according to FireEye.
The cybersecurity firm declined to identify the victims.
How can you tell if you’re a computer security servant for the corporate dictatorship and its precious loot?
1. Part of your business plan is to find hackers targeting Wall Street, the “stock market,” company e-mail folders of bloated, parasitic American financial and business titans (and their flunkies), etc.
2. Your business is leasing computer security services to Wall Street, big companies on the “stock market,” and trying to secure the e-mail folders of bloated, parasitic American financial and business titans (and their flunkies).
3. Your business is news writing about the great problem of potential wealth stealing by hackers targeting Wall Street, big American corporations, and the invasion of e-mail folders belonging to bloated, parasitic American financial and business titans (and their flunkies).
You good computer security servant, you! A grateful nation thanks you.
From the Keepin’ It Real in the Corporate Dictatorship desk:
Amid empty talk in Washington about corporate tax reform, the study said the seven companies, which in 2013 reported more than $74 billion in combined U.S. pre-tax profits, came out ahead on their taxes, gaining $1.9 billion more than they owed.
At the same time, the CEOs at each of the seven companies last year was paid an average of $17.3 million, said the study, compiled by two Washington think tanks.
The seven companies cited were Boeing Co (BA.N), Ford Motor Co (F.N), Chevron Corp (CVX.N), Citigroup Inc (C.N), Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N), JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) and General Motors Co (GM.N) …
Earlier this month, on the protecting-the-shit-of-the-plutocrats-or-the-country-will-fall beat:
The huge cyberattack on JPMorgan Chase that touched more than 83 million households and businesses was one of the most serious computer intrusions into an American corporation. But it could have been much worse.
Questions over who the hackers are and the approach of their attack concern government and industry officials. Also troubling is that about nine other financial institutions — a number that has not been previously reported — were also infiltrated by the same group of overseas hackers, according to people briefed on the matter…
“It was a huge surprise that they were able to compromise a huge bank like JPMorgan,??? said Al Pascual, a security analyst with Javelin Strategy and Research. “It scared the pants off many people.???
Several financial regulators have warned that a coordinated attack on the banking system could set off another financial crisis.
I’ll bet. I want to see another financial crisis. Don’t disappoint us now.
Priceless quote:
The push by government officials is a stark acknowledgment of the vulnerability of financial institutions — even after they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to protect themselves — to an attack if one of their vendors is not fully prepared. The problem is causing some security consultants to privately consider whether the sprawling financial firms with operations across the globe may be “too big to secure.???
Hundreds of millions of dollars to protect themselves! Why, that’s only an order or more of magnitude less than the money Uncle Sam paid them back on its tax returns in 2013.
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11.29.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund at 12:54 pm by George Smith
Milk toast of privilege Arthur Brooks occasionally shows up here, mentioned for bizarre columns at the New York Times, pieces peddling his belief that true happiness comes from embracing your entrepreneurial self and, further, combining it with a faith-like fervor and devotion.
Shorter version: A religious joy is derived through being a salesman in America.
Some excerpts from the past, this in March:
The American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks comes in for special mention because I used a quote from him yesterday.
The essence, envy of the wealthy is bad for America:
“[We] must recognize that fomenting bitterness over income differences may be powerful politics, but it injures our nation. We need aspirational leaders willing to do the hard work of uniting Americans around an optimistic vision in which anyone can earn his or her success. This will never happen when we vilify the rich or give up on the poor.
“Only a shared, joyful mission of freedom, opportunity and enterprise for all will cure us of envy …”
Like Paul Ryan, Arthur Brooks is just another wealthy libertarian dickhead.
He is most famous for writing a series of books promoting the insipid idea that only through entrepreneurship can all Americans know true happiness and freedom.
In other words, those who run their own small businesses are the most happy of Americans. Of course, Arthur Brooks has never been an American entrepreneur, making his living only writing that it is the best thing in life, over and over, for a right-wing business institute.
But never you mind that. As a logical Brooks extension, people who are Christian, centrist-to-right and supporters of totally free markets, are the most happy of all.
In October, Brooks sought to coin a new name to describe burgeoning tech companies like AirBnb, a firm that leverages the lousy economy and its desperation by making it easier for people to sub-let their living quarters to the more well-off, through smartphones.
Brooks thought these firms, the engineers of the new sharing economy were getting a bad rap. This because many thoughtful people now consider sharing economy a two-word synonym for scamming.
AirBnb was part of the “helping industry,” said Brooks:
As in, “Everyone wants to help. Wouldn’t you want to be part of such an industry, helping people with more money than you by cheaply renting your home to them at their convenience????
Quotes:
WHAT is a “helping industry????
To hear him tell it, [AirBnB co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk] started the business because it was fascinating and fun. And most of all, he says, because it could help ordinary people who needed an affordable place to stay or had some excess capacity in their homes. That’s right — Nate sees Airbnb as a “helping industry.???
Some will howl at this …
Ordinary people, especially vulnerable people without power and privilege, find Airbnb empowering and useful. It lifts Americans up …
Any of us can work in a helping industry. That includes teachers, nurses, stay-at-home parents … The blessing of our free enterprise system is that any of us can sanctify our work. We just need to ask if what we are doing truly lifts others up.
As an example of how the helping industry lifts people up, allowing them to sanctify their work, Brooks dug up a woman, down on her economic luck, who now uses AirBnB to lease out her home to strangers a few days a month while she sleeps on the couch for free, courtesy of her parents or a friend.
Just so you know, the word sanctify means to “set apart as or declare holy.” This shows the intense weirdness of the mental space in which Arthur Books resides.
It’s all through his work: a mish-mash of stupid armchair philosophies insisting Christian faith, fulfillment and happiness come naturally from existence as a capitalist small businessman.
In this week’s column, the semi-celebrity pundit devotes his time to describing how being gifted with two briefcases by Mormons in Provo buoyed him. And how that can be a lesson for all to find their way to a state of good will and tranquility.
It’s genuinely fucked. Brooks apparently doesn’t see that he’s being given briefcases, swag, what it’s called in the entertainment industry, because he’s someone who gives speeches and is rewarded just for being that special someone, like a columnist at the NY Times:
SEVERAL years ago, I visited Provo, Utah — in the heart of what its residents call “Happy Valley??? — to deliver a lecture at Brigham Young University. My gracious hosts sent me home with a prodigious amount of branded souvenirs: T-shirts, mugs — you name it. The Mormons are serious about product placement.
One particularly nice gift was a briefcase, with the university’s name emblazoned across the front …
[It] soon had a major effect on my behavior. I found that I was acting more cheerfully and courteously than I ordinarily would — helping people more with luggage, giving up my place in line, that sort of thing. I was unconsciously trying to live up to the high standards of Mormon kindness …
Almost like magic, the briefcase made me a happier, more helpful person.
This was something called moral elevation continued Brooks. And we could all have it, by getting nice things, perhaps, or by watching episodes of Oprah.
And such moral elevation is needed now, more than ever, in our time of paralysis, political and economic dysfunction. We can choose to reject negativity.
So Arthur Brook went back to talk to the Mormons in Utah, and told them his theory of moral elevation.
But later in the week, Arthur was feeling down again, discouraged by the “negative tenor” of the upcoming election.
Then something miraculous happened:
It was at that moment that the mail arrived with a package from Utah: a new briefcase from my friends.
To paraphrase and steal from Shakespeare: Were you like this you’d throw yourself away.
It’s also Small Business Saturday, another thing designed as a suck-up to the American myth that small businesses and entrepreneurs mean everything to our country.
Which is why everything in the dollar stores, Wal-Mart and the super-market chains are made by small businesses, right?
Fuck Small Business Saturday.
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