07.08.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 10:11 am by George Smith
It’s a good gig and it’s apparently working. Former NSA director, Keith Alexander, the 1 million dollar a month consultant on cyberdefense, is convincing banks they ought to pay him protection money so they don’t lose money to cyberwar.
From Bloomberg:
Wall Street’s biggest trade group has proposed a government-industry cyber war council to stave off terrorist attacks that could trigger financial panic by temporarily wiping out account balances, according to an internal document …
The document sketches an unusually frank and pessimistic view by the industry of its readiness for attacks wielded by nation-states or terrorist groups that aim to “destroy data and machines.??? It says the concerns are “compounded by the dependence of financial institutions on the electric grid,??? which is also vulnerable to physical and cyber attack.
“The systemic consequences could well be devastating for the economy as the resulting loss of confidence in the security of individual and corporate savings and assets could trigger widespread runs on financial institutions that likely would extend well beyond the directly impacted banks, securities firms and asset managers,??? Sifma [the Wall Street trade group allied with Alexander] wrote in the document, dated June 27.
Computer intrusions also have been a concern of regional and small banks. Camden Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, said today that an account-draining cyberattack is “a question of when.???
While the image is still muddy, the general idea seems to be put the banks, Keith Alexander and the US government together in a war council for the dealing with anyone with the temerity to attack the interests of the 1 percent in cyberspace.
You don’t think they’re really concerned about your shitty little account, do you?
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07.07.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 1:41 pm by George Smith
Today’s best from Upworthy:
What Every Dog Owner Should Know About Dog Poop
Lead: “It’s not just totally grody to leave dog poop everywhere. It’s actually super bad for us too. Go figure.”
About the author/curator: By day I’m a transformative photographer and art therapist. At night, I sleuth the web for outrageously important stuff.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 12:45 pm by George Smith
Being the billionaire spokesperson for those trampled underfoot is the new coolest gig in the world. Nick Hanauer is the best of all venture capitalists, taking about two years to make a career as a celebrity 0.1 percenter, one on the side of the little people, has been certified cool by many of our six and seven figure explainers last week for an essay speaking of pitchforks and revolution. Those who name-checked him are the people paid to write columns and news reports in which soaring economic inequality is discussed in such a way that nobody ever has to get around to advocating the tough and very unlikely action necessary to make a dent in it.
From the Seattle newspaper, on Hanauer, excerpted:
For someone who just predicted an armed revolution is on its way — against himself — Nick Hanauer doesn’t seem too fraught when I catch up with him …
That bit of hyperbole, though, has arguably catapulted Hanauer into the front lines of the nation’s simmering class war. On the side opposite from his own class …
The article has been “2X the most widely read and shared article in Politico’s history,??? Hanauer boasted. Nearly a quarter million shared it on Facebook alone.
Well, that cinches it. It’s a gold record on Facebook and the culture of lickspittle, where all revolutions, like those that freed the Middle East, started.
Commenters, who don’t earn the six figures of the Seattle Times journalist were not as impressed.
Nick Hanauer — writer (yes, not sic) of wrongs, Facebook hero to sensitive people who universally share their concern about economic malaise and failure, teller of truths on the revolution that always seems to be coming but never arriving.
So when will the pitchforks come out? When the quarter of million of concerned-about-inequality sincerity trolls and sharers are so afflicted they can’t post on Facebook. And, then, maybe.
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07.06.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 12:50 pm by George Smith
Maureen Dowd, NYT celebrity pundit for as long as I can remember, beneficiary of all the riches the kingdom can bestow, is upset on the 4th.
NYT:
“The Fourth of July was always a celebration of American exceptionalism,??? said G.O.P. pollster Frank Luntz. “Now it’s a commiseration of American disappointment.???
From Katrina to Fallujah, we’re less the Shining City Upon a Hill than the House of Broken Toys.
For the first time perhaps, hope is not as much a characteristic of American feelings.
Ask Frank Luntz, of all people.
It gets worse. Dowd rounded up the swells she could find in an afternoon to explain it. It’s the always welcome parading of the gnomic wisdom from the six and seven-figure explainers for the benefit of the great mass of unwashed dolts on Sundays.
Most of them, not all, were glibertarians libertarians who, as a rule, generally know how to get to the nub of any problem immediately.
“The 23-year-olds I work with are a little over the conversation about how we were the superpower brought low,??? Ben Smith, Masturbaiter editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed, tells Dowd. “They think that’s an ‘older person conversation.’ They’re more interested in this moment of crazy opportunity, with the massive economic and cultural transformation driven by Silicon Valley. And kids feel capable of seizing it. Technology isn’t a section in the newspaper any more. It’s the culture.???
Like finding the newest publishing platform to bring you “”33 Photos of Corgi Butts,” a Buzzfeed piece I didn’t know about until Dowd mentioned it today.
Ben Domenech, [a] 32-year-old libertarian, tells Dowd “millennials are paralyzed by all their choices. He quoted Walker Percy’s “The Last Gentleman???: ‘Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.’ ???
Didn’t know I was so fortunate. I can see a book in it. “Down & Out: How That Means You’re One of the Lucky Millions & How to Capitalize On It.”
Walter Isaacson, Aspen Institute director, someone who has everything and “author of the best-selling ‘Steve Jobs:’ “[There’s] a striking disconnect between the optimism and swagger of people in the innovative economy — from craft-beer makers to educational reformers to the Uber creators — and the impotence and shrunken stature of our governing institutions.???
If only the country, and those not doing so hot, could just be more like “craft-beer makers” and Uber. Such ninnies we are not to see it.
I see a book: “From Craft-Beer to Uber: How American Genius Entrepreneurs in Suds to Rides Are Showing How to Virally Succeed and What You Can Do to Join Them.”
Personally, you know I think this is still the perfect song for the weekend.
I believe it’s the purest American exceptionalism, particularly in its artistic commiseration on bald-faced national disappointment and failure. A music for the House of Broken Toys, if you will.
But there was no way to post it to the Times website.
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07.05.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 11:51 am by George Smith
Three people who most have never heard of, two of which are dead, are responsible for everything gone wrong.
From the irrefutably logical Ted Nugent, who has mentioned them twice in two 4th of July columns, one for WND and one at Newsmax:
The blatant despicable fraud of Obamacare scams, entitlement scams, welfare scams, foodstamp scams, fuel subsidy scams, child-support scams, unemployment benefit scams, so called disability scams and the entire Saul Alinsky and Cloward-Piven dismantling of the greatest quality of life ever known to mankind is a tragedy of untold proportions, and the liberal democrat scammasters are treading on us like jackboots gone mad.
Click the link to plumb the depths of the conspiracy. It affords hours of reading.
In Maine, there is a referendum to ban the using of bait to bag bears during season. Nugent has come out against it because he baits bears. And a couple of years ago he was convicted of illegally bagging and transporting a black bear in Alaska while on an expedition to baiting stations.
A person wrote to the Bangor Daily News:
[Ted Nugent] is the poster child for cruel and unsporting — and just plain lazy — methods of killing our black bears.
Sportsmen don’t use dogs, jelly doughnuts or leg-hold traps to hunt bears; they use fair chase still-hunting or stalk-and-shoot methods. Mainers don’t use these cruel methods on any other game species in Maine. Why treat our iconic bears with so much less respect than our deer or moose?
I didn’t know jelly donuts were used to attract bears, thinking it was only something from old Yogi cartoons. But, yes, there is an entire product line of jelly donut bear-bait.
Nugent has put an autographed acoustic guitar on eBay, selling for $7,000, to help raise money to defeat the anti-bear bait referendum in Maine.
So far, after a few weeks, no takers. That’s a lot of money for a red, white and blue novelty acoustic guitar marred by a Ted Nugent signature. Probably not quite worth even $400 after it got the treatment.
“Freedom is not free,” writes Nugent near the end of his July 4th Newsmax piece.
No, certainly not. Freedom is not free is cut-and-paste, a favorite of people who have little to say but a great desire to say it, everywhere in the US over the weekend. Click the link before it expires.
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07.04.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 8:07 am by George Smith
Better now than three years ago. Celebrate freedom, capitalism and national security in patriotic song, eat hot dogs. I’m going to.
From the Irrefutable Logic desk:
Immeasurable blood and riches have been invested and sacrificed in the name of American independence, but as we become more spoiled and self-serving, with busy little bees implementing the Cloward and Piven dismantling of our economy and spirit, all that historical stuff must be getting boring and unhip to the recipients of the redistribution booty …
With the runaway fraud and deceit infesting the welfare scams, entitlement scams, unemployment benefit scams, food-stamp scams, fuel subsidy scams, transportation scams, child support scams, disability scams, the suicidal scams running amok here, there and everywhere, it actually appears a sure thing that a huge swath of Americans actually do celebrate “Dependence Day??? every day.
— Ted Nugent
And, this, worth a mordant laugh.
Feel free to augment the blog’s hot dog budget, or not.
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07.03.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 1:51 pm by George Smith
BitCoin, the digital currency only for wealthy libertarian tech nerds, inheritance billionaires, speculators, hoarders and black markets, burnished the reputation today when venture capitalist Tim Draper was reported as having bought 19 million dollars worth of them, about 30,000, at the US government’s auction of the digital money recovered from the closed website, Silk Road.
From the wire, Draper’s statement:
“Bitcoin frees people from trying to operate in a modern market economy with weak currencies … With [this] newly purchased bitcoin, we expect to be able to create new services that can provide liquidity and confidence to markets that have been hamstrung by weak currencies. Of course, no one is totally secure in holding their own country’s currency. We want to enable people to hold and trade bitcoin to secure themselves against weakening currencies.”
Because, after all, escaping from the debasement of currencies like the dollar, is what BitCoin is about. This morning the Winkdex reported the value of a BitCoin at $641.
Readers may remember Draper is the billionaire behind the 2016 ballot initiative to split California into six states, the one he lives in to be named “Silicon Valley.”
“We need to reboot and the Six Californias initiative would bring government much closer to the people,??? Draper told a news agency a couple weeks ago.
Draper [wants] “people to have a choice, to be local to their state government and to be able to get a refresh so that schools, streets and waterways could improve, poverty would decrease and businesses would want to keep jobs here.”
Which translates as freeing the tech titans of “Silicon Valley” from the big drag of everyone else.
The video is Draper singing “The Riskmaster,” a song he delivers frequently at conferences to handfuls of like-minded libertarian tech nerds in attendance to beg him for money for their start-ups. In this instance it is at Hero City, part of his Draper University of Heroes. (Yes, it’s redundant.)
And no, I’m not making it up.
“It’s just after breakfast, and the superheroes are gathering in a cavernous white-walled room amid a sea of brightly colored beanbag chairs,” reads a NY magazine profile from last year. “Once assembled, they place their hands over their hearts, face the portraits of Thomas Edison and Bill Gates hung high on the wall, and begin reciting their daily oath.”
Further:
“I will promote freedom at all costs!??? says Tim Draper, a venture capitalist with a microphone slung over his ear and a “Save the Children??? tie brightening up his suit.
“I will promote freedom at all costs!??? the heroes echo back.
In lieu of diplomas, Draper U. students receive masks and capes printed with their superhero nicknames and are instructed to jump on each of a series of three small trampolines placed in a line in front of them. While bouncing from trampoline to trampoline, they’re told to shout, “Up, up, and away!???
The school’s purpose is to train students, usually the children of wealthy people, on how to maintain their optimism and act like heroes of capitalism in the building of start-ups.
Pure gold.
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07.02.14
Posted in Bioterrorism, Culture of Lickspittle at 11:43 am by George Smith
In 1982 there was virtually no interest in the flesh-eating microbe, Vibrio vulnificus. When I left school, doctorate in hand, there were probably only a handful of people working on it worldwide. On interviews in which I presented a seminar on it, there was never any enthusiasm. No one wanted to hear a thing. The research, the entire stay at grad school, was regarded as virtually nothing.
Yesterday, from the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville:
More than 40 Florida residents showed up at hospitals last year with a certain bacterial infection, and soon the words “flesh-eating disease??? screamed across headlines.
The bacteria, which killed 11 people, is always an underlying concern, but sometimes officials don’t know how prevalent the bacteria is in local waters.
A Jacksonville University class went out on the St. Johns River on Monday to get an idea of how much of the bacteria exists in the waterway.
There’s no guarantee the study will find much bacteria or any at all, said Anthony Ouellette, a JU assistant professor of biology. The goal of the project is to check out a public safety concern while teaching his students real-world research methods.
Forty-one Floridians developed the infection in 2013, including one in Duval County, one in St. Johns County and one in Nassau County, and 11 people died, according to the Florida Department of Health.
“If we do have an upsurge at some point,??? [the professor leading the student sampling experiment on the water] said, “having background numbers for what naturally exists in these habitats is important.???
Out on the St. Johns River on Monday, Marshalluna Land balanced a dropper over a sampling well as the boat swayed.
The JU marine biology graduate student carefully diluted the salt water so she and her peers would be able to filter out the bacteria and other microbes for study.
As a side observation on the value of the social network, I posted a link to my V. vulfnificus season summary on FB and it was ignored, except for one comment, an inappropriate “Yummy!”, something I had to gently chide the person over.
This is not to say science isn’t dealt with on the social networks. I often see posts to my feed about some aspect of science pre-masticated by the media, shared by people with no science background in my “friends” list. But it always has to fit into their political or philosophical worldview or be of a current famous scientist in the news.
Basic science at the grass-roots level has virtually no meaning for most Americans. That’s a pity and the entire country’s loss.
Perhaps Upworthy needs to handle it.
Previously — on the vulnificus beat.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 11:13 am by George Smith
On Facebook and it’s experiment:
“Only a fraction of our connections on social media are people we love. The rest are people we already probably dislike.”
Better, on what Facebook should do next, or what it already does, if you catch my drift:
Notifications of career success from an acquaintance who is in the same field as you, but younger
Mushy “Happy anniversary, baby!” notes from your ex’s new significant other
Cute snapshots of your friends’ young child who they say is doing so well since they opted not to get him vaccinated
Triumphant posts of celebration from people who root for a different team/candidate than you
Memes involving a photo of a beach or flower overlaid with encouraging platitudes with at least two obvious typos
Do you think you were part of the Facebook experiment? From this end, all I can tell you is that I dislike virtually everything FB puts in my feed. If I hand out a “like,” it’s from courtesy and a desire to be seen as civil.
The group mechanization of manipulation, sincerity trolling, favored figure or agency bootlicking and “upworthiness” isn’t something with which I have anything in common. I suspect there are hundreds of thousands of people who are the same. Like me, at one time now in the past, we were persuaded the social networks were good.
From Truth-Out, a long but not at all unreadable bit from Noam Chomsky:
In the 1950s, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles explained quite clearly the dilemma that the U.S. faced. They complained that the Communists had an unfair advantage. They were able to “appeal directly to the masses??? and “get control of mass movements, something we have no capacity to duplicate. The poor people are the ones they appeal to and they have always wanted to plunder the rich.???
That causes problems. The U.S. somehow finds it difficult to appeal to the poor with its doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor.
From the New Yorker:
Early in the past century, there was a true socialist movement in the United States, and in the postwar years the Soviet Union seemed to offer the possibility of a meaningful alternative to capitalism. Small wonder that the tycoons of those days were so eager to channel populist agitation into reform. Today, by contrast, corporate chieftains have little to fear, other than mildly higher taxes and the complaints of people who have read Thomas Piketty. Moguls complain about their feelings because that’s all anyone can really threaten.
I believe this is more accurate than Nick Hanauer’s semi-regular essays on how “the pitchforks” will eventually come out.
Hanauer is the venture capitalist who has made a second career as a celebrity billionaire, one who is on the side of the little people.
Being a well-heeled spokesperson for those ground underfoot is the new really cool gig. In the past, I wrote this:
I recently watched Robert Reich’s Inequality for All documentary and Hanauer is all through it, the wealthy and wise-sounding man (venture capitalist, author, activist, philanthropist, true patriot and civic leader, according to his bio) delivering the same clarion call: Inequality is wrecking the country, the wealthy need to be taxed more, the people need to be paid more.
The documentary’s Hanauer bits are taken from his home. In the back of the shot, an acoustic guitar is tastefully set …
Here are framing questions for this post: How many people maimed by the American economy have been given the marquee treatment by the big newsmedia for the sheer audaciousness of their thinking about our trying times?
Hanauer, last week, with the same message in a big essay at Politico on how “pitchforks” will come for the “plutocrats” unless more the spoil is more fairly doled out. Of which I only excerpt the remarkable lead:
You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I’m no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can’t even imagine. Multiple homes, my own plane, etc., etc. You know what I’m talking about …
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 10:28 am by George Smith
Last year, it was bullet-proof tactical puffer vests for children:
With his new line, MC Kids, Caballero offers backpacks and jackets for kids, including some in girlie pink and stamped with fluttering fairies, that are also outfitted with bulletproof plating to stop the slugs from an Uzi. Caballero, 46, said that in his 20 years of business, there had never been a demand in Colombia for bulletproof children’s clothing.
But the United States is a different market: a country where there are about as many firearms as people, Caballero pointed out, and where mass shootings have simply prompted some to stock up on weapons and seek other forms of protection.
And you can see them as part of this video, even more relevant now.
And this week, a long report from deep inna heart of WhiteManistan, Texas, described by Rolling Stone as “falling into the hands of gun nuts, border-sealers and talk-radio charlatans [where] George W. Bush would practically be considered a communist.”
The article is more fair than the lead-in’s implication. Even it’s subjects, most woefully, one of the leaders of Open Carry Texas, might find parts of it a truthful portrayal.
This excerpt, perfectly describes the upside-down world of paralytic, dangerous and paranoid white America in 2014:
Open Carry Texas received even worse press after two dozen heavily armed members, some carrying AK-47s, crashed a meeting of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a gun-control group formed after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. The Moms had gathered at a Mexican restaurant in suburban Dallas. Even though the Open Carry members never left the parking lot, the damage was done: As any PR novice would have warned, you simply don’t bring guns to a mom fight.
This week, Target issued a statement that bringing guns to shop for sundries was no longer allowed, looking specifically aimed at Open Carry Texas in Tarrant County.
“It’s also interesting to report that nearly everyone I met [for this story] turned out to be far quirkier, politically, than any caricatured preconceptions might lead you to guess,” writes the Rolling Stone journalist.
While journalistic comparisons between the rise of the Tea Party and the rise of Occupy Wall Street – as two ends of the spectrum responding to economic collapse and elite betrayal – feel like clichéd false [equivalence] by this point, there’s an unruly, anarchistic feel to this crowd that reminds me of the time I spent in Zuccotti Park.”
Readers know there’s no shortage of WhiteManistan blog video on the rise of Gun Bully America. They are invited to enjoy again, Gun Nut Folk Tune and Hey Joe and to sh-a-a-a-a-r-e in the great network of social media where the cream always rises to the top.
Made months to over a year ago, working documentary proof that things can always get worse. And do.
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