05.03.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 12:13 pm by George Smith
A significant and noticeable portion of white American gun owners enjoy bullying others, either through death threats, videotaped outbursts of psychotic rage, or public displays in which they assemble, march and brandish their weapons in front of unarmed civilians. Or all three.
White American gun bullies get off on their pathology, so much so it’s become normal in this increasingly hostile-to-a-civil-life place. It’s natural to the psychotic character of the country, no longer a fringe symptom. Got a problem? If you’re a white guy with guns, show your anger. Make threatening paranoid videos about fighting or shooting the enemies that surround you, a real American. Frighten as many people as possible. Build your following.
Here is a video of a gun shop businessman named Andy Raymond who wished to import and sell a German smart gun by Armatix that won’t fire unless paired with an activating wrist watch. The technology was developed as a safety measure. If the gun is lost or stolen, it becomes useless.
When the news went public of his business venture he was showered with death threats by other gun owners.
Readers know why. In WhiteManistan, a smart gun that deactivates when not paired with a chip is just the beginning of a potential Obama administration and/or UN plot to disarm patriots by mandating they buy such things.
Angry drunk man, or someone playing one, with guns. It’s so unhinged, it’s possibly a spoof. Anyway, it won’t last long.
Andy Raymond [he comes unglued at around seven minutes]:
It’s a great thing for gun rights when you threaten to shoot somebody … If you’re going to shoot somebody, shoot the politicians who made these laws. Take ’em out in the street and gun ’em the fuck down. There’s a goddamn reason we got these fucking things! [brandishes assault rifle]
Stupid hack journalist line of the day, from a website that used to be a newspaper, but which only exists now because its owners bribe Google to put it in the news tab:
The optics of politically motivated gun owners threatening the lives of other citizens over their business activity will likely prove off-putting to a lot of Americans, especially given wide-ranging concerns about the armed standoff between government agents and rancher Cliven Bundy in Nevada over grazing rights and fees. Armed militiamen are still patrolling Bunkerville, Nev. …
The “optics” of “threatening the lives of others … will likely prove off-putting.”
You think? This is tortured journalism so bad it’s actually almost great. But only almost.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 9:35 am by George Smith
Yes, California has parts of WhiteManistan in it, too. And they are just as united, capable and eloquent in Temecula, about an hour so from me, as their brethren in solidly red states.
Temecula has grape vines and golf courses although why you’d buy wine from Riverside County, as opposed to Santa Barbara or Marin, is beyond me.
Temecula also has homeless people, like the rest of soCal, but they don’t like it, they really don’t. So Temecula’s burgomistress, that’s mayor, is exhorting people to not give money to the homeless in Temecula:
“People will know that by giving food, money, or temporary shelter to a homeless person, they are actually enabling the homeless person to continue to live in the creek and use heroin.“
Live in the creek and use heroin.
Surely that is one of the best constructions you will hear this year. A better example the doling out of the pure milk of human kindness would be hard to find. Perhaps it could be the title of a song.
And does it now mean that when you give shelter to the homeless, you must take them to live in “the creek”?
And hear you see the true nature of the grievance.
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05.02.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 9:58 am by George Smith
Fiore gets to the heart of the NRA Convention, a hypnosis session for stoking fear, all to get WhiteManistan to buy more military hardware.
Here.
The NRA is a paranoid death cult. Contrast Fiore’s cartoon with Wayne LaPierre’s speech which starts calmly enough, then goes bonkers. (Advance to 5:44.)
Your eyes may water, too, but not in a good way when you hear LaPierre shed tears over a nation that has “lost civility” at a convention where Ted Nugent was a keynote speaker.
The NRA’s Paranoia TV series, sponsored by miscellaneous gun manufacturers, is truly remarkable.
Enemies Surround You
Military Tactics for Suppression of Captured Enemies Who Used to Surround You
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04.28.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:23 pm by George Smith
From 2012, an interview with one of the founders of Bain Capital, on a book that he and the interviewer thought might rise to the very top, a vituperative argument that inequality was good.
The NYT:
Ever since the financial crisis started, we’ve heard plenty from the 1 percent. We’ve heard them giving defensive testimony in Congressional hearings or issuing anodyne statements flanked by lawyers and image consultants. They typically repeat platitudes about investment, risk-taking and job creation with the veiled contempt that the nation doesn’t understand their contribution. You get the sense that they’re afraid to say what they really believe. What do the superrich say when the cameras aren’t there?
With that in mind, I recently met Edward Conard on 57th Street and Madison Avenue, just outside his office at Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he helped build into a multibillion-dollar business by buying, fixing up and selling off companies at a profit. Conard, who retired a few years ago at 51, is not merely a member of the 1 percent. He’s a member of the 0.1 percent. His wealth is most likely in the hundreds of millions; he lives in an Upper East Side town house just off Fifth Avenue; and he is one of the largest donors to his old boss and friend, Mitt Romney.
Unlike his former colleagues, Conard wants to have an open conversation about wealth. He has spent the last four years writing a book that he hopes will forever change the way we view the superrich’s role in our society. “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong,??? to be published in hardcover next month by Portfolio, aggressively argues that the enormous and growing income inequality in the United States is not a sign that the system is rigged. On the contrary, Conard writes, it is a sign that our economy is working. And if we had a little more of it, then everyone, particularly the 99 percent, would be better off. This could be the most hated book of the year.
Not hated, but ignored although the author, on various pages, seems to have planted the idea it was a great seller.
On Amazon, 23 one-star reviews, all rather well written. Check used prices for a chuckle.
Edward Conard, who you still don’t know, last seen going down with HMS Romney.
Do read the tortured discussion of how his investments improved the aluminum can and, thereby, the price of soda pop for the rest of us.
“I worked with the company that makes the machine that tapers that can … That means the economy can produce more cans with the same amount of resources. It makes every American who buys a soda can a little bit richer because their paycheck buys more.???
Blessed are the job creators, they can always hire way more waiters.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Fiat money fear and loathers at 1:41 pm by George Smith
From the WSJ:
Bitcoin Latest Price: $460.89, down 7.9% (via CoinDesk)
Crossing Our Desk:
– Beijing still seems to matter for the price of bitcoin. Given that trading in the digital currency has dried up considerably since China first started cracking down on banks’ interactions with bitcoin businesses in December, you’d think the market’s capacity to be surprised might have similarly dried up.
But here we are, once again, with reports of some negative statements by officials at the People’s Bank of China and bitcoin’s international price is down sharply. Specifically, today’s $40 drop …
Get your painting of BitCoin Elvis now. Hurry!
BitCoin grifters arrive in Washington for its cheap power, hydroelectric, mostly built by the government, many years ago.
From the Spokane Spokesman:
When two Stanford University grads wanted to start a bitcoin company, they looked for the lowest power rates in the country.
A map comparing energy rates led them to Central Washington, where hydroelectric dams churn out electricity that costs industrial customers less than 2 cents per kilowatt.
HashPlex, the business launched by Bernie Rihn and George Schnurle, is one of several bitcoin mining companies operating or preparing to launch in Grant, Chelan and Douglas counties …
In a warehouse near Wenatchee in Douglas County, Everett entrepreneur Dave Carlson runs a bitcoin business called MegaBigPower. It’s one of three MegaBigPower sites, including one in Poland.
Inside the 5,000- square-foot building are long rows of racks and shelves holding computer boards connected by cables to hundreds of other computer servers that keep track of what the boards are doing.
Carlson has been featured in several major publications, where he’s said his business is likely the largest bitcoin mining business in the United States.
Like Rihn, he doesn’t want to disclose his specific location.
Sing us the song about the democratizing power of BitCoin tech again, won’t you please?
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 1:08 pm by George Smith
At GlobalSecurity.Org:
Memo to American cyberwarriors: You can’t rehab your lousy reputation by planting stories on how you saved banksters in big newspapers.
Illustrating that global cybersecurity policy and action in the US is purely for the benefit of the 1 percent, Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post wrote a story on leaked details of a concerted Iranian attack on American banks in 2012 a couple weeks ago.
All of it.
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04.25.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Fiat money fear and loathers at 2:37 pm by George Smith
The Rise and Rise of BitCoin, via Winkdex: Or the graph or the hoarders slowly trying to unload their holdings onto other libertarian tech geek suckers.
Note steady downward slope since apex of BitCoin mania.
In other news, BitCoin Elvis of Temple City, was given $20,000 in BitCoin by Reddit BitCoin altar boys for a YouTube press release in which he asserted that he was not, in fact, BitCoin Elvis. Again. Thanks for the 20k, though. (No link)
And from the wire, the BitCoin satellite network, which doesn’t exist yet but so (?):
One private venture is aiming to launch a cluster of tiny satellites that would broadcast the latest bitcoin transactions from orbit.
“To me, it’s really about resilience and lowering costs,” Jeff Garzik, the man behind the start-up Dunvegan Space Systems, told Space.com. This week, Garzik announced that his company contracted the private space venture Deep Space Industries, Inc. to develop nanosatellites for the project dubbed BitSat.
Primarily, Garzik hopes the BitSat network will have a democratizing effect, making bitcoin data available to people living in off-grid locations or outside Western nations in places where an Internet connection is costly.
Garzik has a fundraising target between $2 million and $5 million to get the first BitSats off the ground. He’s hoping to raise those funds (in bitcoins) through a Kickstarter-like campaign.
Off-grid being tech geek libertarian code speak for “I’m going to have a place with my rules like the Republic of CyberBunker or SeeLand or any sea-steading micro-nation-type thing.”
Micro-nationers gotta be able to have BitCoin and access to the blockchain.
Next up, the intriguing trailer of the fan documentary, The Rise and Rise of BitCoin, by Daniel and Nicholas Mross, two aspiring Winklevosses.
Viewers will notice the BitCoin movie shows all the tech geek white guys into it (except for the one non-white masked guy who’s selling drugs on Silk Road).
One of the characters in the trailer, another crypto-currency coding genius, again points out the commonly held notion that BitCoin is all about the democratizing power of technology. Because there’s nothing that says democracy more than a money that’s concentrated all in the hands of speculators and hoarders and which can only be “mined” by ridiculous assemblies of machines average people can’t afford.
An excerpt from a review in the Hollywood Reporter:
Between interviews with entrepreneurs, Libertarians who’ve embraced the currency in order to get off the grid and U.S. government officials tasked with assessing virtual currency’s relevance to money laundering and funding terrorism, the film charts the currency’s fast-rising price in U.S. dollars and watches as Dan Mross invests plenty of money in his mining operation. Some chunks of this narrative are chronologically vague, a not-insignificant failing given how quickly things change on the Bitcoin scene. And most viewers will want a little more detail about our guide’s personal experience with the currency. Having bought in so early, is he now rich? How much did he spend on all those specially-engineered servers in his basement?
Make way, BitCoin ist die Zukunft, coming to you today! The future’s brimming with promise and the promise is heading our way.
And just for fun, a picture from the Winklevoss West palace in the Hollywood Hills.
Purchase made possible by the cash chiseled from Zuckerberg.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 11:59 am by George Smith
Cliven Bundy and Co., well done by Mark Fiore as a folk tune set to “Home on the Range.”
Here.
Wonderful stuff and done before Bundy’s outburst about how African-Americans might have had it better back when they still knew how to pick cotton.
True to form, WhiteManistan’s favorite bigots never know how to shut it. Today, this — excerpted — from a Cliven Bundy official explanation:
I am trying to keep Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream alive …
I am standing up against their bad and unconstitutional laws, just like Rosa Parks did when she refused to sit in the back of the bus.
In this he borrows a chapter from the book of old Steel Knees, Ted Nugent.
About once a year, sometimes more, Nugent regularly calls Rosa Parks and MLK his personal heroes or calls himself a rock and roll son of African Americans. Then he calls the president a subhuman mongrel or a chimpanzee, which is OK.
On Thursday, Nugent devoted his latest column to his standard script: African-Americans in the inner cities are responsible for all the gun violence in America, responsible gun owners need more guns to protect themselves and it’s all the fault of the liberal Democrat government that gives people stuff they don’t deserve, thereby corrupting them.
All of it as a preface to an NRA convention in Indianapolis next week, which Nugent — I assume — will be attending via teleconference. Since he’s either on crutches or in a wheel chair.
(Update: From an Indianapolis news bit: “Rock legend Ted Nugent will be present Sunday to address 2nd Amendment issues and sign his latest book.” We’ll see. Good photos or video will tell something about his condition.)
Nugent’s column did not make news this week, eclipsed as it was by the spectacle of WhiteManistan’s new most public bigot.
Home, home on the range deep inna heart of WhiteManistan.
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04.24.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 2:32 pm by George Smith
Illustrating that global cybersecurity policy and action in the US is purely for the benefit of the 1 percent, Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post wrote a story on leaked details of a concerted Iranian attack on American banks in 2012 a couple weeks ago.
Keep in mind while reading anything from the linked Post piece, the Iranian response, if it was that country’s clandestine effort, came after the US/Israeli launching of the 2010-2011 Stuxnet malware campaign into the networks and controlling machinery of its nuclear program.
From me, now semi-famously:
Nobody in the great mass that is not the 1 percent or in the service of the same cares about attacks on the American financial system. They do, on the other hand, wish our financial system would stop attacking them.
From the Washington Post:
In the spring of 2012, some of the largest banks in the United States were coming under attack, with hackers commandeering servers around the world to direct a barrage of Internet traffic toward the banks’ Web sites.
The assaults, believed to have been launched by Iran, were bringing the sites down for hours at a time and disrupting customer business — the first significant digital assault of its kind undertaken against American industry’s computers by a foreign adversary.
It “was a wake-up call,??? recalled an official from a large Internet service provider for the banks …
With regards to bad stuff alleged to have happened, or be happening, to the United States, in national security speak, it’s always “a wake-up call.” It works like this. You secretly and persistently kick your smaller, less resourceful and poorer enemy in the nuts and no one complains. When he strikes back by hurling a couple bags of dog excrement at you, it’s “a wake-up call.”
One supposes your position depends on where you stood, with regards to the bank assault.
The Post:
The attacks on the banks were launched shortly after the expansion of U.S. sanctions against Iran, and whoever was behind them was impressively skilled …
By September 2012, financial institutions including Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase were grappling with waves of electronic traffic that had crept up from 20 gigabits per second to 40, 80 and ultimately 120 gigabits per second. It was at least three times the volume of traffic that most large banks’ Web sites were initially equipped to handle.
Banks were spending tens of millions of dollars to mitigate the problem.
In the Nakashima/Post piece there is not a single mention of the Stuxnet virus and its offspring, or any discussion by administration officials and sources in the real context of the time, that Iranian attacks on bank websites were seen as retaliation for an escalating American/Israeli malware campaign against that country.
That’s your standard garden-variety journalistic malfeasance, right there, partners.
Instead, an anonymous official describes the American response to Iran as “gentle and precise.” In contrast to Stuxnet, which was designed to wreck an Iranian uranium separation centrifuge operation.
This week, with review posts on Bill Blunden and Violet Cheung’s Behold a Pale Farce book on cyberwar and the malware industrial complex, the roots of the national security complex’s propaganda campaign in this area were outlined.
Nakashima’s Post story is another in kind, a piece to revive imaginary characteristics of reason and restraint on the part of US cyberwar/cyberdefense operations through the issue of a new load of fresh clean laundry.
Instead of striking into Iran’s networks directly in retaliation, because, as the story reads, our cyberwar capabilities are so much stronger than Iran’s, a response was concocted to be “gentle and precise.”
Thank you, former NSA director Keith Alexander. In one stroke, his image redeemed. That horrid Edward Snowden mess can be left behind.
American officials and workers in cybersecurity at a variety of agencies “reached out” to 120 foreign countries, allies, and enlisted their aid in squelching the Iranian assaults in a group effort that disarmed the botnet networks used in the distributed denial of service attacks against American banks.
Grand and stirring stuff! American mega-banking websites were saved! Victory was ours in the Battle of BofA!
You, national security dudes and Post editors, thought rigging publishing a story about how US megabanks were bailed out by the government (again), from website attacks, by little Iran is something to pat yourself on the back over? Seriously?
Oh me, oh my, “the banks were spending tens of millions of dollars to mitigate the problem.”
To repeat, your position on the Battle of BofA depended on where you stood.
I’m a big bank client. So are friends. I didn’t notice any problems with my bank’s website during the great cyber-assault.
However, I also didn’t notice any slow down or change in how quickly and efficiently my bank went into my account for the usual administrative and other miscellaneous fee collections during the same time period. That’s digital and software-mediated, too.
The vast majority of Americans didn’t know of, and wouldn’t have given a shit if they did, about the attacks on bank websites and how they were staunched by US and allied cyberdefense.
As a story, the Post’s is entirely in the genre of computer security for the 1 percent. A great story of doings of no benefit to anyone but those at the top of pyramid.
Almost seems a shame the newspaper won that Pulitzer for Edward Snowden’s material last week, doesn’t it?
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Posted in Bioterrorism, Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks at 9:53 am by George Smith
Walter White toasts you, new young ricin men.
American mass media and Google are not your friends. Together, they’ve created a peculiar and abnormal environment which manifests in increasingly unusual pathologies.
Google search now judges the most relevant materials to be those selected through crowd-sourcing by idiots. And so it is elementary to find worthless recipes for ricin with a smartphone app in an instant, along with lots of information that guarantees young men who are broken in some way a quick visit from a federal and state joint anti-terrorism task force.
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 was young Danny Milzman, a student at Georgetown University, of whom much has already been written here.
Walter White said ricin was a fine poison, untraceable. And it is on the net in hundreds of places. Therefore, it must be true.
The prison sentence that would result from a conviction in the Rhoads case is probably around fifteen years.
From the wires in OKC:
Court documents state an Oklahoma City man arrested in a murder plot mentioned a popular television show before revealing he had Ricin.
Federal agents said Preston Rhoads was planning on killing his pregnant girlfriend and her unborn fetus with the deadly toxin.
The Oklahoma Department of Health told News 9 the state has never had a documented case of Ricin toxicity …
The use of Ricin was a plot line in the hit television series, Breaking Bad. Ricin is a potentially deadly toxin made from castor beans. The federal search warrant stated Preston Rhoads asked a friend about the show just moments before showing the friend a vial.
In three of the four ricin cases this year, the young men now in jail talked to a friend or showed them their castor powder concoctions.
Either because they have a subliminal desire to go to jail or because the country won’t know how clever you are with ricin poison, like Walter White, if you don’t tell someone about it. Or both.
Oh, and like Preston Rhoads, ask the buddy if he would like to deliver a pizza to your girlfriend and put your powder on it. Most friends would respond well to such a request, don’t you think? Would Jesse have done it for Walter if he wanted to poison Skyler?
In a very small way it may be satisfying to see how a character and story have so indelibly inspired a special cohort of the American citizenry. But if I were Bryan Cranston, the script writers and the show’s science advisor, I’d actually be kinda bummed at this point. And I enjoyed Breaking Bad. (Google, on the other hand, doesn’t bum out about anything. Part of its function is to raise digital road spikes, oil slicks and cinder blocks hidden in paper bags to the top positions in search on the information superhighway.)
Earlier, on this channel:
The hit TV show “Breaking Bad??? and its dark plotlines played an outsized role in a federal courtroom in Washington this week …
In the case of the Georgetown student, defense attorneys have said Milzman was a troubled 19-year-old struggling with depression. He created the ricin, his lawyers said, because he wanted to hide his suicide plans from his family. If he became ill from the substance, no one would know that he had killed himself.
But the federal prosecutor argued that Milzman’s statements about “Breaking Bad??? suggested otherwise. She told the judge that the show’s protagonist produced ricin not to commit suicide, but to kill someone else. A friend said Milzman was such a big fan of the show he knew the name of each episode by heart. [Italicized — from the WaPost.]
The judge asked if Milzman was such a big fan of the show, why had not the prosecutors brought it up on the day another judge had ordered the young man released to psychiatric treatment in a DC hospital?
The government’s lawyer responded she had been unfamiliar with the show.
“I was not as familiar with the show then as I am today,??? said Assistant U.S. Attorney Maia Miller …
Public service announcement
This blog’s 2006 rendition of the illustration that accompanied Kurt Saxon’s ricin recipe from The Poor Man’s James Bond, one of the original sources of web “manuals” on how to make it. Use your smartphone to share it on social media with your friends! They’ll think you’re as clever as Walter White! Then the armored car circus will visit your neighborhood!
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