02.20.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 10:02 am by George Smith
Peggy Noonan, syndicated right wing columnist, plutocrat and Ronald Reagan’s most famous speechwriter, has discovered she lives in a corporate fascist plutocracy. She is shocked, just shocked at the personal awfulness of the 1 percent and greed and looting as the images of American exceptionalism.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, syndicated here at the Beaufort Observer:
We’re at a funny point in our political culture. To have judgment is to be an elitist. To have dignity is to be yesterday. To have standards is to be a hypocrite …
They are America’s putative great business leaders. They are laughing, singing, drinking, posing in drag and acting out skits. The skits make fun of their greed and cynicism. In doing this they declare and make clear, just in case you had any doubts, that they are greedy and cynical …
They’re making their videos, holding their parties and having a ball. OK. But imagine you’re a Citizen at Home just grinding through—trying to do it all, the job, the parenthood, the mowing the lawn and paying the taxes. No glamour, all responsibility and effort. And you see these little clips on the Net where the wealthy sing about how great taxpayer bailouts are and you feel like . . . they’re laughing at you.
What happens to a nation whose elites laugh at its citizens?
What happens? Everyone but the bankers at the secret party gets worked over. You get to go on Medicaid and sell your guitars to pay bills. Maybe you can get on food stamps.
And next year they have another party just like the one before.
That’s because, ah, “we are at a funny point in our society.”
The should have asked me to play this at the St. Regis Hotel Ballroom. And unlike the singing bankers, I would have been cheap, can hold a tune and teach everyone the words.
One Percent Jokes and Plutocrats in Drag: That which caused the scales to fall from Peggy’s eyes.
Excerpted:
The first and most obvious conclusion was that the upper ranks of finance are composed of people who have completely divorced themselves from reality. No self-aware and socially conscious Wall Street executive would have agreed to be part of a group whose tacit mission is to make light of the financial sector’s foibles. Not when those foibles had resulted in real harm to millions of people …
The second thing I realized was that Kappa Beta Phi was, in large part, a fear-based organization. Here were executives who had strong ideas about politics, society, and the work of their colleagues, but who would never have the courage to voice those opinions in a public setting. Their cowardice had reduced them to sniping at their perceived enemies in the form of satirical songs and sketches, among only those people who had been handpicked to share their view of the world. And the idea of a reporter making those views public had caused them to throw a mass temper tantrum.
The pure Culture of Lickspittle.
Via Frank.
You don’t have to listen to lousy recordings from the St. Regis Hotel Ballroom to be entertained! If you find yourself in Pasadena on Wednesday or Saturday afternoons, you can hear “Rich Man’s Burden” and other things, in person!
Permalink
02.19.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Psychopath & Sociopath, Ted Nugent at 11:07 am by George Smith
Overnight Ted Nugent was criticized by Wolf Blitzer of CNN for a comment, now about a month old, in which he called the President a “subhuman mongrel.”
The segment, in connection with Texas Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott’s choice to use Nugent as a public campaign booster, immediately spawned a Twitter response from America’s most public bigot.
From Media Matters:
This is most ungenerous since it is the mainstream media that butters Ted’s bread. It has made made him enough of a national celebrity to guarantee he earns more money being WhiteManistan’s favorite racist than actually playing guitar to riffraff on the county fair and casino circuit.
In any case, blog readers know Nugent always calls his enemies Nazis. And (Mao-Tse Tung Fan Club) Commies, although the latter seems to have gone to into disuse over the last six months.
In January of this year Nugent compared movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, who is Jewish, to Joseph Goebbels. And the parents of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer were Holocaust survivors.
And, writes Media Matters: “In March 2013, Nugent compared Obama to ‘a German in 1938 pretending to respect the Jews and then going home and putting on his brown shirt and forcing his neighbors onto a train to be burned to death.’ ”
Of course, it’s not news to readers that Nugent is both repugnant and a gold-plated idiot. If you’re going to repeatedly compare your enemies to Joseph Goebbels, perhaps you ought to be able to get the Nazi’s name right before blurting it out with whatever comes into your head.
In the future perhaps Himmler would be easier to spell.
Ted Nugent, as a psychopath, is certainly the best man for the Republican Party as well as another pretty good example of daily malice and indecency as American virtues.
Permalink
02.18.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 12:48 pm by George Smith
Here.
Permalink
02.17.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 5:03 pm by George Smith
Americans don’t know science and as I enter the last quarter of my life I don’t care. I tried to fight the battle for years, starting long ago, and lost.
It’s not entirely the fault of the citizenry or education. It’s because, quite frequently, the American economy and system didn’t actually want a lot of scientists, despite all the propaganda to the opposite you’ve heard through the decades.
I graduated from Albright College in Reading in ’74 with a B.S. in biochemistry, a very new profession. I easily sent out a hundred resumes. I got three interviews, none of them serious. The rest of it came back with the famous line, “our current needs are not commensurate with your [fill in the blank].”
Commensurate was the big word then.
So, a bachelor’s isn’t worth much in science and the country was in a recession.
I went on to grad school at Lehigh and finished a Ph.D. program in good standing. I even published original research that mattered, on a pathogen, a species of flesh-eating bacteria, that’s notoriously well known today. The work was well ahead of its time, what pure science is supposed to be.
Upon graduation I sent out another bushel basket of resumes, now retitled, curriculum vitae.
I had one interview, just as lousy as the three when I was at Albright.
It was at Merck, if my memory holds, and before I gave the customary seminar the person who was my point of contact, a man in his sixties, now probably dead, someone who had a good laugh over the idea of a microbial chemist from Lehigh in Bethlehem doing research on an organism from the ocean. If I’d been a few years older I would’ve walked and skipped the rest of the day at the place entirely.
I was eventually able to get a part-time job teaching substitute chemistry at Pine Grove High School. The full-time instructor was out on leave. He was a wood shop teacher, actually. And that did not last because it was concluded I would damage his credibility with students, as someone with a Ph.D. in the subject, if I was allowed to continue teaching it until he returned. Giving students the best wasn’t really on the menu. It never is.
I was moved to the middle school where I was permitted to substitute as an algebra teacher for a couple weeks.
I eventually took a post-doctoral position at the Penn State School of Medicine at Hershey in the Dept. of Biological Chemistry. I published a little and it lasted for about three years, furnishing a poverty level stipend, until grant money ran out. The man I worked for suggested I continue doing the lab research pro bono until I published more.
I actually took his advice for a month until one day I just had had enough and left. By that time, everyone, a lab assistant, a student intern, and a grad student working on his doctorate (I wrote recommendations for the latter two), had also abandoned the lab. When I departed it was just another empty room.
Going back to live in the Lehigh Valley I was able to teach one semester of introductory microbiology lab to students in the mortuary/funeral home track at Northampton Community College. When that ended, (you should have seen the student reviews that went into my record, one young lady gave me bad marks for having boring clothes) the only thing I was able to get was tutoring a high school student who was doing poorly in chemistry.
I remember his father saying, “Times must be pretty hard when someone like you can only find work doing this.”
Next I looked into going back to school to add an education credential.
I related the experience here:
I had been teaching a lab course in microbiology at Northampton Community College in period of around ‘89-91, not long after leaving Lehigh University. It was suggested to me, by an old Lehigh advisor, that I might pick up an educational certification at Moravian College in Bethlehem. So I inquired and was given a list of courses I would have to take. I had a Ph.D. in chemistry from across town, and was told I would have to take introductory microbiology, a course I had been teaching, as well as other basic chemistry courses, which I also had taught as part of paying the freight for the doctorate.
I already had three degrees in chemistry and you can only imagine how shocking and infuriating it was to hear, as a young person who had recently graduated with the highest qualification one could get in chemistry, that one would have to take beginner’s courses again.
I asked the benighted woman who was talking with me, surely this could not be true, that the school would not honor any degreed credit from other very well known places. She just froze up and said I’d have to take the things again.
Maybe she was incompetent or crazy or something was really wrong that day. It brought everything to a bad halt. There was no point in having a conversation or to make plans on continuing education.
After that I just didn’t give a shit. You can only take so much nonsensical crap and rejection letters explaining in a sentence how your skills are or were not commensurate with the needs of the employer.
This was my conclusion:
Schools and businesses stopped honoring any type of credentials and experience when and wherever it was convenient, which was usually when you walked in their door …
American business and schooling has made it their business to just deny people what they have learned as part of a racket to force many out of the workforce. It is a convenience, one to push desperate people into spending more and more money on “retraining.??? Anything that will discredit labor and ability is thrown at you.
Another feature of the American scientific establishment that took over while I was in my development years was the settling in of the system in which newly graduated doctorates were side-tracked into teaching undergraduate science courses as second-class citizens. Tenured professors were, in this burgeoning system, freed to perform glorious research while a poorly paid but highly trained workforce with no benefits and no job security was retained to teach undergraduate students.
As higher education priced itself more and more out of reach of average Americans (unless they were willing to incur heavy debt burdens upon graduation), it worked to guarantee there really wasn’t much of a demand for scientists. Unless they wanted to spend a lot of time, perhaps all their careers, working as second and third class citizens in the academic community.
So Americans are fools — how astonishing — when it comes to science:
Americans are enthusiastic about the promise of science but lack basic knowledge of it, with one in four unaware that the Earth revolves around the Sun, said a poll out Friday.
The survey included more than 2,200 people in the United States and was conducted by the National Science Foundation.
Nine questions about physical and biological science were on the quiz, and the average score — 6.5 correct — was barely a passing grade.
Just 74 percent of respondents knew that the Earth revolved around the Sun, according to the results released at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.
Fewer than half (48 percent) knew that human beings evolved from earlier species of animals.
The result of the survey, which is conducted every two years, will be included in a National Science Foundation report to President Barack Obama and US lawmakers.
The Culture of Lickspittle gets what it deserves.
Americans are “enthusiastic” about science? I call bullshit.
That’s one of those things you can expect people to say when asked because they feel it’s what they ought to sound like as a proper person in public. Indifferent to science would have been a more believable result.
And such results will be included in a “a report” to “US lawmakers,” half or maybe more who believe global warming is a hoax and don’t believe in the theory of evolution?
Wow.
I had nothing to do with this sorry mess. Don’t blame me. I cared once. Now I don’t.
If you’d gone through it you wouldn’t either.
Note: I am sure my experience was not that unique. Nationally, I’m betting the system simply rejected a lot of people in similar ways.
So maybe ya think blowtorch-strength cynicism isn’t warranted?
This is one answer. Really.
Permalink
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Fiat money fear and loathers at 2:26 pm by George Smith
This morning, Bitcoin could be purchased in Los Angeles, as USC, for $317, the average price on Mt. Gox.
The same seller is now advertising 268 with the caveat, “Price is Mt. Gox market price at time of transaction.”
Mt. Gox, as of right at post publication, is offering an average $320, a low of $248, and a high of $411.
Linking is pointless as the exchange rate is so changeable.
Bitcoincharts dot com offers a spread of pricing, from $629 at BitStamp in the US to a low of 207 from Mt. Gox (in Euros), 278 in dollars.
But why would you buy any BitCoin that offered at an online exchange for higher values? Isn’t the purpose of the network to grease the best, most frictionless, most advantageous deal? It is, by design, an every-man-for-himself currency.
There is no advantage in buying a Bitcoin at any of the elevated rates, either from local traders or on-line exchanges. If there is a wide spread in valuation, this money is only as valuable at the lowest price, presumably sold where the most volume is conducted.
One of the ways to restore the value, then, is by price fixing. The Bitcoin sellers all look at the charts and unilaterally agree to not sell at anything below the highest number. Ha-ha.
Thought exercise: How much have the Winklevoss twins lost on their Bitcoin holdings over the weekend?
Yes, I’ll try anything once. This blog now accepts BitCoin charity.
Donate Bitcoins
Permalink
02.16.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Fiat money fear and loathers at 12:40 pm by George Smith
Bitcoin won't buy Colt 45 to ease the pain of being spit on the sidewalk of America like used chewing gum.
I maintain Bitcoin is the perfect currency for our time. Or, at least, the most fitting. Take the example of the
experts called to testify to its goodness by the state of New York: the Winklevoss twins.
Why are the Winklevoss twins so wealthy? What have they materially contributed to society that is so valuable that makes them so?
They were born into the upper class.
By dint of association/connection with Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard they were eventually able to chisel a settlement fortune from him and Facebook to go away. Are they programmers? No.
Would such a legal option have been open to average Americans without the resources of an upper class? No.
Why did they get a pistachio commercial offer? Because they were famous for being semi-famous in the Social Network movie and chiseling Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
Why were the Winkelvoss twins able to become Bitcoin experts?
Because they had the money from the upper class and sucking cash from Zuckerberg, enough to at least buy up 1.5 million and somethings worth of Bitcoins.
And why are they successful at getting others to invest in their consulting services, hedge funding and so on? Because they are famous to semi-famous for being famous or semi-famous and people see the money sloshing in news articles in which the Winklevoss twins appear.
So the Winklevosses are wealthy because they were born to it and became adept at siphoning big money from large pools of it as the opportunities are presented when it splashes around.
Bitcoin, which is for hoarding, gaming the system, deception, chiseling and speculation, is a perfect match with them.
The majority of people cannot do anything with Bitcoins except pay too many dollars for one. Therefore they either do not know what Bitcoins are or just shrug their shoulders at the idea. Bitcoin is not for the hoi polloi. The Winklessvoss twins are the class who appreciate Bitcoin.
When I entered my name to create an account at Coinbase, the Bitcoin exchange, a week or so ago, I was offered, like everyone is, a button and mechanism to sell goods or accept donations in the currency.
To sell, the service conveniently auto-filled a good I might want to sell for Bitcoins: alpaca socks.
I asked Google whether I could buy Colt 45 or King Cobra malt liquors with Bitcoin. The internet did not provide an answer.
I take that as a ‘No’.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Bitcoin is proving to be the joke of a currency that many experts and pundits had predicted. This is too bad, because the world could use something akin to Bitcoin …
It was recently reported that a Silk Road 2.0 site had been hacked, and that all 4,474 Bitcoins had been stolen. The heist was valued at close to $2.7 million at the time …
The cheapest price for a Bitcoin in Pasadena, today — $344.
The current price on Coinbase: $618
The current price on Mt.Gox (in Euros): 187
The nerds who traveled about an hour to buy a Subway sandwich with Bitcoin in Allentown, WhiteManistan, very close to where I lived many many years ago! (Note: Story posted at one of the internet equivalents of giant hogweed, Medium, the blogging platform started by the Twitter man who realized 140 characters weren’t quite enough and “wanted to give rationality a fighting chance.”)
Make me a believer. I’ll try anything once. This blog now accepts BitCoin.
Donate Bitcoins
Tip o’ the hat to Frank at Pine View Farm for scratch-padding.
Permalink
02.14.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 4:28 pm by George Smith
Someone had to pay for Edward Snowden and it damn well isn’t going to be Keith or Mike McConnell of Booz Allen:
The director of the N.S.A., Gen. Keith B. Alexander, is retiring next month after serving far longer than his predecessors. The director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., who has also been a focus of criticism for failing to police the speed at which security upgrades have been conducted throughout the intelligence community, remains in office.
Both men, and their wives, were guests at the state dinner on Tuesday night for France’s president, François Hollande, which was widely interpreted as an indication they remained in good stead at the White House.
“The National Security Agency has told Congress that it has forced out a civilian employee after a lengthy investigation to ‘assign accountability’ for the disclosure of intelligence secrets by Edward J. Snowden, one of its former contractors,” reads the Times.
“Two others — identified only as an active-duty military member and another contractor — were ‘removed from access to N.S.A. information’ and facilities last August.”
Another contractor most probably means Mike McConnell’s cybersecurity unit at Booz Allen Hamilton, Edward Snowden’s former proxy employer at the NSA.
Business as usual at Versailles-on-Potomac.
Cynically, there is no reason to hold them in poor standing from the perspective of national leadership. They’ve done what they thought they were supposed to, which was to expand the reach and power of national cyberwar and cyber-spying.
That Edward Snowden would be perceived globally as the good guy must be vexing to them. “How can this be so?” they must wonder. “We are the good guys, not the bad guy.”
Has it not occurred to them that they’re extraordinarily lucky? There has been only one Edward Snowden. The bad guys have a pretty loyal club.
I’ll keep you informed when General Keith cashes in his chips. I would forecast a multi-million dollar signing bonus for going to head the cybersdefense operation of a major arms manufacturer plus, possibly, a million dollar book advance to tell his side of the Snowden story.
Keith Alexander — from the archives.
Permalink
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Psychopath & Sociopath, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 10:04 am by George Smith
If you don’t like my song you’re a moron and should not be reading this blog.
From CNN Money, Tom Perkins, who is now doing it just because it gets him video attention:
“The fear is wealth tax, higher taxes, higher death taxes — just more taxes until there is no more 1%. And that that will creep down to the 5% and then the 10%.”
“The Tom Perkins system is: You don’t get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes.”
“But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How’s that?”
I thought that last bit was already true. Many think the same, no?
This puts Perkins in company with others, notably Ted Nugent, who has lobbied twice for the reciprocal: denying the vote to those who allegedly pay no tax.
Nugent means the poor, the 47 percent, anyone on the left and everyone not-white. And they actually do pay taxes, lots of them. Payroll, sales, regular state-administered car fees, phone service taxes, etc.
From 2012:
“Let’s also stop the insanity by suspending the right to vote of any American who is on welfare. Once they get off welfare and are self-sustaining, they get their right to vote restored. No American on welfare should have the right to vote for tax increases on those Americans who are working and paying taxes to support them.”
And again, last year:
He’ll use his NRA clout to make it law that everyone who buys a gun at a gun show go through a background check if the rest of us will campaign for and help enact law that takes the right to vote for presidential and congressional candidates in elections away from people who pay no income tax.
In his blog, and today in his column at the New York Times, Paul Krugman has been working over the same issue:
In fact, the people who seem least inclined to respect the efforts of ordinary workers are the winners of the wealth lottery. Over the past few months, we’ve been harangued by a procession of angry billionaires, furious that they’re not receiving the deference, the acknowledgment of their superiority, that they believe is their due. For example, last week the investor Sam Zell went on CNN Money to defend the 1 percent against “envy,??? and he asserted that “the 1 percent work harder. The 1 percent are much bigger factors in all forms of our society.??? Dignity for all!
And there’s another group that doesn’t respect workers: Republican politicians.
“[When] it comes to Americans down on their luck, conservatives become insultingly paternalistic, as comfortable congressmen (in this case, he specifically aims at Paul Ryan) lecture struggling families on the dignity of work,” Krugman adds.
And then there’s the whole thing of denying health care for the poor through the Medicaid expansion because of hatred of the president and … freedom.
The malevolence is personal.
Also by way of Krugman, an academic paper on factors causing rises in inequality, in this case, “capital account liberalisation,” aka rewarding money holders and the ease of sloshing it around the globe, and “fiscal consolidations,” aka policies of economic belt-tightening or “austerity:”
Last month’s World Economic Forum at Davos will be remembered as the one where the rich realised that incomes were unequal. One suspects the rich had always been dimly aware of this fact, but even they seem to have been astounded by the degree of inequality.
There is clear evidence that the decline in budget deficits was followed by increases in inequality.
Fiscal consolidations are followed by an increase in long-term unemployment.
The past three decades have been associated with a steady decline in the number of restrictions that countries impose on cross-border financial transactions …
What happens to inequality in the aftermath of these episodes? The evidence is that, on average, capital account liberalisation is followed by a significant and persistent increase in inequality.
It is a short and easy to grok read.
Sam Zell — from the archives.
Tom Perkins.
Permalink
02.12.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 4:04 pm by George Smith
Since Jeff Bezos’ attempts to become a physical book publisher have been fought well at the retail level, Amazon has expanded its imprints to publishing only for the digital world.
You can see much of it at apub dot com. 47North, for example, is a digital Kindle imprint devoted to horror and science-fiction. A look at the titles was a complete turn-off. Your mileage may vary.
If this strikes you as publishing by people who don’t even care to read manuscripts, you’re probably close to reality.
I knew Ed Park, Amazon’s literary editor for physical titles, and can vouch he was a nice guy who was definitely into books.
The same cannot be implied from looking over publishing as sifted by book reviews of vanity-published digital works on Amazon’s site, or use by Amazon of its Kindle platform to do big data examinations of what is being read and with what manner of enthusiasm.
How do you judge enthusiasm in reading a digital book, anyway? I don’t have a Kindle. But, if one judges by swiftness of completion or page turns per minute, you can be dealing with a complete turkey, something fascinating, or anywhere in-between, I would think.
At Amazon this has led to the licensing of artistic or creative ouvres, more accurately consumer product niches, so that wanna-be authors can write digital fan fiction novels devoted to it.
The best example, pre-Amazon, was Star Trek fiction. You could walk into any big book store, go to the science-fiction section, and see a hundred or more novels written in the Star Trek world. My impression was they were simply lowest common denominator crap even though some sold well and sometimes name sci-fi authors were tabbed to write ’em.
Similar things were done with the worlds of Sherlock Holmes (Holmes expansion has been far more successful in movies and tv, is decades old, and is/was done by mechanisms which are the very antithesis of world-of-Bezos content creation) and the horror author, H. P. Lovecraft. (True confession: I have Lovecraft’s work and bought a couple titles of fiction derivatives. None were very good.)
Amazon is expanding this world:
And Kindle Worlds on Wednesday announced a deal with Hasbro to let fans write stories in “the next few months??? about G.I. Joe. The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal.
Hasbro sees Kindle Worlds as a way to let fans connect to G.I. Joe, something Michael Kelly, the company’s director of global publishing, describes as “open-source storytelling.???
Hasbro is putting few restrictions on authors. Writers can’t produce pieces that are sexually explicit, racist or sexist. Given that G.I. Joe is a military figure, violence is expected.
“Gritty is OK, but gratuitous is not,??? Kelly said.
And Hasbro, based in Pawtucket, R.I., deep in Boston Red Sox country, threw in one other restriction: G.I. Joe’s comrade, Snake Eyes, cannot be a portrayed [as a Ted Sox fan].
So while Amazon caught the New York publishing world’s attention when it hired Kirshbaum and targeted A-list authors, it’s more quietly been making hay in niche markets. Its 47North imprint focuses on science fiction, fantasy and horror. Thomas & Mercer publishes mysteries, thrillers and suspense books. It has Montlake Romance and Jet City Comics.
Merciful God in Heaven. Have you ever seen one of the GI Joe movies? Comment invited.
This follows on the heels of the licensing of Amazon Kindle fan fiction for minor characters from the novels of, prepare to be stupefied, Kurt Vonnegut:
The book-publishing unit at the online retail giant created an imprint devoted to fan fiction, Kindle Worlds, last May. Fan fiction is often dismissed as mediocre writing …
[Hugh Howey] saw an opportunity to write his own work in a world conceived by Kurt Vonnegut, which Amazon licensed from the author’s estate.
Howey created a short work, “Peace in Amber,??? that wove his 9/11 story with the life of Montana Wildhack, an adult-film star from Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.???
Let’s look again at Amazon Kindle publishing for the fascinating genre of electromagnetic pulse doom in America white survivalist romance fiction.
From Into the Darkness, published just last month, already with 39 customer reviews, 13 of which are five star, and 17 of which are four star:
4 stars … much like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but a touch more desperation and with guns. I got almost as weary of the river as they did.
4 stars — I read a lot of survival fiction and most of it is inexpensive or free. This one was very enjoyable and just a good story. My only reason for giving it four stars is the lack of good editing. That is pretty much usual for an inexpensive debut novel and with professional editing it would get five stars from me. The trip-after-the-ShitHitsTheFan scenario is nothing new but returning home by inflatable raft on a river is pretty original.
And inexpensive it is: 99 cents.
Or how about 77 Days in September, republished by Amazon Digital Services last month, seemingly originally published as early as 2011, with 1,967 author reviews, 1,216 of which are five star:
On a Friday afternoon before Labor Day, Americans are getting ready for the holiday weekend, completely unaware of a long-planned terrorist plot about to be launched against the country. Kyle Tait is settling in for his flight home to Montana when a single nuclear bomb is detonated 300 miles above the heart of America. The blast, an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP), destroys every electrical device in the country, and results in the crippling of the power grid, the shutting down of modern communications, and bringing to a halt most forms of transportation.
Kyle narrowly escapes when his airplane crashes on take-off, only to find himself stranded 2,000 miles from home …
5 stars — This book was recommended to me. I was somewhat skeptical as I began reading, but was quickly drawn in. It has all the elements of an excellent novel. The characters are well defined, believable and easy to relate to. The plot, however fictitious, is grounded in reality and calls attention to a truly catastrophic, yet largely ignored threat to international security.
5 stars — I think we have talent here. From the Forward I was hooked. The idea of an EMP never crossed my mind and it made the story line believable. What better way to hold your interest than to have two people deeply attached to each other trying desperately to get back together after a major event changes all the circumstances of their separation.
5 stars — Just finished this book, after not being able to put it down for days. It’s only equal is “One second after.” Great story line, character development, plots, just a great job overall. I was crying at the end, and that’s a first for this genre and a testament to how well the author creates a personal bond with the reader and the characters. If you like adventure stories, prepper fiction, or so called “survivalist” books, this one is a must read. I hope Mr. Gotham (sic, it’s Ray Gorham) find (sic) time and motivation to write more, as I will happily spend a few bucks on them.
As for the characters, they are truly human. No “Rambo” super prepper no bug out bags, no underground caches or retreats. This book is a look at the real, honest, actual human condition should the EMP scenario actually occur. This is reality, not some prepper fantasy, and for that, I’d give it 6 stars. Read it, it just might make the crucial difference for you if Shit does HitTheFan.
The future of publishing, here today. Thank you, Mr. Bezos.
Permalink
02.11.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:02 pm by George Smith
Seen on Craigslist today while looking for a job in Los Angeles County:
We are a literary marketing company that helps authors/publishers increase book sales.
We are looking for individuals who can boost the positive “Amazon book review” postings on selected titles. You will be given the reviews. No need to do any writing. The books are of all genres, but some are erotica so you should be fine with that. You must have an active Amazon account (meaning having purchased anything from there) and a computer with a unique I.P. address (no Kindles/phones, etc.).
Need a handful of people to post reviews on about 10 books/day (should take less than an hour total). You will be paid $5/book ($50 total/every day). Payment is by Paypal on a daily basis.
If legitimate, not a scam, the payment is a better wage than one can earn on Jeff Bezos’ Mechanical Turk digital sweatshop, which also features employers offering workers penurious amounts (anywhere from 0.1 cent to a penny a word) for reviews as commercial astro-turfing for the web. (Of course, it could just be more sharing economy sucker bait in which the worker posts phony reviews to Amazon and is never paid at all.)
Trivial statistics:
Number of workers killed in Empire of Bezos fulfillment houses
during 2013 shopping/holiday season: 2
Number of kidney stones suffered by Jeff Bezos while on vacation in Galapagos Islands over New Year: unspecified
And Andrew Leonard of Salon needed the New Yorker to be told this?
In this week’s New Yorker, George Packer employs 12,000 words to answer a huge leading question in the headline: “Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books????
The answer, as just about anyone will guess without even reading the argument to follow, is no. Amazon’s relentless, Wal-Mart-like price pressure on publishers, its monopolization of both the means of production and the distribution mechanism, and its ongoing annihilation of the very concept of a “printed??? book are all combining, argues Packer, to hollow out the traditional publishing industry. This will ultimately, concludes Packer, be to the detriment of the culture at large, as there will be no economic model capable of supporting the kind of serious fiction and nonfiction that takes years to gestate, research and craft.
Here is the New Yorker piece. It’s long. The message, now common, although very detailed: Amazon and Jeff Bezos are despised by book publishers. Bezos is not particularly interested in selling books, just in selling everything at the lowest price the market will bear. He wishes to out Wal-Mart Wal-Mart.
The practice is always the same. The use of the tools of software to pit all against all in the American economy, pressing pay, compensation, everything down. Amazon’s business is not unique, just its monopolizing and controlling market weight and the company, in respects much like Google, is trying to do everything including book publishing (which has been a failure [1]) as well as streaming music, video and tv production.
But with all the gatekeepers in publishing and content creation removed by Amazon’s creative disruption — editors and/or choosers, replaced by sifting and matching algorithms adjusted only by the thumbs up and thumbs down provided by customers, trolls and astro-turfed digital review, look at the wonderful things you get!
Like all these self-published novels, printed on demand or delivered for Kindle by Amazon!
The unique genre of electromagnetic pulse attack on America white survivalist romance fiction, set free from the literary dungeon run by the elitist editors in America’s old publishing houses!
Jeff Bezos brought in Business Insider’s Henry Blodget to educate the Washington Post’s journalists on the nature of web journalism. And, presumably, what works for Business Insider.
Which is nothing but clickbait.
Business Insider is a web-site/aggregation sink of “news,” almost all of it reprinted or regurgitated, usually very poorly, from somewhere else. It is safe to say it employs almost no journalists, if any. And the point is to produce the most pandering content using “workers” who do it for free or mostly so.
On Henry Blodget, from “Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator,” in 2012:
In April 2011, Business Insider editor Henry Blodget put out an advisory to the PR world. He was drowning in elaborate story pitches and information about new services. He just couldn’t read them all, let alone write about them. So he proposed a solution: The publicists could write about the product launches of their own clients and Blodget’s site would edit and publish them … In Blodget’s overzealous drive to create traffic for his site, he didn’t mind misinforming. He didn’t care who wrote it as long as it got page views. He was willing to let PR and marketing professionals and people like me write about their clients — which he would then pass off as real news and commentary to his readers.
This is in line with the world of Jeff Bezos where the role of most people as workers is to be paid nothing or almost nothing for goods and services that pander to the whims of masses of consumers.
Getting Blodget, a former stock peddler for Merrill Lynch who was charged with essentially selling fraud by the SEC in 2003 and one of America’s millionaires on the basis of such, to lecture the Post’s editorial staff (Bezos now owns the paper) is reminiscent of billionaire Sam Zell foisting Lee Abrams on LA Times journalists as an “innovation” expert. Abrams made a fortune ruining FM radio with rigid and idiotic formatting that pandered only to advertisers and the lowest common denominator in audience.
(Indeed, it is a wonder that Bezos bought the Post. What does he like about journalism? It’s a legitimate question. Bezos never cooperates with journalists, the exception being 60 Minutes when it agreed to do publicity for his drone delivery fantasy, and is intensely secretive.)
Zell’s philosophy, if readers watched the videos from his time as owner of Tribune, particularly the one from the Orlando Sentinel, was to deliver to consumers what they wanted all the time, stories and pictures about puppy dogs, for instance, rather than expensive coverage of Iraq.
The Lee Abrams/LA Times relationship is another laugh-a-minute horror tale from the Zell era.
A small part of it, the end, is summarized at the LA Weekly:
When news hit Times staffers Friday that Abrams, a former radio industry guru who was the company’s “chief innovation officer,” resigned over a memo that included a spoof-newscast video of nude women titled “Sluts,” there were cheers in the newsroom …
We’re bummed. Frankly Abrams provided some of the most entertaining content to come out of Tribune, gems such as:
“We ARE in the age of the eye.”
“Imagine Newspaper CONTENT is a major artist. Currently they are performing in a old but reliable venue. What happens if the artist (Content) moves into a new super venue? Fans will love it–the music (content) will sound clearer…better seats…etc…If you create anew venue (look) and you do it RIGHT, people will love it.”
And who could forget:
“The front page is four large and visually stunning maps … ”
This is the video Abrams distributed in e-mail to LAT journalists.
The problem was in the implication that it, along with other videos in the e-mail, was the type of journalism/publishing the Times should be doing.
At the time, from the LA Times:
Tribune Co. Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams, who earlier this week sent a companywide e-mail that contained content deemed inappropriate for the workplace, resigned Friday.
The e-mail, the latest in a series of free-form jottings Abrams sent weekly to company employees in an effort to inspire a rethinking of print and broadcast conventions, included links to satirical video parodies of newscasts. One, which included profanity and nudity, he labeled “Sluts.”
Note:
[1]. The one place Amazon has run into a wall is in publishing. Credit people, small business book retailers and later big traditional bookstore chains, for that. Amazon started its own physical book imprint. It has been an example of epic fail, most generously occasionally described as of middling success.
Amazon’s titles have been kept out of many stores.
Around 2012, perhaps a bit earlier, Ed Park, an editor of mine at the Village Voice, went to work for Amazon as a literary editor, shepherding and selecting various works for the company.
A year or so ago I recall him using his Facebook news feed/timeline to promote a book by novelist Benjamin Anastas.
This was at the time the retailer boycott was just beginning to freeze out Amazon titles.
At the New Yorker, the feature on Amazon says of this:
Benjamin Anastas, a novelist who couldn’t find an American publisher for his third book, told a friend that he was going to publish his fourth, a memoir called “Too Good to Be True,??? with Amazon… finding no copies of his new book in most stores was akin to watching himself disappear, and Anastas said that he would think twice before publishing with Amazon again.
Amazon Publishing, which had been releasing mysteries and other genres in bulk, hoped that Kirshbaum would attract big-name authors and publish best-sellers. But top writers proved surprisingly loyal to their gatekeepers, and Amazon had to spend a lot of money on two dubious projects: a million dollars for “The 4-Hour Chef,??? by the self-help guru Timothy Ferriss, and eight hundred thousand dollars for “My Mother Was Nuts,??? a memoir by Penny Marshall, the “Laverne & Shirley??? star. In hardcover, Ferriss’s book has sold a fraction of the numbers of his two earlier self-help books; Marshall’s has sold seventeen thousand. Nearly all of Amazon’s other books have fared worse: “Actors Anonymous,??? a novel by James Franco, has sold fewer than five thousand. (Amazon claims to have sold many more copies of these titles as e-books.) In the past year, Amazon Publishing has barely been a presence at auctions, and several editors have departed …
The celebrities will always be all right, even when their material takes a bath. They’ve banked their bonuses.
For everyone else, Jeff Bezos has you covered. Get yourself over to Mechanical Turk.
The Empire of Bezos — from the archives.
Oh, and do please please read the posts on digital sweat-shopping again. They so aptly describe a flavor of the spray from our Culture of Lickspittle.
Permalink
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »