12.26.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 11:42 am by George Smith
Bigger.
Ted Nugent, today:
This is all the result of one of the “Duck Dynasty??? guys, Phil Robertson, stating what he and many millions of Americans believe about the Bible and homosexuals … State a commonly held belief and watch the other side go ballistic …
Phil Robertson didn’t say anything hurtful or shameful.
From the New York Daily News, Jesus-like:
“I have a degree from Louisiana Tech. But this week I have been called an ignoramus.???
“Jesus Christ was the most perfect being to ever walk this planet and he was persecuted and nailed to the cross, so please don’t be surprised when we get a little static,??? Robertson added.
No links. Google if you want the full Ted and if I know my readers, I think they don’t.
Heevahava — defined. It was either that or a new PARIAH magazine cover. I chose more spare. What would you have done?
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12.24.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 4:43 pm by George Smith
I’m going to repeat myself in re-use of this from a few months back because there’s really no better way to say it: The US acts as if it is the exceptional nation in cyberspace. It reserves the right to criticize and lecture others on what constitutes proper conduct but reserves the right to do what it pleases because of its alleged exceptional nature.
The US, you see, only wages cyberwar, or cyber-espionage, campaigns in defense of freedom and to keep Americans safe. No other nations do similar things. They only cyber-spy on us and probe the net infrastructure to cause damage and steal our wealth.
But this country is now in a terrible position to talk terms in cyberspace, starting with its hot clandestine war on the Iranian nuclear program and subsequent related malware spilled over into other nations and ending with the Edward Snowden revelations.
One could add a chapter or two on the growing together of the private sector and defense structure in the national security megaplex and the fact that it’s a gigantic engine, one with a major focus in finding and securing ever more revenue in tax dollars.
Mix in the apathy of a public disconnected from everything and a supine media for over ten years during the war-on-terror.
The fact that random ‘friends’ and others are now outraged and posting on Facebook or tweeting about an agency they never thought about before is trivial, people complaining about another thing they were too busy or self-centered to pay attention to before it really got out of hand.
I would make Edward Snowden man of the year.
Whether you like what you know of him or not, he did something that made a difference. As in indirect effect of spearing the NSA, he derailed that agency’s (and the national security megaplex’s) propaganda machine on cyberwar.
Domestically, I would be surprised if anything changes.
However, when Brazil cancels an order for American-made fighter bombers for Saab Grippens and specifically says US cyberspying and a ham-handed attempt to get Snowden were the reasons one begins to see how external change might be enforced and extract a cost.
In the US, the cult of cyberwar was always one of avarice and bootlicking stenography in the mainstream and tech press.
And now, finally, at the end of 2013, no one with sense can possibly believe it’s a central issue threatening the economic lives and future of the majority, a sword of Damocles hanging by a thread which requires us to empower our computer security warriors to run over everybody, including us.
The Spiegel cover is from the beginning of November. And it is worth considering again because of the contrast it affords with an article that ran in the US at the same time, one that only demonstrated — again –how much of the mainstream American press lays down for the national security state.
The latter, almost totally removed from global sentiment on the Snowden affair, was a cover story by Kurt Eichenwald of Newsweek, absurdly entitled “How Edward Snowden Escalated Cyberwar.”
Excerpted, it’s a perfect example of a news magazine as corporate national security structure mouthpiece. its only purpose to deny reality and feebly try to beat the dead horse of threat exaggeration on cyberwar back into life:
For more than a decade, a relentless campaign by China to steal valuable, confidential information from United States corporations flourished with barely a peep from Washington. And now it might never be stopped …
The administration’s attempt to curb China’s assault on American business and government was crippled – perhaps forever, experts say – by a then-unknown National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden.
Snowden’s clandestine efforts to disclose thousands of classified documents about NSA surveillance emerged as the push against Chinese hacking intensified …
“Snowden couldn’t have played better into China’s strategy for protecting its cyber activities if he had been doing it on purpose,” one American intelligence official says …
“Certainly no one cares anymore about our whining about Chinese espionage. The time we had for making the case on that is long gone. Internationally, I don’t see how we recover.”
[And, finally, the ludicrous claim NSA director Keith Alexander was telling everyone before Edward Snowden’s actions put a stop to it:]
The threat of Chinese espionage is so large that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, who chaired the Intelligence Committee’s Cyber Task Force, proclaimed it to be part of “the biggest transfer of wealth through theft and piracy in the history of mankind.”
[Include claims, much repeated, for which there is no evidence at all]:
“Twenty years after Iraq, China has stealth fighters stolen with hacker techniques, designs for its carriers, and can pick and choose from all the research the United States has paid for,” Stewart Baker [former general council for the NSA] says. “If we find ourselves in a serious conflict with a nation with those capabilities, we could find ourselves threatening cruise missile strikes and discover that hackers shut off all the power in New York” as a warning of how much power they have to disrupt and inflict damage – potentially including the American weapons reliant on computers to operate.
As for cyberspying advancing its stealth fighter, at the time, John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.Org, dismissed it out of hand to me in e-mail. (This handy chart at GlobalSecurity shows the lag time for China’s development of advanced weapon systems against the appearance of similar US milestones. “They are twenty years behind,” said Pike.)
But readers know well that when it comes to stories on cyberwar, you can get just about any outlandish claim or exaggeration published in the American press.
Edward Snowden’s former employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, flogging the cyberwar machine in 2011.
Additional notes:
“The U.S. always reserves the right to overdo things. That’s the legacy of the last 10 years,??? [George Smith] said. “And to the world at large, it’s viewed as a nation that sees every potential problem as a nail to be hit with the hammer of the military and/or security contractors.??? — US Exceptionalism, June 2103
When you let the people in the biggest cyberwar machine in history have whatever they want the only thing left is to turn it on everyone. If the power and resources are there to do it, it is done. Because they can.
Which is what has happened … [Through] Edward Snowden’s documents and their delivery via the Washington Post and the Guardian, one sees the world Alexander has created. It’s one that cements the global perception that people in the US computer security industry (government and private sector allies) are an untrustworthy lot, predatory and needing close oversight. — GlobalSecurity.Org
And with that, I hope you are enjoying your Christmas Eve.
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12.23.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 3:26 pm by George Smith
One of the finest demonstrations of the malevolence afoot in American in 2013: The defeat of even slight national gun regulation and the actual loosening of gun laws and promotions of stupidity in the majority of the country, brought on by a horrendous gun slaughter right before Christmas of 2012.
Read the comments. Soak up the psychosis. Pictures of WhiteManistanis toting assault rifles in town became common, a new low. The worst in us won.
“Gun Crazy to the rescue! Gun Crazy to the rescue! Go Gun Crazy, go Gun Crazy! Got to buy a gun at Walmart!”
From the archives, January:
One of the common motivations now on display by the gun nut minority in WhiteManistan is the need to appear threatening. One must either appear on websites or on video, or in pictures, talking about killing others, revolution, or doing something that amounts to waving a gun or assault rifle in the face of average citizens.
Behaviorally, it’s profoundly anti-social, nothing an actual civil society would be proud of. It is not a demonstration of freedom. More accurately, it’s the behavior of people who are more interested in bullying entire swaths of society. And it doesn’t take a degreed expert in human psychology to get it.
The media mainstream has a hard time dealing with it because it comes almost exclusively from white male America, a demographic which has, up until now, been shielded from substantial and continuing pressure and criticism. It’s the equivalent of a symbolic pistol whipping, the behavior part and parcel with the surge in gun and ammunition hoarding, a retail arms-buying stampede in which it has not been difficult to find any number of belligerent white guys proclaiming they’re ready to offer the government armed resistance.
Those flaunting weaponry never admit to why they’re actually doing it. The service is always about generously educating others, allegedly furnishing some social good by showing the safe carrying of assault rifles.
As part of the social good campaign, they took their guns to Starbucks and Newtown.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 10:00 am by George Smith
Today, from Krugman, bitcoin has put a place in Iceland, the name of which you can’t pronounce, on the map:
The second money pit is a lot stranger: the Bitcoin mine in Reykjanesbaer, Iceland. Bitcoin is a digital currency that has value because … well, it’s hard to say exactly why, but for the time being at least people are willing to buy it because they believe other people will be willing to buy it. It is, by design, a kind of virtual gold. And like gold, it can be mined: you can create new bitcoins, but only by solving very complex mathematical problems that require both a lot of computing power and a lot of electricity to run the computers.
Hence the location in Iceland, which has cheap electricity from hydropower and an abundance of cold air to cool those furiously churning machines. Even so, a lot of real resources are being used to create virtual objects with no clear use …
Keynes would, I think, have been sardonically amused to learn how little has changed in the past three generations. Public spending to fight unemployment is still anathema; miners are still spoiling the landscape to add to idle hoards of gold. (Keynes dubbed the gold standard a “barbarous relic.???) Bitcoin just adds to the joke. Gold, after all, has at least some real uses, e.g., to fill cavities; but now we’re burning up resources to create “virtual gold??? that consists of nothing but strings of digits.
A money for tech sociopaths and miscellaneous greed heads spouting rubbish about destroying the tyranny of central governments and putting money with alleged real value back in the hands of people, but only a small certain kind.
And here’s the example of the special everyman quality of bitcoin, the Brobdingnagian digital mining operation:
To get [to the bitcoin mine in Iceland], you pass through a fortified gate and enter a featureless yellow building. After checking in with a guard behind bulletproof glass, you face four more security checkpoints, including a so-called man trap that allows passage only after the door behind you has shut. This brings you to the center of the operation, a fluorescent-lit room with more than 100 whirring silver computers …
“What we have here are money-printing machines,??? said Emmanuel Abiodun, 31, founder of the company that built the Iceland installation, shouting above the din of the computers. “We cannot risk that anyone will get to them.???
Mr. Abiodun is one of a number of entrepreneurs who have rushed, gold-fever style, into large-scale Bitcoin mining operations in just the last few months. All of these people are making enormous bets that Bitcoin will not collapse, as it has threatened to do several times.
The story informs the Icelandic bitcoin-mining company will also open a branch in Dallas, Texas. And, boy howdy, everyone knows how cheap and cold it is in Texas in the summertime.
Bitcoin — from the archives.
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12.21.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Fiat money fear and loathers, Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 12:50 pm by George Smith
The tech nuisance demographic that supports bitcoin is a subset of the right wing libertarian tribe. They view it as a way to do their part in destroying tyrannical government. Cody Wilson, for example, the young pest who was sure his 3D-printed plastic gun plans were a strike at government until the US ITAR rules shut him down has migrated to bitcoin wallet-making. (Feel free to add hilarious comments on the need for 3D printing plans for guns in America at the end of 2013.)
You find the same sentiments in old gold bugs, the old white guys of the Republican Party and the old white people known as “preppers.???
Bitcoin is just more high button. It’s literally a “money??? for stroking the every-man-for-himself psychology, a “money” that’s perfectly fit to tech sociopaths.
The being said, another fair assessment is that bitcoin is certainly a money for our time.
Although it’s dressed up as being something good for the world in its way of undermining and destroying central banking, it’s really just something that allows some people, a very select few, to make fortunes without doing anything, more specifically, without doing anything that is even remotely a social good. Just like the 1 percent, or Wall Street, or much of corporate America.
Pine View Farm pointed to another biting critique of bitcoin. Here is the link and an excerpt:
But someone’s already out there offering “Bitcoin mining computers,” which cost several thousand dollars apiece. (Notice that you can’t buy one with bitcoin … heh.) They’re selling you the dream of a “magical money-machine.” There’s a sucker born every minute, and that sucker … his “mark” … is you. Be aware. (One unit sells for $14,500.00 and “ooh, hurry up hurry up and buy one before they all get sold-out!”) You should know better. But they’re counting on you having gold-fever …
Another piece of the growing bitcoin scam is seen here, in a long advertorial aimed directly at the old people conned by the incessant ads for buying gold on Fox News and Glenn Beck’s Blaze website.
It’s a make-money-fast video and if you view it you’ll immediately notice the bitcoin name isn’t even uttered until you’re well into it. The revolutionary new money that’s shaking world government is initially referred to as the newest version of “Edison’s dollars.”
On bitcoin — from the archives.
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12.20.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 3:42 pm by George Smith
“The poor don’t pay enough/They spend it all on liquor.”
I just can’t understand why all the big explainers now examining the hardness of the American heart and economic inequality don’t have a Dick Destiny record.
Not played on NPR, I guess.
From the New York Times:
As the year ends, this argument is playing out in two of the most meanspirited actions left on the table by the least-productive Congress in modern history. The House, refuge of the shrunken-heart caucus, has passed a measure to eliminate food aid for four million Americans, starting next year. Many who would remain on the old food stamp program may have to pass a drug test to get their groceries. At the same time, Congress has let unemployment benefits expire for 1.3 million people, beginning just a few days after Christmas.
These actions have nothing to do with bringing federal spending into line, and everything to do with a view that poor people are morally inferior …
No doubt, poor people drink beer, watch too much television and have bad morals … They are poor because they are weak [reads the ideology].
It’s now to call the United States “Dickensian??? because it’s obvious. It has a mean streak one hundred miles wide.
But it’s combined with an apathy and the talking servant class now all going on about how bad it is (as opposed to the subject of terrorism, which dominated for over a decade as a diversion while domestically conditions were quickly growing worse).
However, none of the explainers have any skin in the game.
Having spent the last three months on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, I can tell you there’s a certain bleakness to filling out numerous university psychology, social science, and political science surveys on inequality in America and one’s attitudes toward who deserves what and the shibboleths of capitalism for 50 cents and 20 minutes to half an hour of work, implemented by tenured professors who earn upwards of 80,000 a year. Regardless of any web eyewash on the subject, no meaningful numbers do this work as a fun hobby or just because they feel like wasting some time on the lap top while watching their favorite evening television shows.
So you can understand any cynicism in the belief that things won’t get better until way more people suffer misery and social disruptions start. Until then, inequality, the mean-spiritedness of right wing extremists and government policy are still too much good as edutainment, fertile ground for scholastic inquiry using crowd-sourcing and the opportunity to wring one’s hands in print from the vantage point of economic security.
Case in point, my representative — Adam Schiff, posted on his Facebook page that the Republican Party was not doing anything to extend unemployment benefits on the recently passed Continuing Resolution government appropriations bill.
Then Schiff went and voted “Yes??? for it, anyway, along with a majority of the Democratic Party in the House.
Did you know how generous corporate America is, at the ground level, right now? A bit rhetorical, I know.
I’ll tell you, anyway. Von’s, part of the national Kroger supermarket chain, perhaps views as local philanthropy the giving away of some of its expired bread at a local food bank I use. I get a loaf or two of it.
What’s it like? Very hard as is stale bread’s nature. You can revive it somewhat with the use of a microwave and watery food or a damp paper towel.
And so for obvious reasons, there’s going to be a fund raiser / tip jar running until after Christmas. It’s been a tough year.
Footnote: If you’ve already pitched in beer/bad morality subsidies, that’s enough, and you have my profuse thanks.
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12.18.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Fiat money fear and loathers, Made in China at 1:39 pm by George Smith
From a Facebook colleague:
Move over, Goldman Sachs. At the rate things are going, and assuming there’s a lot more extreme weather this winter, we may soon be able to add the ride-sharing firm Uber to the list of institutions loathed by nearly everyone, with the exception of those so rich as to pay no attention to what they’re being charged for things …
The more drivers who leave Yellow, say, for Uber, the nearer we get to a world in which only the rich can get around. Which, of course, may not be a bad idea, the rich invariably being nobler, harder-working, nicer-smelling, and generally more virtuous than lazy, malodorous good-for-nothings who can’t afford Samsung Galaxies or iPhones.
From my point of view, I can’t see Uber making much of a dent in southern California. Too many poor people and it’s not semi-pro want-to-be an unregulated cab driver nation waiting to happen.
It may take a couple years for it to sink in that you can’t rule the world from your smartphone everywhere, though.
Uber as a way to redeem your economic viability in West Virginia or Mississippi? Give me a break.
It is pleasurable to see bitcoin have its ass kicked by the world’s second largest economy, China. What countries will follow?
After crashing twice in the past few weeks, both due to China’s moves preparing for the elimination of the digital currency’s use, it’s still easy to imagine that bitcoin hoarders will work hard to push the value of it up again.
Which will only underscore its volatility, demonstrating that bitcoins are only for those who already have real money liquidity and the ability to purchase and sell large amounts of them quickly for speculative purpose. It’s a money for digital goldbugs who increase their worth by gaming it.
Bitcoins and bitcoin wallets are of no use to the hoi polloi who must use money to buy prosaic shit like food.
You can, however, buy a Tesla with bitcoins.
These things being the case, the Coinpunk will probably not conquer the world of tyrannical banking with his ultimate bitcoin wallet. And he just lost half his operating capital in the short term.
“A few drug users aside, no one appears to be buying [bitcoins] as a way to buy things,” reads the Economist, today.
Remember — these is much that can be delved in the blog archives using the search bar. It is great for finding stuff on the sharing economy, the new tech system of systems for reducing everyone to penury, for instance.
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12.17.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 11:35 am by George Smith
The NRA filled everyone with hot lead.
Revisit the psychotic hate in the YouTube comments. And you begin to see why it’s turned out this way a year later.
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12.13.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 10:56 am by George Smith
Welcome to the US of Penitentiary; we all get there, eventually.
We lock up the poor for all the rich; and we do it right, without no hitch.
Welcome to the United States of Greed; it’s the only country you’ll ever need. If you’re into frauds and useless devices — Uncle Sam, the best of choices!
We do dances, brand new dances, all for the titans of finances…
Predator loans, iPhones and drones! Plus we got lotsa crazy people…
Welcome to the United State of Punishment
Our biggest export is excrement
Now we think freedom’s lame
Because what you need is a life of pain
Welcome to the United States of Security
We’ll inspect you now for purity!
If you have gold and your a– don’t smell
We won’t bomb you straight to Hell.
We do dances, brand new dances, all for the titans of finances…
Predator loans, iPhones and drones! Plus we got lotsa crazy people…
Welcome to the US of Penitentiary
Everyone comes here, eventually!
Yes I know the rent is steep
But the whores and beer are really cheap…
Most appropriate. Do follow the links (they open in a new tab) while listening to the catchy tune!
Rock on and have at it.
And here’s the tip jar.
Need an MP3 for your devices? Of course you do. Click here.
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12.11.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 10:06 am by George Smith
At 2:11 — Blessed are the job creators, they can always hire way more waiters…
From economic tax expert and Pulitzer winner David Cay Johnston at al Jazeera:
Prosperous American families have adopted the same approach to wages for servants as big successful companies, hiring freelance outside contractors for all sorts of functions — from child care and handyman chores to gardening and cleaning work — to reduce costs.
Instead of live-in servants, who were common in prosperous U.S. households before World War II, better-off families now outsource the family cook, maid and nanny. It is part of a problem in developed countries around the globe that is getting more attention worldwide than in the U.S.
We are falling backward in America, back to the Gilded Age conditions of a century and more ago when a few fortunate souls grew fabulously rich while a quarter of families had to take in boarders to make ends meet. Only back then, elites gave their servants a better deal …
That is just what the United States has today — a top 10 percent doing well (the top 1/10th of 1 percent exceptionally so), while the bottom third remains desperate for work. But outsourcing has changed circumstances for the worse for those who would do a servant’s work today …
More than half of fast-food workers are on some form of welfare …
Johnston runs the numbers and goes on to write that America’s servant class has a worse deal because it has to pay for its own transportation and living space, which eats up much of what it earns. In the Gilded Age, the country’s families provided housing for its servant class.
This is much like the arrangement found on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
The jobs pay so little — one example being the eight tenths of cent per pool to count swimming pools in Los Angeles by Benedikt Gross and Joseph Lee — that electricity costs to run the PC (if the work was done in the US) ate up anywhere from more than half to all of the profit earned doing the work.
All are immoral systems which have been normalized as acceptable in present day America.
You can have an MP3 of Rich Man’s Burden and its “Blessed are the job creators …” bit for your devices. Click here.
Please help it along. A great song for our time, it deserves a good audience.
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