09.20.13
National Chem Weapons Association
Fiore. You gotta see it.
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A sincere recommendation…
Ted Nugent:
How many more slaughters have to occur before we reverse this very deadly course mandated by clueless bureaucrats?
Liberalism is a death sentence. Don’t buy it.
It took inter-agency joint SWAT forces to take him out. Therefore the NRA should spin up a new program to train soldiers on bases on the use of guns in self-defense. The ones allowed to bear arms should be more heavily armed. And self-defense guns should be mandated for all janitors, secretaries and whatever other civilian workers there may be.
Trivia: Blog comments filter catches astro-turf to domain welovegun.com, a spam site in Arabic, used as a front for advertising and backlinks to the usual goods. On access it attempts to load at least 3000 elements.
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09.19.13
Failed State (continued)
I exploded this morning after reading Los Angeles Times reporter Ricardo Lopez news piece on the American Community Survey conducted by the Census.
“New census data released Thursday painted a grim picture of the economic recovery in the United States,” read the lede. “Still there were bright spots in California.”
When confronted with the volume of data on misery in the census report, a thinking person doesn’t interpret minor statistical up-ticks as “bright spots.” More likely they’re anomalies, noise, or meaningless when viewed with the whole.
I got angry and wrote him a short e-mail. I don’t expect an answer, you never do from the swells. But this puts it in a nutshell:
Me: You had to look pretty hard to find anything good in those census statistics. And that may increasingly be part of the problem. You and your peers are not really in touch with it. If more writing these small bits of news, trying to pan gold from the sluices of horrendous crap, had to pick up bread from the pantry once a week or be faced with the job opportunities in the new economy, perhaps like spending the day on Amazon Mechanical Turk getting 50 cents or less for various “tasks” in hopes that you’ll be able to move eight dollars into your account after a week of it, you’d write it a little differently.
But then you would have to be unemployed and in poverty and you wouldn’t be getting it published.
Lopez is not the only reporter to cover the matter at the Times. Gale Holland, a more senior member of the staff, and a colleague, also looked at the statistics.
There wasn’t anything good in what they wrote:
Poverty continued creeping upward in the Los Angeles area last year, long after the declared end of the recession, new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau show.
The numbers are another sign of continued suffering after the economic downturn: More than 17% of people in the Los Angeles, Long Beach and Santa Ana metropolitan area lived below the poverty line last year. That number rose year by year since 2007, when roughly 13% lived in poverty …
“What is significant and new is that poverty is not rising and falling with the rest of the economy, it is just continuing to rise,??? wrote Bill Parent, associate dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. “This is a terrible ‘new normal.’”
This blog used to be a lot about national security issues. I find it very difficult to write about them now. They’re trivial in comparison to what is reality in the country, on the ground.
And so you’re not going to see much of the national security thing.
By example, anyone who thinks cyberwar is a significant problem compared to what afflicts a very visible portion of American lives daily is a fool worth only your contempt.
If you’re still sane it’s impossible to take someone like NSA director Keith Alexander at all seriously, for patently obvious reasons.
Anyway, why would I call this country a failed state?
Well, the problem in with traditional thinking is that the concept of a failed state adheres to a professional definition. That doesn’t take into account countries that devolve in a way that stems from their unique nature.
The United States, being the wealthiest country in the world with the most powerful military on the planet, would not be expected to be a failed state in any sense of a state department or CIA geo-political fact book definition. It would not be expected to fail on a trajectory comparable to historic examples of empire from the past.
Instead, it’s making its own special way, or case: A country that can’t be governed, with no way to see progress, capable of swinging a mighty stick at designated enemies, yet with a growing population in poverty, an ocean of misery that’s over 50 percent the population of Germany, a bit over two-thirds that of citizenries of Britain and France.
The tragedy of it, and this is known to people who study poverty and who are in it, is that everyone not afflicted turns away. You lose everything, you get uncoupled from society and you can’t get back.
And a big society where millions and millions of people are left to rot is certainly one where many of the disenfranchised can angrily view having work and economic viability as a privilege for those who are the most fortunate.
Today words are of little value. Five years ago I had a readership and could get published. In the intervening span that was annihilated.
For someone who, over the major part of a lifetime, has come to define himself by the word, by the ability to speak clearly, being involuntarily separated from what one is good at is a heavy blow.
So, you know, art, music, busking.
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Failed State
We have met the enemy and it’s our so-called best. Corporate America and the most wealthy have destroyed everything, with no end in sight.
Smartphones and iJunk have not saved the day. You can use them to notify your family you’re going to the food pantry.
Excerpts from the news on the today’s Census report on the state of America:
“The number of Americans in poverty remained largely unchanged at a record 46.5 million. By race, a growing proportion of poor children are Hispanic, a record 37 percent of the total. Whites make up 30 percent, blacks 26 percent. The new census data show that lower-income households are a steadily increasing share of the population, while middle- to higher-income groups shrank or were flat. Roughly 13.6 percent of U.S. households, received food stamps, the highest level on record. Just over half of these households, or 52 percent, were -below poverty.”
Corporate profits soared, noted the New York Times, “but [according to Census data] the median earnings of men working full time have not increased in real terms since the early 1970s.”
“Economists believe that the [Census] report understates the degree of income inequality in the United States, by not including, among other things, earnings from capital gains made on rising stock prices.”
Could we hope for the Republican Party to make things worse in two weeks?
Isn’t it time to send everyone to the glue factory?
Comparisons: 46.5 million Americans live in poverty. Population of France — 65.7 million, Britain — 62.2 million.
Art predicts life:
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 …
Now we think freedom’s lame
Because what you need is a life of pain.
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09.18.13
Grand Old Terrorists
A decade ago, in the introduction to my collection The Great Unraveling, I argued that the modern Republican party was a “revolutionary power??? in the sense once defined by, of all people, Henry Kissinger — a power that no longer accepted any of the norms of politics as usual, that was willing not just to take radical positions but to act in ways that undermined the whole system of governance people thought they understood …
So, now we face the imminent threat of a government shutdown and/or a U.S. government default because Republicans refuse to accept the notion that duly enacted legislation should be allowed to go into effect, and repealed only through constitutional means. Oh, and the cause for which most of the GOP is willing to threaten chaos is the noble endeavor of ensuring that tens of millions of Americans continue to lack essential health care. —Krugman
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The Damaged Tribe
Taken by the New York Times a week ago in Missouri and used as the leading photo for a post-Navy Yard massacre piece on gun control, it’s a photo that, coincidentally, powerfully illustrates a central social problem in this country. And so it requires emphasis and republication.
The photo is WhiteManistan and the need to escape it, perfectly captured.
With hands over hearts the people are not heart-warming. Quite the opposite. In their desire for an unbridled gun culture, they provoke fear and loathing, having brought on the convincing reality that when they get any of their way worse inevitably follows. Nothing can be done and nothing will be done about gun violence because more guns must be bought, they save lives. Everyone is made prisoner to gun hoarding manias, paranoia and regular gun bloodbaths as normal in American civilization.
Mind-numbing, it’s a tableau of the old, irrational and anti-civilization, a collection of my mentally troubled tribe in Jefferson City, Missouri, hoping — of all things to hope for — legislation to nullify federal gun control.
It’s a damaged group, perhaps successful in their lives with grown children, loving pets and all the possessions of American middle class life. But there is something very wrong inside and it can’t be fixed by reason, only endured. Worse, these broken people cannot recognize their mental trouble.
When I see these pictures, now commonplace, I see people the same color, who look the same as my parents, who looked like the people with which I grew up. But we share nothing.
Massacres will continue until morale improves.
From Der Spiegel: America’s unhindered gun mania.
Hat tip to Frank at Pine View Farm.
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09.17.13
Dept. of Wishful Thinking
Most impressive, at the top of the Google winner-takes-all list, WaPost blog wisdom on gun control, furnished by “charticle.”
And what is it, precisely, that anyone wouldn’t get about this?
Fuck you, idiot! We’re gonna keep buying guns and ammo! Yeah!
It’s straightforward enough.
A comment on Aaron Alexis and the faux controversy over his clearances and medals.
The war on terror national security boom guaranteed it.
The explosive growth in national security clearances has never been a secret, nor the employment of thousands of individuals who, statistically, would expected to be unfit. The great sucking in by the business of the war on terror would have, by definition, been expected to bring fallout.
And when one individual blows up and produces a massacre, it is not surprising to anyone who has followed along. The vetting process was never going to be what people thought it was.
And as the BBC noted yesterday, among the shooter’s commendations: “Global War on Terrorism Service medal.”
Such medals were given out like candy. The only qualification was you had to serve in support of Iraqi Freedom or be military personnel involved in homeland security operations. It’s a meaningless citation with no more real importance than a pin for perfect attendance.
It would be a paradox only if it weren’t so ludicrous and sickening.
Unintentional black humor
One day before the Navy Yard massacre, ThinkProgress ran a note on two boobs, just like those in WhiteManistan Vacation, detained by police for carrying their assault rifles to a farmer’s market in Wisconsin.
Why, in Heaven’s name, would people get nervous about that?
It’s just patriotism!
Actually, it’s about bullying and intimidation. They wouldn’t be doing it if they didn’t think it would put the fear into their neighbors.
Their are laws prohibiting masturbating in public and other free-will anti-social antics that generally stand to unreasonably upset your neighbors, a point I and many others have made.
On the necessity of escape from the clutches of WhiteManistan
After Newtown, I thought there might be some change. What wasn’t quite expected was an historic explosion in gun buys and then almost total inaction except at some state levels.
Now I’ve come to see the error in my thinking. Gun control isn’t possible in the US, which is currently an ungovernable country.
More bloodbaths will occur. The question is how many can be stomached before igniting real social unrest?
WhiteManistan in Jefferson City, Missouri, last week — hoping for legislation that would nullify federal gun law in the state. It didn’t happen, falling short by just one vote.
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09.16.13
Cash In! Congressman/Lobbyist Byron Dorgan, author of cyberwar novel!
From the New York Times, astounding news that a Beltway insider has written a book about catastrophic cyberattack on the electrical grid!
WASHINGTON — It’s electrifying.
Iran and Venezuela want to destroy the United States, so they conspire with a rogue Russian spy to launch a cyberattack on the North American power grid, beginning by electrocuting a lineman in North Dakota. Their main obstacle is a small-town sheriff in the state’s badlands, Nate Osborne, a former Marine Corps lieutenant in Afghanistan whose titanium leg ultimately saves the day.
That is more or less the plot of Gridlock, co-written by former Senator Byron L. Dorgan, the latest offering in a peculiar Washington genre.
“That’s my little niche, North Dakota energy thriller,??? said Mr. Dorgan, a Democrat who represented North Dakota in the Senate and House for more than three decades.
But life is increasingly imitating Mr. Dorgan’s potboiler. More than 200 utilities and government agencies across the country, from Consolidated Edison to the Department of Homeland Security to Verizon, are now expected to sign up for the largest emergency drill to test the electricity sector’s preparation for cyberattack. The drill, scheduled for November, will simulate an attack by an adversary that takes down large sections of the power grid and knocks out vast areas of the continent for weeks.
But life has definitely not been imitating Dorgan’s “potboiler.”
The electrical grid has never failed due to cyberattack.
However, there has never been a shortage of fiction, non-fiction, movies and tv shows on catastrophic cyberwar attacks on various pieces of US infrastructure.
In terms of reality, besides being an unimaginative wealthy ex-politician, Dorgan is just another data point for DD’s Law, recently coined, which states:
The probability that any predicted national security catastrophe, or doomsday scenario, will occur is inversely proportional to its appearance in entertainments, movies, television dramas and series, novels, non-fiction books, magazines and news.
Or, put another way, the probability that something bad will happen, as described or predicted by experts or any government, intelligence or quasi-corporate/government assessment agency, asymptotically approaches zero as it attains widespread use in popular entertainments. (And that’s usually very early in the development cycle.)
Dogshite books like Dorgan’s have been a dime-a-dozen over the course of the war on terror years. No one who isn’t paid to do so buys or reads them.
The Times reporter, Matthew L. Wald, is definitely paid to do it.
This is not Dorgan’s first novel. Previously, he wrote “Blowout, in which Iran and Venezuela link up with shady hedge-fund types to destroy a supersecret project that uses microbes to turn North Dakota coal into limitless, low-pollution electricity.”
The mad mullahs of Iran and [now inconveniently dead Hugo Chavez of] Venezuela, aiming daggers at the heart of America, North Dakota!
As evidence of contrived stupidity in plotting, it is something of a chart-topper, having probably taken every bit of fifteen minutes to brainstorm.
(It probably went down like this: “North Dakota! I’ll write it as a global terrorist plot against the state because that’s where I’m from and it will guarantee it’s reviewed in every newspaper and on every local tv news show.”)
Larger still, Byron Dorgan is another perfect example from the Culture of Lickspittle, someone who gets shit simply because of who he is. With no obvious talent, he has an agent and offers for dumbly repetitive white man’s techno-thriller romance fiction no one wants.
“Mr. Dorgan said he started his first book, Take This Job and Ship It, on a cruise with his extended family, using a 24-page guide to writing a book proposal that he found on the Internet,” adds Wald.
New York Times exposure, another type of reward for those at the top in the Culture of Lickspittle, gave Dorgan’s book a momentary ratings bump.
“[Last] Tuesday Gridlock was No. 94,180 on Amazon,” writes Wald. Today it’s at 17,355, with fifteen five and four star reviews, most of them smelling strongly of astro-turf.
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09.15.13
California Snitching — or NSAs for high schools
Private-sectored, and off-shored to foreign workers, the advancing innovation of global networked services, case GEO Listening, hired by Glendale School District to snoop on students on social media.
Most relevant, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
“This is the government essentially hiring a contractor to stalk the social media of the kids,” said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends privacy, free speech and consumer rights.
“When the government — and public schools are part of the government — engages in any kind of line-crossing and to actually go and gather information about people away from school, that crosses a line,” Tien said …
“People say that’s not private: It’s public on Facebook. I say that’s just semantics. The question is what is the school doing? It’s not stumbling into students — like a teacher running across a student on the street. This is the school sending someone to watch them,” Tien said.
Sending someone to watch them, also in their off time.
“To do the work, [GEO Listening] employs no more than 10 full-time staffers — as well as ‘a larger portion’ of contract workers across the globe who labor a maximum of four hours a day because ‘the content they read is so dark and heavy,'” the company’s CEO told CNN.
One is sure that in the sharing economy, the larger portion of contract workers is due to the fact they’re so much cheaper to use than full-time Americans. Digital snitching, like everything else you can do via remote, cheaper with offshore labor and no payroll taxes, benefits, minimum wage, or anything.
The high end American spying companies choose to fill National Security Agency contracts, you see. National secrets need protecting. Kid’s stuff, well, not so much, apparently.
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09.13.13
Art predicted life
Should’ve been a folk hit. But we’re not really into even letting a few eke out a few pebbles on social music, are we?
Friday music loud electric folk rock for modern raging inequality:
“Blessed are the job creators, ’cause they can always hire way more waiters.”
Which, as it turns out, is exactly what has happened.
Krugman, from today in the NYT, ‘Rich Man’s Recovery:’
“Basically, while the great majority of Americans are still living in a depressed economy, the rich have recovered just about all their losses and are powering ahead.”
Just published Piketty/Saez (UC Berkeley) data on inequality and the recovery of the super-wealthy after the Great Recession.
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