Foster Friess, the crazy Republican plutocrat infamous for going on television and making a witless joke about how women used Bayer aspirin for contraception back in his day, AND who bankrolled equally crazy homophobe Rick Santorum’s presidential bid … is now even more crazy, apparently.
In today’s Washington Times, the DC newspaper that lives to publish every single belief, everyday, in Republican Crazy World, Friess has evidently come to the conclusion that it’s possible for his party of nuts rabidly homophobic people to win the gay vote.
How do they do this?
By telling gay people in America the GOP is their protector against the creeping menace of sharia law. That is, they will continue to try and beat up on Muslims in this country and that will make gay people like them more. (Or maybe he didn’t really mean it and was trying to do anything to avoid talking about gay marriage. And WaTimes editors are desperate to reinvigorate the party with the weirdest things that can be thought up.)
Anyway, there can be no doubt it is an ingenious strategy, right there with having a woman hold a pellet between her knees as birth control.
An influential GOP donor said Friday that Republicans should do more to make sure that gay men and lesbian women do not fall victim to the sort of Shariah law practiced by hard-line Islamists.
Foster Friess, the the multimillionaire who helped keep Rick Santorum’s presidential dreams afloat in the GOP primary last year, told reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor that he wants to make sure that gay people are not killed in foreign nations because of their sexual preference.
Asked whether the Republican Party should embrace gay marriage, the 72-year-old investment manager said, “We have to protect the gay people in our country from Shariah law.”
There is no sharia law in the US. But every week, like clockwork, someone on the editorial pages of the Washington Times, insists there is. I always get a newsletter in my mailbox about it.
There’s no place safe from electronic Pearl Harbor, not even lowly Huntsville, Alabama. Or rather, there’s no place the plutocrat cutpurses and their shoeshine boys in the national cyberwar industry find too small if there are taxpayer dollars to be taken off the rubes.
The only way the U.S. will improve its defenses against cyber attacks is if there is a modern-day, Pearl Harbor-like attack or if Americans get agitated enough to ask for answers, according to the former director of the National Security Agency.
Mike McConnell, an expert in cyber security and vice chair of Booz Allen Hamilton, said both Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks could have been prevented if the U.S agencies were were better equipped and if they worked in better cooperation with each other. All the intelligence needed was known, McConnell — who led the NSA from 1992 until 1996 and now serves as vice chairman of Booz Allen Hamilton — said. (In 2007 he was appointed as Director of National Intelligence by President George W. Bush.)
“We had all the pieces, but not the imagination” he told a Huntsville audience at the Chamber of Commerce of Huntsville-Madison County this evening. The event was sponsored by Birmingham-base law firm Sirote and Permutt PC.
The post informs Huntsville is the “No. 2 target in the U.S. for foreign intelligence efforts.”
They’re number TWO!
“With nearly 20 percent of Alabamians receiving food assistance, the state ranks above the national average,” reads a local Alabama news article from last summer. “Experts say this trend seems to be an increasing one.”
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.
From the Salt Lake City Tribune:
Cindy Yorgason was in line at the J.C. Penney in Riverdale on Wednesday when she looked up and saw a shopper with “a large gun.”
Yorgason said the rifle was slung across the back of the man in front of her. When she looked closer, she saw that he also had extra ammunition clips and a sidearm in a holster on his right hip …
On Thursday, 22-year-old Joseph Kelley identified himself as the man in Yorgason’s pictures. Kelley described himself as a firm believer in Second Amendment rights and said he decided to bring the guns to the store to demonstrate that they are not dangerous in the hands of law-abiding citizens.
According to Kelley, the rifle was an unloaded AR-15 and the handgun was a loaded Glock 19C. He said he has a concealed-carry permit, is a former member of the military and contacted police dispatch before leaving his home to tell them about his plans. Kelley also said he was told that he was “well within his rights” and that bystanders’ reactions were positive.
Opinions vary.
“I thought that he was pretty much an idiot,” Yorgason told the newspaper.
Drouin videotapes these encounters and uploads them to YouTube, part of an effort, again alleged to be educating people on their second amendment rights.
Drouin qualifies as an aggravating public nuisance, someone who goes into a neighborhood toting his assault rifle in the full knowledge 911 calls will ensue with the police dispatched to check on him. The local authorities have not been able to creatively figure out how to put an end to it although enforcement of laws to remove vagrants or curb flashing, public urination and other similar disturbances would seem to have some application.
In addition, one questions the mental status of someone who is jazzed by the idea of others calling 911 when he shows up in their area with his AR-15. And whether he should even have a gun permit in the first place.
During the Blair administration, Britain came up with a remedy for nuisances called ASBOs, or anti-social behavior orders.
The application of them has been patchy with much debate about their necessity.
Under section 1C(2) CDA an order on conviction may be made by a court following conviction for a relevant offence if the court considers:
That the offender has acted, at any time since [1 April 1999], in an anti-social manner, that is to say in a manner that caused or was likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons not of the same household as himself, and
An order under this section is necessary to protect persons in any place in England and Wales from further anti-social acts by him.
The case of Gosport Borough Council, R (on the application of) v Fareham Magistrates Court [2006] EWHC 3047 (Admin) states that there should be some evidence before the court that the behaviour in question has caused or is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.
The order is given to prevent the individual named from repeating the nuisance activity.
The display of AR-15s in department stores or ex-urban household neighborhoods — well, DD thinks a case can easily be made that it constitutes activity which the perpetrators implicitly know many in the general public, not in their family, will find harassing. And that’s a big reason why it’s done — the full knowledge that it’s very noticeable, uncivil and intimidating.
Of course, for the last few decades musical groups have occasionally made tunes about the latter observation, the truth of which readers probably learned … sometime back in junior high.
You can turn the odious into humorous fun for the boys. This is not John McAfee’s forte. He’s just odious.
But the Macc Lads, an English punk rock group that operated from the early Eighties to the early Nineties, had it down.
They have nothing to do with the life of John McAfee. But they were avuncular and honestly depraved in ways more human than he’s capable of. And listening to them made me want to visit Macclesfield.
Sadly, reading of McAfee in the Willamette Week does not engender the same enthusiasm for Mary’s Strip Club in a rundown section of Portland, the equivalent of Erv’s BYOB in old Allentown, or wherever you may be familiar with in ex-urban concrete and cinder block USA.
Thought exercise: What’s the proposed eventual sales value for a graphic novel or telemovie on a man who works overtime being contemptible wherever he goes?
The message: Iran is behind the attacks on US banking websites. Causing them to load slowly. Sometimes.
Regular readers know it as shoeshine, the term I use to describe national security publicity efforts on pumped up problems which have no relation to what actually threatens or endangers the majority in the US. Which are things like monthly massacres perpetrated by crazy people from American WhiteManistan, rising inequality and an economy that doesn’t work for hundreds of millions.
Shoeshine news is for the benefit of political agendas (in this case add some flimsy piece to arguments that Iran needs to be attacked) and expanded employment in the cybersecurity arms of America’s weapons manufacturers. And McAfee Associates.
There’s really not much evidence that the government of Iran is behind the ongoing wave of cyberattacks on U.S. bank websites, say many security experts.
“I don’t consider any attack I can do in my spare time as ‘nation-state sponsored,'” said Robert David Graham, chief executive officer of Atlanta-based Errata Security.
“[It] could just as well be a loose group of those sympathetic to Iran and the Middle East and angry as hell at U.S. involvement there,” said George Smith, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank GlobalSecurity.org.
“ItsOKNoProblemBro [the hacker instrument used to launch the denial-of-service website attacks in question] is far from sophisticated malware. It’s really rather simple,” said Roel Schouwenberg, a Kaspersky anti-virus researcher to TechNews. “Going strictly by the publicly known technical details, I don’t see enough evidence to categorize this operation as something only a nation-state sponsored actor could pull off.”
Soligenix stock was on the rise again Tuesday, a day after it gained more than 14 per cent when it said it will submit a proposal for a potential multi-million dollar contract to develop its radiation therapy, OrbeShield.
Its stock closed at 80 cents on Monday, and was lately up by more than 11 per cent, changing hands at around 89 cents as of 1:25pm ET.
The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) has called on the company to submit a full proposal for a potential multi-year, multi-million dollar contract to develop OrbeShield.
Ever since the beginning of the war on terror, Soligenix — once known as DOR Biopharma, has been kept alive solely by bioterror defense funding, most notably for a ricin vaccine. It has also been peddling its anti-radiation sickness nostrums, always called Orbesomethings, for the same period of time.
The company has never brought anything to market. In 2012 its stock fell into virtual worthlessness. Since then it has been kept alive by a value pumping maneuver (a reverse stock split that took 20 shares, then valued at a nickel a piece, and condensed them into one worth about eighty cents) and parasitic attachment to another biodefense funding stream.
Soligenix — from the archives. Keynsian job program digging holes and filling them back in. Or high button welfare workfare for a handful of lousy scientists? You decide.
One way of telling cyberwar is a function of shoeshine and job programs for the top rung of US society and the national security drivers is that it regularly goes on holiday.
Computer malware and insecurity never takes a holiday. But cyberwar does and that’s because it’s driven by press campaigns. And the people who push it, the indispensable tellers of its stories, were off from the end of December until now.
The [Iranian] attackers said last week that they had no intention of halting their campaign [of attacking US bank websites]. “Officials of American banks must expect our massive attacks,??? they wrote. “From now on, none of the U.S. banks will be safe.???
And we have so noticed the attacks. Iranian cyberstrikes so affected the US financial transaction system that the Christmas holidays were marked by a surge in dispensations of cash for assault rifle sales and runs on ammunition. And in newspaper interviews the only thing gun owners said they hated more than Barack Obama and his gun grabbing moves were the cybersoldiers and hackers messing with their bank websites.
Ahem.
The US government now attributes the cyberwar to retaliation over Stuxnut and other computer viruses that US has turned on the Iranian nuclear program.
But American intelligence officials say the group is actually a cover for Iran. They claim Iran is waging the attacks in retaliation for Western economic sanctions and for a series of cyberattacks on its own systems. In the last three years, three sophisticated computer viruses — called Flame, Duqu and Stuxnet — have hit computers in Iran. The New York Times reported last year that the United States, together with Israel, was responsible for Stuxnet, the virus used to destroy centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear facility in 2010.
“It’s a bit of a grudge match,??? said Mr. Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“The attackers hit one American bank after the next,” reads the Times lede. “As in so many previous attacks, dozens of online banking sites slowed, hiccupped or ground to a halt before recovering several minutes later.”
Great copy! What could be next, we wonder? Perhaps we will have to close a couple browser windows, clear the cache, and try again.
Get the bombers and cruise missiles ready. Everyone needs to know that our retaliations won’t necessarily be symmetrical or in kind.
DD Band in Pasadena in November 2010. We often used the famous outro from Won’t Get Fooled Again by the Who as a sequed wrap up of a version of Young Man Blues.
The Pete Townshend sequencer line, which is the hook for Fooled, was done through the guitar in a Roger Linn Adrenalinn III. It always worked well.
Play loud for maximum effect. The audio is from a digital camera capture done by a member of the audience. The video part was so poorly shot it was useless except for a couple low res stills, so it was tossed and the raw audio given a faux stereo image in the digital studio. Caveats aside, the fragment still captures the essence of it.
