“Associated Press photojournalist Nell Redmond was injured when Paula Broadwell swung her car door open on Monday, Nov. 19, 2012 in Charlotte, N.C.” A little blemish signifying affection.
The scandal was revealed after FBI agents began investigating threatening emails Broadwell sent to Tampa socialite, Jill Kelley. Broadwell apparently thought Kelley, a married mother of three, had the hots for the married 60-year-old Petraeus.
Had the hots. And so what’s your problem about accuracy?
If it’s any consolation, after 1,000 views now it’s stuck with recommends that all feature the same video of Paula Broadwell giving a a lecture at her alma mater, one which the Republican crazies are convinced is a part of Benghazi-Gate.
“Let’s Ride,” one of the lead singles from Kid Rock’s new album, Rebel Soul, due on Black Friday.
Essentially, it made me want to punch his teeth in. The lyrics stink, the riff/melody is good but not great, and the white guy rocker/country artist doing his knee-jerk tribute to guns, the military and the American flag provokes nausea. Much worse, hang around, Rock actually takes time to explain it at the end. It’s his effort to make a song for the troops when they’re riding out on search and destroy missions, which he calls “doing their job.”
Admitting you like it is just like saying you enjoyed Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Beret” as a serious tune, not unintended awful camp.
It wraps up many things wrong in WhiteManistan, condensed into stale ol’ classic rock lassitude. There’s the reverence for endless war as long as they, or we, don’t have to fight it, working the guilt off in silly gifts, in this case a tune by a rock star, for soldiers dispensing with the enemy, always less expensively armed and of different color and religion, somewhere else, not here.
No rockers signed up to fight after 9/11. And none have since although there’s been a decade and ample opportunity to do so.
Yet these kinds of tunes have become routine for the audience in WhiteManistan. The celebrities in pop rock and country are very keen on saluting the soldiers in words and melodies. Keep fighting, we think of you, thanks for all that you do.
While Kid Rock no doubt means well (he really, really loves the city of Detroit, Seventies America and Bob Seger), it’s also reflexive pandering. These are the things the white audience wants to hear, not what it needs to. Wounded and just barely surviving modern America, they’re convinced the bottom has fallen out because it has. They need their cultural comfort food plus the symbolic assignment, in song, of three Hail Marys and an Act of Contrition in penance to get the blemishes off the souls before Communion, too.
It deserves ridicule. Reinstating the draft would fix this wagon, but good. And what’s at all like a “Rebel Soul” about it, anyway?
There was just something about the pose that called for pink.
The value in the Petraeus affair is that it has given everyone a legitimate excuse to have a look at the vanity of one its national security and military rock stars.
Paula Broadwell had a p.r. sheet distributed for her book, All In, the David Petraeus biography. That is here.
A couple bits from it deserve showcasing:
“One of Petraeus’ favorite quotes comes from Seneca, a first century Roman philosopher: ‘Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.’ This has been true for Petraeus at many turns …”
The Forum is an annual summer gathering at our signature “Aspen Meadows” campus in Colorado of top-level present and former government officials from all relevant homeland security/counterterrorism agencies (the White House; Departments of Homeland Security, Defense, State, Justice, and Treasury; the intelligence community; and Congress); industry leaders (large and small homeland security/counterterrorism-related companies, as well as private equity investors, merchant and investment bankers, venture capitalists, and other financiers); leading thinkers (in other think tanks and academe); nationally noted print and broadcast journalists; and concerned citizens. During three days of in-depth conversation, participants explore various aspects of aviation security; maritime security; border security; mass transit security; critical infrastructure protection; “soft targets” security; cyber-security; intelligence; counterterrorism strategy; terrorism finance; and more.
Or, more succinctly, one of the high-button places where the upper class in the national security industry convene to network and advance their careers and standing in the business of endless war.
“[In] 2010, Humphries shot a ‘disturbed, knife-wielding man’ dead at the gates of MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa after being attacked,” reads the Hollywood Gossip.
Readers may agree with DD that during their lives, most will have been able to avoid shooting a mentally troubled disabled Vietnam vet who lived in a trailer at a military base, rented for $400/month.
Ronald Bullock made MacDill Air Force Base his home even though he was no longer in the military.
Decades had passed since a grenade blew up on him in Vietnam, rendering him disabled, his brother said. But as a veteran with a military ID, he could stay at the base’s campground for six months at a time.
Bullock, 61, didn’t have a family or a job. He told his uncle he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
“He took a mess of pills to keep him going, to keep him cool,” said his uncle, Phil Sullivan, 80, of Tampa.
Ever since Vietnam, he struggled with drugs and alcohol, his brother said. In 1994, Bullock got four years of probation for aggravated assault on a public servant in Texas. Three years later, he was found guilty of possession of a controlled substance.
Still, his family never thought it would come to this.
Humphries, not named in the original news article, was apparently one of a number of security men involved in the shooting of the fellow:
Then, Wednesday evening, an altercation broke out at the camp. Bullock took off on a motorcycle with security officials in pursuit, according to Col. Larry Martin, the 6th Air Mobility Wing commander.
He became aggressive, and the pursuit continued, Martin said. When Bullock arrived at the gate on S Dale Mabry Highway, he got off the motorcycle and pulled a knife on the FBI agent.
The agent opened fire, hitting Bullock at least once, Martin said.
No one named in the scandal inspires confidence. It will make a cheap but entertainingly tawdry movie fit for cable.
“Having a bunch of medals and badges doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve accomplished anything, you’ve got to do something beyond yourself to make a difference in life. Seek to be consequential in whatever you do.” – Paula Broadwell
Always seek to be consequential. Sounds good. Like some hooey expressly for impressing the peons. Wish I’d seen it before I made the video for the tune.
As old CREEM magazine might have captioned: “Tee-Hee. Soon we’ll be consequential together.”
From the Washington Post, and others, news that many are as sick of Jeff Bezos and Amazon as this blog:
“Care of Wooden Floors,??? by Will Wiles, is the kind of novel you’d expect to see on a “staff picks??? shelf at an independent bookstore. A slim but sophisticated farce by a relatively unknown author, the book is full of witty asides and snappy comments about modern life; its wry, endearingly hapless narrator feels like he might have stepped out of a Nick Hornby story.
But many local stores, both independents and chains, are refusing to stock it. They don’t want to promote what they see as a predatory publisher. [Amazon].
Earlier this year the two companies signed a licensing agreement whereby Amazon Publishing acquires, edits, markets and publicizes books that are then distributed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s sales force, according to Alexandra Woodworth, a publicist for Amazon/New Harvest. The partnership was an effort to woo bookstores into stocking Amazon-published books. But many booksellers are balking.
“We don’t want to do anything that will support their publishing venture,??? said Mark LaFramboise, chief buyer for Politics & Prose in Washington …
“[Amazon] pretty much want nothing more than our demise.??? LaFramboise told the Post.
The bookseller boycott of Amazon titles may be working.
The Post reported:
According to Nielsen BookScan, fewer than 1,000 copies of the [Willes] book had been sold as of last week. “My Mother Was Nuts,??? Penny Marshall’s memoir, which New Harvest [the Amazon imprint] published Sept. 18, sold just 7,000 copies in its first month, despite a reported $800,000 advance; Jessica Valenti’s “Why Have Kids?,??? released by New Harvest on Sept. 4, has sold 1,000.
Why you should have nothing to do with Jeff Bezos and Amazon — from the archives.
“You’re doing a performance for a website and you know they have almost no readership, but you do it anyway,” reads one line from Rolling Stone, in a piece on how to make money in the music industry. “You’re in somebody’s garage doing a taping and you know no one will see it …”
It focuses on a few semi-famous artists, people and groups who were able to sell records in the old industry, but can no longer because no one buys music.
The Rolling Stone article notes: “Record sales were never a major income generator for musicians, thanks to high recording and promotion costs that were charged against the artists’ accounts.”
Which is true. However, the old label structure did not shovel all the risk on the artist and saddle them with an enormous debt if it didn’t work out. It also worked to get the artist, at least initially, in front of a potential audience.
Now this is all gone, replaced by a winner-take-all model. In the winner-take-all system you’ll have noticed one of the major features is the astronomical success of a few artists. These acts wind up so ubiquitous, legions of people make videos, all the same, miming to their music. It’s wall to wall, impossible to escape.
“Digital streaming sites like Rhapsody and Spotify are not yet proving to be viable financial substitutes for CDs,” continues the Rolling Stone article. “[Typical] digital-streaming royalty checks are minimal: ‘You’ll get a check for $100 in six months.’ Managers are equally skeptical. ‘You have to sell a thousand copies to equal a few cents …'”
While the video makes a joke of it, it’s the model of accumulation by dispossession, in which Apple, Google and the web industry have effectively given a relative few haves all the tools to take everything off everyone else.
Apple is more important, more powerful and more controlling than any old music industry label. Yet it has nothing to do with artist development.
Apple was able to position itself as the maker of the best portable jukeboxes, its iJunk the portals everyone must pay for before getting their “free” music. Apple, and web companies in related business, have made their fortunes by transferring what people used to pay for music to themselves while putting little to nothing back in.
It’s a model that’s in place throughout the American tech infrastructure from the development of collective job bidding sites for squeezing the most service work for the least possible amount from desperate labor to automation software expressly to eliminate labor, never to be replaced while those workers remaining boost productivity figures by being stretched to do even more for less. And the profit taken by the dispossessions is split between the purchaser and the maker of the automation.
As far as innovation goes it means less for the good fortune of mankind than the discovery of penicillin.
(In a side note, the leadership, public and private sector, have dealt with the labor disenfranchisement horridly. They have fostered a collective belief that it’s possible to have a country of 312 million in which substantial parts are reduced to poverty and indigence, rationalized under the excuse that the economically displaced all lack the skills and education to be viable human beings in the 21st century.)
Putting the Apple-mediated modern music industry another way: It’s as if one company making a transistor radio had become all that people paid for their rock ‘n’ roll in the early Sixties. And how is that spectacular?
So are Apple and the web now gateways or parasites? It’s the latter.
None of this is quite so funny as the man posing as an MTV exec telling off a young woman in the comedy skit. Thank heaven for those clever enough to make such, not like this dumb sod, eh?
Mitt Romney is the president of white male America …
Romney and Tea Party loonies dismissed half the country as chattel and moochers who did not belong in their “traditional??? America. But the more they insulted the president with birther cracks, the more they tried to force chastity belts on women, and the more they made Hispanics, blacks and gays feel like the help, the more these groups burned to prove that, knitted together, they could give the dead-enders of white male domination the boot.
Forty years ago, reprinted from Fear & Loathing On the Campaign Trail ’72:
Hear me, people. We now have to deal with another race — small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. — Sitting Bull, 1877
The ugly fallout from the American Dream has been coming down on us at a pretty consistent rate since Sitting Bull’s time — and the only real difference now, with election day ’72 only a few weeks away, is that we now seem on the verge of ratifying the fallout and forgetting the Dream itself …
There is almost a Yin/Yang clarity in the difference between the two men, a contrast so stark that it would be hard to find any two better models in the national politics arena for the legendary duality — the congenital Split Personality and polarized instincts — that almost everybody except Americans has long since taken for granted as the key to our National Character. This was not what Richard Nixon had in mind when he said last August, that the 1972 presidential election would offer voters “the clearest choice of the century,” bur on a level he will never understand he was probably right … and it is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise. — Hunter Thompson
Below, the plentiful evidence of widespread self-delusion and the corrosive legacy of Norman Vincent Peale.
Pay the pearl-clutchers no mind. That way lies disaster. The actual fine print on the label of reality reads: “Kumbaya” not included.
We should be confident that whoever wins has our collective best interests at heart, even if we don’t agree with his or her ideology, the same way we reflexively assume that the pilot of any plane we board doesn’t want to fly us into a mountain.
But we don’t make that assumption about our politicians anymore. We don’t believe the other side would have our backs even in an emergency. People today on both sides are genuinely terrified of a wrong outcome in this election. They’ve been whipped into a state of panic – people everywhere are freaking out and muttering to themselves and firing off vitriolic emails. That’s incredibly sad. As a member of the media, I feel sick about it. I think all of us in this business owe America a hug, or something . . . All of this has gone too far, and man, we’d better pray this doesn’t end in a 2000-style mess tonight. Year 2000 America seems like a veritable Buddha of perfect composure compared to the already-terminally-pissed, stress-crazed populace that has been dragged to the final lap of this terrible contest. Like crime victims, we deserve closure. Can we at least have that?
No. Shove it. Never been quite up to it after the high point of describing Goldman Sachs as a giant vampire squid poking its blood funnel into the face of humanity.
I try to read the WaTimes opinion page a few times a week. It gives you a comprehensive grasp of the extremists and their audience built on hate speech. It is the DC Republican power structure’s newspaper, where they go first to get their severe philosophies top billing. So if Guns, Booze & Jesus maddens, it is the place for your comfort.
President Obama must be defeated on Tuesday. Our republic hangs in the balance. A second term would enable him to achieve his seminal goal: the transformation of America into a European social democracy. The nation of our Founding Fathers will cease to exist. Our constitutional system will be replaced by a corporatist superstate based on arbitrary, centralized power and the fusion of big government, big business and big labor …
We are becoming a nation of economic deadbeats and social parasites. Mr. Obama has forged a new redistributionist order: Tax consumers are devouring the wealth of taxpaying producers. In the process, he is breeding an army — a vast electoral pool — of government dependents. Soon, America will hit the tipping point at which the productive classes are outnumbered — and outvoted — by the nonproductive ones …
While it did not take long it was expected. Former vice president Al Gore put out a statement on his blog on Tuesday and blamed the intensity of Hurricane Sandy on “global warming pollution.”
New York and New England were hit with powerful hurricanes in 1821 and 1938. In 1821, the hurricane was called, The Great September Gale. In 1938, the hurricane, aptly named the Long Island Express, slammed New York and New England with winds of up to 120 MPH. The Berkshire Eagle lists other hurricanes and tropical storms dating back to 1635 that have hit the east coast.
Is Mr. Gore saying that these massive hurricanes were caused by some form of man-made global warming…really? Please.
The president could nonetheless see a silver lining in this horrific “weather event.??? For one thing, he gets to posture as the leader of the nation in a terrible time of testing, the one to dole out federal emergency assistance and the great consoler around whom we instinctively rally in such circumstances.
Perhaps more importantly for Team Obama, many voters are going to have many other things on their minds for the next few, critical days instead of thinking about the evidence that their commander in chief was seriously derelict regarding the murderous attack in Benghazi, Libya …
