04.21.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks, WhiteManistan at 12:08 pm by George Smith
The now familiar scene: A joint ricin beatdown task force comes to another quiet American neighborhood, this time in Oklahoma City.
Preston Rhoads, 30, of Oklahoma City, is the latest ricin kook, investigated and arrested by the FBI and local police after a tip of some kind implicated him in a murder-for-hire plot. When authorities entered his house, it was declared a no-go zone in the neighborhood.
From the wire:
Test results have confirmed ricin was a substance found in the home of murder-for-hire suspect Preston Rhoads.
A law enforcement source confirmed with News 9 the substance tested 100% positive for the deadly toxin. However, the substance was only found inside the home and police officers were not exposed.
Oklahoma City Police and FBI agents say Rhoads was planning a murder before they searched his home on Thursday. The FBI says it processed his place for hazardous materials after finding the unknown substance, now identified as ricin.
At Rhoads’ home on N. McKinley, the health department has posted a sign saying the home is unsafe and warns people to stay away.
As in the case of Georgetown student Danny Milzman, Rhoads — although much older — was described as a perfect son by distraught friends and family members.
And, indeed, what profiling material exists upon the net supports this view.
Smiling faces of many friends adorn his Facebook page. And a self-made video of Rhoads on Vimeo shows an affable young man describing his career and education as a creator of digital art.
Rhoads art business homepage can be found at evilpreston dot com, although there is absolutely nothing evil about it. And on Twitter he comes off as normal although 140 character tweets furnish little in the way of material for a definitive judgment.
This makes four cases in which young American men have been taken down by the FBI and joint anti-terrorism squads in ricin beefs this year. That is one more than in 2013. And I thought that was a bumper crop year.
Readers are invited to discuss their thoughts on why and how so many Americans regularly become mentally ill, the condition unrecognized by friends and family until the anti-ricin squad shows up in the neighborhood without warning,
I’ve cataloged it for fifteen years and I don’t understand it anymore.
Why does this country produce such a regular surplus of ricin kooks?
The mass media, which has made ricin good fun and storytelling for the sake of entertainment and titillation; the dime-a-dozen national security “experts” produced by the infrastructure erected during the war on terror and their exaggerated cant on weapons of mass destruction and the ease of making them, all have much to answer for.
But don’t hold your breath waiting for one.
Again, with GlobalSecurity.Org (smirk) hat on, I make the case for a diversion track specifically designed for first-timers arrested and convicted in ricin cases.
Is Preston Rhoads more for the legacy of Kurt Saxon’s The Poor Man’s James Bond and Maxwell Hutchkinson’s blighted Poisoner’s Handbook?
Time will tell.
My 2006 version of an illustration from Saxon’s The Poor Man’s James Bond.
“It is bad to poison your fellow man, blow him up or even shoot him or otherwise disturb his tranquility. It is also uncouth to counterfeit your nation’s currency and it is tacky to destroy property as instructed in [the chapter] Arson and Electronics …
“But some people are just naturally crude … It is your responsibility, then, to be aware of the many ways bad people can be harmful …
“It is right to share with your enemies, the knowledge in this wonderful book …??? — Kurt Saxon
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04.18.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 2:54 pm by George Smith
If you ever gave money to PBS, you should read this and consider stopping.
One of its stories was featured in the Google News tab a day or so ago. I read it, did a slow burn, but figured it wasn’t worth saying anything about. That was until a reader posted and a Crooks and Liars piece on the Kochs hit my virtual windshield.
In essence, it’s a comment rescue, beginning now.
Going in, you must understand that the business news shots on PBS are called by a reporter/editor named Paul Solman. Solman is someone whose belief system in the economy has been blown to hell by the proof that Keynsian thought and modeling on the current economic crisis for everyone but the wealthy is still valid.
So, Solman is an asshole American libertarian. And none of that tribe accepts any of the work of serious macroeconomics experts who have been studying and writing about the Great Recession.
And so, early in the week, PBS dug up David Graeber, an Occupy Wall Street activist, so that he might react to the idea of a universal wage for all Americans.
And it is something that almost sounds reasonable, for a moment. Only almost, though.
The only part of it worth reproducing is the tell — the first paragraph, and it’s not Graeber’s doing.
Written by Paul Solman, here it is:
Editor’s Note: Conservative proponents of the guaranteed income want a lump sum payment (Charles Murray suggests about $11,000 to all adults) to replace existing social welfare programs and downsize American bureaucracy. But some leftists oppose those government welfare agencies, too, London School of Economics professor David Graeber says. The leftist critique of private and public bureaucracies, Graeber explains, is that they “employ thousands of people to make us feel bad about ourselves??? …
With a basic income, everyone would have access to the market. Workers (including those government paper-pushers) could pursue the work they want, while society as a whole would benefit from their scientific breakthroughs and artistic talents.
There are so many things wrong with this straight off, it’s difficult to know where to begin.
So I’ll start with the bigot.
You’ll see the name Charles Murray cited.
Murray is a quack sociologist/writer very popular on the hard right because he’s written books about how not-white people don’t work hard enough, have inferior culture/family values, and that is why they are poor.
Recently he came up with the idea of a universal credit, pinched from the Tories in the United Kingdom. This, so the welfare bureaucracy can be dismantled.
This invention was quickly adopted by our favorite, Paul Ryan, and I’ve spoken of it previously.
The reason the extremist GOP loves it is because it puts all social welfare programs in one package. And they can then be killed in one stroke.
That first paragraph also mentions it as a base survival payment of $11,000 a year.
This is laughable in many parts of America where, annoyingly, many millions of people live. Here in SoCal, $11,000 doesn’t even cover a year of rent, let alone food, clothing, electricity, water, gas and, optionally, a car, which is very hard but not impossible to get along without.
So in the very first part of the story, the PBS editor has tossed a debunked white supremacist (he has a file at the Southern Poverty Law Center) at the audience.
So we have the contrived economic ideas of the bigot and a basic
universal payment that doesn’t cover the cost of basic living in the country. And this is delivered to the PBS audience as something reasonable, as something “leftists” might even be able to accept.
Just so everything else can be thrown out for a hard right every-man-for-himself libertarian paradise.
Why? Crooks and Liars has an idea and it’s because plutocrat and all-around-reviled-person David Koch is on the board of WNET, the “flagship” station of PBS.
At C&L:
The truly insidious feature of this report isn’t Murray, per se. It is the way they present the idea as being something the left can sign onto. This is the new libertarian strategy: Find wedge issues that they presume they can dupe liberals into agreement, then use those dupes to recruit more followers.
As for me, I just think it’s because Paul Solman is, to repeat, a standard American libertarian asshole. The problem would be solved if he moved on to the Ludwig von Mises or Cato Institutes or Reason magazine.
But maybe Crooks & Liars is right. In that case, David Graeber was the dupe.
And that’s because it’s difficult to understand how Graeber, advertised as an Occupy activist, got twisted up in it. Occupy, after all, was one of the arch enemies of the tribe of hard right libertarian/GOP/Tea Party/Kochs.
In any case, the conversation goes from very bad to very bad as well as ludicrous. By the end, it seems like a bad drug trip.
Friedrich Hayek gets mentioned, another libertarian touchstone.
Then comes another wonderful rationalization, just tossed out for consideration as something called the “John Lennon argument:” That moment when Brit pop rock went to pot because the art student dole, a type of base income, was thrown out for workfare in the UK.
In the entire thing there isn’t one mention that all Americans can’t be expected to become entrepreneurs for themselves in “the market.”
And that millions and millions of them wouldn’t even want to be part of a system like that, anyway. Rather, they wish jobs in which they work for others at a living wage, not all craving to be small businessmen, artists, deep thinker/philosophers like Jacques Derrida (go ahead, read all of it, they actually mention him), writers and John Lennons in waiting.
The word “parasites??? is also referenced twice, once directly and once indirectly.
There are always some people who will want to be parasites, the audience must always be informed.
“Parasites??? needs a definition.
Is it everyone who isn’t wealthy?
Or everyone working a job that still needs social assistance to survive?
Or is it everyone who gets social assistance and still can’t survive?
Not the dead, though. They’ve stopped being parasites.
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04.14.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 9:56 am by George Smith
From PaulKrugzilla, over the weekend:
“[The] concentration of wealth at the very top — the 0.1% — is fully back to Gilded Age levels … [and] a lot of wealth at the top is held in offshore tax havens …At the commanding heights of the US economy, hiding a lot of one’s wealth offshore is probably the norm, not the exception.”
Three years since the news of GE paying zero and the “Taxavoidination” jingle.
And what’s changed? Not a thing. That would be socialism!
Ha-ha-ha-ha! Offshore! No tax, to the max.
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04.10.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 2:11 pm by George Smith
From Ted Nugent’s column at World Net Daily, today:
As the November election looms, the Democratic political hit machine and RINOs will do their best to malign the tea party as racists, bigots, homophobes, jingoists, anti-government zealots who are composed of Timothy McVeigh-types.
Meanwhile, there is a gathering storm of Americans who are raising their political pitchforks and don’t even know what the tea party is or what it believes …
These Americans are mad as hell and they aren’t going to take this anymore. No amount of spinning, bobbing and weaving, or smoke-and-mirrors political tricks are going keep these frustrated Americans from the polls.
A political storm is brewing. Good. It’s about time.
Old Steel Knees is WhiteManistan’s most popular and public bigot and, unconsciously, he describes himself very well.
But sometimes he’s too much for parts of it, even in Texas.
A couple of weeks ago the town of Longview canceled a Nugent show scheduled for the 4th of July. To do it they had to eat 16 thousand dollars, paying off Nugent not to show.
And this is because Nugent has a history of suing venues that drop him for shooting off his mouth. One you begin making open negotiations with the devil, you’re on the hook. (More on this a little further on.)
From the Dallas Morning News, in late March:
The city of Longview paid $16,250 to end contract negotiations with controversial rocker Ted Nugent, who was under consideration as the headliner for its Fourth of July celebration in East Texas.
Longview’s payoff last month came after Nugent’s earlier comments and song lyrics became an issue during a campaign swing with Texas gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott.
In January, Nugent called President Barack Obama a “subhuman mongrel??? …
City spokesman Shawn Hara said the controversy surrounding Nugent was just one factor that led the city to call off negotiations. The amount paid was about half Nugent’s performance fee.
There were “a variety of reasons: cost, structure, is it the right musical act for this type of event — a city-sponsored, family-oriented overall event,??? he said. “They decided no, we don’t want to move forward, it is not the right act for this. At that point we decided to end discussions.???
Mayor Jay Dean said Nugent’s act didn’t fit with the family-oriented program the city wanted.
Nugent promptly exploded, this in addition to chiseling the town out of 16 thousand:
If city officials are saying Ted Nugent’s shows are not family friendly, the rocker said Tuesday, “Somebody has bamboozled the good citizens of Longview.???
“The lie that my concerts are inappropriate for any city anywhere is absurd,??? Nugent said in an email response to questions. “My family friendly concerts are legendary and will continue to be all summer long in 2014.???
“Those that hate me are following the Saul Alinsky playbook on how to dismantle, fundamentally transform the greatest nation and quality of life the world has ever known,??? he said. “Those that hate me hate America, plain and simple.???
Nugent did not respond Tuesday to questions about published comments he made last week that Longview Mayor Jay Dean is racist and dishonest.
“I hear from reliable sources that the mayor is a racist and was offended that my band performs mostly African-American-influenced music,??? Nugent was quoted as saying in a column that appeared Saturday in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “Everyone knows ol’ Uncle Ted is the ultimate Independence Day rockout with the ultimate all-American, soul music, rockin’ soundtrack of defiance, liberty and freedom. We shall carry on. We are the good guys. Clueless, dishonest people like the mayor are the bad guys.???
This week Longview was able to cover Nugent’s hostage fee with a donation drive:
A fundraising group led by Mayor Jay Dean has recouped the $16,250 the city paid to end negotiations with rocker Ted Nugent as a potential headliner for Longview’s Independence Day show …
City officials have said they pulled the plug after learning of the talks in March, a few weeks after Nugent was drawing increasingly negative attention for comments he made about the president and his own background.
To get out of negotiations with Nugent’s booking agency, the city had to pay a portion of his contract fee — $16,250 …
On Wednesday, [a Longview representative] said numerous companies including Longview Regional Medical Center and Good Shepherd Medical Center, as well as many individuals, had contributed to the effort.
Readers get a good horselaugh from Nugent describing himself as a family-oriented act. YouTube is rife with video of Steel Knees, on television and on tour, using profanity to condemn his enemies from the president to random women producers on network television.
From this blog’s unrivaled archives (the originals may be gone at America’s dailies, but we keep ’em:)
Ted Nugent’s appearance at the Benton Franklin fair in Kennewick, WA, [in the summer of 2010] brought on fear and loathing in the locals. Shocked, they were just shocked — by Ted’s foul language, heard for miles around, courtesy of the rock ‘n’ roll megawatt PA …
Here are some excerpts from the letters page at the Kennewick paper (note the absence of what generally shouts his obscenities in connection with — the president, other Dem politicians — it’s just the profanity they noticed):
“What rock did they find Ted Nugent under? I am very angry at the choice of words used during his concert. I understand that Ted Nugent is like this — but at a fair with children?”
“I have never been so astonished and mad as I was on the evening of Aug. 26 when my wife and I attended the Benton Franklin County Fair.
“Ted Nugent was performing (?) onstage, cursing, shouting obcenities [sic], screaming at the top of his voice, etc. All while in the presence of many young children.
“This is an insult to our society … ”
And, delightfully, here.
Oooh, still more, from 2011 (excerpting from media coverage):
From a Peoria newspaper: “When [Ted Nugent] shares his political views? That’s entertaining, too, in a borderline frightening way.
“He railed on government in general and the president in particular. He invited his audience to storm down to Springfield and take it over. Right after an f-bomb-laced barrage, he remarked that it was nice to see children in the audience …”
From a Niagara Falls newspaper: “Nugent is ranting at a furious pace, cramming in more obscenities in three minutes than a roomful of cursing sailors, and undoubtedly saying something shockingly funny, or just shocking.
“On Tuesday, many of Nugent’s rants were directed at Canadian visitors. Standing in front of a huge backdrop of the Stars and Stripes, Nugent invited Canadian visitors to “taste freedom.??? Nugent later quipped, “I love you Canadians, it’s your government that is (fucked) up.??? I am paraphrasing of course, but you get the picture.”
Steel Knees has something of an encapsulated mentally ill mind. The part of his brain that believes himself a family-oriented entertainer is completely isolated from that part that spews curses every four or five words. One begins to wonder if he even hears himself or if part of his cognitive function edits out the f-bombs somewhere in the tangle of ganglia between and behind the mouth and ears.
As for suing people who drop him for being ugly in public, one of the most famous cases, well prior to Nugent’s American fame as a public bigot, came in Michigan in 2003.
Again, from the unsurpassed archives of this blog:
In mid 2003 Nugent had a big gig lined up at the Muskegon Summer Celebration in Michigan. He then went on a radio show in Denver to do his inimitably Ted thing. The radio hosts pulled the plug on him.
The result — Nugent summarily dropped by the concert. Billboard, at the time:
“Derogatory racial remarks made by veteran rocker Ted Nugent have cost him a gig at the Muskegon Summer Celebration. Festival officials canceled his concert following an interview last week with two Denver disc jockeys in which the DJs said he used slurs for Asians and blacks.???
Three months later Nugent sued the Muskegon concert officials for defamation. In his complaint, it was linked to a tortured argument about violation of his 14th Amendment rights and breach of contract, which had deprived him of an $80,000 guarantee.
The Billboard image/article is here in a parcel of articles and comes from the case files entered by Nugent’s legal team. (DD has more and may get to them in a future post.)
The lawsuit became a celebrity trial in Michigan during the course of which Nugent’s defamation claim was tossed out. Nugent eventually took the stand, saying the DJs had misinterpreted his use of the n-word in a conversation. Nugent said he had related a story about how an African American had told him, after watching him in performance: “If you keep playing … like that, you’re going to be an ‘n word’ when you grow up.???
Whether this was all Nugent said during the course of the radio appearance was not determined. No tape of it existed, apparently.
“Unmentioned at the trial were news accounts of Nugent’s use of the other [derogatory] words [for Asians],??? reported the Muskegon Chronicle in 2005.
Nugent was successful in his breach of contract suit with the Muskegon festival and was eventually paid his guarantee.
Internet technology has improved some things. Because of it Ted Nugent will never again be able to mount a defamation suit against anyone.
Media Matters notes The Toledo Blade newspaper showing regret over booking Ted Nugent this summer:
The director of a summer event sponsored by the The Blade of Toledo, OH, says the scheduled appearance of Ted Nugent is sparking a backlash from members of the community who take issue with the conservative commentator and musician’s virulent commentary.
“All things being equal I wouldn’t bring in a guy who is aggravating people, that is not my intention,” said Mike Mori, The Blade’s sales director, who is also event director for the Northwest Ohio Rib-Off, a four-day food and music event the newspaper has been running for four years. “It seems like this thing has kind of ballooned in the last couple months. I will probably think long and hard about inviting him next year.”
But Mori told Media Matters if he cancels Nugent’s appearance this year, he still has to pay him the full fee, which he declined to reveal but said is more than $50,000.
“I have to pay him that even if it rains,” Mori said. “I wish the guy would just not say the things he does, he brings a big audience, he’s from Michigan, he packs the place. If everyone hated him, nobody would come. He does have a following, it’s a tough situation. I try to have a diverse type of a line-up.”
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04.02.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 2:42 pm by George Smith
Jesus of America’s work is never done! Just over a month ago he was telling fables about how the poor are better off when you take their food and what little health care they may have away.
Stoned for it, Jesus of America just laughed at Pontius Paul and all the nail drivers, saying slyly, “Wait until next month!”
And, good as his word, next month is here with Jesus of America’s ten year budget which cuts 2 trillion from health care reform and almost 1 trillion from Medicaid and food stamps while giving more gold to those at the top. Jesus of America sayeth: “Don’t feed the poor, they are just too lazy, they’ll never work at all.” Share the love of Jesus of America far and wide!
Pontius Paul Krugman:
The latest Paul Ryan budget is getting a lot of well-deserved flak, and so is Ryan himself. The combination of cruelty and raw dishonesty is so obvious, it’s hard to see how anyone can fail to see what’s going on.
But Ryan hasn’t changed; his budgets have always been like this, and so has he.
The last time, about a month ago — if that, I mentioned Jesus of America would be back in no more than six months, probably less.
Much less, actually.
No amount of nails can stop him, no virtual lance in the side.
It’s impossible to stop Jesus of America.
And that’s because he’s one of the son’s of God in WhiteManistan. They love his spiritual teachings.
If Jesus says it, they know it must be true. So now it’s time to whip the poor (as it always is), they know what to do!
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03.26.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 9:26 am by George Smith
Let’s make the big 20 click push to 800 views! Blessed are the job creators, they can always hire way more waiters!
From Krugman, yesterday:
[Emails] that bash the Kochs raise three times as much as emails that don’t.
And you can see why: the Kochs are perfect villains. It’s not just what they are — serious evildoers who use their wealth to push hard-line right-wing, anti-environmental policies that redound very much to their own benefit. It’s also what they aren’t: they’re wealthy heirs, not self-made men, they aren’t identified with innovation (which you can at least argue for Bill Gates), they haven’t made money for other people like Warren Buffett. So focusing on the Kochs is a way to personalize a vision of conservative politics as a defense of people with unearned privilege.
And here’s the thing: that vision is basically right.
In my e-mail today, and last week:
We JUST got the images that The Illuminators will be projecting on the side of Boston’s PBS station this week to help kick David Koch off the Board of WGBH, and they are brilliant! Check out two of them below. The only problem is that despite nearly 500 members who have chipped in, we STILL don’t have enough to pull it off. You can put us over the top and send an unforgettable message to the Koch Brothers. Just donate $5 here.
Wow! We just learned about a HUGE opportunity to ramp up our campaign to kick right-wing extremist David Koch off the Board of WGBH — one of the most influential PBS stations in the country and the producer of NOVA, Frontline, and Masterpiece — but we need your help …
The Kochs are perfect demons and the Democratic Party has wised up to the effectiveness of demonization as a power and fund-raising tactic.
In press, the Kochs have complained about it.
But here’s the rub: Every time one of the country’s super-rich pops off in the media about how the wealthy are being persecuted in the current social climate, that disliking them is antithetical to some imagined American ideal, they make themselves look even worse.
In so doing they come off as bloated maniacs surrounded by paid lickspittles who would never dream of telling them to shut it. Whatever they may believe, no one has crimped their fortunes appreciably in modern memory.
Moving along, for WhiteManistan, demonization just works! Ted Nugent couldn’t thrive and prosper without it. Ka-ching!
The president, naturally, has been effectively demonized for his entire administration, fundamentally because he is an African-American. A significant swath of the American electorate, the world view/religion/place I call WhiteManistan, believe him to be [fill in anything — as long as it’s monstrous].
And, today, from Krugman, someone mails in the Atlas Shrugged Boogie:
“Paul you are a subhuman communist traitor who should be deported. You are a disgrace to america’s founders and an affront to the Constitution. Republicans believe in protecting the money of WORKERS not RECEIVERS. All workers, poor and rich, should be protected from high taxes equally.”
Krugman goes on to comment, “[During] the Progressive Era, it was commonplace and widely accepted to support high taxes on the rich specifically in order to keep the rich from getting richer — a position that few people in politics today would dare espouse.”
High tax rates on the wealthy, he explains, where an American invention, invented for social and economic reasons to help prevent the country from coming to be like “Old Europe.”
Nevertheless, this has been shoved down the memory hole. Few people know that wealth redistribution was “once as American as apple pie.”
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03.20.14
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks, WhiteManistan at 1:42 pm by George Smith
Spring is coming and a fresh bunch of America’s ricin kooks are stirring in the neighborhoods:
A Hatboro man was arrested Wednesday night for allegedly sending a scratch-and-sniff birthday card laced with ricin to a man now dating his ex-girlfriend, authorities said.
Nicholas Todd Helman, 19, was charged with attempted murder and risking catastrophe after lab tests allegedly showed that the card he placed in the man’s family mailbox March 6 was discovered this week to have contained traces of the toxic substance, Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler said …
Helman had bragged of the toxic card to a coworker at Target in Warrington on March 6, according to a probable cause affidavit. The coworker then notified police, the affidavit says …
When Helman was first questioned about the incident, on March 7, he told police that he had only coated the card with sodium hydroxide, the affidavit says, which he chose because it resembled the toxin anthrax.
Helman also admitted to sending threatening messages to the man via Facebook, according to the affidavit, and police seized from him what appeared to be sodium hydroxide and a notebook with a ricin recipe after questioning.
When a ricin mailing is found, everyone comes: the FBI, the local police, the Department of Homeland Security, the state and local hazmat and SWAT teams.
It must have been a thrilling day in the neighborhood.
And from the WaPost (no link), still another young bean pounder:
A white powder found Tuesday in a Georgetown University dorm room tested positive for ricin, school officials said Wednesday, and a D.C. police report indicates that a 19-year-old man told authorities he had produced the substance.
The “expert” who should have kept her mouth shut is deployed, emitting a comment that really has no relevance to what’s going on in America when ricin kooks are at work:
Amy E. Smithson, a senior fellow with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies who studies biological weapons, said that when ricin is produced with military precision, the substance can be highly lethal. “Ricin is one of the deadliest substances on the face of the planet, no ifs, ands or buts about it,??? she said.
The substance can be highly lethal. Military precision. It’s laughable, a factoid delivered entirely stripped of context. Nobody has died in the US from ricin poisoning in the last twenty years.
As in Hatboro, the Department of Homeland Security, the police, the firemen, everybody, came.
Why couldn’t I get a job like that? That’s real employment security.
The coincidence that, in these cases, both perpetrators are nineteen-year-old boys certainly leaves good work for graduate students in criminal psychology.
Surely both, as have others, have read enough about ricin on the internet to know they are just smashing castor seeds. But if they are caught with the result, which inevitably happens because they are compelled to — ahem — spill the beans, summoning a detachment from the full apparatus of the war on terror to their door, they will go to jail.
I suspect that in certain cases, not all, there is a juvenile hacker mentality at work, one you see in BitCoin altar boys, the old culture of virus-writers, and some hackers: I’m going to do it because I must prove to acquaintances, and by extension — the world, that it can be done! I’ll show everybody!
Addition: Why do ricin kooks seem to come in clusters in ‘Merica? Coincidences? Seasonal? This is the best time to get castor seeds?
Some underlying psychic network, connecting strands of bright, electric, vibrating mental illness?
I’ll probably never know the answer.
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Posted in Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 10:17 am by George Smith
Three columns running, Ted Nugent still fixates on the great pure America he once knew. That’s the place unencumbered by the “bloodsuckers,” where WhiteManistan labored in united harmony, enjoying the fruits of shared upright Christian values and the money and success that comes from such piety.
And now, like last week, his heart is breaking. There’s his WhiteManistan, and everyone else.
“Can the ‘2 Americas’ ever unite?” he cries:
On my side of America are a–-kicking, hard-working, indefatigable, dedicated producers who cannot imagine taking possession of something we did not earn ourselves. And the proof of generosity and love from the producers is irrefutable and legendary, how we take care of our families, neighbors and truly needy fellow Americans and even strangers around the globe in time of need. We provide way more hands-up than we do hand-outs, for we know that able-bodied souls understand deep inside their responsibility to being assets instead of liabilities, and given a prod, will indeed get humping once back on their feet.
Heartbreakingly, as has occurred wherever the desouling scams of socialism and communism have been successfully implemented, weak, herds of uncaring people cut in line to take far more than the truly needy might have coming to them … The scammers’ war on poverty creates more poverty, the Great Society goes bust, the New Deal is a raw deal, and Social Security is antisocial …
“What will it take to wake up the takers to admit that they are destroying this once great, proud, ultra productive last best nation on earth?” Nugent asks.
It eludes Ted Nugent that FDR, World War II and the New Deal were responsible for much of the expansionary economy he so misses from his youth. And that nobody, except the Republican Party, considers Social Security “anti-social.”
Reading the rest, Ted sings the praises of the new tribe of WhiteManistan purity, the Tea Party. Of course he has it right. They hate Social Security, just as long as their checks keep coming. It’s everyone else who might get it coming afterwards that works them up so.
I had hoped Ted would deliver another rousing story of his Horatio Alger-like upbringing and personal tenacity. Perhaps a minder read this column and steered him clear of more anecdotes of chopping firewood, shooting varmints and stomping around the Spirit Wild ranch in Texas on his new surgical stainless steel knees, ignoring the pain and the stretching sutures to get the day’s work done.
Give it another seven days and I’ll be here to tell you the result.
In the mean time, Paul Krugman, explained the song of WhiteManistan in a Monday column:
Or we’re told that conservatives, the Tea Party in particular, oppose handouts because they believe in personal responsibility, in a society in which people must bear the consequences of their actions. Yet it’s hard to find angry Tea Party denunciations of huge Wall Street bailouts, of huge bonuses paid to executives who were saved from disaster by government backing and guarantees. Instead, all the movement’s passion, starting with Rick Santelli’s famous rant on CNBC, has been directed against any hint of financial relief for low-income borrowers. And what is it about these borrowers that makes them such targets of ire? You know the answer.
One odd consequence of our still-racialized politics is that conservatives are still, in effect, mobilizing against the bums on welfare even though both the bums and the welfare are long gone or never existed. Mr. Santelli’s fury was directed against mortgage relief that never actually happened. Right-wingers rage against tales of food stamp abuse that almost always turn out to be false or at least greatly exaggerated. And Mr. Ryan’s black-men-don’t-want-to-work theory of poverty is decades out of date.
“And as economic opportunity has shriveled for half the population, many behaviors that used to be held up as demonstrations of black cultural breakdown,” Krugman concludes.
Sing it, Ted, sing it loud.
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03.19.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 12:41 pm by George Smith
In e-mail, a ticket at the low price of $250, for a trip to Dante’s newly discovered 10th Circle of Hell:
What’s the surest way to make sure attendees are paying attention and absorbing your meeting’s key messages? Rock and Roll of course!
Don’t take our word for it though, check out this awesome article that Meeting Focus did on our Team Rock Stars program.
“Creating a program that guides and helps attendees have a good time, giving them permission to let their hair down and rock out, makes a real difference in retention and repeat attendance.??? says Kerry Wawrin, CMP,program manager for BCD Meetings & Events.
Invigorate and reward your employees through the power of Rock and Roll. Amp up your team’s camaraderie with the help of our Rock stars. Team Rock Stars delivers lasting results and is guaranteed to impact your group in the most productive and fun way possible.
Team Rock Stars is an ideal fit for your company’s next corporate retreat, training seminar, convention, sales meeting or dinner.
Build corporate team skills to cripplingly wretched dad rock.
What’s the best choice: A case of pink eye, a carbuncle on the back of your neck or a day or two of this? Not a trick question.
If you have any pride left after being given the treatment, you quit before they get to you.
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Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror, WhiteManistan at 11:13 am by George Smith
Iraqi Freedom commemorative music and art! Read it!
Great stuff. The record, I mean.
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