02.06.14
Posted in Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 3:01 pm by George Smith
It’s easy to figure out how Ted Nugent’s brain works.
Take the writing of his weekly column. When not calling someone a famous Nazi, metaphorically recommending death or arrest for various members of the administration, or illustrating how communist tyranny is being imposed on everyone, he gets up in the morning, thinks of something dear to his heart, and claims that the dear-to-heart something is responsible for some great national miracle.
In today’s column at WorldNetDaily, Nugent credits hunters and fisherman with cleaning up America’s dirty water in the seventies, specifically Lake Erie:
When I was growing up in that once grand city of Detroit, Lake Erie would occasionally ignite spontaneously …
The perfect “we the people??? ballet of whistleblowing sounded the alarm when real conservationist/environmentalist, you know, hunters, fishermen and trappers, with real boots on the ground, witnessed in the swamps and on the water our beloved muskrat, waterfowl and fish populations drop to unacceptable levels. We quickly stepped up to remedy this very dangerous condition that threatened our hunter/gatherer lifestyle.
We simply refused to accept the status quo of the industrial revolution mistakes …
It wasn’t that long thereafter that Lake Erie got cleaned up so well that it once again became the world’s top walleye and small mouth bass fishery.
It’s a nice story, pike fisherman and muskrat trappers fixed staggering industry-driven water pollution.
Except that’s not how it happened.
It was the hated federal government and the Clean Water Act that did the job.
From one of Ted Nugent’s hates, the EPA:
Fires plagued the Cuyahoga River beginning in 1936 when a spark from a blow torch ignited floating debris and oils. The largest river fire in 1952 caused over $1 million in damage to boats and a riverfront office building. By the 1960s, the lower Cuyahoga River in Cleveland was used for waste disposal and was choked with debris, oils, sludge, industrial wastes and sewage. These pollutants were considered a major source of impact to Lake Erie, which was considered “dead” (devoid of fish) at the time. On June 22, 1969 a river fire captured national attention. Time magazine described the Cuyahoga as the river that “oozes rather than flows” and in which a person “does not drown but decays.” This event helped spur an avalanche of pollution control activities resulting in the Clean Water Act, Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and the creation of the federal and state Environmental Protection Agencies.
After the Clear Water Act of 1972 and other local initiatives started enforcement, Lake Erie gradually improved. Fishing recovered, mayflies, absent for close to four decades, returned.
However, a different and not uncommon problem in modern America, also caused by mass human action, has now arisen: massive algal blooms caused by agricultural run-off.
A 2013 report from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
In 2011, Lake Erie experienced the largest harmful algal bloom in its recorded history, with a peak intensity over three times greater than any previously observed bloom. Here we show that long-term trends in agricultural practices are consistent with increasing phosphorus loading to the western basin of the lake, and that these trends, coupled with meteorological conditions in spring 2011, produced record-breaking nutrient loads. An extended period of weak lake circulation then led to abnormally long residence times that incubated the bloom, and warm and quiescent conditions after bloom onset allowed algae to remain near the top of the water column and prevented flushing of nutrients from the system. We further find that all of these factors are consistent with expected future conditions. If a scientifically guided management plan to mitigate these impacts is not implemented, we can therefore expect this bloom to be a harbinger of future blooms in Lake Erie.
“And so it continues today with all my hunting, fishing, trapping friends as dedicated stewards to monitor the health of wildlife and wild habitat as the ultimate barometers for quality air, soil and water, and, therefore, overall quality of life,” continues Nugent.
The breast swells, a tear is seen in the eye. Then one last recommendation.
“Now wouldn’t it be great if only enough Americans could put forth such effort to cleanse our government of all that political pollution?”
One newspaper excerpt, October 2012:
In recent summers large blooms of toxic algae have returned. In 2011, the worst year so far, there were days when the algae was so thick that Unger couldn’t take his customers fishing. He once drove his 27-foot Sportcraft boat 14 miles straight north from Cleveland before he gave up and turned back. “I never got out of the algae,??? he says.
Ted Nugent does God’s work in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, informs public Maryland, New Jersey and New York are no longer states in America:
“I’m doing God’s work exposing the soullessness of the left, the evil agenda of the same liberal Democrats who engineered the destruction of the greatest city of America my birth city of Detroit. They did it on purpose and now we have a commander in chief who is actually following the recipe for destruction of Detroit for the whole country.???
As he has done in the past, Nugent called Attorney General Eric Holder a gun runner and President Obama an avowed racist.
He accused the Obama Administration of imposing communism on America. “That’s the redistribution of earnings, giving hard-earned money to people who didn’t earn it.
“This is ‘Planet of the Apes’ stuff,??? Nugent said. “This is so indecent, so criminal, that Americans who get up early and work hard are absolutely shattered by the abuse of power and corruption.???
He said Maryland, New York and New Jersey — all of which have legalized same-sex marriage — were no longer America.
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02.05.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 12:29 pm by George Smith
The Super Bowl, the game part, was unwatchable at any speed, a hours long slow-motion disaster in televised pro sports.
The commercials were primarily big budget blow jobs and fantasies to some place I used to live in.
Let Asia assemble your phone!
If your skin crawls it only means you don’t live in WhiteManistan.
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02.04.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 4:27 pm by George Smith
Ol’ EMP Crazy, now stocking 50 pound bags of corn from Sam’s Club and expanding his refuge in Appalachia in advance of the imminent end of America.
In 2012, notorious electromagnetic pulse kook Roscoe Bartlett was run out of the House, losing election to a Democratic candidate in a redrawn district. So, naturally, the first thing one thinks of at a famous web publication — Politico: Hey, let’s do a profile on what happened to Roscoe!
I’m not gonna rewrite everything I had to say at the time Bartlett bit the dust and the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy suffered a blow from which it has yet to recover.
Instead, I quote from the archives:
As long as I can remember Bartlett has been in congress, warning about how an enemy — North Korea, or terrorists, and now the special foe — Iran, will destroy American civilization with an electromagnetic pulse caused by a nuclear weapon detonated over the United States.
The Cult of EMP Crazy, aka as the missile defense/bomb Iran lobby, would have been nothing without Bartlett. Year after year after year Bartlett pounded the issue from the House, as often as possible, even causing the formation of a commission, now years past, to study the threat. [It concluded] the nation could be trivially returned to the age of horse and buggy. (Or as I used to like to put it, the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.)
As a consequence, Bartlett is the inspiration for now hundreds of vanity-published books from the survivalist crew, all distributed on Amazon, all exactly the same – about the end of western civilization by EMP …
Despite all the lobbying, Bartlett was never able to put into action any legislation to deal with electromagnetic pulse doom. But the lobby itself is loud, vociferous and incessant, writing books, articles and opinion pieces, casting movies and commercials, even spanning the Atlantic Ocean to plague the Brits.
Bartlett, for his part, has an obscure career waiting in the prepper/survivalist movement, where everyone is convinced America is about to end, anyway …
Since Roscoe Bartlett has been at his cause for so long, one might legitimately ask what is the man’s legacy?
Striking fear into people who are not particularly perceptive is one of his signal achievements … Bartlett’s unstinting work aimed at describing the total end of US civilization in an instant is particularly resonant within the Christian right …
Roscoe Bartlett, [and this can be said with absolute certainty], has been around longer than PEZ candy, parking meters and penicillin.
The Politico story is here, and excerpting only a little:
Every couple of weeks, the survivalist octogenarian shaves off his white beard, dons a suit and heads to the capital, where he serves as a senior consultant for a cybersecurity company called Lineage Technologies.
Bartlett, a small-government, Tea Party-style Republican, had spent two decades as the U.S. representative for Maryland’s 6th congressional district.
Bartlett’s warnings of catastrophic electromagnetic pulse attacks and solar flares fell on deaf ears and earned him a reputation as a crank …
In speech after late-night speech on the House floor, Bartlett hectored the nearly empty chamber: If the United States doesn’t do something to protect the grid, and soon, a terrorist or an act of nature will put an end to life as we know it.
Bartlett loved to conjure doomsday visions …
Since it was a feature in Politico, it immediately generated copycat coverage in other places, including — surprisingly, the LA Times.
I’ll not repeat from it save to say it includes about everything from the now twenty year-old script/meme. The reporter, one of the Times’ newer employees, was probably in grade school when it started.
Readers know electromagnetic pulse doom now falls firmly within the boundaries of DD’s Law:
The probability that any predicted national security catastrophe, or doomsday scenario, will occur is the inverse of its appearance in entertainments.
Thus, in the case of Roscoe Bartlett’s vision, zero.
There’s a crappy television series, Revolution, on it. Many movies have been made with electromagnetic pulse doom as a central feature of plotting. And do savor the hundreds of vanity-published novels on it, all published through Amazon, establishing a weird genre of adventure and romance fiction for the paranoid prepper far-right in WhiteManistan. (If you click the link to Amazon in the old post, you’ll see the number of books nobody without a mental problem of some kind reads has greatly increased.)
The generic script: The US will collapse soon, through an unspecified series of disasters which include (but are not limited to) total electrical grid failure, rampant bioterrorist-spread disease, and the death of money. Only those in the country, on farms with their own fruit trees, vegetable crops, chainsaws for cutting firewood, elevated water supply, and Bible-reading skills will survive.
Having been familiar with it for so long, I’ve observed there’s a joy in the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy. It’s a creepy enthusiasm for the end of US civilization so the true believers can retreat to their bunkers and bug-out hideaways, well-stocked with guns, ammo and military surplus camo-wear, awaiting the arrival of the starving and diseased scum from the cities who they can have the pleasure of ordering off their property. And then shooting, if not promptly obeyed.
It’s the same joy one senses in the believers in Rapture. Those saved by Jesus in the final score-keeping rejoice in knowing the non-believers will then be subjected to an infinity of misery.
In any case, there are never any Democrats allowed in the bunker when the end comes. It will be a great ritual of purification.
With Bartlett gone to Croatan, or more accurately, a private compound and artificial lake in West Virginia, the mantle of official Congressional electromagnetic pulse crazy fell to the certified idiot from Arizona who goes by the name of Trent Franks.
At which point long-time Cult members knew they had a serious problem.
So they took the electromagnetic pulse doom story on the road to Tea Party meetings in red states, where it is now offered with an entire menu of favorite right-wing hates: The need to end entitlements, the need for legislation to counter “voter fraud,” the need to install anti-shariah legislation at the state level, the need to expose the takeover of the US State Department by the Muslim Brotherhood in the guise of Hilary Clinton aide, Huma Abedin; the treachery of Benghazi…
In response to Politico’s Bartlett profile, Glenn Beck’s Blaze joined in.
Dealing with Iran instead of immediately proceeding with plans to go to war is a Neville Chamberlain moment:
Buck Sexton interviewed on his radio show Saturday former CIA director Amb. R. James Woolsey, now the chair of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Woosley gave a damning critique of the Obama administration’s handling of the Iranian nuclear agreement.
Woolsey, CIA director from 1993 to 1995, told Sexton that Obama’s dealings with the Iranian government have been “roughly equivalent to Neville Chamberlain’s at Munich in the 1930s.???
When Sexton asked Woolsey about Iran’s potential to have a nuclear weapon ready to deploy that the U.S. couldn’t stop, the ambassador said one could be ready in “six months to a year.??? But he added that the Iranians don’t need something sophisticated in order to trigger an electromagnetic pulse, which would be “devastating.???
On that note, Woolsey told Sexton that an EMP poses a security threat in the U.S. as well.
Complete with an old picture of Hitler at Munich.
Takeaway: Like so many things in the socially-crippled US, the paranoid and steeped-in-authoritarianism mythology of electromagnetic pulse doom was turned into a highly-professionalized and tenacious industry, built on the exploitation of a thick seam of WhiteManistan kook-ism and its love of end-times stories in which the virtuous are saved and the sinners destroyed. It’s a profitable business. Just take a look at Roscoe Bartlett’s spread in Appalachia.
Roscoe Bartlett — from the archives.
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01.30.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Fiat money fear and loathers, WhiteManistan at 12:17 pm by George Smith
Plastic 3D gun maker and wanna-be BitCoin wallet developer Cody Wilson has been given a quarter of a million dollar book deal by Simon & Schuster for his story:
“The whole point to me is to add to the hacker mythology and to have a very, very accurate and contentious portrayal of what we think about the current political situation, our attitude and political orientation, a lasting remark,??? he says. “It won’t be a manifesto. But culturally I hope to leave a couple of zingers…a touchstone for the young, disaffected radical towards his own political and social development, that kind of thing.???
Wilson says his proposal received highly mixed reactions from publishers, some of whom saw his attempts to create new ways to circumvent gun control laws as immoral.
The proposed title is Negative Liberty. At Forbes, Wilson claims that soon the government will be trying to jail him.
Cody Wilson — from the archives.
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Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 12:00 pm by George Smith
Missouri and Wyoming are considering bringing back the firing squad. Good. They’ve got good shots in those states.
There is no debate regarding “pain and suffering??? and cruel and unusual punishment with a firing squad.
No link.
Once advocated shooting cats, too.
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01.16.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 3:30 pm by George Smith
Yesterday I went off to get a flu shot. It gave me the opportunity to see of my Medi-Cal health insurance was active, part of the Obamacare Medicaid expansion in California.
It was.
However, it did not cover the flu shot. Why? I went to the Ralphs supermarket to get the cheapest price at their pharmacy and was informed by their pharmacist that Medi-Cal requires recipients to be referred to a doctor’s office for the immunization.
I paid for it in cash. It was easier and relatively inexpensive. But I was still happy to be informed that I had the health insurance benefit.
This is a very big deal.
Why?
Because Obamacare and Covered California, the state run on-line exchange made it relatively easy.
It was not without glitch. From the start, Covered California was swamped by volume. This made it impossible to get someone on the phone if you had a question. And if you tried to get someone in on-line chat, also recommended by the site, that also proved problematical. Sheer numbers of people applying did it.
But I was able to enter all my information on the website and after analysis, Covered California determined I was eligible for Medi-Cal.
And behind the scenes wheels began to turn.
My materials were handed off to a state social services division in southern California, as well as one in Sacramento. At the beginning of January, I received my benefit card.
On Monday, I received notification that my policy had been active since January 1. It also informed that the card would follow.
As I have found, the order was reversed, the mail twisted up. But upon talking with another person, the experience was similar.
Although the enrollment and issuing of documents were not perfectly coordinated, it was accomplished, anyway. And it has convinced me there are people trying very had to make Obamacare in California work and work well.
It made me think again about the sheer malice of the Republican Party, a tribe that is attacking its own in red states, denying them health care millions of others will get across the border, all for mad hatred of the president, his national health care initiative and the poor.
You want to know the faces of evil? Just look at the GOP. Wishing ill of others and working to guarantee it are what they are.
For an example, take my old Pennsyltucky home. Pennsylvania voted for Obama over Romney, yet due to gerrymandered districts and it’s Tea Party governor, Tom Corbett, the state has been held hostage by the Republican Party.
The Allentown Morning Call newspaper published a recent article on Corbett’s plan to give health insurance to the poor. What it boils down to is trying to get around the Medicaid expansion of Obamacare by making their own program, one that involves turning health insurance for the bottom into a workfare program.
The Call:
Audience members at hearing are lukewarm to plan, which would establish possibly illegal work requirements on some Medicaid recipients
For the seventh and final time, Bev Mackereth took to a stage to tell a largely skeptical audience why her boss’ plan to reform and expand Medicaid to more poor Pennsylvanians was a better option than the one available to states under the federal Affordable Care Act …
The federal government has rejected other states’ requests to institute work requirements for Medicaid recipients.
The Corbett administration does not appear willing to alter its stance on requiring some Medicaid recipients to work at least 20 hours a week or show proof they are looking through work by logging on to a state website multiple times a year …
Requiring Medicaid recipients to send 72 job applications in six months appears onerous and unrealistic, said Richard S. Edley, president and CEO of Rehabilitation & Community Providers Association, a Harrisburg umbrella roup of mental health and addiction counselors.
Mackereth’s department has heard mixed reviews about the work requirement, she told the audience. But she said if children can get up and head to class each morning, adults should be able to go to work each morning, too.
Note the standard GOP insinuation that “the poor” have shitty values and habits. Work is just like school. You just have to get up in the morning and go to it and not be a gold-bricking moocher.
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12.31.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, WhiteManistan at 10:47 am by George Smith
60 Minutes, infamously:
John Miller: Could a foreign country tomorrow topple our financial system?
Gen. Keith Alexander: I believe that a foreign nation could impact and destroy major portions of our financial system, yes.
John Miller: How much of it could we stop?
Gen. Keith Alexander: Well, right now it would be difficult to stop it because our ability to see it is limited.
One they did see coming was called the BIOS Plot. It could have been catastrophic for the United States. While the NSA would not name the country behind it, cyber security experts briefed on the operation told us it was China. Debora Plunkett directs cyber defense for the NSA and for the first time, discusses the agency’s role in discovering the plot.
Debora Plunkett: One of our analysts actually saw that the nation state had the intention to develop and to deliver, to actually use this capability– to destroy computers …
So the BIOS is a basic input, output system. It’s, like, the foundational component firmware of a computer. You start your computer up. The BIOS kicks in. It activates hardware. It activates the operating system. It turns on the computer.
This is the BIOS system which starts most computers. The attack would have been disguised as a request for a software update. If the user agreed, the virus would’ve infected the computer.
John Miller: So, this basically would have gone into the system that starts up the computer, runs the systems, tells it what to do.
Debora Plunkett: That’s right.
John Miller: –and basically turned it into a cinderblock.
Debora Plunkett: A brick.
John Miller: And after that, there wouldn’t be much you could do with that computer.
Debora Plunkett: That’s right. Think about the impact of that across the entire globe. It could literally take down the U.S. economy.
John Miller: I don’t mean to be flip about this. But it has a kind of a little Dr. Evil quality– to it that, “I’m going to develop a program that can destroy every computer in the world.” It sounds almost unbelievable.
Debora Plunkett: Don’t be fooled. There are absolutely nation states who have the capability and the intentions to do just that.
John Miller: And based on what you learned here at NSA. Would it have worked?
Debora Plunkett: We believe it would have. Yes.
From Sherlock, the BBC:
Jim Moriarty, in The Reichenbach Fall: “You don’t really think a few lines of computer code are going to crash the world down around our ears, do you? I’m disappointed, I’m disappointed in you, Sherlock …
“I knew you’d fall for it. That’s your weakness. You always want things
to be clever.”
There is old precedent for this. The NSA does have an obscure record of issuing broad claims on how easy it is to crash things in the US, although most would be hard-pressed to put their finger on it.
One example from the past revolved around an NSA-conducted war game, or mock-up penetration test, dubbed Eligible Receiver in 1997. Eligible Receiver was used, by the NSA working through the press, to get out the message that foreign cyberattack could easily be catastrophic for the United States.
It’s now sixteen years beyond Eligible Receiver. No such cyberattacks occurred. However, the old footprint of Eligible Receiver was quite large in the mainstream press.
It is not unfair to look at it as a propaganda campaign, backed up by only small nuggets of truth, the purpose of which was to boost cyberdefense spending. I covered it extensively on the old home page of the Crypt Newsletter.
Here is one of the old NSA claims from Eligible Receiver:
Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times invoked the Pentagon ghost story of Eligible Receiver — the secret wargame conducted two years ago [in 1997] which proponents of “electronic Pearl Harbor??? insist demonstrated the nation could be flattened by cyberattack.
Drogin wrote: “The [Eligible Receiver] hackers broke into networks that direct 911 emergency systems.???
It was a clear and rather extravagant error.
Appearing in June of 1998 to testify before Congress, Ellie Padgett, deputy chief of the National Security Agency’s office of defensive information warfare spoke of how Eligible Receiver addressed the alleged vulnerability of the 911 phone system.
In a simulated exercise, Padgett said, “we scripted (an) Internet message (that) would be sent out to everybody saying there was a problem with the 911 system, understanding that human nature would result in people calling the 911 system to see if there was a problem.???
The working idea in this part of Eligible Receiver revolved around the hypothesis that many people viewing the message on the Internet in a newsgroup might panic and phone their local 911 trunk, causing a jam-up on the line.
“It can probably be done, this sort of an attack, by a handful of folks working together . . .??? Padgett said.
This is an extremely far cry from Drogin’s assertion that the 911 system was broken into by alleged Eligible Receiver hackers. In fact, it has nothing at all to do with breaking into a 911 computer system, whatever that might be.
However, it is consistent, thematically, with the flavor of the mythology propagated on Eligible Receiver …
In fact, during an interview with Crypt Newsletter in the summer of 1998 concerning Eligible Receiver, a Pentagon spokeswoman for the affair asserted “no actual switching systems??? were broken into at any time during Eligible Receiver. She went on to say that Eligible Receiver had only simulated these attacks on NSA computer networks set up to emulate potential domestic national systems.
Nevertheless, Drogin also wrote in paragraph two of the Times piece: “In less than three months, the [NSA’s Eligible Receiver hackers] secretly penetrated computers that control electrical grids in Los Angeles, Washington, and other major cities.???
In 1997, this made the grand assumption that Americans were broadly plugged into the internet, read the Usenet and that the result of a toxic post, like old computer virus hoaxes, would cause people everywhere to overwhelm their local 911 trunks.
Seriously.
Trivia note: Edward Snowden was fourteen at the time of Eligible Receiver.
More as the day continues.
Number of people on food stamps in 2013: between 47 and 48 million.
Keith Alexander, directly from the NSA’s web page, as early as 2012:
The ongoing cyber-thefts [by China] from the networks of public and private organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, represent the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.
Why harp on this?
More than anything else it shows the total disconnection between those at the very top of the national security megaplex and everyone else.
Most of the country, at my level certainly, is still struggling with the economic deprivation and outright calamity of the Great Recession. Although corporate America has rebounded nicely, there has been no recovery for most.
And for Keith Alexander and the NSA, as well as the rest of the defense infrastructure, they saw only expansion. How unfortunate for them that Edward Snowden has spoiled it a bit.
Keith Alexander lives in the world of the plutocracy. Cash money for the day isn’t an issue. Bare bones survival isn’t on the menu. Instead, he and the structure have spent much of their time expanding operations and dreaming up threatening stories and messages to be delivered by the shoeshine men in the press, digging around in their big data suck for things which they, in encapsulated isolated delusion, believe threaten the existence of the country.
When one sees and hears the cant from on high about virus threats to the US financial system and the Chinese cyberwar operation being the greatest transfer of wealth in history and you’re left asking for help at Christmas time, believe you me, it really gets under the skin.
In fact, it’s personal. And it should be so for lots of other Americans, if they ever become more familiar with the subject.
Still more to come.
Liquidate your life in the sharing economy
In which the upper crust and their immediate servants not yet rendered obsolete show how bad they are by leveraging the desperate with smartphones swipe-your-finger apps:
Kim Sundy’s husband kept heckling her nonstop to get her Christmas list to him.
“When I hired the puppet, it got him off my back,” she said.
For $15, the Ann Arbor Mich.-based blogger outsourced the problem to a puppeteer on Fiverr.com who created a short video of a puppet rapping her Christmas list …
Then there is the unselfconscious oaf of wealth, “a chief technology officer,” passed off as someone who thinks of himself as a brilliant do-er in the new world.
The assistants, according to Fancy Hands, will do “anything that doesn’t require us to physically go somewhere for you. Anything a smart, patient, Internet-savvy person with a cellphone can conquer,” as long as it is legal. Plans run from $25 a month for five requests to $65 a month for 25 requests.
For Chicago’s Harper Reed, whose storied career has included chief technology officer gigs for Barack Obama’s presidential re-election campaign and Threadless.com, using services like Fancy Hands and TaskRabbit is just plain “economic.”
“I have a very small company. I don’t have enough money to pay a personal assistant,” he said.
The tasks he hands out aren’t exactly ordinary — things like, “Where can I buy a foghorn for my father for Christmas?” along with sourcing vegan Christmas dinners …
The article gets only one person on the other side, someone newly unemployed who has turned to free-lance micro-paying gigs serviced by bike delivery.
“[Kevin Wagner, a] 34-year-old Chicagoan was laid off from his sales job in August and learned on Lifehacker.com that regular people were making extra money by performing odd jobs with TaskRabbit,” reads the Tribune.
“The Loop resident with a bike has picked up several jobs delivering items, and he has acted as a handyman, including assembling a lot of Ikea furniture … Depending on the week and how much time he has, he’ll make $20 to $400 a week at TaskRabbit.”
One suspects the latter figure is an exaggeration, like most quotes from unemployed people reduced to taking gig work in the on-line bazaar. Few want to tell you what they really earn.
For me, Mechanical Turk has been worth, on average, six dollars a week, at best, an occasional nine, never really exceeding 45 cents an hour, which allows you to determine how much time you need to put in to satisfy the whims of the corporate or academic crowd-sourcing chiseler.
In southern California, acting as a delivery man for Task Rabbit would be suicidal. There simply weren’t enough gigs in Pasadena, when I looked at Task Rabbit, to make them in any way profitable. If you bicycled them in town, perhaps almost.
But an auto is necessary for most of southern California, even much of
Pasadena, and the cost of gas puttering here and there for micro-payments being a gofer to the upper class would annihilate most earnings. This, in the same way that Mechanical Turk’s miniscule payments are significantly eaten into by the cost in electricity just to run the computer you do them on.
It is ludicrous to expect anyone to entertain the idea that people can revitalize themselves economically using the petty networking schemes developed by the tech industry under the euphemism of the sharing economy.
It’s aptly described as gig slave and servant labor in which smartphone and network tech do away with the inconvenience of having to house and pay for the food of your servant, pitting the unemployed or poverty-wage underemployed in a struggling economy against each other for the most miserly sums.
If the economic picture were healthy for the average worker, far fewer would even remotely consider taking such work. The outsource-your-vanity-work bidding services exist precisely because we live in a vulture economy.
Liquidating your life through them is no future. None are increasing the size of the economic pie, revealing only the worst (not that you needed to be told) about the people who burble about how great they are in the mainstream press.
And finally, The Disenlightenment rolls on, provenance — WhiteManistan
The stupid become more concentrated.
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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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12.23.13
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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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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