The UN’s recent approval of an arms trade treaty has, predictably, whipped WhiteManistan’s crazies into a now bog standard frenzy over its alleged conspiracy to take away America’s guns.
Although implementation is years away and there is no specific enforcement mechanism, proponents say the treaty would for the first time force sellers to consider how their customers will use the weapons and to make that information public. The goal is to curb the sale of weapons that kill tens of thousands of people every year — by, for example, making it harder for Russia to argue that its arms deals with Syria are legal under international law.
The treaty, which took seven years to negotiate, reflects growing international sentiment that the multibillion-dollar weapons trade needs to be held to a moral standard. The hope is that even nations reluctant to ratify the treaty will feel public pressure to abide by its provisions. The treaty calls for sales to be evaluated on whether the weapons will be used to break humanitarian law, foment genocide or war crimes, abet terrorism or organized crime or slaughter women and children …
Members of the General Assembly voted 154 to 3 to approve the Arms Trade Treaty, with 23 abstentions — many from nations with dubious recent human rights records like Bahrain, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.
The treaty is an attempt to establish acceptable norms for international arms sales, not domestic.
Nevertheless, it will probably never be ratified by the Senate, because … WhiteManistan!
Indeed, the United States no longer ratifies any treaties because the Republican Party, which controls the Senate from a minority position, has determined that international co-operation, which is what all treaties are about, infringes on American freedom. (In this way a recent treaty to help the world’s weakest, the disabled, was quickly put to death in Congress after decades of effort.)
And that conspiracy theory is now deeply embedded in white right America, which means all of the Republican Party and those Democratic Party senators from red states.
Today, WhiteManistan’s Secretary of Guns and Ammunition, Ted Nugent, told the publisher of his weekly column, what he believes, the mania of which is akin to General Jack Ripper’s belief that fluoridation was a communist plot in Dr. Strangelove.
“I believe we the people have made it rather clear that ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ is more than a song,??? Nugent said in an interview with WND today after the U.N. adopted its long-developing Arms Trade Treaty.
“As putrid and anti-American as the entire U.N. concept/agenda is,??? he added, “we mean it and I believe we have … driven home an adequate fear factor into the lives of the soulless U.N. gangsters. It is they who should be fearful??? …
Nugent believes that President Obama is working with the U.N. on the rules, making the president a “clear and present threat to freedom and the American way of life??? …
“We the people have stepped up to the plate in a most powerful way to the Obama/U.N. gun grab by purchasing more guns and ammo than any society in the history of the world,??? he said.
And there you have it. WhiteManistan stands prepared to shoot UN tyrants and gangsters right between the eyes should they come for the guns. Much like preppers stand ready to shoot the rest of us between the eyes when we come boiling out of the cities WTSHTF (When the Shit Hits the Fan).
A couple weeks ago the Congressional Research Service quietly published “Public Mass Shootings in the United States: Selected Policy Implications.”
The CRS report made this observation about gun massacres in the United States:
“Of the public mass shooting incidents identified by CRS for which information on the race of the perpetrator(s) was available, over half of the shooters were reportedly white.
“Almost all the shooters were male …???
The report adds they also tend to kill themselves during the assaults.
Experiencing the unavoidable news on public mass shootings has shown that, in America, this is indeed a white male thing.
Yet the country has yet to begin a big public discussion on why that is.
What in American white masculinity or psychology predisposes to gun massacres, if anything? Is there a linkage between the tradition of white male ownership of guns as a rite of adulthood predisposing white guys to gun massacres? Does it predispose toward mental illness or is there some other feature peculiar to how white US males acquire guns which has something to do with it? How does the white male component in American gun massacres compare with that of other civilized nations?
Questions, questions, all deserving of answers.
But be careful who and where you ask them. Some people may just shoot you right between the eyes as an enemy of freedom.
“Public Mass Shootings in the United States: Selected Policy Implications” has been put on-line by Steve Aftergood at the Secrecy blog here.
Today Paul Krugman devoted his twice-week opinion column in the New York Times to California and the demographic that has made the Republican Party dead, dead, thoroughly dead, here.
The demise of the GOP came not a moment too soon. The party, gone extremist, had figured out how to destroy the state’s government from a minority position due to the requirement for super-majority votes in the state legislature.
And what is now going on at the federal level is exactly what everyone living in California has had to deal with for most of the last decade.
Modern movement conservatism, which transformed the G.O.P. from the moderate party of Dwight Eisenhower into the radical right-wing organization we see today, was largely born in California. The Golden State, even more than the South, created today’s religious conservatism; it elected Ronald Reagan governor; it’s where the tax revolt of the 1970s began. But that was then. In the decades since, the state has grown ever more liberal, thanks in large part to an ever-growing nonwhite share of the electorate …
The point, however, is that these problems bear no resemblance to the death-by-liberalism story line the California-bashers keep peddling. California isn’t a state in which liberals have run wild; it’s a state where a liberal majority has been effectively hamstrung by a fanatical conservative minority that, thanks to supermajority rules, has been able to block effective policy-making.
And that’s where things get really interesting — because the era of hamstrung government seems to be coming to an end. Over the years, California’s Republicans moved right as the state moved left, yet retained political relevance thanks to their blocking power. But at this point the state’s G.O.P. has fallen below critical mass, losing even its power to obstruct …
Krugman summarizes the history of the state.
I arrived in California when Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley were still Republican territory, still part of WhiteManistan. The Pasadena Weekly, an alternative publication, actually had a column called “The Compassionate Conservative,” in which a crabby old rich white guy, the head of Jacobs Engineering on the Arroyo Parkway, recited the platitudes of Ronald Reagan each issue.
I saw the story about teaching-a-poor-man-to-fish-rather-than-giving-him-a-fish way too many times.
However, the growing population of Hispanics and Asians in the San Gabriel Valley turned Pasadena blue. And the Republicans never made it back.
This occurred for the same reason it happened throughout the rest of California. The party thought it had a winning hand in attacking brown people.
In so doing it loudly pursued cruel public initiatives and legislation to punish illegals. And the people who live here, in the most populous areas, slowly but inexorably turned on them.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, could not even govern. Although elected to two terms, his own party disowned and destroyed him. He could no more be a part of it than Abraham Lincoln could if he were alive today.
California remains two states. The important part, the California that means something in the world economy, the one with the image, although tarnished, that still beckons, the most populous cities (LA County!) and the coast, firmly rejected the GOP.
The small towns in the interior, up and down the state, the empty counties near the Sierras, are still WhiteManistan. There, like in the rest of rural white America, they cling to the delusion that they can persecute everyone not exactly like them and get away with it. And that they have a majority ruling class on their side.
Krugman points out California still has problems, a deeply damaged infrastructure and public education system. But no one is fleeing, the census statistics do not support it.
WhiteManistan’s death grip has been pried loose.
“[California’s] political story — in which a radicalized G.O.P. fell increasingly out of touch with an increasingly diverse and socially liberal electorate, and eventually found itself marginalized — is arguably playing out with a lag on the national scene too,” writes Krugman.
“So is California still the place where the future happens first?”
Time will render WhiteManistan into dust except in the places that don’t matter. But will it happen fast enough?
It’s dripping venom of old white guy nationalism and entitlement was made clear by the Times in a piece on Hazleton, Pennsylvania, an old coal town near where I was born and raised, one whose representation in the nation’s capitol encompasses all that is bad.
This working-class city in the Poconos (Hazleton is not in the Poconos — me) passed the country’s first law aimed at making life so difficult for illegal immigrants that they would pack up and leave.
The city’s crackdown in 2006 was led by Lou Barletta, then the mayor and now a congressman. On Wednesday, he wrote to a bipartisan group of eight House members working on an immigration overhaul bill to criticize them for heading “down the path of proposing some form of amnesty …???
“Why are we even talking about a pathway to citizenship when our borders aren’t even close to being secure???? said Mr. Barletta, vowing to fight a plan that would allow millions of illegal immigrants to compete legally for jobs.
Not everyone in Hazleton and the surrounding area is with that, the Times makes clear.
But there are more than enough like this man:
“The people in this town, we’re becoming a minority,??? said Chris DeRienzo, 30, a wedding photographer who opposes a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. “It hurts. I grew up here. It’s not what it used to be.???
“You want to scream.???
I’m 27 years older than this fellow. How did we both grow up in about the same place and wind up so different, with nothing in common except, perhaps, a mutual repulsion? What went so off the tracks?
“Despite Hazleton’s reputation as one of America’s toughest cities toward illegal immigrants, the Hispanic population there has surged,” informs the newspaper. “The 2010 census showed Hispanic residents totaling 37 percent of the population, up from 5 percent in 2000.”
Steve at Secrecy blog alerted me to Sunday’s episode of The Simpson’s, Homer Goes to Prep School, which pillories a subject familiar to blog readers. In it Homer Simpson goes to the local bar where he runs into a kook who asks if he’s ready for a world gone WROL, Without the Rule of Law.
This leads to enrollment in doomsday prepper training, with the cartoon show adopting all its idiot jargon: TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World as We Know It), and the bug-out place for When the S—- Hits the Fan.
Of course, there’s also electromagnetic pulse doom (triggered by Homer ignoring his work at the nuclear power plant), a bag of dried grain to eat, and an “unsourced” video showing American civilization collapsing like a “deck of cards” (one of which bears the name of Fed boss Ben Bernanke). A shout out to my home town, for reasons unknown, is briefly spotted in a future road sign: “5 Minutes to the Ruins of Pasadena.”
The Simpsons effectively insults the worst in American society, often delivering an overriding moral at show’s end. So it’s fitting that the tribe of white fascist neo-Confederate weapon-stockpiling survivalists who’ve tried to rebrand themselves as “doomsday preppers” come in for their fair share.
They certainly deserve it.
As I’ve written many times, it’s a tribute, of sorts, to the toxic and mind-rotting legacy of the Cult of EMP Crazy, the far right lobby of missile defense nuts who’ve labored for years to get white Americans worried that their civilization could fail at any moment due to electromagnetic attack. And they have been eminently successful in twisting an easily twisted subset of the Republican Party, paranoid John Birchers and Tea Party types.
I’ve written there are never are any liberals, progressives, or non-whites in the bug-out bunkers because part of the mythology of the Cult of EMP Crazy, and by extension — that of preppers, is they’ll be armed and ready to shoot the rest of us between the eyes when the world ends, and we allegedly come out of the burning cities for their stuff.
Marge points out to Homer that it’s not Christian to leave Springfield high-and-dry in a power blackout. So Homer steals the supplies from the prepper community and high-tails it home where everyone finds power has been restored and rioting did not break out.
Why?
Because all the “weird, angry people” left, remarks one character.
Along with the prepper movement, which continues its zombie shuffle through the cynical business of monetizing WhiteManistan’s freaks on reality television, the reputation is well and truly shot in the mainstream when your crazy hobbies and outlooks have been set up as objects for scorn, however gentle, by The Simpsons on Sunday night family television.
In my decades of polling, I recall only one moment when a party had been driven as far from the center as the Republican Party has been today.
The outsize influence of hard-line elements in the party base is doing to the GOP what supporters of Gene McCarthy and George McGovern did to the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s — radicalizing its image and standing in the way of its revitalization …
In those years, the Democratic Party became labeled, to its detriment, as the party of “acid, abortion and amnesty.??? With the Democrats’ values far to the left of the silent majority, McGovern lost in a landslide to Richard Nixon in 1972.
While there are no catchy phrases for the Republicans of 2013, their image problems are readily apparent in national polls. The GOP has come to be seen as the more extreme party, the side unwilling to compromise or negotiate seriously to tackle the economic turmoil that challenges the nation …
I see little reason to believe that the staunch conservative bloc will wither away or splinter; it will remain a dominant force in the GOP and on the national stage. At the same time, however, I see no indication that its ideas about policy, governance and social issues will gain new adherents. They are far beyond the mainstream.
If anything, Andrew Kohut is a bit gentle. The GOP became the party of Ted Nugent. WhiteManistan, as a broad description, is a sickening collection, according to Kohut, “demographically and politically distinct from the national electorate … Ninety-two percent are white … They tend to be male, married, Protestant, well off and at least 50 years old.”
Paranoid and the core of the GOP, they cannot retain power but, from a relative minority position, have brought the country to a near standstill, simply through the power of rage — at the president, at Hispanics, at women, at gays, at the poor, etc.
If you are addicted to common sense and logic, South Dakota should bring a smile to your face.
These sensible Americans just passed a law allowing teachers to carry weapons in school as a means to protect their students from terminal psychos hell-bent on committing mass murder …
Truth is, it is the socialist stooges who are responsible for violence. It is their policies that prevent good guys from arming and protecting themselves and creates the big lie of “gun free??? slaughter zones.
It isn’t just anti-gun leftist policies that have enabled thugs to breed and prosper. The violence on America’s streets is the result of a number of other leftist big-government policies that have worked to destroy families and entire communities by discouraging accountability and rewarding dangerous behavior.
That’s the turbo destructo modus operandi of the socialists …
Nugent: The President of the United States Barack Hussein Obama went to the Vietnam Memorial Wall. He did his smoke and mirrors scam. He pretended to show respect and honor, 58,000 American warriors who died fighting communism. And then he hired, appointed and associates with communists.
If you can’t see through the dishonesty and the scamming of this president with that scenario fresh in your mind, then that’s literally like, I guess that would be like, I don’t know, a German in 1938 pretending to respect the Jews and then going home and putting on his brown shirt and forcing his neighbors onto a train to be burned to death.
So we really have a rotten, rotten man in the White House who I am convinced hates America, hates individuality.
In WhiteManistan the President is a Nazi and a Communist, simultaneously. It’s something easy to see but not precisely addressed by Andrew Kohut’s Pew polling.
When Roscoe Bartlett, mainstay of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, had his House career ended in the November election it dealt a heavy blow to the lobbying group. With Newt Gingrich being run off the national stage yet again, two of its most vigorous personalities were cut down.
Although Bartlett never got any legislation passed he did pursue the cause of defending the nation against electromagnetic pulse doom with dogged tenacity.
Franks is a nobody with no pull, someone his own party hardly pays attention to. Which means any movement of electromagnetic pulse defense legislation either quickly dies in committee or is summarily wiped off the bottom of Congressional shoes like a mildly annoying bit of dog excrement.
This week the National Journal ran a piece on the fate of the electromagnetic pulse caucus. It noted the caucus had expanded its membership from 11 to 18.
However, it’s leader, Trent Franks, is such a busted screwdriver he doesn’t even list it under his tabs for committees and caucuses on his home page.
A small but growing cadre of House members is set to relaunch efforts to protect the nation against what they say is a very real threat: the unleashing of an electromagnetic pulse either by a solar storm or a nuclear-armed foe that could cripple much of the nation’s electrical infrastructure.
“I realize there is skepticism, and I understand it’s easy to dismiss this as something coming from people who might go around wearing tinfoil hats,??? said Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., one of the leaders of the little-known bipartisan congressional Electromagnetic Pulse Caucus …
The caucus is bipartisan in that it includes two nobodies from the other side of the aisle as tokens, Yvette Clark and Loretta Sanchez.
More infamous members are crackpot Steve King, recently in the news as one of the people Karl Rove has targeted as a nuisance politician who won’t be able to win a Senatorial run in Iowa because “he is the poster boy for over the top, racially tinged rhetoric in his attacks on President Barack Obama,” notes the Grio.
“Not only has King compared the president to Saddam Hussein, and called the president ‘very, very urban,’ on the House floor, he has also said, ‘The president has demonstrated that he has a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race on the side that favors the black person,’ ??? it continues.
Like Franks, Steve King is a birther.
Also on the caucus is Paul Broun, another raging GOP sociopath (there are many), in the news for great quote like:
“I was the first Member of Congress to call [Obama] a socialist who embraces Marxist-Leninist policies like government control of health care and redistribution of wealth.
“All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell.”
One of the many liabilities of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy lobby is that, robot-like, it still refers to the “Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States From Electromagnetic Pulse Attack.??? Originally written in 2004 and revised in 2008, it’s now nine years old, five if you’re feeling generous.
The Commission principal was William Graham, an old Reagan adviser and peddler of the “Star Wars” missile defense program.
It’s a twin problem, not only because of now creaking antiquity, but because of the solid impression, one the caucus and Franks cannot escape, that it’s just part of the missile defense lobby.
Prior to Roscoe Bartlett’s defeat in November, the EMP Crazy lobby generally tried to get at least one opinion or mainstream article on electromagnetic pulse doom ending civilization into the news feed at least once a week.
Since the election all the mojo is gone.
The majority of pieces on electromagnetic pulse doom are now all published by WND.com, the right wing conspiracy website most famous as the parking stall of Ted Nugent’s weekly column cursing the president, and peddling Jerome Corsi, yet another crackpot who promotes “a staggering number of outlandish conspiracies about the president, including that Obama has a fake birth certificate and stolen Social Security number; that Obama is both secretly gay and secretly Muslim; and that Obama and his family have lied about the true identity of his father, who may be either communist writer Frank Marshall Davis or ‘some Indonesian.'”
The Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy has always been horribly tainted by its weird and extreme membership. But the departure of Roscoe Bartlett really hurt because he occasionally came off as a reasonable and kindly old man.
Another veteran member of the Cult has been Frank Gaffney. But in the last three years Gaffney has spent much more time convincing Tea Party legislators in red states that shariah law is coming to the United States.
Trent Franks had tried to keep the ball rolling on electromagnetic pulse doom defense.
But as notes the Journal:
Franks said he had been led to believe last session that his bill would be brought to the House floor for a vote. But he said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., let it die in committee. He said he has been unable to get an explanation from Upton.
They just can’t get no respect. Not even from their own, anymore.
A bit over a week ago the mainstream newsmedia covered the release of a new report issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center, one documenting an explosive rise in domestic extremist groups. One of the initiators is the presidency of Barack Obama and the persistent belief — now going on five years — that he is going to take away the guns.
The number of anti-government, far-right extremist groups has soared to record levels since 2008 and they are becoming increasingly militant, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
It says the number of groups in the “Patriot” movement stood at 1,360 in 2012, up from 149 in 2008 when Barack Obama was first elected president, an increase of 813%. The report said the rise was driven by opposition to Obama and the “sputtering rage” over federal attempts at gun control …
“We are seeing a real and rising threat of domestic terrorism as the number of far-right anti-government groups continues to grow at an astounding pace,” said Mark Potok, SPLC senior fellow and author of the report. “It is critically important that the country take this threat seriously. The potential for deadly violence is real, and clearly rising.”
Potok said that the demographic factors driving the rise in such groups began before Obama became president – the census bureau predicts that whites will become a minority group in the US by 2043 – but have been fuelled by the changes in America he represents. The growth in extremism has been helped by the “successful exploitation over illegal immigration” and by anger over the gun control debate, he said.
Law enforcement officials have uncovered numerous terrorism conspiracies born in the militia subculture, including plots to spread poisonous ricin powder, to attack federal installations, and to murder federal judges and other government officials …
While I didn’t comment on it at the time, the report, entitled Challengers from the Sideline: Understanding America’s Violent Far Right, analyzed right wing domestic terrorism for contributing factors. The strongest correlator was the number of seats held in the House of Representatives by Republicans.
Simply, right wing violence escalates when their are more GOP Reps. The report reasoned this might be because those perpetrating right wing violence feel supported ideologically by Republicans in that body.
The other possibility, of course, is that the rhetoric emitted by the Republican Party in control of the House creates an environment in which some people feel empowered, or moved, to violence against the government.
The other contributing factor was legislation, specifically that having to do with gun control. The Brady Bill, or Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, signed into law in 1993 during the Clinton administrations, caused a spurt in militia growth and related right wing violence in that period. Two years later Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in the most lethal act of right wing domestic terrorism in this country’s history.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok told news reporters he “expected extremism to rise, as anger over gun control had become a ‘grassroots rebellion.’. He said that 20 states are considering laws that would aim to nullify federal gun control measures and 500 sheriffs mainly in western US, who say they will not enforce any such measures.”
The ricin plot, which I covered here as the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang, involved four old men who discussed plans to bomb federal buildings and disperse the poison, was a non-starter but rife with the type of language emitted by the insurrectionist right.
Two of the men pleaded guilty. Two remain to be tried on making a weapon of mass destruction. A bucket of castor beans in a shed was recovered by the US government as evidence, along with one of the old internet ricin recipes, uploaded into cyberspace now well over 20 years ago by a bored teenager.
Disclosure: I was consulted on the nature of the recipe because I’m the person who wrote most authoritatively on the subject during the war on terror years. This is when the newsmedia routinely spread the canard that ricin was easy to make simply by downloading instruction from the Internet, a stupid belief that persists to this day.
The recipe doesn’t make ricin. It makes degreased castor powder from castor seeds which contains some ricin, some or all of which may be degraded depending on the instructions actually followed.
No people have died as a result of attacks using ricin in the entire war on terror. And while al Qaeda has periodically evinced interest in using ricin, it has never done so. In fact, more white right-wing Americans have been arrested and jailed on wanting-to-make-ricin beefs than any other nationality. More specifically, it’s almost exclusively a WhiteManistan thing, where it originated a long time ago.
The Georgia case also illustrates the FBI does have a dragnet out for right wing terror plots, one that makes use of informants recruited to infiltrate potential domestic terror cells.
In slightly related news, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity issued a report about a week ago and almost nobody paid a lick of attention.
This is notable for the fact that the Center was regularly in the news with reports and predictions that catastrophic bioterrorism was imminent and easy to carry out during the salad days of the war on terror.
This was because the UPMC Center for Biosecurity was the house that Tara O’Toole built. When O’Toole left to take a position in the Department of Homeland Security, all the zing and mojo went with her.
As you’ve guessed, or knew, the UPMC Center for Biosecurity existed only to dispense shoeshine on the threat of bioterrorism.
Its most recent report, entitled When Good Food Goes Bad, was covered only by Food Safety News.
From Food Safety News:
From its headquarters on Baltimore harbor, the 15-year-old Center for Biosecurity of UPMC looks out on the historic Coast Guard Cutter Taney, the last ship afloat to have immediately fought back when Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941.
The way the Taney instantly turned its guns on the enemy is just the sort of reaction the U.S. needs to mount whenever and wherever there is an outbreak of foodborne illness, according to the Center’s new report “When good food goes bad??? …
The Biosecurity Center’s interest in foodborne illness outbreaks apparently stems from the 2010 “credible threat??? by Al-Qaeda terrorists to poison salad bars and buffets at hotels and restaurants over a single weekend, using ricin and cyanide. “U.S. officials cautioned that even in small amounts of these chemicals in food could cause serious harm,??? says the report.
That plot was not executed, but highlighted the problem. “Initially, it will be very difficult to distinguish deliberate contamination of the food supply from a naturally occurring outbreak,??? it says.
The Center for Biosecurity researchers who probably have never actually seen any real documents from terror cases on food plots using ricin (and cyanide) have only one citation for this in their report, a brief piece issued by CBS News back in 2010.
“Manuals and videos on jihadist websites explain how to easy it is to make both poisons,” informed CBS.
Perhaps they have also missed the facts that al Qaeda has been smashed and that, I’ll repeat, more white American men have been convicted for fiddling with castor beans than any other nationality.
And that no ricin plots in America have ever gone forward. In any case, the report is classic shoeshine work, stuff of no value to most Americans unless they’re in the homeland security business.
Most recently, the al Qaeda comic book Inspire, now at issue number ten, recommended jihadists start causing “road accidents” and setting fire to cars.
“We all agree the Kuffar chose the wrong path,” it reads. “Now it’s time for their vehicles to also leave the right path. Demolition Derby Style.
“The best timing for a ‘Causing Road Accident’ operation is during night hours, especially on Sunday night. Most of the Kuffar will be either drinking or showing off their driving talents to their friends. In addition to the poor visibility due to the scarcity of light (hmmm, hasn’t ever been to LA at night, obviously). Thus it is hard for your ambush tools to be noticed.”
Ingenious. What could they work out next? Perhaps urinating in ice machines at hotels and motels?
Last year, Inspire recommended setting forest fires. And six months earlier, running people over with a pickup truck armed with a snow plow.
They all worked well.
Anyway, the Center for Biosecurity report recommended the US government strengthen food surveillance.
“Fewer food safety inspections and an increased risk to consumers will result from the lack of a new 2013 budget from Congress and the upcoming across-the-board spending cuts, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said …” reads a recent news piece, also at CBS.
It should be noted that, so far, the sequester is happening but al Qaeda is not.
“[Hamburg] said most of the effects wouldn’t be felt for a while, and the agency won’t have to furlough workers … Still, she said, ‘We’re going to be struggling with how to really grapple with the cuts of sequestration … clearly we will be able to provide less of the oversight functions and we won’t be able to broaden our reach to new facilities either, so inevitably that increases risk.’ ”
New category, Shoeshine. The growing parts of the American economy are devoted to it, armies of upper middle class lickspittles employed as process workers and analysts in it. It had to happen.
WhiteManistan is disempowered here. They may have been mad for a day in Poway but it no longer matters.
The trick is disempowering the right wing white guy thing, or at least disengaging from it, everywhere else.
Universal ridicule is key. Middle-aged white guys already have a terrible image with the young and there’s nothing that inspires more respect than overweight cranky people waving idiotic flags with rattlesnakes and assault guns on them.
“I’ll keep my freedom, guns and money …” Now there’s a slogan to bring smiles.
