11.08.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 12:53 pm by George Smith
Tuesday, everywhere but in California, just about every reason for the existence of this blog came true. White American snapped out and stuck it to the black man in the White House the only way they knew how, by voting for the lunatics, fascists and science-deniers of the Old White Purity party.
Everyone else stayed home, even in California, actually, where turn-out was a record low 29 percent. (The advantage here is that the election of Jerry Brown, combined with the years of hating the California GOP put on everyone not-white here virtually destroyed the local tribe of WhiteManistan.)
And I can’t say it wasn’t expected. Outside of the President, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders (an independent) and our governor, the Democratic Party has no bench. Hillary Clinton is a special case, merely this party’s counterpart to the Bush family phenomenon.
For example, the only rational response to the world’s superpower putting a science-denier, James Inhofe, in charge of a Senate committee that will influence science and the world environment is bleak, knowing laughter.
For two years things will now get worse, incrementally. It’s a good strategy for the GOP. It works.
Make the civilian population so despondent or furious with more squeezing, paralysis and reward for the wealthy, they have an even chance of being able to run smallpox for the White House in 2016 by creating more disengagement and more virulent revenge voting against the outgoing man.
The cold Second Civil War was won, decisively, by Dixie on Tuesday.
Not in California, though.
The state is rapidly freeing itself from the radioactive rage of WhiteManistan. This is seen most remarkably in the passage of Proposition 45, a voter referendum that immediately reduced arrests for simple drug possession for personal use to misdemeanors.
It was a solid signal that California is sick of WhiteManistan’s War On Drugs. We’ve finally figured out that permanently ruining the lives of tens of thousands of people, disproportionately not white, and stuffing them into over-crowded inhumane prisons isn’t a quality of a reasoning and merciful civilization.
However, that leaves the other 49 states. And if things go the way I think they might, changing demographics be damned, the GOP party might be able to get smallpox into the White House. Look at what they’ll be facing.
America’s queen? Someone who feels the entitlement of having been there once as the call of destiny? Really.
Today at Salon, one person wrote:
Such an unstable context, where a large majority of the population mistrusts both parties and their leaders, all branches of government and most other supposed pillars of civil society, is not far from what Lenin called a “revolutionary situation,??? primed for civil war or conquest …
Collapse and widespread violent unrest are not entirely unreasonable expectations.
Consider again an excerpt, one I’ve used before, from William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:
I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state … It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsification and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was to try to even make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.
The United States is not Nazi Germany. But no one can say now that its civilization can’t fail in a way unique to its own history and nature.
We live in a corporate dictatorship and the minds of close to half the populace, maybe more, are in much the same poor shape as those described by William Shirer as a correspondent in Nazi Germany prior to World War II.
America’s alleged democracy is every bit as weak and unstable as the social democracy of Germany before the Third Reich.
And this country has never dealt with its central problem: What is to be done with WhiteManistan?
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10.24.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 3:03 pm by George Smith
I wish I had the picture from the hard copy of Thursday’s Los Angeles Times. In the business section, a b&w photo of Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, two self-satisfied middle-aged white billionaires in their look-a-like casual clothes, standing by their cookie-cutter campus bicycles.
It for a story on their first management book, one in a genre that’s an ocean of deadening conformity. Naturally, there’s is different because they are Google, dammit!
And therefore it is called “How Google Works, ” “a guide to managing what they call ‘smart creatives’, according to the newspaper.
Everyone is now well-acquainted with how much smarter everyone of Google is than the lice-infested masses. And that is why they are all wealthier than Croesus because in America you are compensated in direct proportion to your gargantuan talents. Or lack thereof.
But I have yet to see any hint of recognition that the constant numbing stories of how smart they are, how intellectually superior one must be to just pass an interview in Mountain View, of how everything in the place is encrusted with the wonderfulnesses of soaring IQs and unfettered innovations, just ooze condescension.
If pomposity were a person and it met Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg it would throw itself away.
So let’s hear it again for the “smart creatives:”
Jonathan Rosenberg: Traditional management books don’t address the fact that the balance of power has shifted from companies to consumers. That’s made building superior products the paramount issue for companies today. So the key thing that they need to figure out is how to attract what we in the book call the new breed of employee, the “smart creative.” Those are the people who have mastered the tools of the current age to build superior products. We don’t think anyone has told that story before.
Eric Schmidt: We’re always on the winning side when we’re on the user side…. It works in most countries. There are some countries which you can essentially think of as non-democracies, where they’re just not organized around citizens, they’re organized around other things, and there the issues are much harder.
[I have to step in here because Schmidt, in the interview, really doesn’t seem to know how fucked this sounds.]
The interview includes Schmidt and Rosenberg pimping Uber and, then, at the end just slipping in a little bit that Google is heavily invested in the company.
And as stated at the beginning, no Google piece is complete without an assertion about how great it is there because it’s where all the brilliant people are: “[Schmidt]: What attracts people is the ability to work with other brilliant people and to work on really, really big problems.”
Fuck these guys, their driver-less cars and data-delivery dirigibles. As solutions to big problems they’re not exactly the polio vaccine or the elimination of smallpox in our lifetime.
Instead, their alleged “smart creatives” crowning achievement is the tech fossilization of the winner-take-all economy, one in which nothing exists except that which is embedded in the top half page of Google search returns.
Others have caught on:
When I ask people why they don’t pay for a music subscription service or (heaven forbid!) purchase physical albums, the most common response is: Why should I? I can get almost any song I want for free on YouTube. I’ve even had people laugh at me for my naďveté in considering any other way of consuming music. And who can blame these freeloaders from taking advantage of a “free??? (if sometimes legally dubious) source for almost any song ever recorded? But the highly paid Google execs who run YouTube need to be at the top of any list of the culprits who destroyed the economic conditions for musical artists.
What a strange turnabout! Remember when people did volunteer work to help the poor? Now the poor do it to help the wealthy.
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10.23.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 2:17 pm by George Smith
More fresh and hot from the Culture of Lickspittle, via Peter Thiel, who according this blog’s archives can always be counted on for the best in witless bon mots:
You know, we landed on the moon in July of 1969. Woodstock started three weeks later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress ended, and the hippies took over the country. Today the counterculture is to believe in science and technology.
And this is, of course, why, every business section in the country is lauding the new and boring business management secrets book by Eric Schmidt and some other guy from Google this week, two middle-aged nerd white guys who stand by their bicycles and look almost exactly alike.
Because, you know, the hippies took over and the billionaires of Google, PayPal and Facebook are the counter-culture. And Peter Thiel was two when that happened.
Peter Thiel — from the archives.
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10.20.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll, WhiteManistan at 3:34 pm by George Smith
The first review of Loud Folk Live is in and it’s a nice read. At NYC Rock, written by an old editor of Creem magazine, paradoxically, the latter the place my first record thirty years ago was reviewed.
Some of the nice bits, excerpted:
The more George Smith, who tussles with the media world under the name Dick Destiny, lives, the more disheartened he becomes. George is like the last romantic standing, the last man who cares about the US and the more he bristles at “Whitemanistan,??? the more he thinks and studies it, and the more he bristles. It is in the nature of things, of course, but that doesn’t mean Smith shouldn’t be stating his reservations about the Reservation or even singing, dancing, and stomping his feet. Misery loves music loves company, and, as Lennon taught us decades ago, if you wanna have a revolution write a catchy hook.
Which leads us back to the extremely enjoyable and fun Loud Folk Live, if you can’t make people read, make ’em listen. You wanna rail against the robbing of the poor to give more to the rich, you wanna remind us of Waco, Texas, do it with a splendid lick to carry you and people are gonna like you a whole lot more. “Puta??? sounds like Lou Reed circa New York … It is a blast whatever other intentions Destiny might well have. Sure, he’s right, it is “Protest Rock??? but the accent is on rock whatever his intentions might be.
On song after song, Destiny and drummer Mark Smollin discover the joy in creating a racket …
Destiny’s album is a joyful leap into Whitemanistan, into the big muddy where nothing matters but the readies. The Fugs would approve. Allen Ginsberg would approve. Peter Stampfel would approve and I approve in America the place where we call home.
Go read all of it. Make the numbers at Rock NYC tick up a bit.
Yes, and it includes links to the teaser tunes here and here.
And you can have a copy, CD or MP3s, just name your price. Or not, no obligation. Just follow the link and page down.
“Impressive.” — Steve, Secrecy News
Related diversionary reading — Iggy Pop of the Stooges, asked to give a speech in England on the 10th anniversary of the death of famous radio DJ John Peel, excerpted from the NME:
The subject of his lecture – which marked ten years since Peel’s death – was “free music in a capitalist society”. Dressed in a barely buttoned black shirt revealing his bare chest and reading glasses, the punk godfather prowled the stage as he told a packed auditorium how digital advances have caused the music industry to become “almost laughably pirate” and that electronic devices “estrange people from their morals and also make it easier to steal music than pay for it.”
He claimed the normalisation of illegal downloading is “bad for everything”. “We are exchanging the corporate rip-off for the public one. Aided by power nerds. Kind of computer Putins. They just wanna get rich and powerful.”
Pretty much.
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10.15.14
Posted in Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 12:11 pm by George Smith
I’ve written about the extortion job America’s most beloved classic rock bigot pulls on those who get cold feet after booking him for their family-friendly events. And Nugent’s lawyers are now busy bag men, squeezing decent sums for nothing out of the six venues that canceled on him this summer due to bad publicity over his being … America’s most beloved classic rock bigot.
From the Columbian, a newspaper in Oregon:
Controversial rocker Ted Nugent didn’t play a note at the Clark County Fair, but that didn’t prevent him from collecting a settlement worth $45,000 …
Nugent’s original contract called for him to be paid $61,500 for a show at the Clark County Fair.
The fair announced Nugent would be a performer in late April. Almost immediately, some residents expressed concern that Nugent, known for his right wing views and racy lyrics, was not a good fit for a family-friendly concert. A petition began circulating on the website MoveOn.org to have him taken off the bill.
Shortly after the petition hit the Internet, Fair Manager John Morrison announced Nugent’s gig had been canceled.
Nugent, the newspaper replied, promptly issued a threatening e-mail:
Nugent himself wrote an email to Morrison, in which he groused that people were spreading “hateful lies” and that his shows were the “ultimate PG13 family events.”
“I respectfully recommend you do the right thing to avoid a wasteful & ridiculous long drawn out legal action to finally get to the right thing” …
Nugent’s lawyers quickly filed a breach-of-contract suit.
The Columbian adds Nugent’s litigious history, mentioning he sued the Muskegon (Michigan) Summer Celebration for $80,000 after it dropped him from its bill due to “potentially offensive racist terms.”
A couple of years ago, this blog dealt with that event here.
Earlier this summer, the city of Longview, Texas, had to pay Nugent a $16,000 go-away fee just for backing out of negotiation with him after the townspeople decided they didn’t want him for a a show on the 4th of July.
Going forward, any middling city in the heartland offered a piece of Ted Nugent’s summer tour needs to be very careful in researching his history. Nugent successfully extracts significant cash pay-outs from those who back out of a gig with him after he creates a racist stink with his mouth that rebounds nationally as well as in the community.
Either make sure his contract is rewritten so that he can be dropped if his appearance or utterances in public bring shame, fall below community standards or are offensive to groups living in the area of the show or don’t book him at all.
The guy’s literally da bomb. A business transaction is just that and does not carry with it any guarantee clause for free speech.
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10.02.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 2:52 pm by George Smith
Full size. Listen to The National Anthem.
The first copies of Loud Folk Live will be going out tomorrow and Saturday. So expect them sometime around the middle of next week.
I’m proud of it. It’s a better record than my first, Arrogance, way back in 1985 and that, surprisingly, even made mention in a lot of places including Chuck Eddy’s book on the 500 best hard rock and heavy metal records. Which I didn’t take too seriously, but which was nice to have happen, anyway.
Loud Folk Live is much different. It’s an ideology, a point of view, a mix of electric Americana as well as hard-hitting guitar rock n roll, totally live and straight to two-track. What went down over our recent summer of contempt is exactly what you get.
The performances are tight and explosive. Hooray for the Salvation Army Band’s mix of Purple Haze, lyrics to alcoholism and interjections of singing Bringing in the Sheaves gospel challenges you not to laugh. Alone, it makes the entire thing worth having.
And then it tumbles right in to the sermon to our god of green, morals and how to not get into Heaven, Jesus of America.
If you don’t like rock ‘n’ roll, or my voice, you certainly won’t enjoy it.
Which doesn’t bother me that much. If you contributed after the last post, you’ll get one, anyway.
You can still have one for whatever you name. They’ll be CD-Rs with the above insert, later as a limited run burn in a clam shell case.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is just a diversion next to the blog. It’s not. Loud Folk Live is part of my American experience, as important to me as the last twenty years of writing on the subject with which you’ve become familiar.
No one was going to publish a book. Not possible in this country. (Work through Amazon and the empire of Bezos? C’mon, already did that and got hosed.) So I made music.
If you want a copy, go here, page down, then you know what to do.
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09.28.14
Posted in WhiteManistan at 2:44 pm by George Smith
Reuters canoes deep into the swamps of Dixie WhiteManistan to gather opinions on the yen for secession: Only 1 in 4 support it, but the dead-enders are united.
And confused, as always, somehow believing that about half of Scotland voting to leave the United Kingdom was somehow like what precipitated the Civil War and Cliven Bundy defying the Bureau of Land Management.
The Scottish National Party, of course, being so much like the 2014 neo-Confederacy in its support for the labor of the lower and middle classes.
From Reuters:
The failed Scottish vote to pull out from the United Kingdom stirred secessionist hopes for some in the United States, where almost a quarter of people are open to their states leaving the union, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
Some 23.9 percent of Americans polled from Aug. 23 through Sept. 16 said they strongly supported or tended to support the idea of their state breaking away …
Ergo, interview the old white heevahava from the birthplace of sedition:
“I don’t think it makes a whole lot of difference anymore which political party is running things. Nothing gets done,” said Roy Gustafson, 61, of Camden, South Carolina, who lives on disability payments. “The state would be better off handling things on its own.”
Why does nothing get done? Couldn’t be about one party and its base having a world view like ol’ Jefferson Davis’, could it?
OK, Reuters, ask another!
“Texas has everything we need. We have the manufacturing, we have the oil, and we don’t need them,” said Mark Denny, a 59-year-old retiree living outside Dallas on disability payments.
Denny, a Republican, had cheered on the Scottish independence movement.
“I have totally, completely lost faith in the federal government, the people running it, whether Republican, Democrat, independent, whatever …”
Tally: Two fed up old guys in the Old South, both on disability.
I’m one year younger than Mr. Denny. I’m not on disability or retired although one might say I was involuntarily detached from the economy.
Then, icing on the cake, a “Democrat” in Texas, also old:
“When I say secede, I’m not like … Charlton Heston with my gun up in the air, ‘my cold dead hands.’ It’s more like – we could do it if we had to,” said [Lila Guzman], 62. “But the first option is, golly, get it back on the right track. Not all is lost. But there might come a point that we say, ‘Hey, y’all, we’re dusting our hands and we’re moving on.'”
Scottish independence, just like the wish for liberty and effective government in the old states of the Confederacy.
Y’all, I do smell horse-piss; at which my nose is in great indignation!
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09.24.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 2:35 pm by George Smith
Hot off the wires, a gigantic American arms sale to South Korea, to counter what Reuters calls its “restive neighbor,” North Korea.
We only do the best, most expensive and modern arms packages:
SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korea will sign a deal this month to buy 40 Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter jets for about 7.34 trillion won ($7.06 billion) for delivery in 2018-2021, two Lockheed flunkies people with knowledge of the transaction told Reuters on Wednesday …
The company said the agreement includes a substantial “offset” package, including a military communications satellite that will be launched into orbit and then operated by South Korea, as well as significant technical support for South Korea’s K-X program to develop its own domestic fighter jet.
One of the sources said South Korea would sign a follow-up contract with the United States to allow basic maintenance of the jets within South Korea.
The F-35 could not have been developed, built, tested and advertised without the deep pockets of the American people.
In keeping with the theme of considering arms sales as national group-owned goods that ought to contribute to resource wealth fund, a 30 percent value added tax on the sale would potentially reap the following benefit for Americans:
$7, 000, 000, 000 x .30 = $2, 100, 000, 000
And why should we not have that? Americans have devoted their lives earnings to the nurture of the best environment for arms manufacturing in the world.
From Monday: Give Americans a royalty on arms sales.
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09.23.14
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror, WhiteManistan at 1:14 pm by George Smith
It’s another great day in the United States of Security.
Where else in the world can you wake up to a press conference announcing the success of two or three military strikes on enemies capable of posing an existential threat to the digestion of Americans who don’t have to fight remote control war? One against a terrorist group you never heard of previously, but threatening to our homeland?
The President, quite naturally, thanked the troops for their duty, there being a slight hazard of repetitive stress injury when pushing the launch keys for 40 Tomahawks and a higher degree of risk in flying over a country in a new jet where no one has a hope of shooting back because, you know, a bird could fly into an intake or a part could malfunction. It could force an ejection into a territory where they would not be glad to see you.
In this great country, combat mission is now redefined as dropping bombs and missiles on territory against no opposition or as aptly described in the news: “the Syrian radar defenses were passive.”
Quote of the day, from a Syrian Twitter tweeting (we invented that!) near a target: “The sky is full of drones…”
Welcome to the United States of Security, we’ll check you now for purity. If you have gold and your ass don’t smell, we won’t bomb you straight to Hell.
We’ve got predator loans, iPhones and drones!
— The National Anthem, from Loud Folk Live
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09.22.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror, WhiteManistan at 2:30 pm by George Smith
In the distant past I wrote that Americans ought to get something for contributing to this country’s position as the leading arms dealer to the world. The American people, out of their generous pockets, have underwritten everything that’s made our war machine the biggest in world history. We’ve paid for the development, purchase, maintenance and distribution of the world’s biggest, most expensive and most scary weapons. We have created through direct action, avarice, fear, voting patterns and general indifference the perfect business environment for the development of the globe’s most advanced and coveted killing technology. We continue to support, enhance and advertise it through the prosecution of continuous globe-spanning war. Our toadies and proxies look on with envy, just waiting for great deals on big fancy arms packages, bulk allotments of riot control chemicals, and anything related for use on neighboring failed states, their own people or both.
I wrote about it at GlobalSecurity.Org back in 2011 (gee, look at all those ‘likes’, how did that happen?):
Record numbers of Americans apply for food stamps and unemployment. Every job not in finance or arms manufacturing gets beggared or threatened with shipment to China. Saudi Arabia and Iraq get tanks. More and more tanks. There are never enough.
As a thought experiment, I am going to propose a war-profiteering dividend/tax on US arms sales.
Since the core markets for all these businesses are essentially guaranteed by the US taxpayer and government, it seems only fair Americans ought to be regarded as shareholders. And as shareholders, they ought to be in for some rewards. It’s the American way.
Let’s make the war-profiteering tax significant because, although even though I haven’t researched it yet, the US arms industry is probably quite adept at tax avoidance already. So I make it twenty percent of all profits in overseas arms sales — weapons, tanks, aircraft, ships, guns, ammo, bombs, missiles, rockets, chemicals, computer systems, engineering, construction, software, consulting services and support staff — everything.
Here’s the calculation, using SIPRI’s latest data:
20 percent of 247 billion in sales = 49 400 000 000
Further, I will propose a yearly war-profiteering dividend check for everyone in the United States on food stamps. According to Reuters: “For fiscal 2011, average enrollment is forecast for 43.3 million people.”
Here is the calculation:
49.4 billion divided by 43.3 million = 1 140.8776
Everyone on food stamps, no exceptions, gets a check from the protected US arms industry, for roughly $1,140.88. That would certainly be a help.
One could also extend the dividend to all tax-filers for a given fiscal year although it would probably cut the size of each check by at least two thirds.
The only people who wouldn’t be entitled to checks would be employees of the US arms manufacturing base. They’re already getting dividends as well as security. Of course, none of this has any chance of consideration. It’s all in the imagination, delusional. The protected industry of American weapons production is a third rail. No one will seriously discuss taking any big whacks at it.
Over the weekend, from the wire, a big sale of MaxxPro Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles to our famous ally and functional dictatorship in the war on terror, Pakistan:
WASHINGTON: The US State Department on Saturday approved the sale of 160 mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles to Pakistan at an estimated cost of $198 million.
Islamabad had requested 160 Navistar Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles with spare parts, support and test equipment, publications and technical documentation, personnel and equipment training, US government and contractor engineering, technical and logistics support services, and other related elements of logistical and programme support.
Following the State Department’s determination approving the sale, the Defence Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) delivered the required certification notifying Congress of this possible sale.
“The proposed sale will contribute to the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to improve the security of a country vital to US foreign policy and national security goals in South Asia,??? DSCA said.
In 2011, I proposed a 20 percent tax to be collected on American bulk arms sales, to be paid back to the American people as a royalty.
Because times are worse for many Americans I now propose raising our theoretical value added tax to 30 percent.
30 percent of $198 million is $59,400,000
In essence, it would be a way of giving a small basic income to every American on a national resource we have been responsible for husbanding and making available to the world.
You could consider it as the the citizens of Alaska feel about their oil checks:
(Reuters) – Nearly every Alaska resident will soon be $1,884 richer, thanks to an annual payout from an oil wealth trust fund that has been credited with keeping many low-income families out of poverty, state officials said on Wednesday.
More than 640,000 Alaska residents will receive the payment from The Alaska Permanent Fund next month, which Department of Revenue Commissioner Angela Rodell says is the third largest since the state began paying such sums in 1982 with a $1,000 check.
The sum is more than twice the $900 paid to each Alaska resident last year and more than the collective payments from each of the last two years. But it is still off from a high of $2,069 paid in 2008.
Alaska’s Permanent Fund was established by a constitutional amendment passed by voters in 1976 requiring a portion of state oil revenues be put into a savings account to be available for the distant future …
A value added tax on the sale of arms could easily be thought of as a way of collecting money for a resource wealth fund, to be paid back to the citizenry as a royalty for its long and continuing support of the resource.
In this specific case, the block sale of 160 MRAPs to Pakistan.
It’s a perfect idea. Can you come up with a good argument against declaration of American-made Department of Defense-approved and battle-tested weapons of war as a national resource we’ve all made possible? Didn’t think so. 
Slap a value added tax on the damn thing and use it to pay back Americans. We made it possible. We’re the makers, not the takers. We want our share.
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