09.21.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 2:08 pm by George Smith
It worked for the city of Davis in Orange County. And a host of bad publicity notices from around the country have moved San Diego Unified’s police force to schedule the disposal of its newly acquired Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle.
From the wire:
The San Diego Unified School District has decided to return a military-grade armored vehicle donated by the Department of Defense that was intended to be used by city schools police for emergencies such as campus shootings …
“Public sentiment regarding the use of excess military equipment by law enforcement agencies since the civil unrest in Ferguson, Mo., has pointed to the need to be more sensitive to perception,??? [San Diego Unified police chief Rueben Littlejohn] said. “The value that this defensive tool would bring cannot exceed the value of retaining the public’s trust, confidence and perceptions of how we will protect our students.???
Even loaded with teddy-bears, still not a friendly sight. Unfortunately, the Pentagon will quickly pawn it off on someone else.
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09.20.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll, WhiteManistan at 12:53 pm by George Smith
Full size.
When you’ve been tossed in the garbage by the dictatorship of American capitalism you have much free time. Plenty to ruminate on how unfit the country is, time to come up with strong stories and opinions. And one expression of this is Loud Folk Live, made over the summer during live recording sessions in Pasadena with my friend, DDB drummer Mark Smollin.
Loud Folk Live was done as a you-are-there performance, straight to a two-track recorder, dressed up only to the extent of what you’d hear coming through the sound system at a show.
Welcome to the United States of Penitentiary, we all get here eventually; we lock up the poor for all the rich & we do it right, without no hitch. We have predator loans, iPhones and drones! Plus lots of crazy people! — from “The National Anthem”
The pic is the CD cover and it’s ready. Yes, there will be compact discs! CD-Rs for now, but still — something you can hold with higher fidelity than mp3s. (Which you can also have.)
One place you probably won’t see it will be the iTunes store or offered on streaming music services. I’m not particularly fond of the business model of paying a bribe service fee to get thrown into a cloud Oblivion of tags, meta information and lists compiled by “curators” who work for zip. (Quote: “Now you get to give 99 dollars to Tunecore for the privilege of being buried in the world’s digital landfill of streamed music.”)
If you still read the blog or believed at all in what was done for the last two decades you’ll want this.
It’s a statement, sometimes laugh out loud funny, always pointed, and loaded with the contempt and anger richly earned by the Culture of Lickspittle in the superpower of predatory business.
Wanna buy me some guitar strings, picks and other sundries used up in the Loud Folk Live sessions and score yourself a CD at the same time? Wanna review copy? Have an opinion or a promotional scheme?
Share or hit the donate button at the bottom of the “about” page.
Much more to come.
Have a listen to The National Anthem, one of the many great tunes on Loud Folk Live.
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09.19.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 2:04 pm by George Smith
Famous line by Dennis Hopper, playing the maniac Frank Booth, in the movie Blue Velvet, made decades ago. You know, before all the big American beer companies sold themselves to foreigners out of greed.
Today, from the wire, news that Pabst has been sold to a Russian beverage company for a few hundred million.
About a decade ago Pabst was considered a hipster beer in the Williamsburg neighborhoods of NYC and in LA’s west side. It was a good marketing trick.
But today Pabst is only three percent of the American market. Remarkably, it also makes Colt 45, much mentioned here.
And the arrival of Pabst in 24 oz. cans at Baja Ranch a couple weeks ago probably explains why Colt 45 has disappeared from the shelves. Colt 45, much stronger beer, sold for $1.39 for 24 ounces; the same size can of Pabst now goes for $1.75.
The company is so pathetic it’s even afraid of underselling one of its own products. And I’m saying this as someone who always liked Pabst and Colt 45!
Unintentionally hilarious quote, from the wire (no link):
In a statement, Oasis Chairman Eugene Kashper called Pabst Blue Ribbon the “quintessential American brand — it represents individualism, egalitarianism and freedom of expression — all the things that make this country great.”
Kashper will serve as CEO of Pabst Brewing, which will keep its headquarters in Los Angeles.
America in 2014, individualism, egalitarianism and freedom of expression. Haw.
Just like Los Angeles is a birthplace of beer.
Made by Pabst, probably not proudly. Endorsed by me!
Because big corporate beer in America is just as cheap and villainous as everything else, I’m reaching into the archives today for a story on Miller beer.
The setting, a Christmas party in which a man who once lived by me and worked in management for the Miller plant in Irwindale, could think of nothing to talk about but firing people.
This, in the holiday season. Because that’s what everyone talks about in America when it’s time for good cheer!
Layoffs, so the wealthy get more:
I was at a late afternoon Christmas party in Pasadena yesterday when I was told a classically 2010 American tale.
The fellow to the left of me was talking about his job. He worked at the big Miller brewery in southern California, west on the superhighway out of Pasadena to Irwindale. It’s a classic joint. Like all breweries, you can smell the fermentation when you drive by.
He informed the room that Miller’s development plan was to downsize/fire 50 percent of the employees at the place.
I was astonished. Beer, like pizza, one would think to be virtually recession proof. Only if you kill off a population do you cut overall consumption of alcohol.
And the biology and thermodynamics of fermentation has not been changed by innovation in hundreds of years. It can’t be done. Beer-making is immutable. You cannot make it more efficient through the application of technology aimed at efficiency and downsizing.
So I asked the man what was the reasoning behind this, since beer-making can’t be revolutionized.
He said that management had figured out that if you had two people who did jobs with overlap, you could fire one of them, award half their salary to the retained worker, and make the person still employed do twice the work. And the leftovers would jump at that.
He added that this made more profit for the shareholders and company heads.
They shipped him to Texas where he probably got fired, too.
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09.17.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 1:45 pm by George Smith
A Congresswoman, Claire McCaskill, put online a tabulation of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles sent to American police departments since 2011. Its numbers are linked to police departments with less than ten active duty police officers and, by state, how the total number exceeds the numbers possessed by National Guard units. (Hint: Most state Guard units have zero MRAPs.)
That document is here.
The .pdf has inspired a good number of incredulous and justifiably
ridiculing stories on the stunning reality that the Pentagon has also been shipping armored fighting vehicles to school district police forces and penny-ante community colleges.
Like this one, on Saddleback community college in Orange County, California:
With just nine full-time officers, the [Saddleback College police department] somehow managed to get an army mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicle for…what exactly? Scaring kids who don’t put up their parking permit?
In other news today, such stories have had some effect, motivating Los Angeles Unified to claim it would be divesting itself of a number of grenade launchers given to it by the Department of Defense.
It’s become obvious that the people who run the Pentagon’s 1033 Program, which is how these things have come to be everywhere, have no shame, common sense or any recognition of what differentiates a service for the social good from one that has morphed into something quite the opposite.
Look over the document. Be amazed at the numbers.
There are many reasons to seriously consider the United States as a pariah country on the global stage, one with no serious belief in the rights of human beings other than freedoms to buy stuff and or have large weapons stockpiled and ready to use on them if they can’t. Provision of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles for police forces in piss ant towns, community colleges and for school district police forces fulfills the latter freedom. As for the freedom to shop, you’re on your own and the vicissitudes of the economy.
Statistic of the day, easy:
The Payne County Sheriff’s Department in Oklahoma, with one active duty officer, has two MRAPs, the above, weighing 29 tons, being one.
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09.13.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, War On Terror, WhiteManistan at 11:32 am by George Smith
Chagrined over having to get rid of it.
Today the New York Times ran a story that’s been floating around California for a couple weeks, fallout from the Ferguson riots and the national discussion on he arrival of heavy armored cars on American streets.
The city of Davis was perhaps not the best place to shove an MRAP into, it being the town where a peaceful student protest was painfully put down in now famous imagery of security blithely hosing down young people with pepper spray.
From the NYT:
The police department of this modest college town is among the latest California beneficiaries of surplus military equipment: a $700,000 armored car that is the “perfect vehicle,??? the police chief told the City Council, “to perform rescues of victims and potential victims during active shooter incidents??? …
But the City Council directed [Chief Landy Black] last month to get rid of it in the face of an uproar that had swept through this community, with many invoking the use of similar equipment by the police against protesters in Ferguson, Mo., after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager.
“This thing has a turret — it’s the kind of thing that is used in Afghanistan and Iraq,??? said Dan Wolk, the mayor. “Our community is the kind of community that is not going to take well to having this kind of vehicle. We are not a crime-ridden city.???
Kudos for having the fortitude to make an emphatic stand and statement.
While some police in very large metropolitan police departments can make a case, not necessarily always a good one, about the need for what is a heavy armored fighting vehicle, most of the burgs, which is where many of them are now, can’t.
The country’s medium-sized and small towns do not need combat-tested armor nor are they likely to. Mines and artillery barrages are not coming to this country and the number of deployed MRAPs now far outweighs, out guns and out numbers the potential for terrorism or the need to be ready to put down insurrection with overwhelming force.
Fear is what has driven the spread of the MRAP. The theology is that there is always the potential for some terrible criminal or terrorist assault somewhere in America and that these are the things, along with many others, that must be around to guarantee the safety of the police and the public. It is a nationwide view that feeds itself. Under this logic there can never be an end to the acquisition and stockpiling of weapons.
This well done video, with a point — When Did Americans Become the Enemy — nicely shows the ridiculous (and really now kind of oppressive) nature of the Department of Defense’s giveaways to small town America.
The New York Times includes the argument made by in Los Angeles about the infamous North Hollywood shootout of 1997. Now seventeen years past, two bank-robbers armed with fully automatic assault rifles and kitted in bullet-resistant clothing, engaged the police in a firefight that was carried on television.
In the battle, they were killed. Eleven police officers were wounded.
However, the passage of time and history have shown this is an outlier. Not a sign of things to come but that kind of event that may happen once or twice in a lifetime. (For a laugh, re-watch the movie Predator 2. Released in 1990, it is cast in the Los Angeles of 1997, the beginning throwing the movie-viewer into a pitched battle in downtown Los Angeles, one between machine-gun and grenade armed “Colombians” and an, of course, out-gunned police detachment. Even the North Hollywood gun battle that actual year wasn’t as apocalyptic. And since, Predator 2’s Hollywood interpretation of a future LA looks increasingly anachronistic.)
Newly released information from the DoD shows that Los Angeles County police forces field nine Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles.
The Pentagon’s MRAP program was a consequence of the war based on fraud in Iraq. In essence, it was free money to arms manufacturers globally, if they could come up with vehicle impervious to roadside bombs and large buried mines.
The result of the program was a number of only roughly similar vehicles, the commonality being they were all huge, heavy, armored and expensive, ranging in price from around 700,000 to over 900,000 dollars.
Search Google images and you can see the various models like the MaxxPro or the Caiman, the latter coming in four-wheel and six wheel models, optimized for the US Marine Corps but now plainly visible in police departments.
The Davis MRAP is, I think, a MaxxPro. The link above shows the city of Guthrie’s Caiman. The town, population 10,600 or so, is in Logan County, Oklahoma.
These vehicles are a burden on the taxpayers of such towns, one of the reasons the DoD wanted to offload them while still maintaining ownership. It would seem they must be covered by a special kind of insurance and they must be maintained. Can just anyone in small town America maintain a Caiman MRAP? Where do the spare tires come from and what do they cost?
“The Council’s decision set off waves of concern among police officials across the state and highlighted the fact that California — whose crime rate, like those of many other states, is on the decline — has one of the highest concentrations of surplus military equipment in the nation,” writes the Times.
Ultimately, little will be done, except perhaps at the local level as in Davis, about MRAP distribution. Legislation to control or stop police acceptance of such things will die in Congress, as everything does.
And while the President has indicated he supports looking into whether or not DoD gear to police departments ought to be slowed, will not pursue it. The obvious reason, again, is it will immediately be a political millstone. The other side will predictably tell its base that the President, the socialist foreign-born tyrant, is trying to disarm the police.
The presence of the MRAP is not only a product of America’s Culture of Fear. It’s a WhiteManistan thing, too.
Don’t believe it. Look at all the pictures of them in police departments. Note the majority of faces, when shown.
It is within this context that the decision made by the city of Davis is a remarkable one. For various reasons, one mentioned previously,
occasionally other towns have decided they will disengage, too.
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09.01.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 3:18 pm by George Smith
“Politicians like to speechify about ‘hard-working Americans,’ but in your experience, what percentage of your colleagues actually work (or worked) hard?”
Here’s what they said:
Who is working hard is a difficult concept to quantify in today’s workforce. It is easier to determine who is slacking and not producing. That should be the question.
— Lew Hundley, Salem
The problem is that our present liberal system is rewarding people for not working. Many are getting lazy and want to just live off the labor of others. That will come to an end soon.
— William K. Dettwyler, Salem
I have worked both for government and private companies. Most people work hard, although a few do not. The big difference is that in the private sector the hard workers usually advance while in government the politically correct ones advance whether they work hard or not.
— Loren Wright, Salem
Ninety-eight percent work as hard as they need to. Politicians speak of American exceptionalism, but we reward results rather than effort. We perceive the successful as hard-working rather than talented or fortunate, and the failures as shiftless or lacking ambition.
— Erin Cramer, Stayton
While there are a lot of “hard-working” people in our country, it appears the percentage is decreasing. Unions represent the work force, but spend 90 percent of their time taking care of 10 percent of the workers. And the apathetic mentality of our people seems to be growing.
— Tony Weaver, Woodburn
— The Oregon Statesman
To be fair, not everyone was characterized by this certain lack of charity. But over half the hoi polloi were.
Labor Day should be renamed Labor-Management Day. –letter to the editor in Arizona
Most Americans realize that Labor Day is about celebrating workers and their contribution to our free society, but that won’t stop union bosses from stealing the spotlight to push their own agenda. — a corporate flack pushing Right-to-Work law, in the Pensacola Union Tribune
Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor in 1886, said, “We want more school houses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more constant work and less crime; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful and childhood more happy and bright. These in brief are the primary demands made by the Trade Unions in the name of labor. These are the demands made by labor upon modern society and in their consideration is involved the fate of civilization.” — from the Des Moines Register
That ended well.
“We used up all of our tear gas and pepper spray.??? — the Chief Operating Officer of Ferguson, Missouri
Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as allegory for US labor. You get turned into a giant beetle, are villified and injured. Then you die and get put in the trash.
Regardless of stories about Market Basket and Trader Joe’s.
From the No-Job Job Fair.
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Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 1:19 pm by George Smith
Straight from the straight-faced reporting of the New York Times comes another bit on machine gun amusement parks in and around Las Vegas.
Why? For the pleasure of WhiteManistan, freedom and the universality of the amateur video spectacle of a 9-year-old child shooting her machine gun instructor dead.
If you insist on being hopeful, that what ails the “country” can be fixed, you have a hard time keeping that mask on right now.
The NYT explains. Yes, white machine gun enthusiasts live in California, where they must feel terribly oppressed:
“We get a lot of people from California and other states that [prohibit] guns, and Europe,??? Mr. Sessions [owner of the Vegas Machine Gun Experience] said. “They can own a basic firearm but not a fully automatic gun.???
The range’s most popular package is the SWAT, where for $169 a shooter can fire 50 rounds of the MP5 submachine gun, the M4 machine gun and any 9 millimeter pistol, always with a trained instructor. The deal also includes eye and hearing protection as well as a T-shirt.
“It gives them an opportunity to shoot a couple of machine guns and a handgun and they walk away pretty excited,??? Mr. Sessions said. “We get married couples who come in and split a package. It’s a thrilling experience they can share together that they couldn’t do anywhere else.???
“This is about having people have a good time and putting a smile on their face,” an owner of one of the ranges told the newspaper.
“You have to ease their fears and you do that by highlighting the safety features,??? another told the Times. “If they do anything wrong, you will be there to correct them.”
No, you can’t guarantee you will be there, as instructor Charles Vacca can no longer say.
There was nothing to do but retitle Dick Destiny’s Gun Nut Folk Tune as Suck on the Machine Gun. You can listen to it at SoundCloud. Be sure to read the description.
Yes, Ted Nugent has done machine gun amusements, too. YouTube has evidence. Perhaps this week’s column at World Net Daily will explain the tragedy of The Last Stop as the fault of there not being enough legal machine gun firing zones, combined with a liberal Saul Alinsky-inspired plan to make all machine gun lovers look dangerous and nuts while continuing to build the nefarious apparatus that will deprive all Americans of freedom.
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08.29.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 3:32 pm by George Smith
Who can be vilified over hot dogs, hamburgers and beer this weekend? Teachers? Shall we fondly reminisce over how Ronald Reagan dismissed PATCO? Maybe something on eliminating the minimum wage and how to stimulate the capital accumulation of the wealthy with right-to-work-for-less law? How ’bout we run the evergreen “Americans don’t have the skills to compete in the global workforce” up the flag pole a few times? Perhaps we can smile over the elimination of blue-collar manufacturing work? Those hard hats earned too much money so we broke them all down!
That’s what this holiday is, one of America’s phoniest, marking the end of Summer. For the last twenty years all I recall is politicians using the weekend to write anti-Labor opinion pieces, usually stuff praising America’s corporate masters or other miscellaneous social and economic predators.
See if you can spot any of it.
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Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 10:48 am by George Smith
Every time you think you’ve seen the worst from WhiteManistan, someone shows up with a camera video of a 9-year old child accidentally shooting the gun instructor dead at a machine gun amusement part firing range in Nevada.
Because machine gun tourism is an actual thing here.
And, boy, was I on the money with these. If you don’t understand, are driven to rage at the bleak nature and wish to add your thumb’s down, you need a psyche work up. Likable happy tunes about personal liberties can’t be used to describe WhiteManistan. Not by anyone decent.
“Suck on my machine gun!” Another evergreen Ted Nugent quote, one with the same appeal as the Ebola virus.
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08.25.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 1:02 pm by George Smith
The Seeker, by the Dick Destiny Band, performed live in scenic downtown Pasadena, a block from Rte. 66, where you got get your kicks. Two old men and a big jangle in an old song by the Who.
In case you haven’t been following the narrative, or just dropped in, this is what I do with my life. Once you’ve been cut off from the US economy, you have nothing left to do and no one to do it with if they haven’t had the same pleasure.
So might as well do what you can, in this case twice a week, in the corporate Bund. It’s then your prerogative to regularly show how you’ve been judged/rendered/whatever not useful to even very small numbers of people.
And since this is about the Culture of Lickspittle, from the Sunday New York Times, on how it’s now allegedly uncool to promote yourself on-line. (Or shit that obsesses upper middle class white explainers who had no presence in cyberspace before the Facebook and Twitter scripting platforms were invented for them.)
It annoys people:
[Much] self-promotion on social media seems less about utility and effective advertising and more about ego sustenance. One of the earliest psychological studies of narcissism and Facebook, a 2008 paper by Laura E. Buffardi and W. Keith Campbell, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia, found that “narcissistic personality scores were related to … the quantity of information listed about self, self-promoting pictures, and provocative pictures.???
In other words, those who are narcissistic offline also narcissistically overshare online, a conclusion few would dispute …
But, Professor Campbell conceded, online narcissism is a logical outgrowth of DIY capitalism …
Rampant self-flackery, however, comes at a cost. While narcissism is generally “really good at the initial stage of relationship — for being hired or getting promoted, for getting a boyfriend or girlfriend — it damages you over time,??? Professor Campbell said. In addition, the more one self-promotes, the more “you’ll become a polarizing figure??? …
Self-flackery. Quaintly insulting coinage by someone named Teddy Wayne, just manufactured for publication in the Times.
Many might also think flacking is the oxygen bound to the hemoglobin in the Culture of Lickspittle’s very blood.
And how can it be DIY capitalism when there’s been no money for anything in the last year or more? How can it be DIY capitalism when the agencies that have enabled the trivial posting of your stuff are the only bodies making money from the sale of masses of “yous” and our digital trailings?
I am so dense when it comes to these matters and beg forgiveness.
Being polarizing, it is reasoned, is bad in the Culture of Lickspittle. You need a license for it.
I’ll explain. For free.
Polarizing works for Ted Nugent. It works for agencies and corporations too. The Ferguson police presence could be said to have been polarizing.
Cable companies are polarizing. Everyone hates them. Corporate America is polarizing.
This is how Lickspittle works.
If you don’t use Twitter and have maybe only 30 or so “friends,” of which two are actual flesh and blood people you’ve met, and you post — say — your unemployment tunes, you’re polarizing.
In fact, if you post anything on the net, this includes blogging, if it doesn’t make money or have a large audience, you mutate into polarization. Because you’re engaged in self-flackery.
If you send your song in an e-mail link to a handful of others, if it annoys even one, it is spam.
But if people receive advertisements from the popular, political agencies and big companies, it is getting newsletters and information about stuff you ought to buy. In the Culture of Lickspittle.
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