Ask George Smith e-mail: webmaster at dick destiny
The election seemed perfect visual adornment for an altered cover of “Act Naturally.”
The basic track had a couple secs of silence before a drum crash. It seemed to call for a short introduction.
One of the Hitler/Downfall parodies furnished a perfect one. It was great and the original (big ups to its creator, hope he doesn’t mind too much) is here.
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| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| America’s Job Loss – Beri Fox | ||||
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The United States still makes marbles. Barely.
Wait for the China bit. They get to it quickly.
It’s perfectly obvious. Tax cuts for the rich will fix it all.
When the President turns into an excuse to revive Mush from the Wimp, it’s all over. And he gave up without even much of a fight.
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A post at Cryptome explains why most people, DD included, are no good on Twitter. There are less complimentary terms for its prime movers. But it’s all about celebrity and a Darwinistic application of it. The new boss is always the same as the old boss. And those at the top get all the spoils.
As much of an online paradise as Twitter is, it’s not *completely* free of the kinds of annoying behavior we see in the real world. High on the list are the sorts of adolescent posturing that social media in general make so easy — preening, name-dropping, ass-kissing, pandering, cliquishness …
Observations include:
It sometimes seems that there’s no utterance by a Name or celebrity that’s too trivial to warrant instant retweeting by dozens or hundreds of followers. (Yes, you could make the argument that the more followers someone has the more retweets they’ll get, but it’s clear that there’s often more than mathematics at work here. I’ve seen people ignore an interesting link tweeted by a relative nobody and then retweet that same link just a few minutes later when it was tweeted by a Name …
There are Names who have Twitter accounts that they’ve never used but still have hordes of followers–like [at]beyonce, who has never tweeted once but as of this writing is followed by eight hundred thousand very patient people. The day she gets around to tweeting “Hello,” the resulting retweets will probably bring down Twitter’s entire server farm.
Again here.
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Good news, lads! Good news!
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Business motto: More good shit from Eat Shit Farms!
Reinforcing the reality that the US government will do virtually nothing to get corporate predators off the streets, today the news on Eat Shit Farms is that the FDA sent it a warning letter Friday. For Austin “Jack” DeCoster’s provoking of the biggest salmonella-tainted egg recall in history earlier this year. While news was just breaking that one of his shell companies was involved in a hot and fresh case of salmonella distribution calling for a recall of a quarter million eggs.
An organic food blog has the most pungent thing to say:
Remember Galt, IA-based Wright County Egg—the key factory farm involved in August’s recall of 500,000 eggs after a multistate salmonella outbreak? The company whose owner, Austin “Jack??? DeCoster, was called a corporate criminal by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich?
[FDA] Kansas City District Director John W. Thorsky has sent DeCoster a warning letter that requires “prompt and aggressive actions??? to correct a host of unresolved problems. If DeCoster fails to comply, the FDA can enjoin his company from selling eggs or seize the foul farm.
Seize the foul farm. Hah. Well we should hope so.
“How many times has [DeCoster]been allowed to pay his way out of corporate negligence?” the blogger asks.
At GlobalSecurity.Org, DD mirrored yesterday’s post on Eat Shit Farms with comment on the UPS/Fed-Ex shipped toner cartridge bomb plot from Yemen.
It’s here.
There’s an obvious reason for bundling the two together.
This country’s national security apparatus gets its panties in a twist over failed air freight bombs from a marginal country where the spigot could have been turned off a long time ago.
And Predator missions are surely slated.
But do anything about the guy who does business in such a way that he knows his eggs stand to be tainted and that it’s just part of the overhead? And who gives salmonellosis to thousands?
The fellow is an agribusiness terrorist. So we’ll sic mighty Bart Stupak on him and then send a slightly threatening letter.
And that’s the latest news from the great failed society with huge numbers of sitting around people.
Predatory behavior in US agribusiness now seems so commonplace one can but laugh when the latest notice of recall comes through the pipe.
The US government, for all the president’s talk of reform, cannot and will not get the most Dickensian characters off the street. Or shutter their businesses.
Past coverage of Eat Shit Incorporated, Austin “Jack” DeCoster’s salmonella-contaminated wholesale nationwide egg business is here and here.
The Dickensian character, the menace to society, knows that when he’s called before congress the worst that will happen is that he’ll have to face the scripted displeasure of the equivalent of an animated plush toy. In this case, retiring fake Republican, Bart Stupak (D) of Michigan. Who will send out a staffer prior to hearings to cadge up the recent history of food poisonings as listed on this blog over the past two years, as part of his tough “investigation.”
Then everyone will forget the nasty pictures and it will be back to business as usual.
And now, sane people can only throw up their hands at the disgrace of what constitutes “oversight” and “consumer protection.” There is simply nothing that can or will be done.
The only thing left is to quote from the current news. And reflect on how easy it is to get Predator missions launched against human targets in Yemen or Pakistan. And toss billions of dollars into defense against theoretical bioterrorism threats.
But that it is beyond the realm of the possible to do anything about people who sell food poisoned with pathogens, on a monthly basis, in this country.
Evidence of salmonella has been found at an Ohio egg farm that’s received financing from the owner of an Iowa egg farm that was behind a massive recall earlier this year.
Cal-Maine Foods Inc., the nation’s biggest egg seller and distributor, said it is recalling 288,000 eggs the company had purchased from supplier Ohio Fresh Eggs after a test showed salmonella at the Ohio farm.
Austin “Jack” DeCoster owns Wright County Egg and has lent money to Ohio Fresh Eggs.
Ohio officials said DeCoster hid behind other farmers to get permits for the company in 2004. The permits listed two men who had put up just $10,000 apiece while DeCoster had pumped $126 million into the four farms, according to testimony in an administrative proceeding there. At the time, DeCoster had already been labeled a “habitual violator” of environmental laws in Iowa.
Ohio officials yanked the permits after learning about that, but an environmental appeals panel overturned that decision.
DeCoster has often tangled with the government. He has paid millions of dollars in state and federal fines over at least two decades for health, safety, immigration and environmental violations at his farms.
Every so often you come across items that are simply begging for the “Dick Destiny” treatment! An example: Seven Terror Tech Trends.
And some of them are:
“… new forms of airborne attack… model aircraft as “a homemade cruise missile??? or even building a model sailplane out of plastic or composites with a pound or two of explosives and something to serve as shrapnel,??? the presenter said. Such a craft could evade radar and penetrate no fly zones to hit specified targets such as “the next presidential inauguration,??? he said. “Let’s call this a homemade cruise missile???
Terrorist cyber ops…
“Dirty” bombs… Oh, and EMP bombs too… which the terrorists would promptly use to target… the Internet!
“DIY bio-chemical weapons”… and “genetically targeted pathogens” Apparently the latter have been spotted “in several decades…”
“Mass-effect things that go bang.???
Engineered bio-weapons. Hmm, what could these be? “… man-made bacteria designed to take out entire cities… “malignant nanomaterials??? designed to “eat building materials??? and devour vehicle lubricants.”
I missed it. My bad.
ph2dot1 does what’s needed, even including the Strangelove shot of Sterling Hayden.
The only mildly remarkable thing is the Army still wasting effort on premature ejaculates and Toffler-ian turds that were old a long time ago — particularly the evergreens of microbes that eat buildings, microbes for eating specific kinds of people, electromagnetic pulse bomb suitcases, and so forth.
Ten years ago it was hilarious and exciting to read tortured crap from some US Army man going on about ESP, telekinesis and computer viruses that could cause heart failure in a leadership journal for officers.
Now it’s really long in the tooth.
“Security Error” announces my browser upon hitting the Army’s Unified Quest website.
Unconvincing at being forward-looking.
While working the census in Pasadena our crew was given a motivational speech when performance was deemed lagging.
A few days ago, I described like this for el Reg:
This was cause for the delivery of an inspirational speech, the kind used at mass corporate rallies in the US where people pay to be told, by important figures and celebrities, that the only thing standing in the way of success is their bad attitude. If we were not to run with wolves but soar like eagles, we were told, we should separate ourselves from the drag of the complainers and critics.
About a day later, the census began firing what it thought were the complainers and critics, all the non-performers.
The speech was delivered to us as the wisdom of Colin Powell. Whether it was actually all his was hard to know. What’s certain is that it was a grab-bag of quotes attributed to him.
Intelligence-insulting shit, it had nothing to do with the work of being a census enumerator, which was a solitary business.
A sample from the speech:
Never receive counsel from unproductive people.
Never discuss your problems with someone incapable of contributing to the solution, because those who never succeed themselves are always first to tell you how.
Not everyone has a right to speak into your life.
You are certain to get the worst of the bargain when you exchange ideas with the wrong person.
Don’t follow anyone who’s not going anywhere.
With some people you spend an evening: with others you invest it.
Be careful where you stop to inquire for directions along the road of life.
Wise is the person who fortifies his life with the right friendships.
If you run with wolves, you will learn how to howl. But, if you associate with eagles, you will learn how to soar to great heights.
Powell, ever since his epic fail in front of the world at the UN, has made a business of inspirational speaking gigs. He’s a celebrity part of the Must Think Happy Thoughts industry and during the years post his position as Secretary of State he seemed to be on a regular conveyor belt through arenas nationwide and in southern California with the likes of Zig Ziglar.
This nationwide fetish with the idea that positive thinking leads to success in all things and conversely, that critical thinking leads only to failure, is the subject of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America, now in trade paper edition through Picador.
As most observers of the players in the economic collapse now can tell, the book could very well be renamed “How Positive Thinking Undermined America,” past tense. The culture of lickspittle and constant delusional thinking based on only positive reinforcements played its role.
Ehrenreich’s book fully examines this inspirational brainwashing, first taken from the standpoint of its role in the wellness industry. Ehrenreich writes of it from a very up close point-of-view after being diagnosed with cancer. Happy thoughts and positive thinking now being the way in which all patients are counseled or cudgeled into dealing with potentially terminal illness.
Pulling back, the book observes that the practice is used to destroy critical thinking. Or worse and even more commonly, to gin up a labor force or group of employees whose morale has been crushed by bad business and endless rounds of downsizing.
Everyone in corporate America has felt its touch — management using it as a fob for its failures, pushing responsibility off onto employees who don’t have the right positive attitude and who must now change their thinking lest they too be sent into the wilderness.
And it has been coming a good long time, as anyone who has seen scenes from the sports movies can attest. Cue those where the team, slipping on a bad patch, sits in the locker room listening to a seminar for the banishing of contagious loser-ism.
For example, Ehrenreich writes:
Over the past decade, as icebergs sank and levels of debt mounted, dissidents from the prevailing positive thinking consensus were isolated, mocked or urged to overcome their perverse attachment to thoughts. Within the United States, any talk of intractable problems could be dismissed as a denial of American greatness. Any complaints of economic violence could be derided as the whining of “self-selected” victims.
So if Colin Powell actually does believe the slogans and rubbish attributed to him, his now infamous performance before the UN is not the biggest surprise. The good general, perhaps, did not wish to be a whining self-selected victim, excluded from the victory march toward Iraq.
And it underlines how, at the highest national level, unwarranted attitude modification and culture of lickspittle had disastrous consequences.
One might almost think that the current national economic crisis must lead to a modification in attitudes toward the religion of “positive-thinking.”
This is not the case. Ehrenreich devotes time to explaining how Must Think Happy Thoughts, Inc. is a business partially built upon salesmanship into corporate management. It is there where profit lies, in the mass sale of books and speeches for delivery to the listless and despondent employees. There are, it seems, even a handful of “scientists” pushing it.
From this blog in 2008, on the sale of cheap harmonicas and books on how-to-toot-your-way-out-of-unproductiveness into corporate American boardrooms:
[Another reason] for the Mojo Deluxe … made-in-China harmonica is so that it can be packaged with a lot of other stuff suitable for corporate seminar in the US of A.
The author of of “Instant Blues Harmonica” writes on his very last page in the very last paragraph: “[For] the last few years I’ve been doing most of my presentations for corporate non-profit organizations. These clients range from Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream to Merck Pharmaceutical, from the Blue Cross to Red Cross, from Kraft Foods to the American Society of Forensic Laboratory Directors. My unique keynotes and workshops can help your group to work more effectively…”
The image of a roomful of managers from Kraft Foods or directors from the American Society of Forensic Laboratories learning to “blow their blues away” on Chinese harmonicas during a compulsory leadership get-together is a shattering one.
At the risk of sounding too positive, DD heartily recommends Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided.
DD has left the Obama train, no surprise.
It’s impossible to support someone who can say with a straight face, on a trip to India, that it will be good for the middle class, generating a big 54,000 jobs.
“President Barack Obama on Saturday embraced India as the next jobs-creating giant for hurting Americans, not a cheap-labor rival that outsources opportunity from the United States,” reported the AP last Friday, its reporter seemingly not even willing to believe the bullshit being peddled this time out.
In the face of fifteen million unemployed and even more underemployed.
While the entire middle class regards India as a place of no value to them, a place of really cheap labor which giant US corporations uses for the efficient dismissal of even more Americans. (Before that, India was a place US megacorporations could treat murderously.)
The beneficiaries of trade with India are the usual culprits. Military contractors like Honeywell , Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
“Chicago-based Boeing expects to bid for $31 billion of military contracts in the next 10 years as it competes with suppliers including Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed Martin Corp. following a tripling of India’s defense budget,” reported a San Francisco newspaper.
Include a company that can outsource its English data entry to Mumbai, McGraw-Hill.
And credit card collection services.
And, last but not least, Wal-Mart — which can open stores there, employing locals, after the firm has spent a couple decades helping to destroy US middle class make-stuff jobs by bringing Chinese slave labor goods here. You see, it’s consumer business is off in the US due to the economic crash. It can build it back up by using an emerging market to keep doing the same bad things it always has.
The only people who believe India has anything to offer the US middle class are the Tom Friedmans of the world, the fellow fond of telling the tall tale about how a creative, innovative American recaptured his career after having his job sent to India. By making and selling a T-shirt about it.
Great joke. Get’s a big laugh every time.
Why, just recently, here’s Friedman acting as the India-America Chamber of Commerce:
If America turns away from [the] values, [a leader of the National Association of Software and Services in India, an agency that promotes US outsourcing], the socialist/protectionists among India’s bureaucrats will use it to slow down any further opening of the Indian markets to U.S. exporters.
Middle class Americans might not lose jobs to India quite as swiftly! And that would really eat it.
There is no way rebalance the situation. India exacerbates economic decay within the US labor force because of the way the American system is set up. Saving or creating more jobs within the already very healthy national security industry is not a benefit.
Up next, pitches for losing trade to Panama and Colombia for the sake of the same handful of military contractors and, perhaps, American coffee companies with a pathological aversion to even a minimum of US labor.
Big ups for those!
And for this story from Yahoo’s business section, a place caught on the horns of cheerleading for US job loss now that the middle class is enraged with the American plutonomy, you can read of all the “iconic” American goods no longer made here, but in slave labor countries, because of corporate aversion to compensating US workers fairly.
It’s here.
However, if you’re still one of those who have a job, you can peddle a plastic robot — made in a slave labor country — for the guarding of your pile. Allegedly.
Reports the New York Times, from the cutting edge of the ‘artisan economy’ for the making of stuff for rich gadget freak people:
When Robert Oschler, a programmer, leaves his home, he knows it is secure. And if he ever has cause for concern, he can open his laptop and survey the house through the eyes of his watchdogs.
“I don’t have any pets. I just have pet robots, and they’re pretty well behaved.”
Naturally, the Times tech reporter promoting the stuff wanted one, too.
“To me, we’ve reached a banana republic point where our inequality has become both economically unhealthy and morally repugnant,” wrote Nicholas Kristof whose conscience has been bugging him ever since he fucked with the anthrax investigation.
Here are people doing a karaoke “That’s Logistics,” taped by UPS employees, for the sake of branding.
All grenades. No need to jump on them for the team. Just for illustrative purpose, proof I’m not making it up.
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