LOS ANGELES — The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency says contact with its experimental hypersonic glider was lost after launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the central California coast.
The glider was launched from this Minotaur IV rocket at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
The agency says in Twitter postings that its unmanned Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle-2 was launched Thursday atop a rocket, successfully separated from the booster and entered the mission’s glide phase.
The agency says telemetry was subsequently lost, but released no details.
A similar vehicle was launched last year and returned nine minutes of data before contact was prematurely lost …
The U.S. military is trying to develop technology to respond to threats around the globe at speeds of Mach 20 or greater.
“Respond to threats around the globe at speeds of Mach 20 or greater.”
Bomb the paupers in Somalia, Yemen or AfPak at Mach 20. That’s just what Americans clamor for.
This particular example of the empire’s dog crap was started in 2003, born of the pressing notion that the US needs to be able to bomb anyplace on the planet within a few minutes to an hour or two, max.
If you have gold and your ass don’t smell, we won’t bomb you straight to Hell.
Think of it as a Keynesian jobs program for our men in the arms manufacturing industry who get erections over building things that are painted black and don’t work. Thank heaven for these chaps.
Number of Americans currently on food stamps: about 46 million. Or about 1 in every 6 or 7 Americans require food assistance.
If you need a daily example from the empire on where the real parasitism is, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better example than the “Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle-2.”
In any case, the link is to a piece by Barbara Ehrenreich, syndicated from TD to the Guardian, and from a new piece added to her ten-year-old book, Nickel & Dimed, on not making it in America.
The most shocking thing I learned from my research on the fate of the working poor in the recession was the extent to which poverty has indeed been criminalised in America.
Perhaps the constant suspicions of drug use and theft that I encountered in low-wage workplaces should have alerted me to the fact that, when you leave the relative safety of the middle class, you might as well have given up your citizenship and taken residence in a hostile nation.
True.
It no longer makes you blink to read stories about the homeless being chased around in SoCal for being unsightly or people in Vegas being punished for giving out food. (The covering rationalization is that such a thing is unregulated and could lead to food poisoning cases. Which, as a practice, is even more evil than just admitting you don’t wish to let any beggars have food.)
Afflicting the afflicted is part of the national genetic character. In the last decades we’ve selectively bred for it.
It’s reinforced by economic collapse, the fear that if you don’t kick down on the person below you, you’re next, and the natural tendency of frightened people to scapegoat.
The Tea Party is the apotheosis of this. The party is made up of classic kick-downers and I’ve expressed admiration for their capability at unified rage. Rage motivates. It’s something Dems can’t do. Ever.
If you watched MSNBC for the last couple months, between Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow, you’d have thought the GOP was on the run, headed for a good head-cutting session for attacking labor in Wisconsin.
And so when MSNBC put all their effort into covering the Wisconsin state legislator recall like it was raising the flag on top of Suribachi and got the losing side in the Battle of the Bulge instead, it was a big reverse. Very Republican districts stayed very Republican, the guy from the Nation magazine explained today.
The Dem labor protests really didn’t move the border that much.
And there’s no way to tell if they won’t be in for another 2010 nasty shock in 2012.
When rage is afoot over the economy and jobs, you’re for the fool’s hall of fame to think it can be used just because all GOP presidential hopefuls are defined in the narrow dark spaces between the categories of “odious reptile,”“white power Christian mullah” and “weird numskull.”
Food is another expenditure that has proved vulnerable to hard times, with the rural poor turning increasingly to “food auctions”, which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates. And for those who like their meat fresh, there’s the option of urban hunting. In Racine, Wisconsin, a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he was supplementing his diet by “shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked and grilled”. In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver was doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.
The most common coping strategy, though, is simply to increase the number of paying people per square foot of dwelling space – by doubling up or renting to couch-surfers.
It’s hard to get firm numbers on overcrowding, because no one likes to acknowledge it to census-takers …
Whether households wanted to acknowledge overcrowding or not in 2010 census was immaterial The census-takers worked it out.
(At least here we did.)
From my standpoint as an enumerator in downtown Pasadena, overcrowding was obvious. And very frequently it took the form of big old houses, abodes which looked fine on the tree-lined streets off Colorado Street, but which hid a practice of cutting the interior rooms into stealth apartments.
You walked into these once fine homes and you were in the equivalent of a flop house with single bedrooms and large closets employed as rentals. Conditions ranged from poor to plain abominable.
In these, the kitchen and bathrooms were all common use. And these modern flophouses — while not in the mansion district near the Rose Bowl — were right beside the upscale condos inhabited by the lowers in the upper class. Grinding poverty was in spitting distance of wealth, made easy to overlook by silence, neatly cut lawns and painted exteriors.
Ehrenreich discusses one family on food assistance, even that made inhospitable by requirements, put in place to drive people away under the assumption that those who need the assistance are probably parasites.
“[They] discovered that they were each expected to apply for 40 jobs a week, although their car was on its last legs and no money was offered for gas, tolls, or babysitting,” writes Ehrenreich. “In addition, [one family member] had to drive 35 miles a day to attend ‘job readiness; classes offered by a private company called Arbor, which, she says, were ‘frankly a joke'”.
A few months after I moved to California I met Barbara Ehrenreich at the Los Angeles Festival of Books. Nice lady. I was so in awe she probably thought I was a stalker.
Krugman, in one of today’s later blog posts at the NY Times:
And now it turns out that what really terrifies the markets, let alone the suffering unemployed, is the prospect of a second Great Depression — a prospect that has become much more likely thanks to the utter wrongness of elite policy priorities.
Great work, guys.
As an aside, with regards to eating squirrel or raccoon meat, there are good reasons why we got away from it.
Many decades ago, trichinosis was a problem in Pennsylvania because of the local predilection for eating their own pork sausage. Modern hog farming, while causing other problems, put an end to it.
On the other hand, raccoons can carry the enzootic disease, rabies. And the incidence of rabies appears thankfully rare in Michigan.
Rabies in wildlife (raccoons) has been successfully controlled in some parts of the United States through the use of oral rabies vaccination programs. In these programs packets of vaccine are distributed for consumption by these terrestrial rabies vector species.
So eat raccoon if you must. But be careful out there and encourage and reward diligence in your local bushmeat butcher.
Last year, research at Duke and Harvard universities showed that regardless of political affiliation or income, Americans tended to think wealth distribution ought to be more equal.
The problem? Rich people wrongly believed it already was.
Then there is the problem of Tea Partiers’ own class position. While they are funded by the wealthy, many do not identify themselves as wealthy (though there is dispute on the real demographics). Still, a strong allegiance to the American Dream can lead even regular folks to overestimate their own self-reliance in the same way as rich people.
I’ve never had any use for “allegiance to the American Dream.” I would imagine there are a lot like me. All considered blasphemers.
Idolatry of Ayn Rand apparently a data point.
And these things now essentially define political positions and are a big part of the near violent polarization in American life.
Interesting side note: From experience I know there’s an intense aversion to any music — even some made by celebrities — in the US when it gets “political.”
The problem is that most music (other than pure love songs and oldies interpretations), or written or painted work drawn from current American life, if it’s reality-based even a bit, can’t help but be perceived as taking a political position.
You’re not writing or creating from the standpoint of an honest individual voice if it doesn’t.
Therefore, I get the trivial objection that “The National Anthem” is political because it has one image in the video — a “Conservative Talking Points” blog on an iPhone — that’s objectionable because it’s seen as slanted. Strip away the slides for the entire thing, however, and the slant disappears.
Of course, it still has a position — the national image. Which definitely has nothing to do with any American dream. A nightmare, maybe, one that you can’t wake up from.
Good news, lads! Good news! Many people will never have a sense of humor that extends beyond watching others take pratfalls and the telling of shit jokes.
It came down to two choices on what to give you. This, or a new video of GOP Presidential Candidate Thaddeus McCotter playing guitar to “Let It Rock” on Huckabee.
Not really much of a contest, really.
It’s called “The National Anthem” for obvious reason.
Sing along. It’s easy.
“Yes I know the rent is steep; But the whores and beer are really cheap!”
Notes, for those interested in what’s under the hood: The drums lift the rhythm from “The Wanderer.” Classic Fender Champ sound, recorded mostly live with a Fender amp and Option 5 Destination Overdrive. Axe — the ol’ ’79 Gibson SG and two harmonicas, one made in Japan, the other in Deutschland. Some Pennsy Dutch voice comedy from old vinyl.
“Good boy” alert, but a different flavor, the national security expert in training.
Today, the idea is floated that the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy has been treated maybe a little too shabbily by whatever constitutes the analytic community.
The idea is that it’s sort of bad to laugh at the Cult if you’re unwilling to take the time to write a scholarly piece that soberly dissects the issue.
Yeah, right.
Here’s the key line, republished from the Atlantic (where I dumped on the guy who wrote it, Patrick Disney, a couple weeks ago) at a blog you’d never normally read:
To be honest, not a lot of folks have taken the EMP threat seriously enough to give it a thorough rebuttal … I myself have tried to dive into the issue as part of my graduate research, imagining various scenarios in which an electromagnetic pulse attack could seriously threaten the United States, its allies or its military. And although I still maintain that EMP is, in general, a laughably overhyped “threat,??? the issue deserves better treatment from the analytical community than it has gotten.
According to [Newt Gingrich], EMP may be the greatest single threat facing America today.
Fresh stuff.
Today, there’s more because — apparently — no one paid enough attention the first time:
Under what circumstances would a terrorist be unsatisfied with an old-fashioned, direct nuclear strike against a city? If the goal is to crash the US economy, the terrorist could hit Wall Street …
The national security man-in-training thinking about what would create the most fear.
Hitting Wall Street. First time I’ve heard that. Today.
Ahem. Hitting Wall Street with electromagnetic pulses, be it through bombs, rays or “direct nuclear strike,” is always one of the first things that occurs to people conducting these exercises. Scramble the finances!
Here’s a discussion on non-nuclear electromagnetic pulsing, before the House Joint Economic committee back in 1997.
Years ago I put this on the web as part of the old Crypt Newsletter page and in it, a retired general with six Purple Hearts, Robert Schweizer, goes on about the threat to everything, singling out the “banking” systems:
You can use [electromagnetic pulse weapons] against the banking system so that currency transactions and financial transactions cannot be made … This can be done with going to RadioShack and buying the components. I have in my briefcase a catalog from one of the companies that is putting out these devices that says, “We will show you how to do it. Everything is included. If it isn’t, we will help you get it with diagrams or other assistance.” And, the prices are from $35 to $200 to buy components to go and do a number on Wall Street.
The kind of scenario that one could envision would be the van with a radio frequency weapon in it and no exterior signs or indicators or signatures on it, just driving in circles or up and down the canyons of Wall Street pulsing with this almost limitless capacity to generate high power pulses through the walls of the financial and banking institutions on let’s say, a Sunday morning at 2:30 a.m. And, you can make as many passes as you need.
Again, it’s non-nuclear, but even way back then, the argument touched on the servant’s obsession with protecting the territory of the plutocracy. Schweizer died a number of years ago never having seen a single example of what he was warning about.
But back to Disney, who argues:
But this year has witnessed a shift. The message about the impending blackout has softened. The jihadi boogeyman, who until recently was perched in a rowboat off the East coast ready to launch a scud, has vanished. The new EMP monster under the bed is: solar weather?
Well, no, not precisely. Bad solar weather was a convenience, one that was simply added to the pie. He knows this.
I tried to helpful, suggesting Roscoe Bartlett be put under a shroud on the floor of Congress to symbolically all the Americans who would be dead a year after the electricity vanished.
“March 23 should be designated as EMP Recognition Day,” wrote someone at the Heritage Foundation, at the time.
“An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) produced by the detonation of a nuclear weapon at high altitude or as the result of unusually powerful solar activity (often called severe space weather) could produce catastrophic destruction in the United States,” is the lede sentence.
As I’ve said, the bad solar weather hook is a convenience. And that’s because what the Cult of EMP Crazy chieftains want are only two quite specific things: more missile defense and to bomb Iran.
Tehran’s navy deploys ships to the Atlantic capable of launching long-range missiles. This is not a joke. This is a dress rehearsal for the day an EMP attack ends our way of life … A simple Scud missile, with a nuclear warhead, could be fired from an inconspicuous freighter in international waters off our coast and detonated high over the U.S.
It would wreak devastation on America’s technological, electrical and transportation infrastructure. Masked as a terrorist attack, Iran would have plausible deniability of any responsibility.
The Revolutionary Guards have successfully test-launched long-range ballistic missiles from a ship before, so the statement that they are arming some of the vessels with such missiles should worry the United States. An Iranian navy ship or any commercial vessel operated by the Iranians could easily launch a missile from outside the Gulf of Mexico and essentially cover most of the United States. Much more alarming is the fact that once in possession of a nuclear bomb, Iran could successfully carry out its promise to bring America to its knees by a successful electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on America.
“One nightmare scenario posed by the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States From Electromagnetic Pulse [Attack] was a ship-launched EMP attack against the United States by Iran, as this would eliminate the need for Iran to develop an ICBM to deliver a nuclear warhead against the U.S. and could be executed clandestinely, taking the U.S. by surprise …
Yesterday I wrote about Chinese ads selling counterfeit American electric guitars to YouTube. From the the frontpage of the Washington Post website the previous week, to a smaller picture ad spun out by Google Adsense/AdWwords and tied to guitar star demonstration videos.
In yesterday’s case it was sales pitching for fake Paul Reed Smiths.
Google AdSense is the vehicle of choice for Internet bottom feeders. Using Google “products” it’s probably fair to say you could set up AdSense ads for working hand grenades, hit squad services or sales of stolen goods, advertised with just the same words and get away with it for a few days. (In fairness, I haven’t tried. But judging by the reprehensible rubbish I routinely see peddled, it’s not a bridge too far.)
Today, the AdSense ads for fakes of domestic guitars were spied at the Los Angeles Times, sans immediate giveaway pictures.
Here’s the ad from this morning:
Clicking through to the site one gets a standard assortment of rock-bottom priced fakes of domestic Gibson gear.
Again, here are two fresh examples, one labeled with a clear “Made In USA” marking on the headstock:
The technology of ad streaming makes it easy for these types of things to be everywhere. And it underlines the magnitude and the gravity of the problem faced by US guitar manufacturers.
Chasing this stuff around is whack-a-mole work and the resources simply don’t exist to combat it.
Futher, there’s no obvious control or correction mechanism in domestic net advertising to fight it.
My experience has shown US companies running this type of thing really don’t like hearing the news. They’d rather have the advertising dollars — even when the amount may be trivial — and for others to just shut up and not bother them over it.
General Electric Co. (GE), oncestill vilified in the U.S. for leadership in outsourcing jobs, is pulling more information-technology positions back in-house.
Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt has said GE will add more than 15,000 jobs in the three years through December. About 1,100 will be just outside Detroit in a center for information technology, a field emblematic of outsourcing. So far, GE has hired about 660 people in Michigan, a state that led the nation in jobless rates, making it a symbol of U.S. industrial decline.
Manufacturing expenses in the U.S. have narrowed in comparison to countries like China and India, helping GE add skilled jobs like the 125 planned at a flagship gas-turbine plant in Greenville, South Carolina, Immelt said in July.
About $17 billion of GE’s $150 billion in sales last year came from exports, a trend that fuels creation of such positions, Immelt said July 13. In the second quarter, about 59 percent of GE’s total sales came from overseas.
Here’s a chance to spend a day in the outdoors with legendary rock star Ted Nugent the Whackmaster himself at his Waco, Texas compound.
The iconic madman and avid hunter has put a day of hunting and fishing for two lucky fans at his compound on the auction block at leading charity auction site Charity Buzz .
The auction is an effort to raise funds for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital through the Eric Trump Foundation’s online auction.
The lucky winning bidder and a guest with join Ted Nugent, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump Jr. for a day they’ll never forget.
The current standing bid is $5,250. The experience, valued at $30,000, is open for bidding through Aug. 8th …
Endure a day with Ted? Wouldn’t you just give the research hospital the money and pass?
After DD screwed up the plan for selling counterfeit guitars through the Washington Post ad feed last week — and I did screw it up a bit — Google property has now been enlisted.
The same Chinese-made “brand” guitar selling site now hitches to Google AdSense on YouTube, where they’re attached to guitar store demos.
I tipped Gibson’s legal department to the Post ads last week. But I’m done with the good Samaritan pro bono work.
Paul Reed Smith is never mentioned in the advertising. But all the models the ad links to are Paul Reed Smith steals.
The routine is identical. The guitars are photographed with obscured headstocks.
PRS guitars are top of the line, domestically. A number of years ago the company offshored some manufacturing to Korea and those models are called Paul Reed Smith SEs. They’re in the medium price range.
The Chinese-made counterfeits all sell in the same slots occupied in the Gibson funny business at the Post last week — the high 200 buck range.
Which is an entire order of magnitude cheaper than domestically made Paul Reed Smiths and about half the price of Korean-manufactured models.
And I’m done chasing this stuff around — for the time being. If the Post had to be hectored into doing the right thing. And then Google took up the slack, American guitar manufacturers are on their own.
Good luck stemming the tide when your countrymen work for the enemy.
