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Thems the critics and nobody else love. And thems the crowds go see.
Comedy, too. Nazis on the Dark Side of the Moon. Hilarious. Everyone loves the camp.
Ginning it up for something shot in Afghanistan or what passes for a beaten up Islamic country ten years on … Boring!
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Remember the saying? As signs of Iran war fever build in the mainstream press, no one asks why, once again, we’re priming the pump for the beating up of someone smaller and weaker.
Over the Christmas holiday I read Neptune’s Inferno, by James D. Hornfischer, a book on the naval battles that took place off Guadalcanal in the Second World War.
Post Midway, the Imperial Japanese Navy was still exceptionally powerful.
It fell to the US Navy to keep what became known as the Tokyo Express, the IJN’s resupply sorties to its army on Guadalcanal, from tipping the campaign against the United States.
It was a near thing.
Casualties were great. No quarter was asked, none given. And the US Navy almost always went into action out gunned. American naval men expected to lose their lives against an enemy considered highly trained and possessed of fearsome night-fighting warships.
It’s an excellent account, one that underlines how different things are today.
The US war machine never clashes with someone who stands a chance. It faces no IJN. It isn’t ever in combat with anything like the Wehrmacht in Normandy.
I can’t dredge up a single instance of the US fighting anyone it could have lost to in my lifetime.
As a consequence we have a country where everyone pays lip service to the military on holidays out of a guilt and obliged behavior coerced by being allowed to be largely exempt from war and its consequences.
And we have an entire class of people in the national security apparatus who spout rubbish about how they’re underwriting and guaranteeing my right to say stuff like this by dint of their patriotic
duty. It’s like being in a bad movie.
How many Americans can even name the generals who are in charge of the fighting?
Who remembers who was the architect of the campaign that
invaded Iraq? Where is Tommy Franks now? Who cares? (Even the man’s own vanity page doesn’t mention the invasion until the fifth paragraph. He knows as well as anyone, I bet, he wasn’t exactly outmaneuvering Erwin Rommel at el Alamein.)
No matter how daring or satisfying the takedown of Osama bin Laden was, it also invites unfavorable military comparisons with WWII.
In 1943, American fighter planes ambushed the architect of Pearl Harbor, the IJN’s Isoroku Yamamoto, killing him when his transport flight was shot down over Bougainville Island in the South Pacific.
Japan was still a formidable enemy.
By contrast, Osama bin Laden was killed a decade after 9/11, at a time when, if one measures by operational tempo, al Qaeda was and is for all intents and purposes, destroyed.
So as the drums beat louder (here’s the Short Count, aka Arnaud De Borchgrave, cluing us to an October surprise) and the secret war against Iran threatens to turn public, the US military — in this case, the navy — will find itself going into action against an “enemy” that stands
not even the slightest chance.
The rest of the world knows it, too.
There will be nothing good from this, no nobility, no feats of military leadership to be remembered years later, no stories worth repeating.
It will be another case of the world’s biggest, wealthiest and most fearsomely armed military, taking a couple weeks to crush the over-matched, in the process uniting another entire middle eastern country against us.
The country, the military, the people in Neptune’s Inferno are all long gone.
Reading it raised the question: Do our current military leaders think of themselves as those who have common tradition with the sailors who went down fighting in the Slot?
Maybe. If so, perhaps they’re also greatly deluded. In 1941, the entire country took part in the war. In 2012, not so much.
Just don’t bother us here, please.
Culturally, we now we make two types of war movie. It is proof of the
uncomfortable split and shared guilt in American society. It shows
the recognition that the military does things in our name, things most
people have no interest in coming to grips with.
The first type of war movie are those audiences are reluctant to see because they’re too close to the real. The second kind, which so many like to see, have no connection with reality.
The first kind, based on books published in the last decade on the war are made on small budgets. They comprise documentaries or recreations.
None of them make money. Hardly anyone sees them. They’re painful, all unpleasant. No one pays them the slightest attention except a few entertainment critics.
The second kind are done on giant budgets, no expenses are spared, and the heroic US military is engaged against giant talking robots or unspecified alien invasion forces with firepower far in excess of anything the good guys bring to bear until the final ten minutes of the last reel.
Lots of people see the latter. Big names like to show the square heroic jaw while acting in them.
The latest, Battleship, advertised during the Super Bowl, has Liam Neeson as everyone’s favorite grizzled military leader.
It’s another in the line of couldn’t find anyone big enough for a fair fight so they made someone up.
It may be fair entertainment but it’s nothing to be proud of. The psychology exploited may have something to do with the lack of overwhelming enthusiasm for national war-on-terror victory parades.
Who would we celebrate victory and success in an existenstial struggle over? Aliens? Robots?
No, those people on the other side of the globe, who it has been decided need pre-emptive destruction, ten years after the fact, because the fear-based economy says so,
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The drummer in the DD band passes along an Alternet article, one delving into the right wing fascism of the GOP voter, a phenomenon described by social scientist Robert Altemeyer on his introductory to the book, The Authoritarians.
Rick Santorum is entirely cut from the nasty cloth described by Altemeyer. The more he is in the news, his words published nationwide, the more despicable he appears to those not exactly like him.
If you were asked to imagine a presidential candidate as horrid and horrifying as Rick Santorum more than a decade ago you likely wouldn’t have been able to match the reality. Conversely, it’s Santorum’s most insane bits which now put him, perhaps only momentarily, at the top of the heap for the psychopath vote. To paraphrase Shakespeare, they like Santorum because he’s so toxic he could poison poison.
The Alternet piece, in total seriousness, excerpts a bit taken from the Volkische Beobachter, the newspaper of Hitler’s Nazi Party, and asks readers to compare it with the utterances of Rick Santorum.
The words are a bit stilted but the point, unfortunately, is well taken:
Hence, the right wing’s ongoing attempts to erase the separation of church and state, its crusade against Planned Parenthood, its strange obsession with gays. Consider the following political platform, which sounds almost as if it were taken from a speech by Rick Santorum:
The preservation of the family with many children is a matter of biological concept and national feeling. The family with many children must be preserved … because it is a highly valuable, indispensable part of the … nation. Valuable and indispensable not only because it alone guarantees the maintenance of the population in the future but because it is the strongest basis of national morality and national culture … The preservation of this family form is a necessity of national and cultural politics … This concept is strictly at variance with the demands for an abolition of paragraph 218; it considers unborn life as sacrosanct. For the legalization of abortion is at variance with the function of the family, which is to produce children and would lead to the definite destruction of the family with many children …
The Alternet article adds the excerpt was published in the Volkische Beobachter in 1931.
Related: Leprosy or Santorum?
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After reading the, oh say, one hundredth time, what Google human resources people are said to ask prospective employees –“You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown in a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?” — would you even want to work there?
Fuck Google. I bet even they’re sick of reading the tripe. It’s also probably occurred to someone on site that when what you thought was a brain-tweezing question gets tossed around in public it starts looking more like some turd from an asshole rather than the intellectual fruit of a critical thinker.
In an economy of diminished prospects career advice columns in magazines and newspapers have taken up repackaging interviews in which company supervisors torture job candidates with weird questions and outlandish behavior as testing the ability of workers to think on their feet.
It’s intelligence-insulting, the opposite of how it’s peddled.
In today’s LA Times, the pattern, excerpted for examples:
No longer satisfied with sorting through resumes and screening applicants the traditional way, some companies are using offbeat interview techniques to test the mettle of job seekers. Skills, education and good references are still important. But firms increasingly want a real-time look at how prospects tackle problems, gin up new ideas, handle change and work as part of a team.
To assess these amorphous qualities, interviewers at some firms have adopted aspects of reality shows, quiz programs or Broadway auditions …
Companies are running job seekers through a gantlet, in part because they can.
Minneapolis advertising agency Campbell Mithun asks candidates for its internship program to apply in a series of 13 Twitter messages. Limited to 140 characters with each tweet, candidates are challenged to show their stuff in a small space.
“We’re looking for digitally savvy, creative thought leaders, and the 13-tweet process gives applicants a real opportunity to demonstrate these capabilities,” said human resources director Debbie Fischer.
Want to sling sprinkles at Pinkberry? The chain requires applicants to brainstorm commercials for its frozen yogurt and then work in teams to devise a marketing plan for a hypothetical product such as a paper cup …
Most of the comments are appropriately supercilious.
In the spirit, I’ve thought up some potential interview questions to add to the see if they can think on their feet pile.
1. You’re a human resources manager and you’ve been asked to give prostate exams to all male job candidates. What will be your procedure from start to finish? Remember, some but not all will react very negatively to your work.
2. You’re a tampon. Tell me three famous women from history who you’d have liked to have been in.
3. You’re a drone operator flying a Reaper over Somalia. Your CIA boss has ordered you to destroy a hut made of garbage and sticks because it is said a terrorist lives inside and is there now. You see two children and a woman right next to it on your screen. What are you going to do?
Oh, wait …
The Scorpions, the German pop metal band cosmically famous in the mid-to-late Eighties, have just issued Comeblack, an album of covers. Most of which are total crap. However, a redo of the Small Faces “Tin Soldier” is worthy, if in a special way. And I’ve set up the blog post so you can see how I mean it.
The Scorps “Tin Soldier,” with Klaus Meine singing, “I’m a little tin solder that wants to jump into your fire” and more, is — well, so very gay. And I mean this in a good way, think Village People and camp, so to speak.
I’ve set this up so you can see this version of “Tin Soldier” as the soundtrack for the trailer to Taxi Zum Klo, an old and rather charmingly amusing foreign movie about life in gay Germany.
For this to work, now — achtung (!), turn the sound on the first YouTube video to off. It’s called muting.
Now start the trailer. Then quick start the Scorpions tune in the lower embed. Ignore it, easy to do, and watch the trailer with the new music. (The trailer is only 1:35, enough to get the feel. But if you want, since the Scorps tune will still be playing, haul the trailer track button back into replay.)
Wunderbar!
Taxi Zum Klo, Taxi to the Toilet, herein as Scorpions zum Klo.
I could have stripped the music from the original movie trailer and overdubbed the video with the Scorpions track. But using this method, there’s no need to mess with the original owners with a new upload.
Still, I love the results and I hope you’ll appreciate it in the spirit intended. I like the movie and the tune.
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Gentle language describing the GOP as a party of angry old white bigots trying to re-fight and win the Civil War:
[When] you look at the numbers, it’s stunning how little this Republican primary electorate resembles the rest of the United States … They are much closer to the population of 1890 than of 2012.
From the New York Times, the piece continues: “[The nomination is] occurring in a different place, guided by talk-radio extremists and religious zealots, with only a vague resemblance to the states where it has taken place.”
This comes as no surprise. It’s easy to see the extremists are good at being horrible, particularly when financed by idiot billionaires who wonder why their old patriarchal jokes about women putting aspirin between their knees from Fifties aren’t funny anymore.
When I worked at the Morning Call newspaper in the late Eighties, editors wouldn’t allow such quotes into the newspaper, even if they were made by important townsmen at local meetings. People were gently saved from themselves.
Now this doesn’t happen. Perversely, there’s a big audience that loves hearing extremely angry white bigots be themselves.
It’s here in southern California in the guise of Los Angeles radio celebrities John and Ken.
Today, John & Ken were run off, finally, for repeatedly referring to Whitney Houston as a “crack ho.”
Since they’re the biggest thing in radio in the Southland it remains to be seen whether it sticks. It probably won’t for it’s not like the radio men don’t do such things regularly.
John and Ken have a huge audience precisely because they cater to the other California, not the place I live.
California, as anyone with any sense will tell you, is two states.
The one that matters, with the majority and a polyglot, diverse population, is found in the coastal cities and towns.
And there is the second California, mostly really angry white guys and their families, living in the interior. That audience likes to hear radio that blames all problems on people of other colors — the Asians, the Latinos, the “crack ho’s,” the homos, the liberals — and suggests we’d all be better off if they were either all in prison or given sound beatings.
That’s the audience of John and Ken.
The Los Angeles Times recently ran a profile of the two, one suggesting they are more nuanced than your average bigots.
I know Times people, have met many over the years, and saw them again at the memorial for my friend, Don. They don’t listen to John & Ken and they all knew the stuff their paper printed on them, in trying to appear fair and balanced, to coin a phrase, was nonsense.
Excerpted, all you need to know:
Broadcasting from a Democratic stronghold in a politically deep blue state, Kobylt and Chiampou have created one of the most popular local radio talk shows in the country by tapping into the contradiction that is California. Not a single Republican holds a statewide elected office. The Legislature is solidly Democratic … The angrier the Californians, the likelier they are to listen in.
For much of their tenure in Southern California, the New Jersey radio transplants have hammered away at illegal immigration. They spent weeks calling on Brown to veto the second half of the California Dream Act, which gives taxpayer-supported college grants to illegal immigrants …
They also gave out the cellphone number for Jorge-Mario Cabrera, spokesman for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, and urged listeners to give him a piece of their minds. More than 500 did, Cabrera said.
Transcripts of about 40 calls provided by Cabrera are filled with profanity. One man who called 42 times, Cabrera said, offered this sentiment: “You pig. I hope you die in your own vomit.”
The John & Ken audience is the same as the one ruling the GOP race.
Politically, John & Ken and their loyal fans have no power in California outside the ability to be spiteful and harassing. And if it weren’t for the newspaper, other media pieces and the occasional billboard, the majority of Californians wouldn’t know anything about them.
However, as in the small white idiot GOP caucuses in the heartland, as with the John & Ken fanbase, the loyalists are extremely focused. And this has been their time to show the rest of us what odious folks they truly are.
Over a year ago I started a tab on Ted Nugent, primarily to show how his special brand of stupid foaming-at-the-mouth incivility had traveled into the mainstream.
But today miscellaneous Ted Nugents, some far more well-dressed, are in the news daily.
Ted-style quote, still excessive and alienating as ever, has become the stuff through which the GOP rallies its own.
From some Republican dumping ground — Sangamon County — in Illinois, Ted collected his rather small, I would imagine, speaking fee — last week:
“We have a guy in the White House who is an absolute, America-hating punk,??? Nugent said. “And it isn’t really the punk’s fault. It’s we the people for bending over and letting the punk in the door.???
“How about a welfare program … (where) for every kid who gets a sandwich from the welfare program, there’s about 10,000 pigs buying bling-bling, dope and meth with my welfare money,???
“If we don’t fix the United States government this November, we will get exactly what we asked for,??? Nugent said, “and it won’t be the rabid coyote’s fault for getting into our living room – it will be our fault for not shooting him.???
“Prior to being elected President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln represented Sangamon County in the Illinois Legislature,” reads a Wikipedia entry on it.
Lincoln, as everyone knows, was fatally shot by John Wilkes Booth.
An amusing editorial cartoon of Ted Nugent standing before a portrait of Lincoln, from the Springfield, IL, newspaper is here. Click on it for a large version.
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Today the Alyona Show at RT covered accelerating drone seepage into US airspace, specifically the passed legislation green-lighting it. Over the past couple weeks, it’s also been subject to treatment at Steve Aftergood’s Secrecy Blog, one post of which notoriously generated a hailstorm of crazy wrath from the Drudge Army.
Drone are already used in the US. However, the new push is mostly all about money. Defense — read private contractor — spending in the areas of drone manufacturing and design, as well as cybersecurity, are two places relatively immune from future budget-cutting.
And the Alyona show aptly points to a chart on lobbying efforts from the drone industry and a startling but not unexpected doubling in greasing for it in 2011.
The drone industry knows there’s a good chance homeland security dollars can be used to lease drone flights to all manner of local government — read police — departments through the US. It’s a type of distributed payment in which the entire taxpayer base is used as a bank for what are effectively local point sales.
It’s been used throughout the last decade to equip police departments with all types of military equipment in the name of the war on terror. Leasing or buying drones, while much more expensive, is not fundamentally different.
Anyone who doubts this practice should probably review South Pasadena’s acquisition of a totally unnecessary armored car, as noted here a week or so ago.
If Burbank, for example, can have an armored car for a quarter of a million dollars on a grant from Homeland Security, why not a Predator drone for a couple million.
Southern California, including Pasadena, already has an able police air force, of sorts. It employs helicopters and over the course of fifteen years I’d have to say they’ve been cost effective. The Pasadena air force — one helicopter — has been successfully used to track and pin individuals of interest to the police (like car thieves or single gang members) using spotlights and infra-red optics. However, it is hard to imagine that a drone could do such a job better but not hard to imagine it being done and costing a lot more.
All because of the natural tendency, established in the last decade, in which police departments always wish to acquire additional military capability as long as they don’t have to pay for it from their local budget. And, with Senior Fellow GlobalSecurity.Org hat on, that is how I assume drone services will be offered to them by the industry.
In a Monday post at the Secrecy Blog, entitled “DoD Envisions ‘Routine’ UAS Access to US Airspace,” Aftergood includes a claim by a member of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International drone industry lobbying group:
“Over the next 15 years more than 23,000 … jobs could be created in the U.S. as the result of UAS integration into the [National Air Space.]”
When industry trade groups are boosting something they always include job creation claims as enticements.
Using simple arithmetic it is easy to put such claims in their proper perspective.
Using the drone industry’s own figure on job creation,. that’s 1,533 and one third jobs/year. Spread over a country the size of the United States at 311.5 million.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the employment/population ratio is 58 percent, which means 180.7 million people in the labor force this year.
Here’s the calculation:
1,533.33 divided by 180,700,000 = 8.48550083 × 10-6
That is, drone work is projected to contribute 8.48 x 10 to the MINUS SIXTH POWER, in terms of relative percentage to the current labor force.
Yeah, we need to so keep those unmanned aerial systems assembly lines humming and growing.
In other words, economic benefit to the middle class economy, outside of the profit to the manufacturers in the arms industry, is trivial.
Last week, LA Times Empire’s Dog Feces beat reporter W. J. Hennigan noted a protester at a trade conference for the drone industry, one in which the keynote address was delivered by the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee:
At a conference about the development of drones for use in combat, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Santa Clarita) was interrupted Wednesday by an anti-drone protester as he was giving a speech …
McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was discussing how efforts to curtail the military budget would hurt national security and the U.S. military when the protester interrupted him.
“These drones are playing god,” she said, carrying a banner that read “Stop Killer Drones.”
The crowd, made up of military contractors, military personnel and industry insiders, was surprised and hushed at first, but began booing when the protester continued to denounce the use of drones in combat.
Within seconds, hotel security personnel surrounded the woman. She was carried out …
Hat tip to Pine View Farm where I noticed the Alyona Show on RT bit.
Predator loans, iPhones and drones … “”The best startlingly real and truthful electric folk rock song this year!” — Joe Morgansternly, The Weekly National Standard Journal & Politico Review
Recommend it. Sing the chorus. You heard it here first.
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“And sent from on high, would come a prophet, in simple sleeveless vestments, to help the faithful defeat the wicked king, before he spreads his health care seed!”
Mark Fiore cartoon animation on the wisdom of the bishops. The guy who does the voices is teh shit!
Here. Go now.
Evil Boys, a Dead Boys tribute band, doing the best version of “(I Don’t Wanna Be No) Catholic Boy” on YouTube. Finns, yet. Who’d figure?
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AP Ticker takes on Charles Murray who’s latest bit of genius tries to make the case that shiftless downwardly mobile white people are that way because they don’t share the core values and ways of the more upscale tribe.
Krugman destroyed Murray and the thesis that the upper class has morals and that’s why it’s successful last week.
The Scrapple News bit features footage of old black and white film from when Philadelphia was a factory town a long time ago. Then the jobs all went to Mexico. And, finally, China. It’s congruent with the old 8mm of Fender yesterday, which went, first, to Mexico, and then to China.
The Murray argument also fits with the idiot claims that Americans simply lack the skills to fill manufacturing jobs in this country, as if making guitars or much worse, cleaning glass touch screens with organic solvent in the Chinese manufacturing district, requires some kind of right stuff the lazy non-upper class white tribe no longer possesses.
Trivia: The Nation’s submissions editor liked the “Mitt Romney Blues.” “Love it,” were the words. Not quite enough, or easy to fit for the magazine though.
So how do you catch a break around here? Anyone know?
Today Fender, the “iconic American” guitar maker, employs more people in China and Indonesia than it does in this country. However, at one time it was an obviously proud-to-be-American company. And average Americans, as seen in the above home movie, worked in guitar manufacturing for it. There was no rubbish spouted in newspapers about Americans not being skilled enough for a manufacturing economy.
Leo Fender and his fellow businessmen trained people and put them to work.
From past posts on Fender and other US guitar companies, firms that moved labor as quickly as possible overseas, turning their domestic operations into artisan shops:
An aerial view [of the old Fender factory] in “The Soul of Tone,??? a coffee table book on Fender, shows old pre-CBS Fender filling nine medium-sized warehouse-type buildings. CBS then immediately doubled the company’s manufacturing floor space.
The American manufacturers of rock and roll equipment have all offshored to China.
What remains in the US is essentially custom shop business. The American-made items are ten times or more the expense of the same models made in China. And the former are reserved largely for people with major label music contracts and that part of the upper middle and plutocrat class which dabbles in guitar playing. For them, the expensive American made guitar is a status symbol for a gilded age.
All down the line in the Guitar Center showroom, all the famous American-made guitar lines are now produced in China. Gretsch, like Fender, divided into two tiers. The famous big semi-hollow body guitars popularized in Nashville and Memphis, played by the inventors of rock and roll — the guys in the bands backing Elvis and Gene Vincent — are made in China. If you want to pay ten times or more for one, the premium models are still made here.
The middle class jobs and factories that produced those instruments which made the sound that went worldwide are gone. And this country, and the rest of the world, isn’t better for it. It was profit driven decision-making in a race to the bottom. And it destroyed tradition and a proud legacy in something the made the whole world a brighter place. You could be proud of working in a factory that made guitars and amplifiers for everybody in the USA.
Am I bitter? You bet your ass I am. The people who did this deserve stoning.
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