09.25.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 11:10 am by George Smith
I had National Security Agency director Keith Alexander pegged as one of the finest ministers of witless propaganda in service to the national security Bund after seeing a videotaped appearance of him before a crowd of DC sycophants, one where he delivered the now infamous claim that Chinese cyber-spying was bringing about the biggest transfer of wealth in history.
It was, Alexander implied, America’s economic future going up in smoke.
Most Americans still don’t know his name but now he gets lampooned in comic strips.
Yes, wow, Keith Alexander loves science-fiction movies. He is a nerd, as this great pic from a DefCon conference two years ago shows. (Since le affair de Snowden, he has been disinvited.)
Young hackers, listen to Keith Alexander, a tech chicken-head biter just like you, and please save our futures and the American economy from Chinese cyberwar.
Gag me. Next year, or perhaps a little later, he will be cashing in the chips as head of cyberwar rent-seeking at one of the big arms manufacturers.
And this is still perfect.
Keith Alexander — from the archives.
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09.24.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 1:47 pm by George Smith
Today, famous Robert Reich, in the NYT, discussed the prevalence of “American Bile” and how it allegedly differs from the past: “Add in the fact that most Americans no longer remember the era, from the Great Depression through World War II, when we were all in it together …”
We were never all in it together. And Robert Reich was two years old in 1948.
There just weren’t the modern communications networks to show the historic cracks, divisions and spectacular life-defining hates. Ask George McGovern how the nation came together to vote for Nixon. Oh wait, we can’t. Ask Hunter Thompson, oh wait … Ask Honest Abe, oh never mind.
To be fair, Reich mentions the Civil War once but in an odd way, in reference to pre-Civil War actors the “Know-Nothings” and the “anti-Masonic movement,” demonstrating Richard Hofstader’s “paranoid style in American politics.” It rather understates matters.
Mostly, Reich’s NYT piece makes the argument that if the economy wasn’t so rigged and most doing so badly, maybe he would not have been called a “Commie f—bag” by a Fox News watcher who approached him in the airport on one of this celebrity speaker jaunts and people would be more courteous with their tribal hates, keep the anger to themselves and we’d again come together as a nation.
All of this is in time to promote Reich’s new documentary, Inequality for All.
The trailer is sincere, spiced with just the right mix of the poignant and uplift in its music.
In the last five years the US has spawned an entertainment niche industry for the superstars of the left, one where they get to be the millionaire master explainers for the many Americans who have never been so fortunate.
(At this point I’m getting anywhere from three to sometimes a dozen daily e-mail solicitations from Obama for America, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DailyKos, MoveOn, and a couple others — including for the last two days — Robert Reich, which purport to say something urgent but which always come with a micro-donation button. It’s the same as spam and it has its category: Give money to the professional superstar left.)
Robert Reich, no matter what he does, would never be allowed to fail in America, just like the rest of the 1 percent. Making a documentary movie of him teaching and speaking about American inequality, being the master explainer from a position of renown, had less risk than me writing “The National Anthem” and hoping a couple thousand people would listen to it.
But Reich will gets lots of great reviews for being great and allegedly telling us something we didn’t know already.
I didn’t quite grasp the enormity of its disaster but Michael Moore’s Roger & Me, back in 1989, told the same story, better, first. The segment of it with the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” with the street drive-by of the ruins of Flint, Michigan, is and was devastating movie-making. And Moore was not a member of the elite left when he made it.
Fuck the celebrity professional left edutainment and collections machine.
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09.23.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll, WhiteManistan at 2:41 pm by George Smith
If you’ve been wondering about what’s behind part of the GOP hate party on food stamps, it’s outrage over Jason Greenslate, a San Diego surfer with a hard rock band called RattLife, who has an EBT card.
Fox News made a special example of him and the GOP has been using video of Greenslate to inflame people with the implication the SNAP program has expanded because of alleged moochers like the “beach bum.”
“You can no longer sit on your couch or ride a surfboard like Jason in California and expect the federal taxpayer to feed you,” said Kansas GOPer Tim Huelskamp when the House food stamp cuts were voted up last week.
Greenslate, who cooperated with Fox in hopes of getting publicity for RattLife: “I do work. I’m just not making any money. I’m setting up a career for myself.”
Darrell “Benghazi” Issa of California delivered this unintentionally amusing quote: “Clearly it’s an example of somebody using a government program that is unreasonable, considering he has chosen to make less money and is using public assistance for a lifestyle decision … He obviously is anticipating being very rich later and not paying back the money.”
Getting rich playing in a rock band, yeah, that happens so easily.
Anyway, this is a standard right wing media trick — finding one person getting a detested government benefit, in this case, a food stamp recipient, ideally in a blue state, someone most offensive to WhiteManistan. And Jason Greenslate is certainly that. His band, Rattlife can be found on YouTube.
Rattlife is an 80s-90s Guns n Roses in Hollywood style-act and the videos are worth checking out for the comments alone, now made by the terminally enraged in WhiteManistan who seem to think if they get angry enough, they can will Greenslate out of existence or, at least, maybe get him arrested.
:I don’t think that one person [in a Fox News story] should be the decision for 47 million people [on food stamps],” Greenslate told the media today, which is certainly a sensible statement.
There’s another reality here, unstated. Job opportunities and wages are so poor in southern California that if Jason Greenslate worked the kind of more traditional “jobs” actually available, like wait staff at Starbucks, he’d still be eligible for the SNAP program, anyway.
I like Jason Greenslate and because he so pisses off the party of extremists who have used him in a right wing media gotcha, you should like him, too.
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09.21.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall at 10:28 am by George Smith
Here’s a good explanation (at Salon) of the divestment of manufacturing for cheap prices, a government decision supported by all the presidents we’ve had since Richard Nixon. The end of making stuff brought down the middle class.
The story makes the point, now made by many: You can’t have a country like the United States if you generate nothing but low-paying service jobs for the support of the lords. It’s simply a modern feudal system. The great things the country was known for in science and progress post-WWII won’t be sustainable.
The Silicon Valley will never save the world by a bubble of extreme wealth, iKit, big data and web applications surrounded by a land of have-nots.
Anyway, to curb inflation in the 80’s, Paul Volcker tightened up monetary policy, setting the lending rate so high people couldn’t afford loans for cars and houses. It slowed the economy and utterly destroyed the steel industry, something I saw firsthand, living in Bethlehem. I even wrote a hard rock tune about it.
So sing happy songs on the radio and watch as the world crumbles down … And it’s hard for me to stifle a yawn as the American dream hits the ground.
The narrative of social and national decline extends through much American literature during the last 40 years. If you read Friday Night Lights, Buzz Bissinger’s book on high school football in Odessa, Texas, a good deal of the background story is on the ruin of the middle class economy in the region, brought on by just this thing.
In the end the Salon writer returns to Flint, Michigan.
Made famous in 1989 by Michael Moore’s Roger & Me, the first movie to show exactly what was being done to the country through what became an acclaimed documentary on the ruin of Flint as an auto-manufacturing center.
Flint never recovered, nobody did.
An excerpt:
No American city has suffered more during the Age of Deregulation than Flint. In 1978, Flint had 80,000 automaking jobs, and the highest per capita income in the nation. Today, it has 6,000 automaking jobs, and the highest murder rate in the English-speaking world. Instead of Corvettes and speedboats, the yards are filled with mean dogs.
Roger and Me: Beach Boys tune from Andrew Reznicek on Vimeo.
Hat tip to Delaware Liberal, where I spied it.
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09.20.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:20 pm by George Smith
You know, that new sharing economy thing where sociopaths from America’s upper middle servant class or some miscellaneous toff uses innovation — TaskRabbit or driving around on Skid Row leveraging the destitute — creatively employing underutilized human meat assets?
From the Los Angeles Times, on the iPhone store in Pasadena’s Old Town, on famous Colorado Street (’bout a quarter mile from me):
Pasadena Police Lt. Jason Clawson confirmed that a fight broke out about 9 a.m. as a man left the [Apple store in Pasadena] with multiple iPhones. Several homeless people said the man picked up dozens of people at homeless shelters downtown, drove them to Pasadena and promised to pay them $40 — $20 for each iPhone voucher they were able to secure.
Clawson said the fight broke out when people who were in line and hired by the man began fighting with him because they said they weren’t being paid enough, Clawson said. Police escorted the man from the scene, he said.
“It didn’t go right. I stood out here all night,??? said Dominoe Moody, 43, who said he was picked up along with several vanloads of people at a homeless mission.
Many of the homeless who had been hired to stand in line — but later stranded at the store — lingered near the store after the arrests, some hanging out on the corner across the street and a few continuing to stand in line. One homeless man was escorted out by an Apple employee after wandering into the store with no money …
Apple and no money go together like oil and water.
Anyway, seems like there really ought to be an iTunes store app for this, called iBum, one that locates homeless missions or hang-outs near you when it’s time to find someone to stand in line for the upgrade.
“Customers waiting outside the Apple store on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica on Thursday night were grumbling about a well-dressed man who had hired two unemployed men to wait in line for him,” continued the Times.
“The man, who said his name was Sam but declined to give his last name, said he worked at a ‘high-profile Santa Monica app company’ and needed a new phone immediately because he had lost his phone recently … [He] briefly considered hiring a line sitter on TaskRabbit — a website that enables people to hire others for small errands — ‘but it was too expensive.’ ”
iChisel to the rescue.
Brings out the best in people while transforming our lives from gold into lead.
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Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 1:40 pm by George Smith
Unwise.
And now officially a pariah.
Fired in WhiteManistan:
(AP) Gilberton Borough Council members said Thursday night they plan to fire Mark Kessler, nearly two months after voting to suspend the only full-time member of the town’s police force …
In January, Kessler drafted a resolution the borough adopted that calls for nullifying any federal, state or local regulations that infringe on the Second Amendment.
This leaves continuing to grow the militia, called the Constitution Security Force.
Mark “Gunny” Kessler of Schuylkill County, PA, from the archives.
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Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 11:06 am by George Smith
From the American Journal of Medicine:
“The number of guns per capita per country was a strong and independent predictor of firearm related death in a given country, whereas the predictive power of the mental illness burden was of borderline significance … Regardless of exact cause and effect, however, the current study debunks the widely-quoted hypothesis that guns make a nation safer.”
Accompanying data shows US the obvious world leader.
Journal article here.
Full size.
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Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 9:14 am by George Smith
Full size.
Krugman today: “[It] grows increasingly hard to see how … we can avoid a government shutdown — and … the even more frightening prospect of a debt default … this political moment of truth was going to happen sooner or later. We might as well have it now.”
Bring on the Constitutional crisis. See if the crazy backed and elected by corporate wealth in 2010 can bring down the government and the economy.
Why not?
They voted to toss a few million off food stamps yesterday and set the stage for closing the government over Obamacare today. They should have what they want, a doomsday, and see what it’s about.
No more suspense.
Wreck it, do it, stop the checks, stop the planes, stop the services, send homeland security home, stop the spending in government/military towns, stop it all, bring on the whirlwind and blight in the “greatest nation on Earth,” let’s get it on. With hands over hearts. God Bless America!
The catalog of PARIAH covers. Collect them all.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 8:35 am by George Smith
Ted Nugent:
How many more slaughters have to occur before we reverse this very deadly course mandated by clueless bureaucrats?
Liberalism is a death sentence. Don’t buy it.
It took inter-agency joint SWAT forces to take him out. Therefore the NRA should spin up a new program to train soldiers on bases on the use of guns in self-defense. The ones allowed to bear arms should be more heavily armed. And self-defense guns should be mandated for all janitors, secretaries and whatever other civilian workers there may be.
Trivia: Blog comments filter catches astro-turf to domain welovegun.com, a spam site in Arabic, used as a front for advertising and backlinks to the usual goods. On access it attempts to load at least 3000 elements.
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