More limited in scope and apparently more capable of interesting real publishers are secession novels. Call it a semi-literary genre for WhiteManistan readers without quite enough spine to actually fire on their local Fort Sumter.
In another way of speaking, Tom Clancy knock-offs for neo-Confederates.
Anyway, the Wall Street Journal did a brief review of a few which envision the secession of Texas.
One book with a major publisher, St. Martin’s Press, is “Don’t Mess with Travis” by Bob Smiley, which envisions a Texas governor driven to secession after he discovers a federal plot to siphon off the state’s natural resources and ship them to California.
“We wanted to show the absurdities on both sides of the aisle,” says Mr. Smiley, a television writer in Los Angeles and former researcher for the late William F. Buckley Jr. Of secession, he adds, “It obviously remains something people in Texas think could and maybe even should happen.”
“Alan R. Erwin learned how seriously some took the idea in 1979, when he wrote a pioneering work of Texas secessionist fiction, ‘The Power Exchange’—and found that some Texans considered him the leader of a real revolution,” adds the newspaper near the end.
“I kept telling them, ‘You need to read my book, because we don’t win,'” Mr. Erwin said of the actual [Texas] secessionists,” to the WSJ.
Makes me think I should turn WhiteManistan into a short story.
Discuss.
Note: You really should appreciate that I did such a good job with the surf rock. Because I care about those kinds of details.
You don’t really think a few lines of computer code are going to crash the world down around are ears, do you? I’m disappointed, I’m disappointed in you, Sherlock …
I knew you’d fall for it. That’s your weakness. You always want things
to be clever. — Jim Moriarty, The Reichenbach Fall
Took a while to get to it but the New Yorker ran such a thoroughly insipid piece on the matter of cyberwar, it deserves mention for its slapdash collection of pasted-together assertions and idiotic anecdotes.
The distinction between a war with guns and a war with bits is blurring.
(But did the New Yorker writer ask for the opinions on the matter from those bombed or shot?)
Throughout the conflict in Syria, rebels have used YouTube to foment outrage and to tell their stories. A sentence can tell you that blood flows in the streets, but a handheld camera can show it.
The government in Damascus meanwhile has sent out malware and published its own videos …
The so-called Syrian Electronic Army spun the U.S. stock market into a panic by hacking into the Twitter account of the Associated Press …
More recently, hackers broke into the Twitter feed of The Onion [and posted something inane] …
The Internet has helped to open up [Iran] in recent years, as Evan Osnos has written. But the government remains far more lion than wildebeest.
(As Evan Osnos has written. Of course!)
On shutting off the Internet: It’s terrible for business, creates chaos, and enrages the world.
(Did shutting off the Internet in Syria enrage you or appear to enrage many of your friends? Do you think it enraged the President?)
Last year, the security firm Renesys published a study on just how hard it would be to shut off the Internet in countries around the world. Sixty-one were at “severe risk …”
Cyberwar explained, allegedly. Or, rather, cyberwar discussion as a squirt of intellectual air-freshener for the posh.
“Nicholas Thompson is a grandson of Paul Nitze, one of the subjects of his most recent book, which gave him unprecedented access while researching his book. In March 2013, Thompson received a 21st Century Leader award from the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. He is also an acoustic guitarist and has released three albums of original instrumental music.” — Wikipedia
“This biographical article is written like a résumé … Please help improve it,” reads the site.
It’s hard to believe a guy volunteered to tell this story to the New York Times (although the personal business stimulus may be valuable):
SAN FRANCISCO — In the month since two men violently shoved him to the ground and stole his iPhone 5, Dalton Huckaby has almost completely stopped calling his mother. It usually takes him a full day to text his friends back. Nothing personal, but Mr. Huckaby is just too frightened to take his replacement iPhone out in public.
“I never thought this would happen to me,??? said Mr. Huckaby, 39, a personal trainer, who since the robbery, which he called an iCrime, has become the kind of person who patrols his neighborhood streets in San Francisco warning strangers about the dangers of using their smartphones out in the open.
“Happen to see about the horrible violence you incurred …” reads the Facebook page.
The New York Times has advice to keep you and your iPhone out of the grasp of predators:
BE LIKE A DOLPHIN Dolphins sleep with one eye open, to stay semi-alert to lurking predators and unexpected danger. If you need to use your phone in the wilds of the subway or sidewalk, do so discreetly, reserving at least a portion of your cognitive capacity for minding what is happening around you. Avoid leaving your phone on the table at restaurants, bars and coffee shops where it can easily be snatched …
That’s the weekend’s top Culture of Lickspittle entry. And while street heists for consumer electronics are unfortunate, they’re not uncommon. And I doubt that using one example as intellectual air freshener for the haves and its servant class is particularly helpful.
Particularly with the art and phraseology that came with this one.
“It took a well-coordinated and very busy industrious criminal gang — a directed mob,” said George Smith, senior fellow with Washington, D.C.-based think tank GlobalSecurity.org.
“If you have such a similar mob you can put together, you can think about trying to duplicate this type of thing,” Smith said. “But you’ll have to have some startup capital, since it’s not quite something you can just walk out the door and assemble off the cuff.”
“The picture of two of the New York errand boys flaunting their stack of bundled cash in the car won’t strike anyone as being from the high end of innovation and thinking,” Smith pointed out.
Hiring local petty criminals to do the dirty work also increases the risk of exposure, said Sean Sullivan, a security adviser with the F-Secure security firm in Helsinki, Finland.
“The need to have lots of money mules to withdraw all the cash seems to be the big complication in getting away with the crime. That leaves a trail for law enforcement” …
Or, as a commenter on Slashdot wryly observed, “This is not how bank fraud should be done. The right and proper way is to become too big to fail, too big to jail, rig the LIBOR rates, create systematic rigging, award oneself huge salaries and bonuses, threaten worldwide economic collapse, hold governments to ransom and get huge bailout money.”
Global banking, apparently particularly in the Middle East, can’t secure itself. And it is probably quite prone to criminal recruitment of insiders.
The larger issue looming is how does one secure a financial system the average person, or worker, has no faith in?
In the US, bankers and giant banks are now among the most hated. How do you save or batten down a system when attacks on the system are met with public indifference?
I’d remarked in November that Roscoe Bartlett’s removal from the House of Representatives had crippled the Cult of Electromagnetic Crazy. His caucus leader replacement, Trent Franks of Arizona, is a birther nobody even the most crazy in the GOP pay no mind.
This week the Cult had another spike put through its zombie head with the revelation that the Heritage Foundation’s “immigration study” was co-authored by a man, Jason Richwine, easily tied to a white bigot organization on the web.
I’m not going to go into the details. It’s big news on the political blogs.
But over the years electromagnetic pulse doom, aka the astro-turfing lobby for bombing Iran and buying more missile defense, has also been one of Heritage’s hobby horses.
Heritage Foundation was never a think tank. It’s just another propaganda mill funded by wealth to provide convenient studies and experts for the worst GOP impulses.
So anything that blows it up, like this, is very good.
Wheee! The Heritage Foundation is engaged in frantic damage control; not only did its big anti-immigration-reform report turn out to be a steaming heap of, um, bad research, but one of the co-authors turns out to have a serious white supremacist background.
It would be a terrible thing to happen to a serious think tank. But Heritage isn’t a serious think tank, which means that all of this is just a bit of overdue poetic justice.
Remember, Heritage came up with the ludicrous claim that the Ryan plan would cut unemployment to 2.8 percent, then tried to scrub the result from its records. It produced ludicrous “studies??? purporting to show that small farmers and businessmen were victims of the estate tax. And there are many, many more examples.
So, adios, Heritage and buddies in the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy. It’s been almost twenty years and I’ll miss you. But only a little.
Infamous plastic 3D gun-printing schnook Cody Wilson had more good things happen to him this week when a division of the US government ordered him to take down his digital gun plan for violating the ITAR.
It was promptly rehosted on the Pirate Bay. And I am sure his many libertarian supporters banged their keyboards in joy while opening thier Bitcoin wallets for more philanthropic donations to the cause.
Anarchy! Liberty! Death to all fascists! Except us.
Wilson, who continues to call his operation a non-profit company, as if it’s performing a service to mankind had this to say to one of the tech rags:
“This is the conversation I want,??? Wilson said. “Is this a workable regulatory regime? Can there be defense trade control in the era of the Internet and 3D printing????
“The future of distributed technologies in the Internet is that no one has control of the information,” he told Mashable. “This is more than guns now, man, this is about the Internet, this is about information.”
Well, I don’t know, Cody. Can you make highly enriched uranium on your 3D printer? Perhaps a short range ballistic missile?
All right, let’s make it easy. A small plastic cluster bomb. Something that fairly easily explodes into bits of plastic shrapnel when triggered.
During the height of the war on terror you hardly ever saw anyone in the professional ranks with the nerve to say that grubbing for more defense research funding on the back of fear was inadvisable.
I am a scientist. I am not opposed to research. It is essential for the similar preparation required for either a bioweapons assault or a naturally emerging disease. Nevertheless, a fear-based crisis response, because public officials happened to be among the targets, is self-defeating.
Academics should resist the temptation to exploit the ricin letters to obtain more resources for their research. There are already ongoing scientific studies of ricin, including some that employ the toxin to kill cancer cells. We don’t need an infusion of money into ricin research. I don’t claim to know the motives of the ricin letter mailer or whether he got the idea from a television show. I do know that overreaction encourages future terrorists.
The author, David Sanders, is “an associate professor of biological sciences at Purdue, is working on a Howard Hughes Medical Institute-sponsored curriculum-development project,” reads the newspaper.
“[Environmental] sensors for true biological agents are and will be for the foreseeable future wastes of money,” he adds.
Sanders also writes that the over-reaction to things like the Dutschke ricin-mailings inspires other terrorists.
He is echoing what I have written for years. The ocean of print, television and Internet news on the subject, during the war on terror years, established the received wisdom in the minds of would-be terrorists that biological and chemical warfare are easy to do.
As one consequence, many bad people have maintained an interest in fiddling with castor seeds.
It is fortunate that reality does not match the national belief that a ricin weapon is easy to make, simply by pounding castor seeds, and J. Everett Dutschke’s tainted letters were, in the final measure, just a damn nuisance.
After the ricin letters arrived and made news, a scientist and one company did immediately go rent-seeking.
The US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland, has developed a vaccine called RVEc, which protected mice that were exposed to inhaled ricin.2 The vaccine has also been tested in human volunteers, who subsequently developed antibodies to the toxin. But further human testing is needed, and it is not clear whether the Department of Defense will continue to fund the vaccine’s development.
The other leading vaccine candidate, RiVax, is made by a company called Soligenix, based in Princeton, New Jersey. The vaccine was initially developed by Ellen Vitetta, an immunologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and batches made by her group have been tested in animals. Those batches have also been found to be safe in healthy human volunteers, in whom they stimulated the production of antibodies.
But Soligenix has not yet tested the safety and effectiveness of its own batches of RiVax. The company’s development efforts have slowed as a result of budget constraints at its funding agency, the NIAID, says Vitetta.
“It basically is not going anywhere,??? she says. “It’s disappointing and upsetting.??? After an event such as the latest ricin mailings, “everyone wants to know where the vaccines are. Somebody has to think this work is important enough to fund us and let us finish it.???
Soligenix’s work on the vaccine is currently funded by a US$9.4-million NIAID grant, but further testing in animals to prove the treatment’s effectiveness would cost between $20 million and $40 million, says Chris Schaber, the company’s president.
Soligenix is actively working to develop vaccines for bioterrorism agents such as ricin, but funding the research remains a challenge, according to company president and CEO, Christopher J. Schaber.
“Every biodefense program needs to be sponsored by the government,??? said Schaber. “We don’t spend our own money on biodefense. The company could not take off with biodefense unless we secure a large procurement contract from the government, which are typically in the hundreds of millions of dollars …
Soligenix’s share price rose 20 percent this week after the ricin-laced letters to government officials were publicized.
Soligenix would make money if the government stockpiles the vaccine, but the research has to be funded and it has to get FDA approval before the company can procure a government contract.
“We’ve taken this very far with the support of the NIH (National Institutes of Health), but we really need to get a larger contract with more funding to allow us to move forward,??? Schaber said. “The government many times doesn’t move that quickly on these things, especially because a lot of people haven’t died.
Soligenix’s stock, which isn’t worth a great deal, shot up on the 16th and 17th, the day ricin letters to Roger Wicker and the President were discovered, boosted by speculators. A letter had been sent to a judge in Tupelo, MS, on the 10th but did not make the news until after the letters had been discovered in the nation’s capital.
J. Everett Dutsche was arrested on April 27 by the FBI.
Soligenix, a company that exists only because of taxpayer spending during the war on terror — from the archives.
Q: You say on your website “Styx and REO deserve me.??? What does that mean?
A: Make no mistake, those incredible virtuosos in both Styx and REO were and continue to be inspired by the same black American musical heroes that my band and I are inspired by. I guarantee you that each member of all three bands was lured into the world of music by Chuck Berry, Bo Diddly, Little Richard and of course the Stones and Beatles who were inspired by Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, Lightning Hopkins and all the original black soul music masters. Even the sweetest music moments by those bands are delivered with real all-American gung-ho soulfulness and we couldn’t be more proud to bring our Ted Nugent Black Power Tour 2013 to the same music-loving fun gluttons that love all three bands. We deserve each other!
Q: About a year ago, you said “If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will be either dead or in jail by this time next year.??? Neither has happened. Please explain.
A: This president and his administration are so out of control that they are creating an America that does not resemble the America of our founders, and good people like me are their enemy.
Q: Because of some of your comments, you were visited by the Secret Service and were disinvited from performing at Fort Knox. Can you comment on this?
A: We indeed had a wonderful, professional meeting of mutual respect, and they left knowing what they arrived knowing: that I did nothing wrong and that they wasted their time responding to dishonest liberal Democrats who lied through their teeth.
Q: America is, I think, at its most divisive. What is the solution to bringing the country back together and can you find any common ground with the other side?
A: We the people are fighting back stronger than ever and I still believe that the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, the American Way, will prevail and return soon. We need to show unity in we the people having a dream of nonviolence upgrade for our beloved America …
The reporter asked good questions. But this doesn’t work with Ted Nugent as he responds only through e-mail.
You’ll have to admit “nonviolence upgrade,” coming from Nugent, adds to the already long list of howlers.
