Ask George Smith e-mail: webmaster at dick destiny
If you don’t think it’s funny you can’t be my friend.
A little over two hours of recording, not bad for a quick joke where I had to come up with a song to fit a comical monster movie vibe. And, yeah, except for the drums which are programmed, I do play all that stuff.
I’ve been calling him Ol’ Syphilis, but this is good from a joke column at Politico:
“I hate to say this, but if Ryan wants to run for national office again, he’ll probably have to wash the stench of Mitt Romney off of him,??? Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Republican Party of Iowa, told The New York Times on Sunday.
Coming from a resident of Iowa, a state where people are polite even to soybeans, this was a powerful condemnation of the Republican nominee.
Though Ryan had already decided to distance himself from the floundering Romney campaign, he now feels totally uninhibited. Reportedly, he has been marching around his campaign bus, saying things like, “If Stench calls, take a message??? and “Tell Stench I’m having finger sandwiches with Peggy Noonan and will text him later.???
Even before the stench article appeared, there was a strong sign that Ryan was freeing himself from the grips of the Romney campaign.
It sucked in Paul Krugman.
Hey, it happens. A couple weeks ago I fell for a similar joke piece in which Todd Akin was said to have told a political reporter gayness was cured by breast milk.
Anyway, when everyone is making your campaign the butt of jokes, it’s over. No one is bothering to hide the contempt.
Another bad 24 hours, by viral accident, for Mitt Romney.
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Maybe you can have a temporary minimum wage job in retail with bad hours and no benefits for three months this year, ringing the cash register for stuff made in China. You may not be able to afford holiday gifts but you might be able to wrap or bag them!
There are also signs of an improving jobs picture. The best gift this holiday season may be more jobs.
Toys “R” Us said Tuesday it will take on 45,000 seasonal workers this holiday — 5,000 more than last year.
Kohl’s, the department store chain, is adding more than 52,000 holiday workers, about 10 percent more than last year.
Target’s seasonal workforce will be 80,000 to 90,000, down slightly from a year ago.
But Walmart is adding 50,000 jobs, slightly more than last year, and Gamestop will add 17,000.
But a much better job would be to be the kind of journalist writing these evergreen stories, positions which pay more, come with benefits and, perhaps, longer duration. Plus you get to think and act like you eat paste all day.
“Apple has already sold more than 5 million iPhone 5s,” it reads. “That doesn’t sound like an economy in recession,” said a vice president from GameStop.
Lessee, 5 million iPhones versus 46-47 million unemployed/underemployed or on food stamps. Ignore the eaters of paste.
You’ll get to work into January, too. Returns, ya see.
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American human right researchers on both coasts — at Stanford out here, and NYU, have published a collaborative study on the drone campaigns in Pakistan. And it isn’t pretty. For practical purpose, drones are conducting a campaign of terror despite official blandishments to the contrary.
The drone campaign is also free of democratic control.
Far more civilians have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas than U.S. counter-terrorism officials have acknowledged, a new study by human rights researchers at Stanford University and New York University contends.
The report, “Living Under Drones,” also concludes that the classified CIA program has not made America any safer and instead has turned the Pakistani public against U.S. policy in the volatile region.
Notably, this story was not written by the newspaper’s drone flack, W. J. Hennigan, who over the space of the last couple years has been something of a p.r. office for the armed drone industry.
From the executive summary of Living Under Drones:
[US drone strike policies] cause considerable and under-accounted-for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury. Drones hover twenty-four hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning. Their presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities. Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves. These fears have affected behavior. The US practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims. Some community members shy away from gathering in groups, including important tribal dispute-resolution bodies, out of fear that they may attract the attention of drone operators. Some parents choose to keep their children home, and children injured or traumatized by strikes have dropped out of school. Waziris told our researchers that the strikes have undermined cultural and religious practices related to burial, and made family members afraid to attend funerals. In addition, families who lost loved ones or their homes in drone strikes now struggle to support themselves.
The Living Under Drones researchers recommend the US government institute a new set of procedure, all of which will presumably be found quite unpalatable by the Obama administration.
They include: “[ensuring] independent investigations into drone strike deaths.” conducting “robust investigations and, where appropriate, prosecutions [while establishing] compensation programs for civilians harmed by US strikes,” and fulfilling “its international humanitarian and human rights law obligations with respect to the use of force, including by not using lethal force against individuals who are not members of armed groups …”
Journalists, it advises, “should cease the common practice of referring simply to ‘militant’ deaths, without further explanation. All reporting of government accounts of ‘militant’ deaths should include acknowledgment that the US government counts all adult males killed by strikes as ‘militants’ …”
Naturally, there has been a loud cry against the incessant escalating use of drones abroad. In a slew of cartoons, editorials and even some news pieces, the drone campaign has been heavily criticized.
All without effect, demonstrating how the drone program has gone completely beyond democratic control. Indeed, the use of drones to kill people in the poorest and most desperate places of the world has not even been a momentary topic for discussion in the current presidential race.
Osama bin Laden is dead and al Qaeda has been rendered virtually non-operational, except for moments of opportunity in places wracked by civil war and total societal breakdown.
Yet, eleven years after 9/11, the eye barely blinks when news stories come across the wire on the thrumming of General Atomics’ Reaper drones in the air above the blighted areas of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. And the subsequent technological vengeance brought down on those in the targeted areas.
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When you have to start you column like this (it’s like starting one with “It’s not always a bad idea to beat your wife”):
Gold is not just a lunatic fringe investment
Gold is often derisively referred to as an investment that only kooks who are preparing for the end of the world in a bunker can love. But it might be time to stop with all the gold bashing.
Sure, plans to return to the gold standard may still seem a bit extreme. (Sorry Ron Paul and your loyal minions!)
Over at CNN, it’s peppered with “I am not a gold bug” and the disclaimer, “The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Paul R. La Monica.”
At $1770 an ounce the average American in 2012 can really afford to make a killing in gold hoarding, lemme tell ya.
“Now I’m not trying to suggest that gold is the new Apple,” writes the paste eater, trying to have the glue and eat it, too.
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The new fad is mini-series TV for the web. A couple months ago Yahoo rolled out “Electric City,” an animated science-fiction drama starring its bank roller, Tom Hanks as the central figure. I watched two episodes, as thrilling as watching mud dry.
Today Yahoo started “Cybergeddon,” a very poor woman’s “24,” underwritten by Symantec.
You know what it’s all about. Push software button remote terrorism, with all the scenarios and myths the salesmen and fear-mongers have delivered over the last ten years.
Since the episodes are only 10 minutes long, there’s a lot of push-buttoning to be shoehorned into each segment.
The premier, uniquely entitled “Push of a Button,” has its central character, a young lady of the FBI who has just nabbed her first cyber-terrorist in Prague, dumping her boyfriend special agent because she prizes her career track more.
The cyberterrorist is sent to prison in the Ukraine where his term is cut short because he has a smartphone which he pushes a button on to deposit a quarter of a million dollars in the accounts of his guards.
A deal’s a deal — so instead of beating him to death and keeping the cash — the jailers let him out.
Upon which he pushes another button on his smartphone to launch an attack on the, wait for it, water systems of southern California. A virus, said to be like Stuxnet, you know — the one we wrote to attack Iran, has been activated in Los Angeles.
It’s a laughable subterfuge, regularly peddled by cybersecurity salesmen.
Water in Los Angeles county is not centrally controlled or even in one spot. It’s all over, in the little sub-communities and tracts, in the valleys and the foothills, and the smaller to medium-sized cities of the Los Angeles metropolitan complex.
It’s distributed, there’s no way to centrally attack it, or to even attack one piece that would immediately threaten to endanger millions of people. Sadly for terrorists, if not scriptwriters or cybersecurity salesmen, water is durable in the US.
From a month or so ago, when the usual quacks were peddling the idea in hopes of getting some cybersecurity legislation passed:
For example, my brain tells me, and it’s usually pretty good at these things, that it would be virtually impossible to affect water in Los Angeles County short of destroying the Owens Valley, the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the Colorado River and the Colorado River Aqueduct. It would take an almost irreversible blackout in California to hinder the flow of water into LA County.
What, could hackers or cyber-soldiers blow up Pasadena Water & Power or make the complex unusable and all the water unpotable?
Contrary to what may be popular belief, huge vats of poison are not stored right with water so that a “the push of a button” can contaminate it. Too much chlorine, or adding a little too much alum, would have only negligible effects.
Southern California would ignore you, “Push of a Button” cyberterrorist.
The traffic on the freeway through Pasadena would start jamming around three, as usual. The sun would blast the concrete on the el Molino bridge as I walk over it, maybe to Bobby’s for a soda and a taco.
And that’s all I have to say about this piece of pandering crap. I jumped on the grenade.
Cybergeddon — “The Push of a Button” — is here.
Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy chieftain endorses Todd Akin:
Former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich broke with national party leaders and endorsed Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, saying other Republicans must “in good conscience??? do the same.
“If Todd and the people of Missouri prove it’s a close race, what’s the moral case for not backing the Republican nominee???? Gingrich said.
The moral case? That’s an easy one: You shouldn’t vote for dicks.
Newt Gingrich never does anything without getting paid. One wonders the amount of ransom he required for this?
Tricia Romano, once an editor at the Village Voice, has a Twitter story stream that succinctly described what Michael Lacey of New Times did to the New York altie when it bought the franchise in 2006.
It’s here.
Over the course of seven years, Lacey torched the place until, this weekend, the Voice was sold off to someone else:
Our parent company, Village Voice Media, has been sold to a group of the company’s editors and publishers in a deal that includes the Voice and our 12 sister publications across the country … In a letter to staff announcing the sale, VVM Executive Editor Mike Lacey says he and business partner Jim Larkin “never wished to be the last ones at this remarkable party.”
From 1999 to 2006 I wrote many things for the Voice, including a column on the Iraq war called Weapon of the Week, a cover story, essays and lots and lots of pop music reviews.
When Lacey bought the Voice, he and New Times minion proceeded to fire every editor in the place, naturally including all the people I had written for and pitched to.
The rancor towards them in Romano’s comments fairly reflects what was done to the place.
Under Lacey the Village Voice lost 40 percent of its readership, according to a digest news piece on the matter at Poynter.
Village Voice Media has lost advertising revenue over Lacey’s dual ownership of Backpage, an often sued site infamous for its sex-trafficking and hooker ads.
Lacey, reads the Poynter piece, will devote his time to defending Backpage.
The company split appears aimed at slowing an exodus of national and local advertisers from Village Voice Media in recent months.
In April, the drug company Pfizer agreed to remove its advertising from VVM’s flagship publication, the Village Voice, after pressure from activists who contacted advertisers directly about Backpage’s adult content.
In an April letter, Pfizer sent to a New York based-activist at the forefront of the campaign to pressure VVM to shut down Backpage, which the activist provided to Reuters, a Pfizer representative wrote “we received your inquiry, and Pfizer has decided to remove its advertising in the Village Voice.” Nearly a dozen similar letters from advertisers were provided to Reuters to show that the campaign has been effective.
American Airlines, Best Buy, AT&T, Ikea, H&M, IHOP, Macy’s and the Miami Dolphins professional football team have all stopped advertising in VVM publications in recent months.
Chalk up a small victory for Nicholas Kristof who had used his position and column at the New York Times to publicly shame the Voice over
Backpage.
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From the wire, on an iJunk manufacturing plant in China:
About 2,000 Chinese employees of an iPhone assembly company fought a pitched battle into the early hours of Monday, forcing the huge electronics plant where they work to be shut down.
Authorities in the northern city of Taiyuan sent 5,000 police to restore order after what the plant’s Taiwanese owners Foxconn Technology Group said was a personal dispute in a dormitory that erupted into a mass brawl.
However, some employees and people posting messages online accused factory guards of provoking the trouble by beating up workers at the factory, which employs about 79,000 people and is owned by the world’s largest contract maker of electronic goods.
Apple uber alles. Gotta have the iJunk.
“Comments posted online, however, suggested security guards may have been to blame … In a posting on the Chinese Twitter-like microblog site Sina Weibo, user ‘Jo-Liang’ said that four or five security guards beat a worker almost to death,” reads the story.
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Mitt Romney is the syphilis of presidential candidates. He is the worst example I’ve witnessed. Every day brings something new, repugnant, and or stupid from him — like a fresh chancre sore:
When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous. And she was choking and rubbing her eyes. Fortunately, there was enough oxygen for the pilot and copilot to make a safe landing in Denver. But she’s safe and sound.
Ol’ Syhilis had flown in to soCal to raise money at one of his infamous 50k a plate do’s.
And while he couldn’t get elected to be a dog catcher in the state there are always handfuls of fascist toffs willing to come to Beverly Hills for milking.
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