Ask George Smith e-mail: webmaster at dick destiny
At 26 seconds — Interviewer: “You’ve just gone about how all the liberties in America, doors being beaten down for people using the wrong type of bow and arrow … you’re an accomplished writer.”
At 2:09 — Nugent: “[The] America haters hate me. That proves I’m doing God’s work because the devil is upset.”
Did you ever wonder what happened to old Saturday Night Live comic, Victoria Jackson? She has a web show. Here’s an episode.
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Halliburton loses a high-intensity neutron source.
Laughable quote from lickspittle chosen for hard public relations job:
“It’s not something that produces radiation in an extremely dangerous form,” said Chris Van Deusen, a spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services. “But it’s best for people to stay back, 20 or 25 feet.”
One example of how broken the American system is that no matter how loathsome politicians, public figures or corporations become, they keep being rewarded.
(Click the links.)
In November Mitt Romney will be run off permanently but that will be only an exception to the rule.
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How Fatima Started Islam, the anti-Islam hate speech book covered yesterday, ads for which were spammed into e-mail a few weeks ago, relied on anonymity and the global web. Unsuccessfully.
The spam campaign’s aim was probably publicity and sales through Amazon.
The spoofed mail to DD blog, henrylswartz@yahoo.com, was identified by The Honeypot Project here. It came August 26.
It was sent through a mail server in China, perhaps one operating off the cn.com domain, to about 1000 recipients, using a variety of spoofed originating addresses.
Six of the book’s seven “5-star” reviews were placed before, during and just after the spam campaign.
This could indicate stimulus from the spam, or perhaps more likely, astro-turfed reviews placed to take take advantage of curious clicks by those who received the spam.
Fatima received a total of 122 reviews on Amazon. 111 were “1-stars,” the others all “5-star.” It is a distribution with no middle.
All of the “1-star” reviews came in the time frame of the book’s spam,
reacting to it, some so noting with imprecations to cease and desist. They indicate the reviewers had no interest in buying it although they may have seen enough from Amazon’s “search inside … ” option to get the gist.
Indeed, I’d find it remarkable if the book sold any copies. But some rotten game was afoot.
The book was originally published in 2009 and ignored. So why the renewed push?
From news reports on “Innocence of Muslims:”
Early yesterday morning VICE was anonymously furnished with documents that link a California man named Robert Brownell (aka Robert Brown) to the pre-production of Innocence of Muslims, the F-grade anti-Islamic film that has resulted in violent protests at and around US embassies in Sanaa, Yemen; Cairo; Tripoli; and Doha, Qatar. He is a man who has, as of yet, not been named in association with the film.
The documents clearly state that in 2009 and 2011 Robert Brownell purchased pre-production services related to Desert Warrior, which has been widely reported as the working title of the film that the world now knows as Innocence of Muslims.
The YouTube “Sam Bacile” account uploaded two videos that ignited the “Innocence of Muslims” riots on July 1 and 2.
Coincidences? Maybe. Probably. Or not.
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Remember! Government spending on sissy civilian jobs programs does not work and increases the deficit!
Government spending on military and defense contracting budgets works! And leads to jobs!
The same thing, long form, at DD blog — from the archives.
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Most fawning and pretentious quote this year, easy:
“[Jeff Bezos] thinks on a planetary level,??? said David Risher, a former Amazon senior executive …
It comes from an article on Amazon Web Services, an operation that sells cloud computing worldwide. Recently the subject of a puff piece in the New York Times, it was essentially described as a business to change the world.
However, when you read the fine print, the world-changing seemed fairly trivial, use of massive cheap computing for stuff that ain’t special at all:
Another start-up [that uses Amazon computing], called Cue, scans up to 500 million e-mails, Facebook updates and corporate documents to create a service that can outline the biography of a given person you meet, warn you to be home to receive a package or text a lunch guest that you are running late.
Underwhelming.
“Millions of people in Africa shop for cars online, using cheap smartphones connected to A.W.S. servers located in California and Ireland,” reads the piece.
Hunger, in millions, by world region.
But Amazon computing services, by Jeff “Planetary” Bezos, is selling cars to a small percentage at the top in Africa.
Amazon is the world computing business model of destruction of wealth in populations easily attacked and liquidated, for the near instant self-gratification services of the upper slices of the world. Amazon does not solve world problems, it does not alleviate hunger, it does not boost human health.
Amazon’s massive computer resources do not noticeably advance science.
However, Amazon Web Services have been an alleged boon to “sales leads:”
GoodData, based in San Francisco, [uses Amazon services to analyze] data from 6,000 companies on A.W.S. to find things like sales leads. “Before, each company needed at least five people to do this work,??? said Roman Stanek, GoodData’s chief executive. “That is 30,000 people. I do it with 180. I don’t know what all those other people will do now, but this isn’t work they can do anymore. It’s a winner-takes-all consolidation.???
Sales leads.
Amazon enables massive computing to destroy jobs in making and selling things, so that it can sell all the most trivial objects in the US.
It smashes professional publishing for mass vanity publishing, which makes little for the people sucked into it, but potentially quite a bit when you take a slice of every book a self-published author sells to himself or members of the immediate family.
It builds warehouses nationwide, where temporary workers with no benefits earn sub-standard wages and are worked into heat strokes, so that it can sell razor blades or other household goods and consumer electronics to lazy Americans who could just as soon buy in the shops in their towns and cities. It wishes to out Wal-Mart Wal-Mart, one of the biggest liquidators of the worth of labor and manufacturing in this country.
[A] multibillion-dollar [warehouse] building frenzy comes as Amazon is about to lose perhaps its biggest competitive edge — that the vast majority of its customers do not pay sales tax. After negotiations with lawmakers, the company is beginning to collect taxes in California, Texas, Pennsylvania and other states …
“We want fast delivery,??? Mr. Bezos said. At a minimum, “we can work on making it the next day.???
It is a monumental bet, even for a company that consistently defied skeptics on Wall Street and Main Street as it rose to become one of the country’s largest retailers. Amazon’s delivery of everyday objects needs to be fast enough and cheap enough to wean customers from their local stores.
Weeks ago the Times ran a piece on the mass making and selling of fake five-star book reviews … on Amazon.
A follow-up piece by the journalist was even harsher:
I’ve tried to talk to Amazon about this, but in general it is unwilling to discuss — well, just about anything, in my experience. An executive there briefly dismissed the problem, telling me that it would be easy to fake one or two reviews but when an item had hundreds, you could trust that the reaction was authentic. Then I wrote about a case for the Kindle Fire where the manufacturer was secretly refunding the price if readers wrote a favorable review. Just about every review of that case was fake, and there were hundreds.
On the basis of that story and others, I got a lot of messages from Amazon customers about suspicious review activity. Amazon, it seems, is not overly interested in policing its own site. Authors buying book reviews to establish their credibility is one thing; manufacturers trying to juice sales of their new products is much worse.
There’s a larger point here. Technology companies visibly improve people’s lives and sometimes talk about their higher purpose (think Google’s “Don’t be evil??? motto) but in the end they are profit-seeking corporations. Amazon may in some ways be replacing the public library, but unlike the libraries of yore, it is not a public service.
It is not a surprise that the world Google, Amazon, and social networking has made promotes faking and rigging. The reduction of all measures of quality to web ranking by numbers has created a winner take all environment where there is always very strong incentive to cheat. In fact, cheating often seems like the only way to survive if you’re not already sitting on top of the pile of lucre at the web tech giants.
In fact, Jeff Bezos and Amazon have a piece of the cheating business, too, covered by the Mechanical Turk service.
If you spend time testing Mechical Turk’s Human Intelligence Tasks world bazaar, a Bezos/Amazon creation, you quickly grasp that much of the work advertised in it is in the generation of astro-turfed content to websites in articles, ratings and posts done for copper slivers of a penny per word. And the only purpose this work, or “product” serves, is to contaminate the web environment with oceans of phony, obscuring all else, in the aim of rigging the purchaser’s of it into the top returns of internet search.
From here, last year:
Another great category of [Amazon Mechanical Turk] work, which you should probably stay away from if you’re a sweat-laborer, is article creation.
“Write an article containing x-number of words on [you name it]??? they read.
Most of these appear to be ads by a variety of scumbags in the business of uploading astro-turfed content pushing businesses, services and products on the web.
You can tell they’re scumbags, and that they expect scumbags to work for them by the screechy commands, demands and veiled threats inside the solicitation.
The commands warn the sweat laborer not to “plagiarize??? because the content will be checked by “plagiarism checker??? software [meaning it’s run through Google] which seems to mostly indicate the employers are trying to generate stuff that won’t get downgraded by the search giants robots in spam blogs and miscellaneous insta-sites …
Also in this category, the jobs for virtually nothing in which one writes phony posts and articles for web places trying to gin up the appearance of actual use and enjoyment.
I used to buy books through Amazon and still have an account on it. And it’s possible, if things keep condensing and shriveling, that Amazon will be the only agency to do certain kinds of web businesses with, in the future.
But Jeff “Planetary” Bezos and Amazon are poison now.
One waits for all the wonderful things said to be coming because of Amazon:
[Amazon] is also a philosophy of enabling other people to build big systems. That is how Amazon will make a dent in the universe.
Don’t hold your breath, “make a dent” meaning it just gets more and more of the pie at everyone else’s pooled expense.
Jeff Bezos and Amazon — from the archives.
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UPDATED
Whenever you think corporate America can’t be more odious/ludicrous, you are surprised:
“(AP) LINCOLN, Neb. – Beef Products Inc. plans to file a defamation lawsuit in the wake of a publicity storm over a meat product that critics have dubbed ‘pink slime.’ The Dakota Dunes, S.D.-based company said Wednesday that it will announce a lawsuit Thursday. A company executive and lawyer refused to name the defendant … The term ‘pink slime’ was coined by a former U.S. Department of Agriculture microbiologist.”
Baby eat pink slime, damn you, or we’ll nuisance litigate!
Beef Products, Inc. took a savage hit in the marketplace when it’s reason for being was rejected by the American consumer.
In a reasonable world, they’d have taken their hiding and disappeared.
But the USA isn’t a reasonable world. Corporations are mechanistically vindictive, encouraged to operate as if godly. The ‘inventor’ of pink slime knows what’s best.
The company will only be interested in suing someone with deep pockets. That means either ABC, the company that broadcasts Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, the program that generated viral media destroying pink slime in the market. Or the US government, specifically the USDA.
This isn’t about getting the product back into its market position. That can’t happen. The squeezed-out pink mess won’t go back in the tube. It’s about revenge and getting a payoff to go away.
Beef Products Inc. filed a defamation lawsuit Thursday against ABC News for its coverage of a meat product that critics have dubbed “pink slime,” alleging that the network misled consumers to believe the product is unhealthy and unsafe …
The reports cited in the lawsuit include 11 that aired on television and 14 that appeared online in March. Webb said the reports had “an enormous impact” on the company, forcing it to close three of its four U.S. plants and lay off more than 650 workers. Webb said the network also published a list of chain grocery stores that had stopped selling the product, and that this pressured others to end their business relationship with BPI.
The company states that television connected with the pink slime biz caused a loss of 80 percent of its business, claiming the impact “catastrophic.”
Can you reinstate your company in the public mind in court? No.
Ultimately, it’s more self-made bad publicity for Beef Products, a company trying to punish others and extract its pound of … pink flesh … for rejection.
Not doing much for the image.
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The cause of the the lethal Libyan and Egyptian riots against the American embassies is now known as a promoted video, The Innocence of Muslims, made by someone named “Sam Bacile,” a pseudonym.
No links, as it’s now unavoidable.
However, reading of it today I had the uneasy feeling it was a bit familiar.
At the end of August, this blog — and many others around the web — was sent spam mail about a book called How Fatima Started Islam: Mohammad’s Daughter Tells It All by one Noor Barack, a pseudonym.
The spam blurb:
Did you know that Mohammad was a drunken, child molesting, cowardly pimp? The Ayatollahs and Terrorists do not want you to know the truth about Islam and promise to harm you if you tell anyone. Fight back and read this well written, totally funny, parody on the founding of the so-called religion …
See sample Chapters, the back cover showing Mohammad depicted after a 5 day bender (the terrorists hate this picture), read about the never sober Mohammad having sex with camels, pre-adolescent girls and boys, the terror, sneak attacks, killings, rapes, assassinations, mutilations, back stabbing and mental illness. No other book in the world is at all like this one. Strike a blow for American Freedom by reading it.
I looked at the Amazon page, noted it was a piece of hate literature and promptly forgot the thing.
But today the news about Sam Bacile and the alleged nature of “The
Innocence of Muslims” trailer hinted at something I’d seen recently. It had the same peculiar and hateful idiosyncrasies as the Fatima book.
How Fatima Stated Islam was published first in 2009. And it was in English, a vanity publication by “Camel Flea Press,” vended on Amazon.
Since it was in English one would not expect the insult of it, and
believe me, that’s what it’s loaded with, to have made any impression in
the Muslim world.
However, “The Innocence of Muslims” is visual and, according to the
news, was subtitled/translated in Arabic.
The new spam promotion for the Fatima book came at the end of August.
“The Innocence of Muslims” was made in 2011, allegedly shown once in Hollywood to a near empty theater, but was heavily promoted yesterday in a live Internet stream from hate-pastor Terry Jones’ church.
Are these two things from the same people? The push on them is similar, solely through the web, the only place where they could be marketed. And everyone, from mailers to authors, uses obvious pseudonyms. So maybe.
It’s worth looking into.
Like “The Innocence of Muslims,” it portrays Mohammed as a buffoon and a criminal. From front to back, it is a merciless parade of juvenile, odious slurs and fabrications, passed off as humor, on everything associated with Islam.
Excerpts (warning: very offensive), from How Fatima Started Islam: Mohammad’s Daughter Tells It All:
Fatima: So on the eve of my twelfth birthday, with little fanfare and very matter-of-factly, I was turned out as a whore … The local yokels and camel jockeys who were the bulk of the customers generally would screw one of [us] chippies anywhere and everywhere.
The four pillars of Islam, the founding supports that were needed in order that the religion could flourish and grow, and conquer, were the
essentials. The first three were the camel, alcoholism and prostitution. The fourth and last pillar, the final original building block needed to complete the quartet that enshrined Islam, was the pillar of mental illness.
I was very afraid of someone … seeing [the Prophet] wearing a linen with an obvious yellow-brown stain on the backside.
It’s worth noting the extremist American purveyors of such things want publicity in Islamic nations. Video of riots are vindication, getting them off.
The United States has its own riotous history connected to relatively recent religious offense.
John Lennon and “the bigger than Jesus” thing.
Of course, Lennon wasn’t actually trying to provoke unrest.
Maybe.
Because it would be so unusual after a revolution and the total breakdown of the country for lots and lots of young men in Libya to have automatic weapons, rockets and grenades.
“The fact that some of the attackers were armed with rockets and grenades is one of the factors leading to that initial conclusion,” reads the piece.
Honestly, where do they come up with the people who anonymously tell reporters such things?
It’s OK to stop refilling the prescription of stupid pills, guys. You’ve had enough.
Remember, there’s always a self-serving ‘think tank’ you’ve never heard of, with right-wing counter-terror experts consisting of old refugees (in London, or Los Angeles, New York, or DC) from any country you care to name, ready to give the inside poop on what’s really happened.
Today is no exception, from CNN:
According to our own sources at Quilliam Foundation, the attack was the work of roughly 20 militants, prepared for a military assault. It is rare, for example, that an RPG7 — an anti-tank rocket-propelled grenade launcher — would be present at a civilian protest. The attack against the consulate had two waves. The first attack led to U.S. officials being evacuated from the consulate by Libyan security forces, only for the second wave to be launched against U.S. officials after they were kept at a secure location.
And how would he know, being in London and:
[A] former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a jihadist organization that fought against Muammar Qaddafi’s regime in the 1990s. After resigning from L.I.F.G. in 2002, he became a prominent critic of jihadist and Islamist violence.
Ten to twenty years ago. What’s a decade or two and an entire revolution out of the loop, huh?
Update: The al Qaeda’s behind it all theory, laughed out of town by spreading violence and closer-to-the-scene accounts.
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On 9/11, it would also be good to remember what the catastrophe brought on.
Share it.
Lethal trivia: One week after, we were treated to anthraxer Bruce Ivins from the heart of the US biodefense industry. That’s him in the video and the white label pressing of his home-made country 45.
Just think about that for a minute. Bruce Ivins, a man at the very center of one of the more famous defense science installations, used 9/11 as cover to kill, sicken and spread fear in more Americans.
Fort Detrick, the place where Ivins made the anthrax, has never apologized.
“Plus we got lotsa really crazy people …”
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One of the great advantages of Facebook’s automatic hiding of comment threads: Celebrity death hoaxes flourish.
Think of it this way. You’re a bona fide prick and determined to show something no one else has, ever — that it’s easy to trick people on the web! And what better way to do it than to launch a hoax: Beloved actor Morgan Freeman has passed away!
Make a short obit that only sorta looks like it came from someplace concerned and authoritative, like a newspaper, with picture, and share on Facebook!
Watch an army of idiots spread it.
Don’t worry about those who show up to post coments like, “Look people, Morgan Freeman is not dead!” Facebook will quickly hide them and the only thing most will see in their newsfeeds is the announcement that the poor man croaked suddenly, along with a huge number of likes, share and comments.
And there will be lots of comments, by people vainly posting that Morgan’s not dead. Heck, Mr. Freeman could show up himself! All of it to be ignored, hidden away, because that’s how Facebook works.
The large numbers displayed will convince people there’s been an outpour of regret because ‘Mericans stupid people believe such figures on social networks mean important news and shit is brewing. It’s the wisdom of crowd-sourcing, boiled down to one or two simple and infallible metrics.
So quick, go and post your thing about Morgan Freeman, or anyone else — as long as they’re famous, dying.
Or post an obit of someone who died seven years ago, like Bob Denver, and watch the users rush to share it while Facebook hides all the attempts at rectification: “Hey people, I liked Gilligan, too, and was sad when he passed but that was …”
Or post spam, with a picture, of some poor animal that was tortured to death or mistreated somewhere in Jugoslavia or Trans Dniester …
Those are red hot, too.
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From Mark Smollin, DD band drummer at Saturday rehearsal, after a few rounds of it on early-Seventies style hard rock. It’s a Holowon Static Egg, now ten years old, I think, dating back to when a niche US industry for handmade guitar effects, usually copies of old classic circuits, emerged. Think — not made in China — where the major manufacturers shipped all their production and tooling.
The Static Egg is a fuzz tone and they’re basic equipment for copping the feel of Sixties and early Seventies blues rock. A good one, and this is, enables a great woolly distortion, static-y shrill squealing noise, horn-like bleats, and just about everything in between.
When it’s on, it sounds righteous, from slightly compressed and clean to heavy and crushing with a twist of the guitar’s volume knob. And it tears its own hole in any mix. (It’s not necessary to explain the knob functions. You just twiddle until it sounds right. There’s nothing to it.)
For example, if you have a Stratocaster and you want to do something ala Jimi Hendrix, a certain kind of fuzz tone — called a Fuzz Face, helps a lot. The Static Egg isn’t a Fuzz Face but it will still do the job.
This tune shows it off well. It gives a bit of sustain to the clean guitar parts, makes the jangly and twangy stuff more penetrating, furnishes the crunch on power chords, and does the bleats and stereotypical Sixties fuzz sounds, too
Strat and Static Egg fuzz (plus an octave-up fuzz on the outro.)
C’mon, this is a great spoof with a nice grifted image of LiLo, too.
After I bought mine, the production of Static Eggs seemed to stop for many years. More recently, a newer model has been spotted, one with four knobs and a bit more of a conventional look. But I’ll always have mine, it looks fine now with ten years of wear and the Letraset transfer lettering still very legible. Fuzz tones are close to being bulletproof.
The Static Egg also is the primary sound for Carla Sandwich, which accentuates what you can do for the sake of trash rock.
YouTube rewards users who upload demos of equipment. like fuzz tones, where the player sits around, plays a few riffs from favorite songs and twists knobs by himself. A more valid demonstration is to show it in a recording. But that’s harder, YouTube doesn’t reward the practice, and it makes tyros and amateurs whine they can’t hear the guitar and box by themselves.
In the real word, not Google/YouTube’s universe of dull copycats, guitar players use effects and tone in the context of tunes.
Fuzz tone effects didn’t capture the imagination because they were popularized by random nerds humorlessly copying fragments of someone else’s famous riffs. They were in radio cuts by the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Iron Butterfly and Led Zeppelin.
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