Ask George Smith e-mail: webmaster at dick destiny
Chainsaw Rally — remixed and put to YouTube found, some of it famous, some infamous. Everything you need to know about Ted Nugent in a bit over two and a half minutes.
And, yeah, he really did feel the bite of a jaggedy chain years ago.
Permalink Comments off
Not a week goes by that my news tab doesn’t have a few stories on the American survivalist movement, courtesy of the presence of doomsday electromagnetic pulse references in all such pieces. The homespun country paranoids are now firmly in the US entertainment mainstream, notably in newspapers, almost purely because of the semi-success of one of the crummiest television reality series ever, National Geographic’s Doomsday Preppers.
The prepper movement shows all the collateral damage [the rubbish from the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, a GOP construction] has wrought on the suggestible and unbalanced.
Conspicuously, this increasingly nuts demographic is almost entirely white, far right, heartland, fundie Christian religious and breast-beatingly patriotic.
It is not a surprise that cable television feels this niche large enough to monetize. Death cults/apocalypse believers have always been part of the American experience. However, until social media, micro-casting and the Internet there wasn’t an easy way to cynically gather all of them up into a nice exploitative package for advertising.
Two stories this week underline it.
From the Seattle Times on survivalists in the Pacific Northwest, which has always been a stronghold:
[Tom Martin, 34, a long-haul truck driver based out of Port Angeles] and other preppers are adamant about not being mistaken for survivalists, especially after the recent news stories about the North Bend man who police say shot himself in a hillside bunker after killing his wife and teen daughter.
Says Martin, “That guy sounded like a nut case, somebody who thinks everybody is out to get them.”
On its website, Puget Sound Preppers says, “This group is NOT involved in: revolution, war, militia, political parties, religious activities, racism, or lobbying. This group is about skills and knowledge.”
An upcoming meeting, for example, is on raising chickens.
He doth protest too loudly, offering only a standard and easily shot up likely story in defense.
Here, Google search results for preppers, Obama and socialism.
At once paranoid and practical, preppers are essentially pessimistic boy scouts. Some prepare for war, others for economic collapse, and in parts of Western North Carolina many worry about an Electromagnetic Pulse weapon (EMP) that would disable electronics and turn back the clock by a full century. In every scenario there is reference to a fallen society that’s “WROL” (without rule of law) in which only the well-prepared can prosper.
EMP is the primary concern of Jan Sterritt who, along with husband Bill, runs Carolina Readiness Supply in Waynesville N.C..
“It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when (an EMP will hit)”, she says.
Jan scurries around her store with a cordless phone clipped to her belt. It rings at 5 minute intervals with new questions from the Sterritt’s now growing customer base.
“It was just like we’ve gotta do something. We’ve gotta tell people about it and get them prepared,” she says when pulled aside for a quick interview.
OPSEC makes interviews tricky. Jan and Bill only allowed us in the store, with some reservations, after we promised not to blow their customers cover. Both Sterritts say that for most of their first year in business shoppers would wait until the store was empty before revealing their prepper needs in whispered voices.
Now, Bill says, people are beginning to “wake up”.
“There’s fewer and fewer people that think we’re nuts,” he says …
Of particular concern to Bill, is the “occupy” movement. Bill points his finger toward Asheville, about 20 miles East, where protesters gathered over the summer.
“There are those who want to disrupt our constitutional system. I mean there are anarchists in the street. They’ve been in the street since last fall. I fear they’ll be out in the streets this spring and summer. They’re being subverted by anarchist elements, communists, there’s a lot of subversion going on within these groups. It’s scary.”
Bill is now more animated as he talks about his real motivations. His political interest in prepping dovetails with trends in the national news. When the economy cratered in 2008, when Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office, when concern grew about Federal debt, preppers multiplied nationwide. In the western Carolinas they’re around every corner.
There is no progressive viewpoint within the prepper movement. And they have an allergy to the descriptor “survivalist” because of its association with neo-Nazis, militias and the far right. They are inescapably a part of this social fringe, on television, always visibly infatuated with fortified home ammo dumps, machine guns, and paramilitary training.
They all share an uneducated, simplistic and diseased world view, half of their daytime life spent obsessing over how they’ll defend themselves from the others who will come for their stuff in the inevitable fall. And you know who all the others are.
Poke them hard enough with hard questions, or supercilious articles, and they’ll snap. Since they are always carrying and displaying weapons, general news reporters may feel reluctant to press them on such matters.
However, one does not have to go very far on YouTube to find men in camouflage, advertising themselves as preppers, recommending shotguns or other firearms for use in shooting government men or strangers in one situation or another.
“We want someone in our group who is very familiar with weaponry and the art of fighting … I am thrilled to have somebody who actually knows how to use a gun and that means more than plinking away at a range where the target does not move …” sez my favorite prepper, the Patriot Nurse, in her latest video.
It’s arguable that National Geographic has done anyone a service by thrusting these people into the limelight as sometimes reasonable, for the sake of some money on cable television.
Permalink Comments off
See, when you make money on the clicks and data-mining of US Facebook users who do pay taxes, you take that swag to Singapore, the famous wart-on-the-tip-of-Malaya that masquerades as an important country, to cheat Uncle Sam. From the wires, the likely story, filed under ‘P’ for ‘Parasites:’
Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder who gave up his U.S. citizenship, has nothing against the U.S., just its complicated rules on U.S. citizens holding money overseas, a spokesman said.
Mr. Saverin, who now lives in Singapore, decided last year to renounce his U.S. citizenship, a decision that was made public a few days ago. The move sparked an outcry among some tax experts who suspect he’s aiming to save on taxes. Although Mr. Saverin will have to pay a hefty exit tax for renouncing his citizenship, based on some calculation of his assets, Singapore is a relatively low-tax jurisdiction, particularly for foreign investors, and does not levy capital gains tax.
This story, just another item to add to the now popular niche fad in which the wealthy renounce citizenship in overseas consulates so as to avoid the income tax, aka the much easier to remember “rats deserting the sinking ship” thing.
“[Eduardo Saverin] also plans a charitable foundation,” it reads.
From the archives — other pieces on the wart on the tip of Malaya, one of many little nothing countries made for the wealthy and where the economic product increasingly is legal money laundering services.
Sing along: ‘Gonna go to Grand Cayman, if he don’t get it back …’ And that’s famous Jamie Dimon, Aemrica’s most well-known financial crook, at 42 seconds in.
None of the little legal money-laundering countries have militaries worth shit. US Special Operations and an airborne brigade could knock them over in an afternoon.
Since their business is increasingly to deprive the US government of legitimate revenue, money which could be employed to repair US infrastructure, retain jobs at the local level, and — in general — provide the necessary services of good civilization to Americans, they can be viewed as threats to security.
Wouldn’t it be nice to see a clever short story about a US military assault on the banking districts of Luxembourg, Singapore or Grand Cayman?
It used to be the other way around. Movie scripts could be written about a small nothing country, like the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, declaring war on the US so as to lose and get American reconstruction dollars.
“There isn’t a more profitable undertaking of any country than to declare war on the United States and to be defeated … No sooner is the aggressor defeated than the Americans pour in food, machinery, technical aid and lots and lots of money …” — trailer from The Mouse That Roared
Time for a rewrite of that script.
Now wars are the revenue stream of American arms manufacturing and national security businesses.
So it’s just plain easier to offer personal services which enable wealthy Americans and businesses to be tax cheats for a percentage of the action.
Wouldn’t you like to see a movie of Singapore or Luxembourg banks and financial server farms knocked over by American troopers? Hilarious.
And just in time for convergence, another of the Silicon Valley’s rich men, another fellow wants to live together, wanting his own tax cheaters’ micro-nation on a barge:
Imagine living on a serene, man-made floating city where you can live and work with other like-minded individuals from all over the globe, without direct influence from any government entity. If Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel has his way, that wild idea may be just a few years away. The wealthy venture capitalist is putting his money behind Blueseed, a company that promises to create an offshore luxury barge where young entrepreneurs can work, live, and socialize, all without the constraints of a modern city — or pesky immigration laws.
This perhaps because the starship needed to leave the planet seems just a bit out of reach. Even claiming an asteroid or a piece of the moon seems logistically impossible.
Previously — venture capitalist to conquer all viral disease, too.
In the culture of lickspittle people with super-rmoney always attract sappy cult folllowings. Money can’t buy you love but it goes pretty far with whores and boot-licks.
Sometimes if Paul Krugman harps on unemployment and publishes data extracted from the Bureau of Labor Statistics enough, minor things get done. Someone unspecified in Congress either gets anxious about the state of affairs or wishes they had statistics to refute arguments that employment opportunities in this country are dreadful. So the Congressional Research Service is commissioned to write a report.
And the CRS is, generally speaking, unfailingly honest.
This has resulted in two papers, published by Steve Aftergood at the Secrecy blog, on youth employment in this country, and its trend over the last twelve years.
The CRS report “Youth Labor Force Background Trends,” is unremittingly bleak.
From the age of 16-19 I either worked at the Pine Grove Municipal Swimming Pool or managed it. It wasn’t hard to get that job.
However, in the last twelve years, the trend for youth employment has always been downward, except for a slight leveling in the middle of the decade. Since 2009, conditions have become markedly worse.
“Over the past decade, teens and young adults have experienced a precipitous decline in employment …” it reads.
A figure in the report maps youth labor market trends from 1948 to the present.
From 1948 to 2002, the youth labor market was fairly stable, showing slight cyclical ups and downs, perhaps tied to bad economic conditions much less severe than presently, and which eventually passed. In fact, for the age group 20-24, people fresh out of training or college and entering the workforce, there was even a slight upward trend overall.
After 2002, and especially after 2008, things became bad for everyone young, differing in matters of degree — sometimes large, depending on whether you were white, Hispanic or African American. (In that order.)
And the group which has taken the worst shot has been the very young, aged 16-19.
A second report, “Vulnerable Youth: Employment and Training Programs,” gives a quick historical overview of government projects aimed at combating poverty and creating jobs.
Old names like the War on Poverty crop up.
In view of the trends mapped in “Youth Labor Force Trends” one might expect the investments in youth job training in “Vulnerable Youth” to be unremarkable over the same period.
And such is the case.
Tucked away in the back of “Vulnerable Youth” is a table of investments in youth jobs. Except for a slight bump in 2008, national expenditure on such programs has been stagnant, even decreasing slightly, in opposition to labor statistics which show irrefutable and pressing need.
It is another study of one symptom of national decline.
Why someone in Congress requested such reports is a mystery because, of course, nothing will be done.
Also among the latest posts on Secrecy blog is a longish piece on the National Security Agency’s effort to avoid minor embarrassment over an old report on US reconnaissance aircraft flights over the old Soviet Union during the Cold War.
“[The] article does present what appears to be some valuable ‘new’ information including some fine details about [signals intelligence] coverage of the U-2 incident in May 1960,” writes Steve Aftergood of Secrecy blog.
“But the author himself acknowledged that all of this is ancient history.”
In 1960, labor trends were far better than now. People had reason to have hope. However, generally speaking, the data trends now show they can stop wasting time on such pipe-dreaming.
Remember, too, that in 1960 the country’s population was 179 million. Today it is 312 million. So the labor force employment, shown as percentages in the CRS report figures, indirectly indicates much higher raw numbers of people unemployed or underemployed now than in the period marked. Use of percentages, while still a good metric, applies a relative smoothing to the graphical presentation of the material.
Permalink Comments off
Someone who scans only for keywords and proper names on Twitter, now following me because they mistakenly believe I’m on the same page, spiritually. Not the first time, either, just one of the more unintentionally funny.
Which makes me also ask the question, “How do you follow 9k twits?”
Social media big numbers, all about pecker-length measuring metrics, useful to celebrities who don’t need it and use Twitter as a micro-mailing list for those who believe anything in excess of 140 characters is “TL — DNR.”
See Nick Kristof. Still trying to get the whores and pimps off the Village Voice’s BackPage property after a social media petition site (an American fad some like to pretend has more power than the NYT or Jamie Oliver’s TV job on pink slime) wasn’t quite enough. 1.2 mil followers! He could win any social media talent contest he entered on the net and not even have to hum one tune for an MP3.
Anyway, back to my follower, the emitter of the sayings of Jesus.
Even the joke book cover was “TL — DNR,” apparently.
“Shun the word ‘gay’ for it despoils the Sacraments of Holy Matrimony and is a mortal sin.” — Page 9.
When also can’t rule out the person thought it was actually real and approved, only showing, again, you just can never accurately underestimate the minds of people you don’t know.
Keywords: Jesus of America, American Jesus, social media buffoons
Permalink Comments off
Not a trick question.
Dave Hurban, a tattoo artist from Newfield, N.J., surgically implanted four magnets into his wrist. Why? Basically, it’s a cool (or at least unique) way to hold his iPod Nano in place without a pesky wristband.
You can check out the video of the process below. But be warned—there will be blood.
I passed. But the meat blob Cult of iJunk didn’t.
Visually, still not as striking as sticking iKit in your mouth.
Permalink Comments off
Headline from yesterday, unintentionally hilarious, written with the opposite intent:
The ‘Evil Genius’ behind Al Qaeda’s underwear bombs
“With the death of Osama bin Laden, Asiri is a key reason that US officials consider Yemen’s Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, to be one of the most significant threats to the American homeland,” reads the piece. “He is highly determined and fully committed to attack America,” it continues.
For MSNBC, Michael Isikoff writes a similarly voiced article, using the latest issue of Inspire, as a roadmap. Al Qaeda has “engineers,” even though they can’t spell:
“They have a team of engineers, scientists and doctors. It’s a little spooky,” said Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, a member of the Homeland Security Committee who was briefed this week on the intelligence operation that U.S. officials say thwarted an AQAP plot to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner. “In my view, it’s very likely they have produced more of these.”
One hint at the expansion of AQAP’s bomb-making capabilities can be found in passages in an article entitled “Wining on the Ground,” found on the 57th page of the latest 59-page edition of Inspire, released by AQAP last weekend.
In 2009, AQAP had only a “very modest and small laboratory in a rural area” to make bombs, the author of the article –identified as Yahya Ibrahim — wrote.
But now, after obtaining “a large deal of chemicals from military laboratories” in a key city in southern Yemen — “the modest lab has transformed into a modern one,” the Inspire article stated.
It’s almost beautiful how the story is twisted from one of failure into pieces which try to cast the impression al Qaeda men are cranking out underwear bombs at some modern facility in Yemen.
From two failed attempts, a failed printer cartridge bomb plot, and infiltration by a spy who turns over the latest goods to the US, to an “Evil Genius,” a bomb factory of perhaps great capacity, and a most dire threat to the US “homeland.” The refashioning of the story is eye-watering in audacity.
By this time next week it will be in the rear view mirror as an al Qaeda victory.
As for Isikoff, the one time I was covered for one of his pieces at Newsweek many years ago, everything in it was wrong except the things I told him and a colleague.
In fact, at the time, I felt the Newsweek journalists knew they were twisting the story. They did so because the truth didn’t fit the official narrative of the war on terror as published in this country.
In the meantime, yesterday news broke about JP Morgan Chase, one of the giant Wall Street banks that blew up the US economy, was still at it, to the tune of a $2 billion dollar loss:
Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan, blamed “errors, sloppiness and bad judgment” for the loss, which stemmed from a hedging strategy that backfired.
The trading in that hedge roiled markets a month ago, when rumors started circulating of a JPMorgan trader in London whose bets were so big that he was nicknamed “the London Whale” and “Voldemort,” after the Harry Potter villain.
“Voldemort” or the “Evil Genius” of underwear bombs — who’s the threat?
Permalink Comments off
Ted Nugent’s fans are what Paul Fussell called ‘bottom-out-of-sighters,’ people so light in the wallet absolutely no one was interested in advertising products to them.
Fussell used it in reference to roller-derby on Saturday morning television back in the late-Sixites and Seventies in his book, Class.
Denver Westworld ran a photo essay on Ted’s fans at RedRocks amphitheatre. It’s here and worth the momentary laugh.
Reads the news weekly: “When this male Ted Nugent fan was asked about the recent investigation by the Secret Service into the Nuge regarding some controversial comments Nugent made about President Obama, his response was, ‘It’s bullshit! He [Ted Nugent] lets the FBI train on his property.'”
Yeah, the Green Berets, too. Would you believe … the local chapter of Boy Scouts of America? Well, would you believe … two guys using a metal detector to find buried old coins?
It’s also worth noting Ted’s notoriously teetotal and prone to bagging on users of spirits. So it’s fitting the only venues he plays are those where the fans are encouraged to smell strongly of drink.
Like old roller-derby, Ted’s fans also don’t buy anything except the occasional concert ticket. They don’t buy records. They may go for an occasional T-shirt.
And when Ted tried to sell his own beef jerky years ago — Ted Nugent Gonzo Meat Biltong — it went bust.
Permalink Comments off
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports two of the members of the gang will likely go to trial. Two have already accepted pleas on conspiring to acquire weapons and silencers.
Lawyers representing Ray Adams, 55, and Samuel Crump, 68, gave no indication at Tuesday’s federal court hearing whether they would seek a plea deal weeks after the two other men charged in the plot pleaded guilty to weapons charges and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.
Adams and Crump are charged with conspiring and attempting to make a biological toxin called ricin.
Adams’ attorney Barry Lombardo said “no, no, no” when asked if his client is pursuing a plea deal. Crump’s lawyer Dan Summer declined to comment …
A ricin conviction sends them to jail for a long time.
The Georgia Ricin Beans Gang was too incompetent to make ricin. And any notional plan to push castor powder out of a car speeding along the highway was laughable. In no way would it have worked.
However, the paradox is a tough one. No one ever walks in the US on a ricin charge, no matter how incapable or foolish they are.
No American defense lawyers have ever been able to argue such a case and win before a jury. While it has been done one time in England, it would be an eye-opening first here.
Crump had memorized the recipe for the poison, prosecutors said, and Adams had the know-how to make it as a former government lab technician. The men were arrested just days after authorities say they discovered evidence they were trying to extract ricin from castor beans at Adams’ north Georgia home.
The attorneys for the two men, though, have said the government’s charges are overblown.
“The government doesn’t have a strong case. Surely there was talk about ricin, but it was ridiculous,” Summer said at an earlier court hearing. “It was like an old man in the stages of senility talking out of the side of his mouth.”
Yes, it certainly was ridiculous. However, thanks to the war on terror, such a fact will likely be disregarded.
Permalink Comments off
National Public Radio has a long record of producing garbage on cyberwar. And I’ll skip most of a recent piece except for the end — which pretty much fulfills the definition of the adjective, “reptilian:”
Some national security leaders argue, in turn, that there have been times in U.S. history when the country has to make security investments whether they make business sense or not. The need to prepare for a massive cyberattack, they say, is such an occasion.
Larry Clinton’s response: Then the government should pick up the check.
“If the government was interested in paying the private sector to do all these things, probably we would go a long way toward doing it,” he says. “But the government so far, [with] the Lieberman-Collins bill, wants it all done for free. They want the businesses to simply plow that into their profit and loss statement, and the numbers are staggering. You simply can’t do it.”
First, it’s necessary to understand Larry Clinton is a spokesman for a trade group of big weapons manufacturers and Pentagon contracting businesses (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Science Applications International Corporation) with cyber-defense arms called the Internet Security Alliance.
The Internet Security Alliance knows that if American corporate business which holds the telecommunications, energy, banking and transportation infrastructure is asked to pay for strengthening cyber-defenses they’ll simply decline to spend at the level US arms manufacturers would like to see. If they spend any more than usual, at all.
Therefore, the ISA is very interested in having the government pay for everything, as it more strongly guarantees revenue streams.
Think of it like the business model adopted by the banksters. Risk is shoved off. The government picks up the entire tab and the defense industry profits.
It’s very easy to be supercilious with the Internet Security Alliance.
It’s website is plain, showing a trade group of no-confidence inspiring circle-jerkmen and rent-seekers from arms manufacturing.
But wait. Maybe I’m being unfair. Let’s take a look at what the ISA website claims are its primary goals:
ISA advocates a modernized social contract between industry and government …
Developing a 21 century policy platform for government to work productively with industry through a “Social Contract …
To understand what the ISA means, substitute the phrase “rent-seeking” for “Social Contract,” which the business group misuses horribly.
Generally, the “social contract” has been used to mean humans ought to live in a civil society, one in which government imposed order and protected the weak and the average from the predatory, who if allowed to prevail would, as Thomas Hobbes described famously, make life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
The “social contract” doesn’t say anything about the government guaranteeing the business of corporate computer security and arms manufacturers because without them, our life might be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” because of cyberwar.
What the Internet Security Alliance wants, like much of what big corporate America advocates for, is “rent.”
Rent-seeking, as defined by a Glossary of Political Economy Terms:
The expenditure of resources in order to bring about an uncompensated transfer of goods or services from another person or persons to one’s self as the result of a “favorable??? decision on some public policy. The term seems to have been coined (or at least popularized in contemporary political economy) by the economist Gordon Tullock. Examples of rent-seeking behavior would include all of the various ways by which individuals or groups lobby government for taxing, spending and regulatory policies that confer financial benefits or other special advantages upon them at the expense of the taxpayers or of consumers or of other groups or individuals with which the beneficiaries may be in economic competition.
That the ISA would actually pay corporate mouthpieces to write such self-serving shite about a so-called non-existent “Social Contact” tells you everything you need to know about the group.
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »