Ask George Smith e-mail: webmaster at dick destiny
WhiteManistan Blues Band weekly Saturday anti-corporate fascist 1 percent shopping plutocracy jam deep inna heart of Pasadena. Margaritas, Trader Joe’s select Cava, Sekt or ‘champagne’ — one of these combinations.
Wish you could be here. But you can’t.
Cyberwar. Keith Alexander. China. Al Qaeda, Asymmetric. Oh, really?!
Atomic Reactor amp of the WhiteManistan Blues Band. And it sounds it, too.
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On Friday. one White House pr man compared the GOP to terrorists. The extremists immediately protested.
Later in the day, a second White House pr man called them extortionists.
Six figure explainer, pundit, and Maddow Show producer Steve Benen layed down the word, or was otherwise quoted in the Washington Post:
“As a rule, regardless of where one falls on the political divide, officials should resist the urge to compare their rivals to terrorists. I don’t care how radicalized congressional Republicans have become — they’re not al Qaeda. Period. Full stop.???
How many people will die or are dieing in slow motion because of the impositions and orders of the extremist party?
The differences between our jihadis and their’s are proximity to victim and choice of tools. How else would you describe a gang that’s pro-nationwide hunger and against healthcare for those who don’t have it?
It’s real easy to lecture on the rules of civil discourse when you’re a six or seven figure explainer. But being blunt and descriptive has appeal.
Provoke a Republican today, poke them in the eye with a linguistic pointed stick, try to make an ugly explosion, it’s what they want.
The extremist party is empowered when called terrorists by mortal enemies, which is everyone not Republican.
Since they’re authoritarian paranoids, it’s vindication. Rules of civil discourse are a club extremists find handy to beat you over the head with while they’re going Ted Nugent. Civil War 2 has been on for awhile, nothing will end it except complete ruin at the polls for one side or the other.
I have a grudging admiration for the filled-with-malice strategy of trying to engineer a coup against the elected President from the bottom even if it won’t work. If, on the odd chance that it does, they’ll have successfully changed the structure and working of the government.
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Reuters:
“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 …some employees and people posting messages online accused factory guards of provoking the trouble by beating up workers at the factory …”
The closest Americans got to rioting against Apple products happened in Pasadena last week when homeless men who were bussed in from Skid Row to wait overnight in front of the Apple store got angry with the man who “hired” them for gypping them out of what he owed.
On the other hand, when people peacefully picket Walmart for being shafted and having to go on foodstamps, we can count on seeing pictures like this…
And sometimes you can even count on an armored car, courtesy of Homeland Security block grants for fighting terrorists.
Hat tip to Pine View Farm. God bless America.
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Allowed me to steal this comic.
The good thing is now everyone knows how the net works. Everything for those with the most, nothing for anyone else.
And you’ll have noticed how Google, social media, and iTunes solved the vexing twin problems of accelerating poverty and inequality during the last decade.
ABC News headline:
Jeff Bezos Says Washington Post Could Take a Page From Amazon.
Yes, the WaPost could adapt its journalists to the Amazon Mechanical Turk free-lance gig writing model, turning out 5-600 word pieces for 50 cents as human intelligence tasks.
Pay could be changed to average Amazon customer-centric fulfillment warehouse employees, a bit above minimum wage, sometimes implemented through third party local contracting. Expect to become a part-timer.
The Post could lobby the government to waive taxation for 20 years, like the deal Bezos enjoyed with state sales taxation, or barring that, move revenue collection to two profit-shifting/money-laundering fronts in Luxembourg.
The wisdom of Bezos, worth 23 billion dollars: “You have to lean into [the headwind] because complaining isn’t a strategy.”
Jeff Bezos’ world of Internet empowerment — from the archives.
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No humorists necessary. In my e-mail this morning:
Dear Rockers,
This past month our Team Rock Stars program was utilized by three major corporations to much success. We at Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp have created a once in a lifetime Team Building and Entertainment program to make your company’s outing, convention, or sales meeting an unforgettable event. Just read below testimonials from our satisfied customers who utilized our program and enjoyed super success. Don’t miss out on an interactive team-building program that rocks!
If you’re looking for an affordable way to add a Rock ‘n’ Roll theme to your event whether it’s team building or a night’s entertainment, call us to discuss your needs and we will be glad to share with you our suggestions to make it an once in a lifetime experience. Check out our page for more information.
“Thank you to you and your team for an incredible Rock Camp at our Soul Media Event down in San Diego. For those journalists who participated, they said it was ‘an experience of a lifetime’. They never want to go on another car maker’s event because ours could not be topped. Your team did a great job bringing them all together and helping them achieve something they never thought they could.???
-Michael Sprague, Executive Vice President, Marketing & Communications for Kia Motors America
“On behalf of the entire team at Kia Motors America, thank you for rocking our world last week in San Diego – the automotive journalists who attended as our special guests had a great time and could not stop talking about their experience the next day as we saw them off for the trip home. From our first call together to talk through a potential partnership to our interaction on-site at the Hard Rock Hotel, the RNRFC team exhibited nothing but a can-do attitude and offered a guarantee that the experience would be a hit, and it most certainly was.???
-Jay Joyer, Executive Vice President for Zeno Group
Our Rock Camp attendees have told us constantly that attending a Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp is not only a life changer, but a real experience to learn lessons to run your organization and rock your business.
Or set the needle down around 4:40.
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So misunderstood, the neo-Confederates.
A study on my old southeastern Pennsylvania home, explanations by the indigenous, excerpted:
“I remember taking a second look and going, ‘Really?’ It was shocking,” said Bryl Villanueva, 35, of Lafayette Hill, who recently saw a rebel flag flying in Conshohocken while on the way to a friend’s house. “Maybe they’re from Alabama.”
“Me, I fly the stars and stripes,” said Dereck Banks, a self-described history buff from Clifton Heights, Delaware County.
But Banks, 55, who is black, can’t miss the Dixie flag plastered across the back window of his neighbor’s pickup truck parked at the curb. It’s also on the front license plate, with the word “Daddy.”
“It offends a lot of people. White folks, too.”
“I’m not prejudiced at all. My granddaughter is half-black,” said Copeland, who flies a flag from his home on busy Route 724 near Phoenixville. “I just love the South. If I could live there, I would.”
Copeland, however, doesn’t seem overly concerned with political correctness, as evidenced by the sign on his door that reads, in part: “Unless you are blind or cannot read this sign, you can bet your ass I am going to stomp the s— out of you if you bother me!”
“If somebody broke into your house and robbed you, and they were wearing New York Giants attire, you wouldn’t assume that there was something evil in the Giants association,” said Gene Hogan, chief of heritage operations for the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “You would say, ‘No, that was an evil person that co-opted those garments.’ Same way with the battle flag.”
“[It] represents all the good things in America,” Hogan said.
The flags were out again the next weekend at a concert headlined by Brad Paisley, and tailgaters were outraged because security was forcing them to be taken down.
“It’s not racist at all,” said Blythe, 35, a carpenter [who has a neighbor who flies the Confederate flag on his truck]. “Everybody loves each other on this block.”
I bet they love each other.
Greece has Golden Dawn, other Euro nations have their radical bigot political parties.
The US has the biggest tribal agglomeration of bigots, the neo-Confederacy, or my old WhiteManistan roots. (“It’s a brand, a symbol of oppression, violence, and … white supremacy,” one sociologist tells the Philly newspaper, in a modern version of telling a reporter how to pour piss from a shoe.)
As the mess gets worse, the country rotting from the inside out in its uniquely American corporate fascism, as animosity is fanned, still more Confederate flags.
And it’s why “Goober Peas,” an old Confederate marching song, is lampooned in WhiteManistan Vacation.
The special PARIAH cover on the matter.
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Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of the Nation, a magazine I once (long ago) subscribed to and now never read, celebrity-slumming in the WaPost:
“Chilling.???
That’s how one reviewer describes the experience of watching Harvey Weinstein’s latest film. Only the movie in question isn’t “Erased,??? Weinstein’s pulse-pounding thriller about an ex-CIA agent on the run. Nor is it “Only God Forgives,??? in which Ryan Gosling finds himself caught up in a gritty underground world of Thai drug smuggling, prostitution, rape, and murder.
The movie is, in fact, a documentary, but one more disturbing than international criminal conspiracies and more devastating than any “Sharknado.??? It’s about income inequality.
So glib, so clever. “More devastating than Sharknado,” one of SyFy Channel’s relentlessly bad Saturday night movies turned into a micro-cultural fad by those who never watch them, something made for less money than vanden Heuvel is paid in a year.
Robert Reich, reviewing his own movie, by way of syndication to the Kansas City Star:
As I emphasize in “Inequality for All??? — a new film out this week in which I explain the savage inequalities and insecurities now undermining our economy and democracy — we can make the economy work for us rather than for only a few at the top.
From the San Francisco Weekly:
Last year, Variety named San Francisco-based movie producer Jen Chaiken, along with her L.A.-based 72 Productions partner Sebastian Dungan, among the new “10 Producers to Watch.” This year, therefore, we’ve been watching Chaiken — or her films, anyway, which most recently include a pair of Sundance prizewinners: Jill Soloway’s comedy-drama Afternoon Delight, now playing, and Jake Kornbluth’s documentary Inequality for All, featuring former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, opening locally on September 27th.
But sometimes watching isn’t enough, so we talked to her too …
[SF Weekly]: American wealth disparity seems like, uh, a difficult subject.
Yes, it can be daunting to an audience, but let me tell you, as filmmakers, it was a hard movie to make, and part of why it was so hard is that we wanted to make it accessible. And so we wanted to take this mammoth topic and distill it so you can understand it, and you can enjoy yourself. After Sundance, somebody said something very pleasing to me: “I laughed a lot. And I cried. In a movie about the economy! I don’t know how you did that.” I said, “You have just made my year.”
[SF Weekly]: Is that the secret of the Reich-Kornbluth combo?
Oh yeah. Humor was a big talking point for us. Bob is very charismatic, and funny. So as the person who’s going to guide you through this issue, he’s great. And Jake doesn’t come from documentaries, he comes from comedies …
Inequality for All was hard for the well-off to make (it includes as one multi-millionaire, Nick Hanauer, who has spent the last couple of years on the lecture circuit of the pro left), so “humor was a big talking point,” because nothing so satisfies as famous names talking about how we the people can fix inequality — with jokes mixed in so it’s not such a downer.
The script about laughing and humor, repeated from the promotional materials, in the Detroit Free Press:
“Oh, I’m much funnier than Al Gore,??? says the former Clinton administration secretary of labor [in reference to a comparison with “An Inconvenient Truth”], who brings a sense of humor to the movie as well as a willingness to be personally revealing …
There’s a lot of information to digest. Yet for a movie that dwells often in the land of charts and graphs, director Jacob Kornbluth and Reich were committed to keeping things lively.
“We intended it to be entertaining. We didn’t want it to be in any way dry or didactic. People who have seen the screenings, many of them have told me that they’ve laughed and they’ve cried,??? says Reich during a phone interview a day after his appearance with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.???
“Inequality for All??? took home a special jury award at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and has been praised by movie critics …
Kickstarter crowd-funding was allegedly used to give us Reich’s movie.
The only way I’ll see it is if someone else buys a ticket when it comes to Pasadena. And then I’ll review it.
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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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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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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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