09.21.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall at 10:28 am by George Smith
Here’s a good explanation (at Salon) of the divestment of manufacturing for cheap prices, a government decision supported by all the presidents we’ve had since Richard Nixon. The end of making stuff brought down the middle class.
The story makes the point, now made by many: You can’t have a country like the United States if you generate nothing but low-paying service jobs for the support of the lords. It’s simply a modern feudal system. The great things the country was known for in science and progress post-WWII won’t be sustainable.
The Silicon Valley will never save the world by a bubble of extreme wealth, iKit, big data and web applications surrounded by a land of have-nots.
Anyway, to curb inflation in the 80’s, Paul Volcker tightened up monetary policy, setting the lending rate so high people couldn’t afford loans for cars and houses. It slowed the economy and utterly destroyed the steel industry, something I saw firsthand, living in Bethlehem. I even wrote a hard rock tune about it.
So sing happy songs on the radio and watch as the world crumbles down … And it’s hard for me to stifle a yawn as the American dream hits the ground.
The narrative of social and national decline extends through much American literature during the last 40 years. If you read Friday Night Lights, Buzz Bissinger’s book on high school football in Odessa, Texas, a good deal of the background story is on the ruin of the middle class economy in the region, brought on by just this thing.
In the end the Salon writer returns to Flint, Michigan.
Made famous in 1989 by Michael Moore’s Roger & Me, the first movie to show exactly what was being done to the country through what became an acclaimed documentary on the ruin of Flint as an auto-manufacturing center.
Flint never recovered, nobody did.
An excerpt:
No American city has suffered more during the Age of Deregulation than Flint. In 1978, Flint had 80,000 automaking jobs, and the highest per capita income in the nation. Today, it has 6,000 automaking jobs, and the highest murder rate in the English-speaking world. Instead of Corvettes and speedboats, the yards are filled with mean dogs.
Roger and Me: Beach Boys tune from Andrew Reznicek on Vimeo.
Hat tip to Delaware Liberal, where I spied it.
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09.20.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:20 pm by George Smith
You know, that new sharing economy thing where sociopaths from America’s upper middle servant class or some miscellaneous toff uses innovation — TaskRabbit or driving around on Skid Row leveraging the destitute — creatively employing underutilized human meat assets?
From the Los Angeles Times, on the iPhone store in Pasadena’s Old Town, on famous Colorado Street (’bout a quarter mile from me):
Pasadena Police Lt. Jason Clawson confirmed that a fight broke out about 9 a.m. as a man left the [Apple store in Pasadena] with multiple iPhones. Several homeless people said the man picked up dozens of people at homeless shelters downtown, drove them to Pasadena and promised to pay them $40 — $20 for each iPhone voucher they were able to secure.
Clawson said the fight broke out when people who were in line and hired by the man began fighting with him because they said they weren’t being paid enough, Clawson said. Police escorted the man from the scene, he said.
“It didn’t go right. I stood out here all night,??? said Dominoe Moody, 43, who said he was picked up along with several vanloads of people at a homeless mission.
Many of the homeless who had been hired to stand in line — but later stranded at the store — lingered near the store after the arrests, some hanging out on the corner across the street and a few continuing to stand in line. One homeless man was escorted out by an Apple employee after wandering into the store with no money …
Apple and no money go together like oil and water.
Anyway, seems like there really ought to be an iTunes store app for this, called iBum, one that locates homeless missions or hang-outs near you when it’s time to find someone to stand in line for the upgrade.
“Customers waiting outside the Apple store on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica on Thursday night were grumbling about a well-dressed man who had hired two unemployed men to wait in line for him,” continued the Times.
“The man, who said his name was Sam but declined to give his last name, said he worked at a ‘high-profile Santa Monica app company’ and needed a new phone immediately because he had lost his phone recently … [He] briefly considered hiring a line sitter on TaskRabbit — a website that enables people to hire others for small errands — ‘but it was too expensive.’ ”
iChisel to the rescue.
Brings out the best in people while transforming our lives from gold into lead.
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Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 1:40 pm by George Smith
Unwise.
And now officially a pariah.
Fired in WhiteManistan:
(AP) Gilberton Borough Council members said Thursday night they plan to fire Mark Kessler, nearly two months after voting to suspend the only full-time member of the town’s police force …
In January, Kessler drafted a resolution the borough adopted that calls for nullifying any federal, state or local regulations that infringe on the Second Amendment.
This leaves continuing to grow the militia, called the Constitution Security Force.
Mark “Gunny” Kessler of Schuylkill County, PA, from the archives.
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Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 11:06 am by George Smith
From the American Journal of Medicine:
“The number of guns per capita per country was a strong and independent predictor of firearm related death in a given country, whereas the predictive power of the mental illness burden was of borderline significance … Regardless of exact cause and effect, however, the current study debunks the widely-quoted hypothesis that guns make a nation safer.”
Accompanying data shows US the obvious world leader.
Journal article here.
Full size.
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Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 9:14 am by George Smith
Full size.
Krugman today: “[It] grows increasingly hard to see how … we can avoid a government shutdown — and … the even more frightening prospect of a debt default … this political moment of truth was going to happen sooner or later. We might as well have it now.”
Bring on the Constitutional crisis. See if the crazy backed and elected by corporate wealth in 2010 can bring down the government and the economy.
Why not?
They voted to toss a few million off food stamps yesterday and set the stage for closing the government over Obamacare today. They should have what they want, a doomsday, and see what it’s about.
No more suspense.
Wreck it, do it, stop the checks, stop the planes, stop the services, send homeland security home, stop the spending in government/military towns, stop it all, bring on the whirlwind and blight in the “greatest nation on Earth,” let’s get it on. With hands over hearts. God Bless America!
The catalog of PARIAH covers. Collect them all.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 8:35 am by George Smith
Ted Nugent:
How many more slaughters have to occur before we reverse this very deadly course mandated by clueless bureaucrats?
Liberalism is a death sentence. Don’t buy it.
It took inter-agency joint SWAT forces to take him out. Therefore the NRA should spin up a new program to train soldiers on bases on the use of guns in self-defense. The ones allowed to bear arms should be more heavily armed. And self-defense guns should be mandated for all janitors, secretaries and whatever other civilian workers there may be.
Trivia: Blog comments filter catches astro-turf to domain welovegun.com, a spam site in Arabic, used as a front for advertising and backlinks to the usual goods. On access it attempts to load at least 3000 elements.
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09.19.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 1:49 pm by George Smith
I exploded this morning after reading Los Angeles Times reporter Ricardo Lopez news piece on the American Community Survey conducted by the Census.
Entitled “Amid bad census data news on income, poverty, some bright spots,” it is the kind of reporting that reveals only the tip of the iceberg in why nothing can be done in the US.
“New census data released Thursday painted a grim picture of the economic recovery in the United States,” read the lede. “Still there were bright spots in California.”
When confronted with the volume of data on misery in the census report, a thinking person doesn’t interpret minor statistical up-ticks as “bright spots.” More likely they’re anomalies, noise, or meaningless when viewed with the whole.
I got angry and wrote him a short e-mail. I don’t expect an answer, you never do from the swells. But this puts it in a nutshell:
Me: You had to look pretty hard to find anything good in those census statistics. And that may increasingly be part of the problem. You and your peers are not really in touch with it. If more writing these small bits of news, trying to pan gold from the sluices of horrendous crap, had to pick up bread from the pantry once a week or be faced with the job opportunities in the new economy, perhaps like spending the day on Amazon Mechanical Turk getting 50 cents or less for various “tasks” in hopes that you’ll be able to move eight dollars into your account after a week of it, you’d write it a little differently.
But then you would have to be unemployed and in poverty and you wouldn’t be getting it published.
Lopez is not the only reporter to cover the matter at the Times. Gale Holland, a more senior member of the staff, and a colleague, also looked at the statistics.
There wasn’t anything good in what they wrote:
Poverty continued creeping upward in the Los Angeles area last year, long after the declared end of the recession, new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau show.
The numbers are another sign of continued suffering after the economic downturn: More than 17% of people in the Los Angeles, Long Beach and Santa Ana metropolitan area lived below the poverty line last year. That number rose year by year since 2007, when roughly 13% lived in poverty …
“What is significant and new is that poverty is not rising and falling with the rest of the economy, it is just continuing to rise,??? wrote Bill Parent, associate dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. “This is a terrible ‘new normal.’”
This blog used to be a lot about national security issues. I find it very difficult to write about them now. They’re trivial in comparison to what is reality in the country, on the ground.
And so you’re not going to see much of the national security thing.
By example, anyone who thinks cyberwar is a significant problem compared to what afflicts a very visible portion of American lives daily is a fool worth only your contempt.
If you’re still sane it’s impossible to take someone like NSA director Keith Alexander at all seriously, for patently obvious reasons.
Anyway, why would I call this country a failed state?
Well, the problem in with traditional thinking is that the concept of a failed state adheres to a professional definition. That doesn’t take into account countries that devolve in a way that stems from their unique nature.
The United States, being the wealthiest country in the world with the most powerful military on the planet, would not be expected to be a failed state in any sense of a state department or CIA geo-political fact book definition. It would not be expected to fail on a trajectory comparable to historic examples of empire from the past.
Instead, it’s making its own special way, or case: A country that can’t be governed, with no way to see progress, capable of swinging a mighty stick at designated enemies, yet with a growing population in poverty, an ocean of misery that’s over 50 percent the population of Germany, a bit over two-thirds that of citizenries of Britain and France.
The tragedy of it, and this is known to people who study poverty and who are in it, is that everyone not afflicted turns away. You lose everything, you get uncoupled from society and you can’t get back.
And a big society where millions and millions of people are left to rot is certainly one where many of the disenfranchised can angrily view having work and economic viability as a privilege for those who are the most fortunate.
Today words are of little value. Five years ago I had a readership and could get published. In the intervening span that was annihilated.
For someone who, over the major part of a lifetime, has come to define himself by the word, by the ability to speak clearly, being involuntarily separated from what one is good at is a heavy blow.
So, you know, art, music, busking.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall, WhiteManistan at 8:59 am by George Smith
We have met the enemy and it’s our so-called best. Corporate America and the most wealthy have destroyed everything, with no end in sight.
Smartphones and iJunk have not saved the day. You can use them to notify your family you’re going to the food pantry.
Excerpts from the news on the today’s Census report on the state of America:
“The number of Americans in poverty remained largely unchanged at a record 46.5 million. By race, a growing proportion of poor children are Hispanic, a record 37 percent of the total. Whites make up 30 percent, blacks 26 percent. The new census data show that lower-income households are a steadily increasing share of the population, while middle- to higher-income groups shrank or were flat. Roughly 13.6 percent of U.S. households, received food stamps, the highest level on record. Just over half of these households, or 52 percent, were -below poverty.”
Corporate profits soared, noted the New York Times, “but [according to Census data] the median earnings of men working full time have not increased in real terms since the early 1970s.”
“Economists believe that the [Census] report understates the degree of income inequality in the United States, by not including, among other things, earnings from capital gains made on rising stock prices.”
Could we hope for the Republican Party to make things worse in two weeks?
Isn’t it time to send everyone to the glue factory?
Comparisons: 46.5 million Americans live in poverty. Population of France — 65.7 million, Britain — 62.2 million.
Art predicts life:
We lock up the poor for all the rich
And we do it right without no hitch
Welcome to the United States of Greed
It’s the only country you’ll ever need …
Now we think freedom’s lame
Because what you need is a life of pain.
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09.18.13
Posted in Crazy Weapons, WhiteManistan at 1:58 pm by George Smith
The damaged tribesmen of WhiteManistan are incapable of seeing their mental trouble.
They can be counted on to do the wrong thing, always.
Open carry of guns to Starbucks in Newtown, Connecticut, was an idea and action by people who need to be ostracized from society.
And the “I Love Guns and Coffee (at Starbucks)” campaign to take your guns to the franchise has just been … killed.
From Starbucks, today:
Few topics in America generate a more polarized and emotional debate than guns. In recent months, Starbucks stores and our partners (employees) who work in our stores have been thrust unwillingly into the middle of this debate. That’s why I am writing today with a respectful request that customers no longer bring firearms into our stores or outdoor seating areas …
Our company’s longstanding approach to “open carry??? has been to follow local laws: we permit it in states where allowed and we prohibit it in states where these laws don’t exist. We have chosen this approach because we believe our store partners should not be put in the uncomfortable position of requiring customers to disarm or leave our stores. We believe that gun policy should be addressed by government and law enforcement—not by Starbucks and our store partners.
Recently, however, we’ve seen the “open carry??? debate become increasingly uncivil and, in some cases, even threatening. Pro-gun activists have used our stores as a political stage for media events misleadingly called “Starbucks Appreciation Days??? that disingenuously portray Starbucks as a champion of “open carry.??? To be clear: we do not want these events in our stores. Some anti-gun activists have also played a role in ratcheting up the rhetoric and friction, including soliciting and confronting our customers and partners …
I would like to clarify two points. First, this is a request and not an outright ban. Why? Because we want to give responsible gun owners the chance to respect our request—and also because enforcing a ban would potentially require our partners to confront armed customers, and that is not a role I am comfortable asking Starbucks partners to take on…
Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, told newspapers: “The presence of a weapon in our stores is unsettling and upsetting for many of our customers.”
And this points again to the dark heart of the gun-crazy in America. They have made a big thing out of open carry in restaurants, shopping centers, snack shops and on the streets of cities because it is about intimidation, a form of low level mental terrorism.
Their’s is a dark joy in unsettling those they see as enemies all around.
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