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Nothing could be more American than McDonald’s and wage theft. It’s tradition, supplanting apple pie.
Hard to choose this week. Missouri was in the running for a brief period. So was Uncle Sam. But since they’ve held off until next week the remote-control bombing of paupers in Syria, he may get another shot.
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In e-mail today, an ad for a Line 6 device to turn an iPhone into a Pocket Pod (the latter of which I have.)
The SonicPort can be “[the] centerpiece of your GarageBand mobile studio,” it reads.
Never liked recording on iOS platforms, never will. Pretty pictures in the linked video. But it doesn’t rock.
You want rock? Call me.
You ought to hear what the Pocket Pod, sans iJunk, sounds like with me going through it live into a guitar amp. And I’ll have an example for you soon.
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Missouri takes the lead as the new heart of sedition in Civil War 2. Honest Abe maneuvered the South into firing on Fort Sumter by sending a resupply convoy into Charleston harbor. Maybe the President can instruct the ATF and FBI to send expeditions to the Show Me State after its crazy legislature makes criminals of them when they try to enforce national gun law, provoking an armed confrontation.
“Missouri is only the beginning,” one of the new rebels against federal tyranny tells the New York Times newspaper.
“I’ve got five different states that want a copy [of our bill].”
I think it would be great entertainment to fire a volley of cruise missiles into Jefferson City, Missouri, instead of a piss ant country like Syria, for a change, don’t you? They’re very precise, I hear.
Unless a handful of wavering Democrats change their minds, the Republican-controlled Missouri legislature is expected to enact a statute next month nullifying all federal gun laws in the state and making it a crime for federal agents to enforce them here. A Missourian arrested under federal firearm statutes would even be able to sue the arresting officer.
The law amounts to the most far-reaching states’ rights endeavor in the country, the far edge of a growing movement known as “nullification??? in which a state defies federal power.
The Missouri Republican Party thinks linking guns to nullification works well, said Matt Wills, the party’s director of communications, thanks in part to the push by President Obama for tougher gun laws. “It’s probably one of the best states’ rights issues that the country’s got going right now,??? he said.
What would be your tactical operational plan to strike the legislature in Jefferson City? Discuss.
Labor Day, as defined at the DoL: “The first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers.”
I look forward to the expostulations and op-eds we get this time of year: Anti-labor and anti-union essays, bits on right-to-work-for-less, tributes to the biggest corporations for their innovation in trimming the workforce & making work not pay, how the boot heel of Obamacare on the throat of said corporations will cause them to fire good Americans and how the Middle Class can be restored by not raising the minimum wage or perhaps even eliminating it.
Also, school is about to begin and teacher unionization is totally evil, California is an economic basket case/Texas is business paradise, and bad minimum wage workers should take the day to reflect on all they have been given and stop causing hardship for Wal-Mart and McDonalds.
Remember that food stamps should not be given to people who won’t work even though most who get them do and if you are working and still poor it is either a bad lifestyle/bad personal responsibility thing or because you have zero skills compared to everyone else in the global economy and deserve it.
Feel free to add your own variations on the familiar American homilies to the value and sanctity of human capital.
Remember to buy the hot dogs and beer, they’re on special, and college football begins this weekend, one part of the economy where the workers receive very good pay and benefits.
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On Friday, Charlotte Sexauer, a reporter from the Santiago Times contacted GlobalSecurity.Org over news of an old stash of botulinum toxin, discovered as part of a Pinochet government clandestine program.
An initial story, in the Santiago Times, explains the circumstances:
Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship possessed biological weapons capable of killing “thousands,??? it was revealed by a former government official Thursday.
Former Public Health Institute (ISP) director Ingrid Heitmann told the German Press Agency (DPA) that “two boxes of syringes full of Botulinum toxin??? — dating back to the 1980s — were found underneath the ISP in 2008. Initially, Heitman claimed the amount could wipe out “half of Santiago,??? though later revised this estimate to the thousands without giving a precise number.
Heitmann said the toxins were destroyed without then-President Michelle Bachelet’s office or the Justice Ministry being informed, and added she “panicked??? when her colleagues made the discovery …
Legal evidence and reports had previously demonstrated that botulinum toxin was tested on in labs, and sarin gas and thallium were manufactured during Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Secret police (DINA) agent Eugenio Berríos was charged with carrying out the production and use of sarin gas under Pinochet’s orders.
The toxins found underground in 2008 were believed to have been sent from the Butantan Institute of Sao Paulo, Brazil, in the 1980s. Heitmann added Chile did not have the capacity to produce botulinum toxin.
The reporter asked me, “If Botox is legal, why is Botulinum Toxin considered a chemical weapon? What makes it prohibited by the Geneva Protocol?”
Botulinum toxin is the single most deadliest poison known. It is prohibited because of this and because of its history as a weapon manufactured in historical bioweapons programs. The Japanese used Clostridium botulinum in WWII and the US military developed it as a weapon at the same time because of fears Germany was pursuing it. It was also a tested part of the Soviet bioweapons program.
Botulinum toxin weaponization is within the capability of national programs and there is no antidote for poisoning by it except sustaining measures. People must be maintained on ventilators until the body repairs the part of the synaptic junction eaten away by the toxin. This can be a relatively long period and it is easy to see that a large number of botulinum poisoning cases, as might result in use of a weapon, would stand a good chance of overwhelming medical facilities.
Botox, on the other hand, as used in the cosmetics industry, is the same poison but is not shipped in dosages that can prove problematic or lethal to human beings. It would be a lot of work, impractical really, to actually collect enough botox vials from the cosmetic industry, recombine them, and then concentrate the contents without loss into a usable weapon.
One American company produced botulinum toxin for research purposes and was lax in its procedures and oversight during the years of the war on terror. It sold reagent grade botulinum toxin in concentrated pure form to quacks masquerading as researchers in the time period ca. 2003-2004 without oversight.
The cosmetic industry quacks who bought botulinum toxin from the American private sector laboratory were interested in diverting it for resale in their cosmetic surgery businesses. The operation was discovered when one of them administered the concentrate to himself and patients/acquaintances without realizing it was so dangerous. They all suffered acute botulism and had to be maintained on ventilators for months. This drew the attention of the FBI which rolled up the ring and raided the American lab.
The lab, named List in the San Francisco Bay area, was forced into bankruptcy by the incident.
It has apparently emerged from that bankruptcy and continues to sell and research botulinum toxin along with other biochemical agents of interest.
“Since 1978 List has advanced research through quality products,” reads a description on its “about” page.
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Envisioned Culture of Lickspittle corporate headquarters.
It’s fairly obvious Apple believes its urine to be the world’s sweetest Kool-Aid.
From Krugman, an observation on how the mighty eventually fall:
Yep: the uncouth nerds who created Microsoft became incredibly rich, acquired couth, and lost their edge; Apple stayed edgy in part because of Steve Jobs, but also because it was a disappointment for so long. And if its plans to build a high-tech Versailles are any indication, the now super-successful Apple may be heading down the same road as its one-time nemesis.
At the height of his power, Bill Gates and Microsoft rescued Apple and Steve Jobs.
Today Apple believes it stands astride the world, if this article — pointed out in the Krugman post, is any indication:
At what turned out to be his last public appearance, Steve Jobs stood before the Cupertino City Council on June 7, 2011, to present plans for a new corporate campus for Apple (AAPL). Scarecrow thin but forceful as ever, Jobs displayed several renderings of a headquarters intended to accommodate more than 12,000 employees in a single, circular building. “It’s a little like a spaceship,??? he said of the massive, four-story ring, which, at 2.8 million square feet, would be two-thirds the size of the Pentagon and set among 176 acres of trees where today there are mostly asphalt parking lots. “We have a shot,??? he said, “at building the best office building in the world. I really do think that architecture students will come here to see it??? …
The true expense of the campus lies not in green tech, though, as much as the materials—as well as what product designers call “fit and finish.??? As with Apple’s products, Jobs wanted no seam, gap, or paintbrush stroke showing; every wall, floor, and even ceiling is to be polished to a supernatural smoothness. All of the interior wood was to be harvested from a specific species of maple, and only the finer-quality “heartwood??? at the center of the trees would be used, says one person briefed on the plan last year.
The main building will also be groundbreaking in how it’s assembled. While the structural shell will be erected on site, the glass that forms the exterior walls will be bent and framed by Seele in its factory in Gersthofen, Germany. “It’s something like 6 kilometers of glass,??? says Peter Arbour, an architect with Seele, who says that no company has attempted to use panes as large …
You only have to read about two and a half pages of it to get the idea Apple needs the structure, if only for the expanded space to fit all the raging conceits.
There is another historic instance of big world-gripping architectural plans that comes to mind. That went well.
Interior of Albert Speer-designed Volkshalle, to be built in Berlin of Greater Germania after victory in World War II.
Glenn Greenwald killed the Internet — Fiore.
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What is the national cancer that has eaten up reason? It is the Republican Party, the extreme right, and its media. Almost single-handedly, it is they who have damaged the American public’s perceptions of science. We endure this bad time, one of government paralysis, stagnation and the flaunting of ignorant beliefs of no substance as righteous virtue, hoping that something might change. But hope is not a strategy.
Yesterday, the New York Times published an opinion entitled “Welcome to the Age of Denial,” by Adam Frank.
An astrophysicist, Frank discussed the ignorance of the American populace with regards to science, and how it has — discouragingly — steadily increased.
He writes:
IN 1982, polls showed that 44 percent of Americans believed God had created human beings in their present form. Thirty years later, the fraction of the population who are creationists is 46 percent.
In 1989, when “climate change??? had just entered the public lexicon, 63 percent of Americans understood it was a problem. Almost 25 years later, that proportion is actually a bit lower, at 58 percent …
Today, however, it is politically effective, and socially acceptable, to deny scientific fact. Narrowly defined, “creationism??? was a minor current in American thinking for much of the 20th century. But in the years since I was a student, a well-funded effort has skillfully rebranded that ideology as “creation science??? and pushed it into classrooms across the country. Though transparently unscientific, denying evolution has become a litmus test for some conservative politicians, even at the highest levels.
Meanwhile, climate deniers, taking pages from the creationists’ PR playbook, have manufactured doubt about fundamental issues in climate science that were decided scientifically decades ago. And anti-vaccine campaigners brandish a few long-discredited studies to make unproven claims about links between autism and vaccination.
One of the things scientists do is to accurately describe observables. Frank sort of does it when he mentions “conservative politicians.”
Perhaps there is a reason for this tip-toeing. Diplomacy. He wants laymen to read what he’s written and not close their minds immediately because he mentions the GOP directly.
But this, in and of itself, is a concession to how much harm the right has done to the ability to issue public statements of science fact. It has made, as Frank notes, the statement of what is scientifically true into a process in which laymen now believe it is all politically motivated from the left.
Almost exclusively, science denial is the property of the right. Science did not leave the GOP. The GOP threw down science.
As I’ve written before on this blog, I was at Lehigh University when Michael Behe was hired into the biochemistry floor where I was a Ph.D. student.
Behe was the man who renamed creationism into “intelligent design.” He was cagey, kept his mouth shut about his beliefs and plans until he had tenure and Lehigh’s scientists were asleep at the wheel. Initially, they paid little attention to what his best-selling books on intelligent design, Of Pandas and People and Darwin’s Black Box, actually said.
Behe subsequently transferred to the biology department and that’s when his hiring blew up in the university’s face. Today the biology department must run a disclaimer about Behe on its webpage.
Michale Behe was discredited in the Dover school district of Pennsylvania trial that pitted the teaching of evolution versus creationism in public school. The school district had changed its policy in 2004 to one in which Behe’s intelligent design was to be taught as an alternative to evolution theory, with his book, Of Pandas and People, as reference material.
It took a judge, not scientists at Lehigh or anywhere else, to dismantle Michael Behe and call intelligent design exactly what it was, weasel wording for creationism.
But the the damage had been done and it was grievous.
For years Behe had been embraced and used by the right to convince Americans there was legitimate scientific doubt about evolution.
“My professors’ generation could respond to silliness like creationism with head-scratching bemusement,” writes Adam Frank for the Times.
Yes, some would.
Some played dead, though, and it was at my school and elsewhere. And now we have what we do.
It is also worth noting that it was the self-same opinion pages of the New York Times that published Michael Behe’s opinions on “intelligent design” creationism in 1999 and 2005. This, like many New York Times editorial disasters (think Iraq and WMDs) was harmful to public knowledge.
And this is also at the heart of why science denial is the property of the right in the United States.
Science is about standards. Standards are achieved or called for by the evaluation of facts determined by experimentation following the rigor of the scientific method. And argument ceases when facts are established by carefully gathered data. Research moves on.
The right despises standards, facts and science because to believe in such things means you must discard your opinions, fairy tales, or impeding personal philosophies when results discredit them or require the making of rational policy.
And the right does not stomach that in the US.
With regards to evolution, the right was successful at propagandizing people with the canard that science was attacking their religious beliefs. Science and evolution do nothing of the sort. Science makes no determination about God. The existence of God is not experimentally testable.
But back to the New York Times and its old relationship with Michael Behe. The cachet the opinion pieces on its pages afforded him did much in subsequent years to twist the average American’s understanding of evolution and the actual role of science. And this was because Americans cannot distinguish between crackpots who may have a tenured position at a respected university and scientists as a whole.
The right in this country plays this well. It finds one scientist, one who is on the fringe, isolated by colleagues but still present in the academy, and uses the weird or wrong in arguments to laymen, alleging there is actual professional debate on a matter concerning well-established science. This, when there is none.
With the case of climate change, funded by fossil fuel energy companies, the right simply created some websites, phony organizations and position papers that looked like serious science to laymen. Consider that one again. With money
backing you, to cast doubt on established science, it is now only
necessary to gin up something phony that looks like science to people unfamiliar with the real thing.
And American scientists have had one hell of time fighting it.
The result has been disaster. The Republican Party and its belligerent and now dangerous dunces, on the pages of the country’s newspapers, in videos in front of their constituents, on television, on radio, spewing compounded nonsense on everything from reproductive biology to the environment.
Sure, they can be defeated at the national level when the ludicrous statements become too alienating to overlook. But at home, at the root level, they’re always rushing to enact law and policy that preserves ignorance in states where they control the legislature.
In February 2005, Behe wrote in the Times, 10 months before the Dover decision crushed the idea that intelligent design was respected science:
In the wake of the recent lawsuits over the teaching of Darwinian evolution, there has been a rush to debate the merits of the rival theory of intelligent design. As one of the scientists who have proposed design as an explanation for biological systems, I have found widespread confusion about what intelligent design is and what it is not.
First, what it isn’t: the theory of intelligent design is not a religiously based idea, even though devout people opposed to the teaching of evolution cite it in their arguments …
You’ll have noticed in the lead paragraph, Behe calling “intelligent design” a “rival theory” to evolution. And the Times let him get away with it.
Again, the problem here is duplicity and bears repeating: There was never any accepted published science backing up anything with regards to creationism.
In 1999 Behe had written for the Times:
Teach Darwin’s elegant theory. But also discuss where it has real problems accounting for the data, where data are severely limited, where scientists might be engaged in wishful thinking, and where alternative–even ‘heretical’–explanations are possible.
This was part of an opinion piece in which Behe set himself up as an arbiter of reason, arguing that the state of Kansas should not have abolished the requirement of teaching evolution but, instead, taken the more rational approach of teaching allegedly competing theories.
Frank concluded “Welcome to the Age of Denial” by saying, ‘[As] we know from history’s darkest moments, even the most enlightened traditions can be broken and lost.”
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