08.21.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Permanent Fail at 4:17 pm by George Smith
An old friend from the Lehigh Valley saw the link to the Community College as a verb post on Facebook and had this to say:
I remember losing my chemical processing job to NAFTA in the mid nineties in PA. Went to community college to brush up on some math courses but economics sent me back out to the work force. Lo and behold, those same chemical processing jobs now had an associate degree attached to the same responsibilities I had for 10 years after I got out of the Navy in 1986. So to do the same job I had as a Teamster and being trained in house at the plant I worked at I now had to go to college to able to apply for that job and put myself into dept with student loans at the age of 35. A nice little kick in the balls.
Building for decades, the US economy is really a story about contempt.
That nice ‘f—you’ was being put into place all through the country.
It’s the plain dishonoring of credentials and experience, all so people can be de-skilled, de-jobbed and compelled to spend money enrolled in courses to learn things they have already learned, sometimes more than once.
I ran across it when I graduated from Lehigh, multiple times.
Schools and businesses stopped honoring any type of credentials and experience when and wherever it was convenient, which was usually when you walked in their door.
I had been teaching a lab course in microbiology at Northampton Community College in period of around ’89-91, not long after leaving Lehigh University. It was suggested to me, by an old Lehigh advisor, that I might pick up an educational certification at Moravian College in Bethlehem. So I inquired and was given a list of courses I would have to take. I had a Ph.D. in chemistry from across town, and was told I would have to take introductory microbiology, a course I had been teaching, as well as other basic chemistry courses, which I also had taught as part of paying the freight for the doctorate.
I already had three degrees in chemistry and you can only imagine how shocking and infuriating it was to hear, as a young person who had recently graduated with the highest qualification one could get in chemistry, that one would have to take beginner’s courses again.
I asked the benighted woman who was talking with me, surely this could not be true, that the school would not honor any degreed credit from other very well known places. She just froze up and said I’d have to take the things again.
Maybe she was incompetent or crazy or something was really wrong that day. It brought everything to a bad halt. There was no point in having a conversation or to make plans on continuing education.
My impression, for the last thirty years, has been American business and schooling has made it their business to just deny people what they have learned as part of a racket to force many out of the workforce. It is a convenience, to obviously push desperate people into spending more and more money on “retraining.” Anything that will discredit labor and ability is thrown at you.
And we have a media and population, a good deal of which has been propagandized into believing whatever someone tells them along these lines.
You must retrain, even for minimum wage pay.
On Amazon’s digital sweat shop, Mechanical Turk, you can easily find many 2 and 5 cent jobs for which it is claimed you “are not qualified.” Don’t believe me? Go look.
It’s all part of the environment of demeaning labor and talent so it can be had as the cheapest of commodities. In addition, the national industry of predatory re-training schools is well established. For fees, always more fees and loans, we are promised revitalization.
And then when we finish up, typically, there’s no job or something that pays mininum wage or less, at which point you can be told again you need more re-training, your credentials are crap.
The continuing selling of this in bad times is playing with fire. At some point a large number of people will have lost interest in believing anything. They’ll be convinced, because it cannot be ignored, they’re in a society where work for living pay is a privilege awarded to those with only the right connections. And that those who have that privilege think of everyone else as inferior. This is what brings down entire countries.
You cannot sustain a system and philosophy that cynically condemns and cannibalizes decades worth of work and people for the benefit of a very few. The ax of history will eventually come to chop it down.
In a related, census data released on recovery from the end of the recession in 2009 has still lagged. No one who really got hit is yet back to what they were earning or worth before the troubles started.
But of particular interest is this brief bit on the alleged value of schooling, at the New York Times:
In the recession and its aftermath, many people went back to school, earning associate or bachelor’s degrees. Such credentials have helped, the new data shows, but they have been no guarantee against loss of income.
Households headed by people with only a high school diploma have seen their post-recession income decline by 9.3 percent, to $39,300 in June of this year, the report said. For households headed by people with an associate degree, median income declined by 8.6 percent in those four years, to $56,400. And among households headed by people with a bachelor’s degree or more, median income declined by 6.5 percent, to $84,700.
And, finally, a bit from today’s New Yorker website, more anecdotal contempt for people, everyone except a small slice. It’s been conditioned into the DNA.
At one of the country’s annual gatherings of music money and excess, SXSW in 2012, the brilliant stunt of paying poor people 20 bucks to be wi-fi lampshades:
“At last year’s South by Southwest technology conference, in Austin, the marketing agency BBH set up thirteen homeless volunteers as wireless transmitters, for twenty bucks a day. They lugged mobile Wi-Fi instruments around the city, searching for crowded conference areas, wearing shirts that identified themselves as homeless hotspots.”
Of course it was met with dismay. But who would even think of it except those who view contempt for others as normal part of daily life? People as ambulatory furniture and cheap stuff at that. At SXSW, one of the big hot money flows in the music biz.
The rest of the NYer piece is the usual high-button hand-wringing about the poors, hung on the hook of pop-art begging signs for the homeless, delivered with a slightly detached air of what-can-be-done-ism.
Nothing. Nothing can be done and nothing will be done.
The New Yorker writer can’t capture the smiling contempt of the year-old stunt of using homeless people as walking wi-fi “hot spots.”
This picture, on the web portal for it, does.
The brief smiling profiles of cleaned-up homeless people, adorning a PayPal button for donations on what the tens of thousands of music tourists and journalists in Austin thought might be fair to pay for wireless access. Two dollars for 15 minutes, another lousy deal, was the suggested amount in the fine print.
And the website with smiling faces or homeless people was not designed for twenty bucks a day.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 12:49 pm by George Smith
Did you know Facebook prohibits the “sharing” of such DK cartoon files because a privacy bit is set in the PNG? It’s true. Seems counterproductive and stupid. Plus, DailyK is hosted through Amazon Web Services. And every time you log the web page, you get a film pop-up that must always be dismissed with a click.
That’s three strikes, you’re out. They went to the digital grasp, along with everyone else in web design.
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Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 12:18 pm by George Smith
The American for a country where contempt is a virtue. Wait around for the rant in New Haven about “food stamp cocksuckers” who use the program to buy “crack.”
The Connecticut newspaper was not wrong when it compared his profane ideology to the Ku Klux Klan.
To Ted Nugent, most Americans are “cocksuckers.”
By dint of Media Matters and YouTube, all can see one of the most public bigots of our time, and — boy — is he angry about it.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 10:43 am by George Smith
Bradley Manning gets 35 years. Next up, Julian Assange, unless he wants to stay in the embassy of Ecuador in London for the rest of his life. If Manning can be put away for life, so can Julian Assange and, inevitably, Edward Snowden.
In the big story few Americans will recall who turned Manning in but today he figures large again in summaries of the case.
The fellow was Adrian Lamo, a feckless convicted hacker and apparent pathological liar, once a low-level but constant publicity hound at Wired and other on-line magazines. One way of looking at it is to observe Manning couldn’t have had worse luck when he sought out Lamo on-line and chose to speak with him. Many would have told him, outright, run away.
But Manning is an historical figure.
Lamo is not. Rather, he’s an always present human carbuncle, someone whose publicity and achievement as an informant turning Manning’s chats and e-mail over to the FBI and Wired (also not spotless in the affair), exists only due to the frailty of the person who confided in him.
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08.20.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks at 1:59 pm by George Smith
Yesterday’s bit on the National Journal ricin plot news that wasn’t news, because nincompoops on the staff at the magazine’s Global Security Newswire staff had mistakenly resurrected a 2011 article from the NYTimes, has been laundered.
Once nonsense is passed through an alleged source of authority, it can spread everywhere.
Take this snapshot, from Yahoo’s News Service:
To reiterate: There is no ricin bomb plot. This is trash, a mistake, taken from a New York Times piece that was clearly dated 2011.
Makes no difference, though. Just another small example of how degraded mainstream journalism is. Between firings, downsizing of operations, and a conversion to a model that values only page views and eyeballs, it’s not surprising. But it is still dismaying.
With regards to any alleged ricin bomb plot? It was going no place in 2011. Nothing has changed.
DD’s Law, you see:
The probability that any predicted national security catastrophe, or doomsday scenario, will occur is inversely proportional to its appearance in entertainments, movies, television dramas and series, novels, non-fiction books, magazines and news.
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08.19.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks at 3:24 pm by George Smith
Full size.
I never rely on the National Journal for security reporting on anything. Still, it is considered a sage publication within the Beltway, often getting a lot of good press.
But that doesn’t mean they don’t employ total nincompoops.
The above is my screen snap from the National Journal today, a news item about an alleged plan by al Qaeda in Yemen to launch ricin attacks.
It’s bylined the Global Security Newswire, a National Journal effort that has no connection with the real GlobalSecurity.Org
The article is nonsense. It cites a New York Times report, with a link, one allegedly published last Monday, or something.
However, apparently they don’t even bother to check their own link.
The New York Times piece was published in 2011.
“Confidential findings suggest the terror group has been trying to amass castor seeds and other ricin precursors at a secluded location in Yemen’s Shabwa province, an area beyond reach of the country’s central government in Sanaa, according to the sources,” it reads. “The data — initially reported in 2012 to President Obama and senior White House security staffers — suggests the militants want to have explosives spread the deadly substance through crowded indoor areas, government personnel said.”
The New York Times piece, again, is clearly marked 2011.
It’s such a great example of excrement in reporting one was tempted to
say it must purely be the result of a mistake in web-publishing automation. However, that doesn’t explain how the story was rewritten and advanced a year.
This is what happens when you employ people who are incompetent, or don’t pay them, or overwork them, or some combination of the three. There’s no excuse for it. There’s nothing right about it. There never will be.
DD blog, and GlobalSecurity.Org, debunked the idea of ricin bombs by al Qaeda back when the New York Times tried to pass it.
Indeed, maybe al Qaeda wanted to make ricin bombs back before 2011 (maybe they still do). But that is only because they are feebs and know nothing about the poison. They cannot make enough ricin and, further, since it is an active protein, it would not survive bombing, being denatured by fire, heat and shearing forces.
What to do? What to do? A minor blip in the news, but still — what’s the correct response?
Fire someone? Let other agencies employ them to mess things up?
“Global Security Newswire, produced by National Journal Group, offers daily news updates about nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, terrorism and related issues … A free e-daily, the Newswire provides thorough, accurate coverage …”
Yeah, right.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 1:07 pm by George Smith
Today’s perfect selections from the Culture of Lickspittle, pieces from the blogging editorial team at the Atlantic, some of the worst and most patronizing assholes on the net, solving the problems of sluggish US growth, mass unemployment and inequality. These days, everyone plays the stupid riff about community college being the Philosopher’s Stone for turning American labor lead into gold, the silver bullet nostrum that cures the leprosy of the alleged lack of skills in Americans. And if loutish and stupid citizens just had the right skills, the economy would get back on its feet for them.
The President plays it regularly in speeches. Everyone has caught the catchy tune.
It’s part of an increasingly urgent propaganda message, one the purpose of which is to convince people that the 1 percent taking everything isn’t so bad and may not even be relevant to the economic misfortunes of the majority. No, the misfortune is at the feet of American workers, who are inferior because they do not have “skills.”
But all hope is not lost. Americans can magically regain skills by paying for them, possibly through community college certifications.
It’s truly cynical and transparent, because the people always going on about it are those with high-button educations, schooling now completely priced out of reach of the masses. They are the explainers with their nice college degrees, certifications that they are A-OK in the skills department, allowed the privilege of a job in the higher paid servant classes. Because there’s a need to politely tell it how it is to all the inferior people.
So, here at this blog, we can turn “community college” into a verb (it’s what my massive college education, now obsoleted anyway, did):
Dodson community colleged his way out of crushing debt and two years of unemployment after he was laid off from his engineering job at Cisco Systems.
Forty eight million Americans community colleged their way off food stamps, many for the second time, in a new economic Renaissance.
The President, and many others earning six figures a year with benefits, insisted millions of American would community college themselves to a new and prosperous future.
From the Atlantic, where no one community college-ing is on the editorial staff as a writer:
Skills for America’s Future, a policy initiative run out of the Aspen Institute, was created in 2010 as a spin-off of President Obama’s Jobs Council and was originally led by longtime Obama supporter Penny Pritzker. With Pritzker now installed as the new Commerce secretary, Aspen announced earlier this week that the skills-training program will continue with executives from Snap-On and Gap at the helm.
There are employers who now work with community colleges to develop certificates that help show that a worker is ready. The National Career Readiness Certificate basically tests those kinds of skills I was talking about–can they read for information, locate information, do math?
It’s good to know one needs a community college background, paper proof that you can “read for information, locate information [and] do math” for a minimum wage retail job selling blue jeans and tools at the Gap and Snap-On.
If there was a button you could push to burn these people at the stake you’d push it.
Again, this is about contempt. Contempt for Americans seen in the implication that people aren’t fit to work and cannot read or do arithmetic.
The problem is not, as it appears when shopping Baja Ranch, that people don’t know how to read and do arithmetic. They do! They do fine with cash registers, counting out money, reading stocking lists, preparing foods behind the counter, reading labels, using scales and so on. The problem is being paid too little for a fair day’s work.
In fact, there was no shortage of Americans who tried to get jobs in the 2010 census. Almost all of them, as far as I could tell, had a basic grasp of reading and math.
However, there’s always room for another scam at the bottom. Now that Americans can afford even less, they can have a certification dangled in front them, one that promises a future job, if and when they take some courses and pay to take a test that proves they have reading comprehension and the basic ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide.
Also from the Atlantic, the question answered — “Are the rich getting too much of the economic pie?”
So we headed to Dangerously Delicious Pies in northeast Washington, D.C., with business editor Derek Thompson to explain income inequality over dessert. We ordered three pies — peanut butter, blueberry, and something amazing called the “Baltimore Bomb” — to make three charts that illustrate the income and wealth gap in the U.S. We’re not the first to mix math and pastry, as we discovered recently, but we hope this video offers a tasty perspective on a complex economic question.
There you have it. Pies. They ate pie! The worst inequality and economic injustice among the civilized powers, explained over frou-frou pies by glossy mag servants to the toffs in DC.
No link. The Atlantic is a site of the infinite download, auto-playing nuisance advertisements and video as soon as the page is logged.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 8:03 am by George Smith
Glenn Greenwald is an accomplished journalist. His release of the materials provided by Edward Snowden is historic.
But he’s not great at everything.
It was unwise to publicize that people you were working with (a family member) — separated globally — were also handling the Snowden materials.
It was obvious, even to the man, they would all become objects of global tracking and observation by the US government and its proxies. And that there might be opportunities taken to look for and seize encrypted files on thumb drives and a lap top.
Which now has been done, if only to provide confirmatory evidence of what Snowden has made available and to procure ancillary files which may hold indications of plans for it.
Greenwald’s an investigative journalist, one with a big ego. It’s not surprising that some aren’t particularly skillful at the spying trade.
On the other hand, shaking down the partner, David Miranda, through the authority of British intelligence service toadies, certainly does nothing to convince the world you’re not the new Evil Empire.
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08.16.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall at 3:11 pm by George Smith
Everybody knows something. That’s the hook an on-line bidding bazaar for consulting services, called Maven, part of the alleged great knowledge-sharing economy, uses to sell what it does.
Maven connects people interested in speaking to thousands of experts knowledgeable in a specialized areas of science and business. As a user of Maven in the role of consultant, you set your rate hourly. The lowest you can go is $25/hour, which immediately sets it apart from crowd-sourced micro-task work at places like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. (More, on which, later.)
A couple years ago I joined up for Maven and listed my areas of expertise — which are pretty obvious if you read this blog. National security issues, specializing in weapons of mass destruction, cybersecurity, and — as a side — protein chemistry/biochemistry.
Maven lists your profile and bio, anonymized or not, depending on your desire. Presumably it is searched when someone is looking for experts which hit your keywords.
Maven will also boost your profile — for a fee.
In the time I’ve been on Maven, my profile has been viewed — at best — three or four times. Put bluntly, it never comes up in search.
This didn’t bother me. I’m used to being overlooked in the winner-take-all scheme of things. I decided to ignore the account.
However, when someone from corporate America does actually view your profile and decides to ask for advice, Maven sends you a notification.
But what if the invitation to consult is from a total idiot?
Corporate America is rife with them, businessmen — maybe successful — who can still be pretty dumb at lots of things, individuals who wish to ask nonsensical questions.
My first request was from some American business that wanted to know about the potential for bleaching melanin.
There is none.
Melanin is a natural pigment of complex biochemistry. It’s present in almost all animals. One of evolution’s great achievements, there’s no way to make it go away.
Or, in another way of speaking, you can’t turn black and brown people into white people with rubbing creams or other chemicals. In fact, when melanin is inhibited by genetic disease, the result is very disfiguring.
I have no desire to take money from stupid people, or even to talk to them about things which they could easily determine, by themselves, to be impossible.
So I deleted the invitation to consult.
This is not how things are done. You have to formally decline and give a reason on Maven.
After another e-mail admonishment, I did so. I discovered Maven also rates your “expertness.” I was 2.5 on a scale of 1 to 5, without ever having consulted. This seems to mean someone can give you a bad review even if you decline to speak with them.
The next consulting request — one of the features of the service is that the businesses asking for the consult are rendered anonymous until a deal is clinched — was made by someone looking to discuss the issue of cyber-attacks and cyberterrorism on the US electrical power-generating infrastructure.
Seemed straightforward, something I could talk about and return good value.
I accepted the invitation.
The next thing the corporate customer wanted, still anonymous, was for me to take an on-line test.
Corporate America is also filled with people who have little respect for anything, or others with whom they wish to deal. Total contempt for people everywhere is now embedded in the American way of doing things.
I declined to take the test and indicated, through the Maven interface, that I would be turning down the offer to consult. No money would change hands.
Again, Maven requires you fill out a reason for turning down a consult. This was easy. The requesting party was not an honest broker. It wanted me to do something for it, take a test to prove myself in a manner which did not specifically have anything to do with the questions it wished to discuss.
My Maven rating, of course, was not improved by honesty.
A few weeks later Maven sent me an e-mail informing it needed “protein chemists” and that there would be a referral fee available if I could find one, or more, to consult on Maven. I informed the service that I was highly trained in protein chemistry. There was no answer.
A couple months went by, my weekly Maven bulletin informing me that my profile had been viewed “zero” times and not come up in search.
The next invitation to consult came from the same business originally interested in discussing American electrical power generation, cybersecurity, risk and evolution of effort on the matter. In fact, it was precisely the exact invitation I had rejected a couple months earlier, just cut and pasted into a new request.
I rejected it for the second time. Again, Maven required a reason. Reason given: Entity — after initial rejection — waited a couple months and refiled with an identical query, one that involved taking an on-line test. I won’t take such tests. Contempt, as I’ve said, is now found at all levels of American business life and it is something that anonymous crowd-sourcing software developed in the Silicon Valley conveys well.
Maven then inquired, could I refer someone to help the client. Absolutely not.
Why would I? Why would anyone? Some corporate entity, anonymous, dealing in bad faith. Just the kind of people you’ll go out of your way to help.
There are no news items on Maven Research, the on-line consulting marketplace, in the current Google News tab. Wonder why?
Related:
“Is LinkedIn Cheating Employers and Job Seekers Alike?” — at PBS.
The short answer: Why yes, yes it is. You can read why. The critique, from a headhunter, is long and detailed. LinkedIn is, unsurprisingly, just another corporate tech start-up for the business world, one that has degenerated into a scam which pits everyone stupid enough to be in its resume marketplace against everyone.
Again, this is a piece, at the heart of which is a contempt for dealing with people honestly and humanely.
Of interest, a more general observation on corporate human resources operations:
As I’ve written often in the past, I believe the automation of recruiting, job seeking and hiring has exacerbated America’s employment crisis. Online forms and tools like the “apply with LinkedIn button” make it too easy for the wrong applicants to apply for jobs, and harder for employers to find the right ones. But when a job applicant’s position on the stack of resumes can be bought, the search for the best-qualified candidates is even further compromised, and so is our economy.
America’s jobs crisis needs to be looked at as a failure of employers and job boards to ensure an accurate and fair employment process. Blaming unskilled and improperly educated job seekers is a fool’s errand, as Wharton researcher Peter Cappelli demonstrates in his book, “Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It.” The talent is out there; it’s just getting lost in a system that employers have permitted to supplant more sound, accurate recruiting methods and their own good judgment.
Everyone from employers to job seekers to the U.S. Department of Labor should be scrutinizing the mechanics that control recruiting, job seeking and hiring — and how these systems contribute to the employment crisis.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 10:51 am by George Smith
Embiggen, as they say.
Lawmakers and privacy advocates called Friday for reforms and greater transparency in operations of the National Security Agency in response to reports that the highly secretive agency repeatedly violated privacy rules over the years.
The reaction came after The Washington Post reported the violations in Friday’s editions, citing an internal audit and other top-secret documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. —WaPost
Ninety days ago Keith Alexander was using all the publicity tools of the mainstream press to spread the assertion that Chinese cyber-hacking was stealing the country’s future.
The Edward Snowden affair ended that, making him a poor man’s Bob McNamara after the release of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.
But it’s radically different today and the times they aren’t a changin’.
The very cool satirical art of PARIAH!
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