07.29.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall, WhiteManistan at 8:56 am by George Smith
PARIAH: “To steal from the poors to give to the rich.”
From AP:
By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent. But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76 percent enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.
By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity …
“There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front,” said some expert to the news agency.
White alienation. Geez. That’s what it will take to start the food riots, eh?
Big version. Do statistics belong in modern folk art?
The Pariah collection.
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07.28.13
Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 2:10 pm by George Smith
PARIAH: “Dedicated to bringing it all down on your heads.”
More in the fine satirical art series.
From NY Mag:
The Republican Party has spent 30 years careering ever more deeply into ideological extremism, but one of the novel developments of the Obama years is its embrace of procedural extremism. The Republican fringe has evolved from being politically shrewd proponents of radical policy changes to a gang of saboteurs who would rather stop government from functioning at all. In this sense, their historical precedents are not so much the Gingrich revolutionaries, or even their tea-party selves of a few years ago; the movement is more like the radical left of the sixties, had it occupied a position of power in Congress. And so the terms we traditionally use to scold bad Congresses—partisanship, obstruction, gridlock—don’t come close to describing this situation. The hard right’s extremism has bent back upon itself, leaving an inscrutable void of paranoia and formless rage and twisting the Republican Party into a band of anarchists.
And the worst is not behind us.
“The reign of the Republican House has not yet inflicted any deep or permanent disaster on the country, but it looks like it is just a matter of time,” it concludes.
Hat tip to Frank and Pine View Farm.
Full size Pariah magazine.
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Posted in Rock 'n' Roll at 1:43 pm by George Smith
Mick Farren, UK rocker, author and troublemaker, passed away while performing onstage with his old band, the Deviants.
As a young man I bought Deviants albums, along with his later solo releases, Screwed Up and Vampires Stole My Lunch Money, the latter of which featured charming titles “Half Price Drinks,” “I Want a Drink,” and “Drunk in the Morning,” a trilogy that communicated a certain amount of personal biography.
When I first moved to southern California, Farren was living in LA and writing a weekly column for the long since gone Los Angeles Reader, an alternative newsweekly.
Here’s a bit from the David Frost show, with Farren explaining how he injected a bit of craziness into the Isle of Wight rock festival in 1969.
And here is an excerpt from one of Farren’s book, one which I bought, entitled The Black Leather Jacket:
“It was all too obvious that (the black leather jacket) was my provisional membership card to the Bad Boys … I’m sure my normally level-headed mother saw it as the first rash step down the slippery slope that led all the way to drugs, degradation and cheap women. So, for that matter, did I.
“… I struggled into what was going to be my first cool leather garment. The leather creaked with newness and smelled like the interior of a factory fresh car … My legs seemed longer, my shoulders broader … I looked so damn cool. Mother of God, I was a cross between Elvis and Lord Byron!”
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07.27.13
Posted in WhiteManistan at 2:09 pm by George Smith
I see it everyday crossing the el Molino bridge. (You have to live here.)
Anyway, from the LA Times:
In a new critique of how minorities are treated in the Antelope Valley, a judge has ruled that Palmdale violated state voting laws by maintaining an election system that stymied Latinos and blacks from winning office.
The judge’s findings come a month after the U.S. Justice Department accused Palmdale, Lancaster and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department of a systematic effort to discriminate against minorities who received low-income subsidized housing.
Federal officials said deputies conducted widespread unlawful searches of homes, improper detentions and used unreasonable force that specifically targeted blacks and Latinos …
Judge Mark V. Mooney, in an opinion released this week, concluded that Palmdale’s at-large voting system for its city council violated state law because the city has “racially polarized voting??? and minority voters are unable to influence the outcome of elections.
The judge agreed with plaintiff Juan Jauregui, who argued that Palmdale had not adequately followed the California Voting Rights Act, which requires district rather than citywide elections if there is any evidence of racially polarized voting, and if it can be shown that a minority district can be drawn. Palmdale is 54.4% Latino and nearly 15% black yet has only elected one Latino city council member and never a black council member in its history, said Jauregui’s attorney, R. Rex Parris. Parris is also the mayor of Lancaster.
“The current absence of any Latinos or African Americans on the Palmdale City Council reveals a lack of access to the political process??? …
This Los Angeles Times map of how LA County voted shows the voting polarization. LA County went heavily for Obama.
But in the high desert, which is where Palmdale and the neighboring
town of Lancaster sit, the black and Hispanic voters are in roughly
two distinct areas, surrounded by red. The blue areas tend to urban and are more densely populated.
A link to the map which is zoom-able and and searchable by city
is here. Once you’ve zoomed in, you can mouse over various precincts to see the voting results.
The Republican Party works voter suppression wherever it can get it, even at the most local level.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 11:21 am by George Smith
From the wires, news of yet another tv series on the Culture of Lickspittle phenomenon known as bigfoot:
“When I saw this, it truly blew my mind,” [the creator of a new bigfoot reality show] told Yahoo! TV. “It’s not my world, but there’s all different kinds of DNA, obviously, like hair, fur, saliva, stuff that maybe scraped off onto branches … scat is obviously a very big piece [of evidence] in the woods. And for the scat, it’s so crazy that it can be determined, within several hours, what animal it has come from, very specifically, through the DNA sequencing. And even when samples are found, our experts have this knowledge … and in the lab, there’s a textbook that is just filled with pictures of various kinds of scat, from every animal. It shows the picture of the animal, the shape of the scat … it’s all really crazy, but hearing all these folks talk about it is fascinating.”
Basing your show on a hunt for bigfoot dung. Science! For Idiots! Who Enjoy Video of Seeing Other People Stepping into Cow Patties & Other Places Where People Took a Dump in the Woods!
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07.26.13
Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 3:37 pm by George Smith
Police Chief Mark Kessler, now briefly Pennsyltucky’s most famous citizen, has the attention of all the medium-sized newspapers in the region. And the Southern Poverty Law Center which noticed his attempts to take a militia-style group nationwide earlier this summer.
From the Morning Call:
Gilberton police chief Kessler told NBC News on Wednesday that he expects to lose his job, but believes his speech is protected under the First Amendment.
From the Harrisburg Patriot-News, an editorial:
Kessler, 41, bald, outspoken and as hard as the coal that’s scraped from the ground in the massive fields on the east edge of town, is literally a force of one. He also serves on a local school board.
He’s also active in gun-rights circles. He appears on a radio show on the conspiracy-minded website “Infowars??? [run by crazy Alex Jones.] And he hosts his own website where he’s organizing a militia-style group called The Constitutional Security Force.
He also pushed a resolution through the Gilberton borough council authorizing him to take any measures needed to prevent the “unconstitutional enforcement??? of changes to federal gun laws.
Let’s be clear, there’s something seriously disturbing about the idea of a gun-toting, F-Bomb spewing, conspiracy-theorist, police chief/school board member who may or may not have anger management issues being anywhere near a position of power.
But there’s also something weirdly Pennsylvanian about the rhetoric that sprays from Kessler’s mouth as fast as the rounds he fires from the borough-owned weapons in his videos.
Let’s dispense with hard coal romanticism bit. I grew up there and hard men mining hard coal were pretty much all gone by the time I was in my early teens.
The rest is fine, though, and reading it I thought of responding to it from the perspective of having been there and now being here.
What is to be said to my old tribe back in Schuylkill County?
Well, I had some points to make:
Dear Schuylkill County:
I’m writing to you from today from the sunny streets of Pasadena in southern California. But I grew up in Pine Grove and spent almost half my life in Schuylkill Country. I’ve been gone now for over two decades.
However, I can’t imagine any police chief in a small town in the area in the early-70’s, when I was a teen, being anything like Mark Kessler. I didn’t know anyone, in a place where plenty of people had guns, who had a couple assault rifles firing full auto. Didn’t know anyone with even a remote chance of going nationwide with profanity as a brand, a stars-and-bars patch on his shirt and the assertion that “libtards”, uh, take it … well, watch the videos.
The place was strongly Republican and Gus Yatron was the representative in our nation’s capital for a really long time. He was an uncontroversial man, quiet, not known for much of anything. He would have been appalled at someone like Mark Kessler. I suspect everyone who ran things in the small town of Pine Grove, only twice and some as large as Gilberton, would have been horrified. Sure, there were raging jerks but they were kept out of any positions of power or authority.
If you could place Mark Kessler’s videos in a time machine and send them back to Gilberton forty years ago I bet you the people would watch and be convinced the country had collapsed and been overtaken by complete violence and anarchy.
Police Chief Mark is a symbol of national progress, I suppose, and not of any good kind. You can respect the freedom of speech and still believe a person like him needs to be ejected from any position of government-mandated responsibility at once. You can’t excuse away a personal website that just looks like a recruiting advertisement for a militia, one that declares the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms unconstitutional. How does that work with local law enforcement, anyway, since the ATF is a specific enforcement agency of federal law? What happens when, theoretically, the ATF comes to Gilberton?
I can tell you that in southern California, Mark Kessler would have been history as a policeman or sheriff, probably less than a day after his videos went viral. Then maybe he could have a career in private security.
Yes, Schuylkill County and Los Angeles County might as well be as far apart and different as Earth is from Jupiter. But I think we can probably agree that a warm heart is of much greater value than curses, the middle finger and a demonstration spray of hot lead meant to intimidate.
I feel sorry for the people in Gilberton. Perhaps they did not know Chief Mark Kessler like this. But now that they do they should realize, too, that government and its ability to authorize someone to have an assault rifle that’s used to get in the face of others is not good government. Law enforcement that uses its position to try and recruit a militia is not, by any definition, good law enforcement.
Doesn’t matter how small and close-knit your town is, it’s just bad and you’re the worse for it.
On Police Chief Mark Kessler’s website he calls the Southern Poverty Law Center an “anti-American group.”
If you know what the SPLC and what it does, track the violent right, you have an inkling as to why.
Earlier this summer Kessler and his Constitutional Security Force became an object of interest:
In preparation for that feared day when the federal government comes for citizens’ guns — a fear that animates much of the antigovernment “Patriot??? movement — a police chief in Pennsylvania has formed a militia-like group to stand against federal authorities he believes are intent on destroying the Constitution. The group, the Constitutional Protection Force (CPF), has already grown to 38 chapters in 38 states, with each dedicated to “meeting any attempts by the federal government to forcibly disarm the public,??? one website claims.
Behind the effort is Mark Kessler, police chief in the tiny borough of Gilberton, Pa …
Of course, it remains to be seen just what will become of Kessler’s militia — if it will grow or dissolve amid the ever-tendentious fight to pass gun control legislation. But in the meantime, the CPF has attracted widespread attention, and support, from a growing faction on the radical right.
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Posted in WhiteManistan at 11:52 am by George Smith
PARIAH: “To afflict everyone else.”
North Carolina’s voter suppression bill got final approval in the Senate by a vote of 33 to 14 late Thursday afternoon.
The House Bill 589 aka vote suppression bill was passed in the rules committee on Monday and got the Senate’s blessing for the third time this afternoon. Comparatively speaking in Pope’s North Carolina, three days is a long time to debate and pass a bill that contains three pages on voter ID, to eradicate non-existent rampant voter fraud, with another 53 pages on matters that wouldn’t stop voter fraud even if it did exist. The only thing this bill achieves, as Democratic Senator after Democratic Senator pointed out is suppress the vote …
One intersting twist was made by a Republican Senator who claimed that this bill doesn’t suppress the vote, because when other states did it in 2012 – voting in their states went up. That’s because people recognizing that Republicans were coming for their votes so it was a matter of using it or losing it. It was not because these laws made voting more accessible! — PoliticsUSA
“I didn’t want to be right,??? Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says about her prediction that striking a key prong of the Voting Rights Act will lead to a wave of minority voter suppression, “but sadly I am.??? — ThinkProgress
There are literally too many shitheels in USA 2013 to keep up.
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07.25.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:47 pm by George Smith
Wonderful story in the NYT on the “New Audio Geeks”!
They spent years stealing MP3 music, helping make recorded music not pay, and now hate the sound quality. Now they prefer old record players with high end speakers and amps, on which to play used vinyl which pays zero in royalties, or stream Spotify, which pays half a penny a tune to artists. I’m dumbfounded by how cool this is! Now that we’ve used digital tech to destroy the economic model of pop music for the sharing economy we can go back to record players and enjoy the piles of remains in true audio fidelity!
Excerpted:
For a while, Mr. Svizeny, a guitarist and avid music consumer, engaged in the MP3 arms race, ripping songs from Napster and other file-sharing sites and importing them to his iTunes account. “The sound quality didn’t matter at all,??? he said. “Just the music.???
But Mr. Svizeny’s attitude has since changed. He no longer owns an iPod and rarely, if ever, downloads music, he said. At work, he listens to Spotify, the music-streaming service. At home, he plays LPs, inspired, he said, by his father’s collection of Black Sabbath and Frank Zappa records. “I could buy a terabyte hard drive and store countless MP3s, but it’s lost value to me,??? Mr. Svizeny said. “I’d rather hold a physical thing.???
With vinyl, he added, “You’re experiencing music in a different way.???
Mr. Damski went through a similar evolution, from having more than 50,000 songs on his hard drive to “abandoning??? iTunes, he said, in favor of Spotify and the scratchy joys of vinyl. He likes the physicality of LPs, and the way they make it hard for him to skip songs. He also enjoys what he called the “Easter egg hunt??? of used-record shopping, otherwise known as sifting through bins of Olivia Newton-John and Al Martino releases, hoping to find a rare gem from the Beach Boys’ bearded phase.
In true audiophile fashion, it now pains Mr. Damski to listen to low-resolution music played through the microspeakers of a smartphone or a computer. “I wanted to hear a Kinks song the other day that wasn’t on Spotify, so a friend looked it up on YouTube,??? he said. “It sounded so bad.???
“You have a whole generation getting music over the Internet, from streaming, tablets, iPhones,??? a maker of high fidelity equipment told the Times. “It’s introduced many more people to music,??? all of them “potential audiophiles.”
I listen to CDs through the DVD player going into my old Samsung analog television. I am so not where it’s at.
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Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 12:33 pm by George Smith
From PARIAH mag cover star, Ted Nugent, at WorldNetDaily:
As I celebrate the greatest R&B rocktour of my gravity defying career, the Ted Nugent Black Power Tour 2013, paying homage and gushing love every night for the black musical geniuses that inspire all great music, like I have for more than 50 years, it pains me deeply to see the return of such nasty, unnecessary racism erupting across America today.
And before the racism scam industry unleashes their predictable, soulless lying hatred at me, my musicians include my dear black friend Johnny Gunnel and Marco Mendoza, a Mexican-born American. For like everybody I have ever known, and the George Zimmerman family as well I believe, there does not exist a racist fiber in the bones of any Nugent or Nugent associate. Not by any stretch of the imagination, contrary to the real racists out there. I have never met a racist, but I see and hear them on TV all the time, more and more lately …
Did you happen to mention that the misguided, I believe racist prosecution team’s prime witness, one Rachel Jeantel, displayed pretty much every self-inflicted bad choice that really oppresses blacks?
Obesity is also a major cause of death for blacks. That no one disciplined Rachel to get the most basic education to be able to read or speak clearly is the root of unemployment for blacks.
In light of this wisdom, the banner of Ted’s column is UNINTENTIONALLY THE BEST ON THE SUBJECT, EVER!
One can only bow the head in admiration. What a publication! What a guy!
And this is the best iJunkcast ever.
Listen to it all if you dare! Take the DD challenge! Proffer your reaction in fifteen to twenty words or less in the space below! Win an Escape from WhiteManistan No-Prize!
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07.24.13
Posted in WhiteManistan at 5:25 pm by George Smith
PARIAH: “Your Scream of Rage in an Unfree Land!”
Police chief Mark Kessler puts the sleepy patch of Gilberton, Pennsylvania, on the map! The birthplace of a new nation!
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