Dick Destiny

2008-05-11T14:49:00.000-07:00

DEMOCRAT CLASS WAR: Us versus them

Obama at brew pub in Bethlehem, PA. Relative absence of baseball caps and older white guys in frame indicated he would not do well, losing both Northampton and Lehigh counties by a good margin.

"[It is not] helpful to insult the groups that supported Mrs. Clinton, either by suggesting that racism was their only motivation or by minimizing their importance," wrote Paul Krugman the past week.

"After the Pennsylvania primary, David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, airily dismissed concerns about working-class whites, saying that they have 'gone to the Republican nominee for many elections.' On Tuesday night, Donna Brazile, the Democratic strategist, declared that 'we don’t have to just rely on white blue-collar voters and Hispanics.' That sort of thing has to stop."

Actually, DD doesn't think it does. Furthermore, having lived in Pennsyltucky most of my adult life, I say: "Let's do it more!"

Let's have the class war out in the open. DD endured it in Pennsy for decades. If you were educated, you were an elitist. If you spoke well, you were worse than that -- en elitist and a pansy. You were someone to be ridiculed, ostracized and bullied.

Whatever work the educated person did was not real work, not like the toil of the blue and gray-collar class. If you were the offspring of a teacher in a place like Pine Grove, Schuylkill County, you were a "richie" even though the profession is solidly middle class. One or both of your parents had gone to college and now had three months off every summer while betters were breaking their backs making a real living. Those who went to college were rich and lazy. If you went to grad school you were a total douchebag, not to be tolerated among real folks.

And some of the same things are playing out for Barack Obama. It is not only about race but also about a white class war.

The Los Angeles Times sent a reporter to West Virginia, which is somewhat like Pennsy only demographically more destitute and poorly educated. The article published the most unpleasant and inflammatory quotes it could find from a handful of heevahavas, some of them allegedly the declining species known as the "Reagan Democrat."

These were ugly things to say, just like many of the utterances from the central counties of Pennsylvania a few weeks ago.

"Osama, Obama and Chelsea's Mama" -- [the] sign belongs to Eric Hardy, 38, a former Democrat who works at a woodworking plant. Now a die-hard Republican and president of the West Virginia Coon Hunters Assn., Hardy opposes any Democrat 'who wants to go after my guns ...' He suspects Obama for his 'Muslim name' ..."

"I'm not yet convinced that Barack Obama is more substance than fluff," Clyde M. See Jr., "a former Democratic speaker of the West Virginia House of Delegates and two-time gubernatorial candidate," told the Los Angeles newspaper.

"He's a fine speaker, mind you, but I'm still not sure he's got the right stuff to win the general election."

Go out to the piece and one reads more anonymous poison tongue about Obama being a terrorist and -- always -- a Muslim. The newspaper has to go out of its way to state the man's a Christian and include the qualifiers that bigotry and stupidity are commonplace among the locals. See here.

It's too late to hope we can all come together and sing songs of unity around the campfire. The America DD knows is divided into tribes, cliques and claques which have very little in common with each other and very little desire to live and work together. DD is used to it. Stratification and separation are the way of things in the good ol' USA. It's now your civic duty to find your tribe and fight against, or at least passively oppose, those who are not part of it. And it's important to get more of your tribe to the polls than the other tribe can muster.

So if the white American churchgoing blue-collar undereducated Americans are angry and blue, then -- eh -- what can ya do?

Author Paul Fussell wrote "Class: A Guide Through the American Status System" and while it is not entirely up to date for 2008, it is an entertaining, educating and supercilious book.

Fussell states repeatedly, often in a dryly humorous way, that class in America is "a touchy subject."

" I have experienced many times that awful truth of R. H. Tawney's perception, in his book 'Equality': 'The word class is fraught with unpleasing associations, so that to linger upon it is apt to be interpreted as the symptom of a perverted mind and a jaundiced spirit'."

"Especially in America," Fussell adds, "where the idea of class is notably embarrassing."

Fussell notes that your reaction to any discussion of class reveals much about which class you are actually in. If you blow your stack or become "very anxious," it "suggests you are middle class and nervous about slipping down a rung or two ... It is the middle class that is highly class sensitive."

Fussell argued that his research found nine classes. "Top out-of-sight, upper and upper-middle" in a top tier. "Middle, high prole, mid-prole and low prole" in a middle slot. And "destitute" and "bottom-out-of-sight" on the low end.

Money, however, is not the only defining distinction in the American classes. Values, tastes, and traditions are among many things which separate us. These are hard distinctions -- engraved during upbringing -- and they persist from birth to death, being generally inescapable, Fussell concludes.

"Class," which was published in 1983, is not always still on the money.

"Showing off used to be the main satisfaction of being very rich in America," he writes. "Now the rich must skulk and hide. It's a pity."

Heh-heh. Time and progress has changed some things.

Fussell describes a portion of the middle-class, actually the lower middle-class, and it fits those in Pennsyltucky who did not vote for Obama and, in many cases, appeared to be in a snit over being dissed as bitter. This, one sees, is the same as getting upset over discussions of class.

"Our former lower middle-class [Fussell calls them high proles] ... are identifiable as people things are done to," he writes. "They are in bondage -- to monetary policy, rip-off advertising, crazes and delusions, mass low culture, fast foods, consumer shlock."

"If you're a high prole, you do the things a commercial society has decreed you're supposed to do."

And if you do not "embrace" the doing of such things, Fussell notes, you are branded as an "elitist."

One suggests "Class" as good reading for the thick-skinned. This normally excludes many, many Americans and seems to suggest why "Class" never found its way onto bestseller lists. Everyone is gored in it, equally.

High prole Pennsyltucky Clinton voter. Bitter over being described as part of a now bitter class.

2008-04-24T14:44:00.001-07:00

CODGERS AND UNEDUCATED FOR CLINTON: Heck of a constituency

Sorry, can't help it.

Barack Obama had it right when he pegged small-town Pennsyltuckians. They just didn't like hearing it. They're poorer than the average, less educated, and they don't like those who tell them so in any form. Like many Americans, they can't take criticism. If one calls it as you seen, as they used to say in PA Dutchland, you're "too big for your britches" or "uppity."

But the codger vote isn't much of a winning hand. The young college-educated didn't vote for him in the Pennsy hinterland (with one exception) because they don't live there. When they can, they move out to places like Research Triangle Park in North Carolina ...

See that big splotch for Obama in the middle of Pennsyltucky? That's the Penn State University/State College vote, the young and middle-aged educated and over-educated vote. No heevahavas allowed!

See the Obama splotch near Harrisburg? That's Dauphin County, specifically the voters in Steelton (who are African American) and Hershey, the educated core built around the Penn State School of Medicine.

They didn't go for Obama in any of the counties DD outlined in past weeks. It was always a waste of time to expect much in such locales. And maybe the Democrats just don't need much of that vote to win a general election. Maybe they just need every bit of the core voting now for Barack Obama.

The mainstream media made a big deal of Obama dissing what they call "lunch pail" Americans. It was quite a presumption to see evening news pundits on network and cable TV, supposedly sticking up for the Pennsyltucky commoner, a citizenry they've never had anything in common with.

Although DD has spent more than half of his life in the hinterlands of Pennsy, I have nothing in common with the people who live there. That was made abundantly clear forty years ago.

However, forty years ago Bethlehem Steel in the Lehigh Valley was still humming. And ALCOA's aluminun extrusion plant in Cressona, Schuylkill County, was the largest in the world. And Pine Grove, PA, had a garment industry. If you worked in any of these you could raise a middle-class family without the benefit of a college education. That was where there were "lunch pail" Americans.

But there have been no lunch pails in Pennsy for a long time. They were gone before DD left. And they'll never be coming back. And no stipends or government grants for educations at local community colleges, as John McCain intimated in Youngstown, Ohio, later in the week will fix it. Community college educations don't get you worthwhile jobs in any new economy. Four year college degrees, the kind of which many cannot afford, are the only ticket out. Chits from community college education don't hack it.

(Example: Let's say someone is angling for a job in the health professions because this is where they have read demand is solid. If you have a four-year nursing degree, a four-year biotech or medical tech B.S., you can do something. If you have a two-year chit from a community college, you can be an "assistant" in the medical and health professions. This translates as: Poorly paid "bedpan technician." DD taught introductory microbiology for a short time at a community college in Pennsyltucky. No one who went through that program would be considered qualified to even take up any menial lab tech job open to those with training stemming from a Bachelor of Science degree. This was harsh but it was the way the professions worked in the late Eighties and it isn't any different now.)

Pennsy is in the rearview mirror.

It is almost the equivalent of a benign Third World nation, one where the middle-aged are still allowed to own property. This is their only non-depreciating asset. And living is not too bad around a couple big centers of education and urban development.

It's possible that Pennsylvania might be a metaphor for the upcoming general election. Will the people looking to the comfort of the past outnumber in vote those who are looking to the future? Are the codger-n-Republicrat-barfly vote the hinge?

Maybe not this time.

As for not being down enough with huntin' and fishin' and religion and patriotism, these were all just rationalizations for the mainstream Pennsy voter to say what he or she really thought -- that a black guy scares them.

Hunting was an excuse to go out and get drunk while away from the wife, to shoot your dog if you were overzealous and trigger happy, to pawn off some crappy venison sausage on your non-hunting neighbor if you got lucky and bagged a deer. Wow, yeah, bring on the pheasants filled with pellets! Tasty!

Gunning in Pennsy was about neat stuff like the Hegins Pigeon Shoot. The shoot was all about gambling and drinking and beating up animal rights protestors. (See here and here for first-hand accounts. DD was so there!

As for religion, in Pennsyltucky they often practice their faith superficially. Faith is not a blanket indication of richness in spiritual matters.

In Schuylkill County, with its Catholics (of which DD is one) and Protestants of varied denominations, Sunday meeting was an exercise in attendance. The more you went the more gold stars you earned. And with enough gold stars, by golly, maybe Jesus will take notice!

However, if you're an elitist you better not have the temerity to question anyone's faith.

Additional notes:

Bebe Blazfemi added a comment during our Blogger black hole moment. It came in over the transome and addressed a past write up on Hazleton, the town in Pennsyltucky from whence Obama Girl comes. It's in Luzerne County. Luzerne didn't go for Obama.

"Wow, I don't think I could have summed it up better," write the commenter. I 'did time,' as I call it, in Schuylkill County - my high school years, and 'be different and be damned' was definitely the motto. I don't know anyone that doesn't still live there who doesn't share my, (and your,) view about it. My relatives are from there, but I'd been moved there from NE Philly. I now live in 'Center City' Philly and couldn't be happier."

The latest from the Reg.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that some American scientists think terrorism can be defined by equations and a priori vulnerability factors. Close study of terrorist action and behavior is too dull for many in the US counter-terror business, so it's better to have numbers; insurance men, newspaper reporters and government officials like them, and Benchmark Analysis for Quantifying Urban Vulnerability to Terrorist Incidents delivers plenty.

Written by University of Arizona math professor Walter W. Piegorsch and two others colleagues and published in a recent edition of the journal Risk Analysis, the study came with a ready-made hook. Boise, Idaho, it is claimed, is among the ten cities in the US most vulnerable to terror. This guaranteed some terror beat coverage in the US newsmedia and, as is usual when some study claims to spot deficiencies in terror defense, thrilled local government officials interested in dunning more taxpayer money from the Feds.

See here for the full read.

2008-04-24T13:38:00.000-07:00

BLOGGER TARPIT: World famous app killed DD blog for two weeks

In case you have been wondering why your host has been idle for so long: I was being held incommunicado by the Blogger application.

Through the month of April, Blogger's FTP publishing to domains outside its own blogspot failed for many. The blog application simply quit working when the user hit the "publish post" button and the system hung in a circular loop displaying the message: Your publish is taking longer than expected."

The troubleshooting forum for problems like this consists of unpaid astro-turfers and apple-polishers, fans of the service who hang around dispensing advice, directions which -- in this case -- had nothing to do with the fault ailing FTP publishing. And company staffers do not respond to e-mails describing faults and asking for direction or assistance.

To say it's been annoying is an understatement. But you get what you pay for, right? so it's all the sucker's fault for using a "free" service.

Naturally, during the same time frame anyone who posted comments saw that they did not appear. No, it wasn't sneaky and mean ol' DD censoring your freedom of speech. They just went into the blackhole. I saw 'em but they didn't go anywhere. Maybe they're somewhere now! Are we anywhere?

In any case, this adventure -- which has happened before but not lasted weeks -- exposes a thorny issue. I like to post when the whim arises, not when someone's blogging application magically decides what its schedule of working and failing will be. Why it worked five minutes ago is a complete mystery! No amount of fiddling in the past two weeks made any difference at all. And then, lo, it worked!

To dispense with it entails thinking about how to migrate the blog at DickDestiny to another platform without giving up all the archived content which now generates a considerable amount of daily traffic.

How to do this? If you know of something that can help, please feel free to drop me a line. I'm all ears, for once.

Of course, you may never see this explanation. In that case, publishing just failed again!

In the meantime:

The recent arrest and jailing of Roger Von Bergendorff afforded an opportunity to go through my files of ricin indictments and convictions in the US since ca. 2004. The nature of the perpetrators in the criminal complaints required something a bit more descriptive than ricin maker/would-be bioterrorist, so for the sake of variety and entertainment value, I've dubbed them "the ricin crackpots."

Read the entire analysis and summary at The Reg here.

2008-04-09T13:27:00.000-07:00

PENNSYLTUCKY MEXI-FRAID TOWN NOT FOR OBAMA: Apparently -- but home of Obama Girl

The Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader ran an unintentionally laugh-out-loud funny story on Hazleton's famous celebrity-via-YouTube export, Amber Ettinger, aka "Obama Girl."

Technically, Hazleton is more famous for being a place of formerly closeted bigots now in the open in their desire to criminalize illegal immigrants, a menace or threat they believe to have ruined their town.

Luzerne County, Schuylkill County, the entire Pennsy coal country was fouled up decades ago. Mexicans had nothing to do with wrecking it.

"Standing outside city hall in the gathering dark, Norman Tarantino felt, for once, that he was lucky to live in Hazleton," wrote the Los Angeles Times months ago.

"Most of his friends had moved away over the years, convinced that the old coal city's best days were behind it. But as of Thursday night, Tarentino said, Hazleton once again has something to be proud of. It is the most hostile environment in America for illegal immigrants."

"When John Quigley, a Democrat mayor, lost his reelection bid in 1995, it was amid rumors that he had rented billboards in New York to recruit Latinos to town in exchange for government payments of $1,000 a head," read the newspaper. "Quigley called that rumor 'an urban legend . . . ' but many in Hazleton believe it."

We're supercilious toward Hazelton because in soCal, DD still knows the old coal region in Pennsylvania.

More illegal immigrants probably shop at small markets, cheap eateries and liquor stores within twenty minutes walking distance of DD's house than live in all of the decrepit and brokedown towns of the eastern coal counties of Pennsyltucky. Hazleton, freaked out over outdoor ads in Spanish. Convinced that small businesses which cater to Spanish-speakers are corrupting the quality of their civic infrastructure.

Because things stink economically in Pennsylvania and they're not experienced with a real multi-culti environment, illegals are a good scapegoat for the locals.

"Hazleton occupies a unique perch in this year’s presidential contest," reported the Times Leader. Somewhere around 23,000 people live in the town.

"It’s the hometown of 'Obama Girl,' the New York City model of YouTube fame whose racy videos proclaiming her crush on Barack Obama are definitely not campaign-sanctioned," informed the newspaper. "Her parents still live here, and her unlikely career break has gotten older, working-class whites talking more than they otherwise might have about the young black politician from Chicago."

The idea of Democrats as anything more than tokens in Hazleton, even if they pretend to be for Hillary Clinton, is a laughable one from the standpoint of a Pennsy-expat in soCal. (The newspaper insists in the same article they outnumber Republicans 2-to-1 in Hazleton.) Even slightly progressive people leave places like Luzerne County when and if they can. Or wish they could leave.

"Then, too, there’s Hazleton’s place on the front line of the illegal immigration debate," continued the newspaper. "When an influx of undocumented workers changed the city’s character and took a toll on school, hospital and public safety budgets, Hazleton adopted headline-grabbing measures to punish companies that employ illegal immigrants and fine landlords who house them. Other cities followed, but last year a federal court threw out the law. The ruling’s under appeal."

"If this slice of hard-times country mirrors how Pennsylvania ends up voting, there’s hope for Clinton."

The newspaper proceeds to interview the locals who profess they're not bigots, tripping themselves over Freudian slips in the same interview.

Sez one: "I’m not crazy about voting for a colored guy, but that’s not why I don’t support Obama. I’m not prejudiced. I just like Hillary."

Sure, whatever ya say.

The baleful spectre of Jeremiah Wright is still eating some of them, too.

"Hearing about Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, makes ['Obama Girl's dad, Terry Ettinger] mad. "It’s the black philosophy of the white people holding them back ... That they can just say one side of it and have the congregation cheering — when I don’t think it’s true!"

The newspaper informs 'Obama Girl' "rents a place in New Jersey but still considers Hazleton home. Her parents say she plans to vote in Pennsylvania’s primary. But her dad says nobody should confuse her public persona with how she’ll vote — which he says is nobody’s business."

It's all the fault of others, folks in the Pennsy heartland! Blame illegals for lousy pay, poor jobs and no health insurance. Blame "the black philosophy of white people holding them back..." Blame others for having been cheated of something -- anything -- you thought you were entitled to.

"Democrats ... outnumber Republicans by close to 2 to 1 here," claims the newspaper, profiling people who only seem to fit the description of "Democrats" as those who may vote for Clinton in the primary, so Democratic they also freely indicate a desire to vote for McCain in the general election.

"But McCain’s sympathetic approach toward immigration may cost him Republican support too, perhaps even from the city’s mayor, Lou Barletta, who’s using his activist role in the immigration debate to challenge the local Democratic congressman, Paul Kanjorski, D-Nanticoke," adds the newspaper.

"[There] is a small Obama campaign headquarters, opened last month. Some locals drive by just to see if it’s real."

Obama Girl for who and from where?

Recently:
Republicrat barflies for who? In Pennsyltucky.

Back to Pennsyltucky.

Pennsyltucky life from the archives.

2008-04-07T12:45:00.000-07:00

REPUBLICRAT BARFLIES FOR CLINTON IN PENNSYLTUCKY? More likely McCain

Do these look like Democrats? The white-men-in-dive-bar political constituency. Of this we can be certain: 'Pro' diabetes, smoking, booze and wearing baseball caps indoors.

Leave it to some upper-middle-class snob writing for the Sunday New York Times magazine to plumb one of the nicer-looking dive bars in southeastern Pennsy for Dem voters.

DD spent almost two decades playing rock 'n' roll in such places in Bethlehem and Allentown. Only someone writing for the New York Times would think to look in them for signs of Democratic life. Normally, one would look in them for signs of fights and aggressive power alcholism. If you let on you had slightly progressive opinions, you kept your pie hole shut about them or were in for a hard night.

Michael Sokolove had returned to his old home 'burg, Levittown, in Pennsyltucky. As everywhere in the state, it's "whiter, older and less educated than the rest of the nation."

There is mention of Reagan Democrats, white men who turn into Republicans the instant they find a candidate on the other side of the fence who seems like a strong and manly daddy-figure. Maybe John McCain in the general election.

They'll be union workers come upon hard times by the closing of a local steelworks, in Levittown -- US Steel's Fairless Works, as opposed to Bethlehem Steel in the Lehigh Valley. The same kind of union workers, who more often than not, voted for Republicans and social and economic policies inimical to their standard of living and chosen livelihood.

In the great wasteland between Philly and Pittsburgh, Democrats can get elected. And it is why areas like the Lehigh Valley and Bucks County can shape up to be swing areas within the state during a general election. Democrats from the Pennsy hinterlands get into office by being Dems only in name. And if you're a national candidate, you just do the Republican-lite thing when campaigning in the state.

Anyway, the out-of-work blue-collar cultural conservatives will often vote GOP, anyway. During the Eighties in the Lehigh Valley, they famously went for arch-conservative Don Ritter. Ritter was one of the most common Pennsylvania Dutch names in the region and so the locals voted for him en masse, even though he wasn't Pennsy Dutch. And they never really figured that one out.

They also loved Paul McHale, one of the Democrats who led the charge to impeach Bill Clinton.

"I drove over to Gleason's Bar, around the corner from my house," wrote Sokolove for the magazine. "That, too, was a sort of reality check after spending a few days dwelling with Obama's devout enthusiasts. Eight men sat around the bar, and not one of them supported Obama."

What a scintillating observation.

Sokolove found a couple who professed to be Democrats. Perhaps they were. Perhaps they were telling him what they thought he wanted to hear. Perhaps they had no intention of voting at all, like most of those I was familiar with in the Eighties and Nineties while doing the rock 'n' roll thing.

Clinton strategist Mark Penn's conflict-of-interest job in support of a trade agreement for Colombia may not matter at all for the blue-collar hard cases in Pennsyltucky. They have voted for people who've greased the dissolution of their industries in the past.

Take, for example, this Levittown "Democrat" dug up by the New York Times magazine.

"[One white guy] sat drinking a Coors Light and talking with his buddies," wrote Sokolove. "A Philadelphia Phillies spring-training game was on TV, and he glanced up at it every time the audio picked up the crack of the bat. I asked him if the presidential campaign interested him. 'Absolutely,' he said. Rapid fire, he told me the issues he cared about: 'No. 1 -- gas prices. It’s killing everybody. No. 2, immigrants. They should go back to Mexico. Three, guns. Everybody should have the right to bear arms. In fact, everyone should have a gun in this day and age.' "

"I wondered if he was a Republican. 'Are you kidding?' he said. "I’m a Democrat all the way. I hate Republicans.' "

Indeed this fellow may have been a Democrat -- a Democrat in the way Strom Thurmond was prior to 1963-64. Or a mealy-mouthed drunk.

The concern with illegal immigrants in a place like Bucks County, Pennsyltucky, is emblematic of the confusion which describes and characterizes the state's voters.

Southern California has illegal immigrants. Pasadena probably has more Mexicans in it than all of Bucks County and its surrounding neighbor shires.

The Pennsyltucky voter simply hasn't even the vaguest notion, informed from a daily reality, about what the issue means.

Mexicans are scapegoats for some lily-white Pennsylvanians, maybe a significant portion of them, a growing threat or menace they may have heard about on Fox News when Bill O'Reilly rants about Los Angeles being out-of-control or, alternatively, Lou Dobbs on CNN, uttering similar things about illegal immigrants contributing to the destruction of the middle class, day after dreary day.

It's all the fault of the Mexicans! Blame Mexicans for lousy pay and poor jobs. Blame Mexicans for having been cheated out of a share of the so-called American dream. Blame Mexicans as contributors to any crummy national state of affairs. Blame the illegals because you came home drunk again, slapped your girlfriend, causing her to move out, thus depriving you of sex. (See Hazleton, a town in Pennsyltucky, for more of the same.)

Who can win such voters? They're too mixed-up to predict with any precision. They will startle you, frequently in a fashion deadly to their own interests.

"In the latest CNN 'poll of polls' conducted March 26 through Saturday, Sen. Hillary Clinton holds a 7-percentage point lead over Sen. Barack Obama -- 49 percent to 42 percent," reported the news network today. "Nine percent remain unsure, the surveys found.

"That gap is 4 percentage points narrower than a similar CNN poll of polls conducted March 26 through Wednesday. In that average, Clinton led the senator from Illinois 51percent to 40 percent. Nine percent also were unsure then."

Update: On Tuesday the LA Times editorial board accused Obama and Clinton of pandering to Pennsylvania voters.

"For Clinton and Obama, there can be no happy ending to this story," wrote the Times. "As president, they could either break their promises and embrace trade deals with the likes of Mexico and Colombia, thus disillusioning a key part of their base, or keep their word, thus badly harming foreign relations, damaging the U.S. economy and ultimately reducing job prospects for the very workers they purport to be trying to protect."

Per capita income in Colombia is $7,200/year according to the CIA Factbook. It is not the poorest of nations. However, from the US census, the average income in Pennsylvania is $45,000. Practically speaking, it's probably about $10,000 lower than that in the great green wasteland between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Certainly, average incomes in places like Schuylkill and Luzerne counties don't get close to $45,000.

Still, if one takes a handicapper's average income in the Pennsyltucky heartland of $35,000, that puts the average family around six to seven times wealthier than the average Colombian. That's still very poor by any US standard.

Los Angeles Times editorial board members have probably never lived in the Pennsyltucky hinterland, a region hurt badly by globalization and free trade. And it is safe to say that a trade pact with Colombia is neither here nor there with respect to Pennsyltuckians. It is certainly not a "win-win" prospect for them, as the Times insisted in its piece.

Irrespective of whether politicians are pandering to the state's voters or not, no one in Colombia is going to be buying whatever products Pennsyltucky's Republicrats are making these days. They don't have the money to afford US labor. They might have the cash to afford old US junker automobiles and trucks.

Differently said, no one in Pennsylvania much needs Colombia to buy stuff unless they work in the part of the US military or military support industry tasked with the job of selling arms and training to that country's government in the name of the war on drugs.

Correction: Oof, pardon our error! The first edition of this post stupidly mentioned the fictitious Bristol County. Levittown is in Bucks County. There is no Bristol County in Pennsyltucky.

Back to Pennsyltucky

Pennsyltucky life from the DD archives.

2008-04-07T10:01:00.000-07:00

SHOCK & AWE THE HOOKER: Sure this is gratuitous. So?

An instrument of freedom thrusts and penetrates deep into the enemy in Iraq, delivering a spurt of democracy.

"Jury selection began this morning in the case of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, 51, who is charged in federal court with prostitution-related racketeering offenses," reported the Washington Post today.

"Prosecutors and defense lawyers signaled plans to call former clients of Palfrey's escort business as witnesses in a trial that could last four weeks. Prosecutors contend that the business was a front for prostitution activities; the defense argues that Palfrey never authorized any illegal conduct ... Among witnesses listed by the prosecution: Harlan K. Ullman, an academic whose main claim to fame was a scholarly paper he wrote more than a decade ago on the military strategy of shock and awe.

The Post commits a standard newspaperly error of omission. Ullman was often the man of the hour on news broadcasts during the opening days of the glorious war.

His Complete Idiot's Guide to War, formally entitled Shock & Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance in 1996, and referred to as a "scholarly paper" by the Post, included many fine howlers, bromides and aphorisms to delight the newsmedia in March and April of 2003. One which has especially withstood the weathering of time: "Rapid Dominance might conceivably achieve [victory] in a matter of days (or perhaps hours)..."

See here for a recentremembrance.

And here for "The Weapon of the Week" installment concerning Shock & Awe.

Sun-tzu! Gesundheit!

2008-04-06T18:30:00.000-07:00

GUANTANAMO BAY PUBLICICISTS VIGILANT FOR MISPERCEPTIONS: Famous American gulag library has 5,000 books, not just 2,000

Around a week ago the Los Angeles Times ran a story on the US military's gulag, Guantanamo Bay, here.

It pricked up the attention of this blog by stating one of the favorite pieces of reading material in a section of the compound was Stephen Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," an inspirational book on how to be good worker bee in the US of A.

On Saturday, the Times ran a medium long list of trivial corrections to the original story, pointed out by "Pentagon officials and officers of the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo," obviously ever-alert to misperceptions whicy may arise as a result of coverage of their prison. America's reputation may be shit in the rest of the world, George W. Bush a hated figure, and Guantanamo Bay a place where the citizens of other nations believe prisoners -- ah, detainees -- are tortured ... but ... but ... but ... it'll be a cold day in Hell before military publicists and minders let an article in the LA Times get away without immediate correction, lemme tellya.

"The article [on Guantanamo] said that lights were kept on in the cells 24 hours a day for security reasons, and that some prisoners grew their hair long to shield their eyes to sleep," read the Times' corrections page. "Since September, all detainees have been issued sleep masks."

Are they like the ones you used to see in old movies about Hollywood starlets?

"The article said that detainees at Camps 5 and 6 could see each other only during prayer time when an aperture in their cell doors was opened," continued the correction. "The prisoners can also see each other when being escorted to showers or interrogation, during recreation time and when the aperture is opened for meal delivery. The article referred to 'the hour for rec time'; in fact, prisoners are allowed at least two hours of recreation daily."

Now that's a big difference, ain't it?!

The original article said the Guantanamo prisoner's library had only 2,000 books. It has 5,000 corrected the Pentagon. This includes "multiple copies of many titles"!

Multiple copies of "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People"! Hallelujah!

"The article said that once a prisoner had skipped nine meals he was considered to be on a hunger strike and taken to the medical center where he was force-fed," stated the Times. Medical officials from Guantanamo "[said] hunger strikers are force-fed [with a nasal tube shoved into them] only when their weight has fallen to 85 percent of their ideal body weight and a doctor recommends it."

Now that's one helluva an error. Shame on that newspaper.

The LATimes report on Guantanamo was constructed from information "as gleaned from reporting trips over the last three years" because, um, the US military has an elaborate set of rules governing reporting on the site, rules made to hinder reporting.

2008-04-06T14:29:00.000-07:00

FAT GUY IN WEDDING DRESS, FRONT & BACK: Cream-of-the-crop music journalism

"Besides, the flow of new music is so daunting that critics find themselves buried beneath piles of 'important' new stuff," Ann Powers of the Los Angeles Times boldly proclaimed a couple weeks ago. "The channels that help determine which artists 'matter' have multiplied as well. There's no consensus. Established critics need to be knocked from their pedestals."

If "no consensus" now means "knee-jerk consensus" this is exactly true.

Music journalists -- rock critics -- are at their very best when being phony about the true state of affairs in their profession. They never like to admit the obvious. Ignore the people behind the curtain who, in a world with an overwhelming number of outlets for publishing, choose to run with the same subject, often on the very same day, in many places.

Excellent groupthinkers, they march in lockstep to the schedule of record releases even when it exposes them as tools in the tank for record companies and publicists. Instead they pretend it's something deeper, like starting a dialogue about an artist or the putting of a new release in its proper context.

Keep in mind, music journalists aren't exactly like reporters on the national desks at major newspapers and networks. Covering some ludicrous-looking fat guy named Cee-Lo Green and "THe Odd Couple," the latest release by Gnarls Barkley, isn't the same as covering the President's latest embarrassments and atrocities. With elections coming, it's helpful to civic life in America to see that the outgoing leader of the GOP is adequately covered in hundreds of newspapers. But no one would be hurt if deprived of hundreds of pics of the tattooed obese fellow in a wedding dress just because he has a new record.

DD subscribes to the Los Angeles Times and the Sunday New York Times. On opposite sides of the continent and the top standard-bearers in newspaperland, they have a readership that's a little bit beyond that of whatever local shopper passes for the town daily in thousands of 'burgs 'cross the land. They can afford to show a little latitude.

So what do they do in their arts sections for the biggest edition of the week? The great pop music journalists and editors cover exactly the same thing, almost as if they worked it out between themselves.

To illustrate:

Tough-looking fat guy, Cee-Lo, in wedding dress -- front view. In the Los Angeles Times, article by Richard Cromelin.

Tough-looking fat guy, Cee-Lo, in wedding dress -- aft view. In the New York Times, article by Jeff Chang, same day.

Of course, reporters and free-lancers generally don't pick the pics or art for their pieces. But the brain-dead choices on display in the country's flagship Sunday editions undo any impression that a reader is about to get some hot scoop. (Well, maybe a different kind of steaming hot scoop.)

Instead, it says: "This is the promo art to go with the cattle-call interview, done in Beverly Hills, where the stars consented to grant an audience to the corps of professional suck-ups."

" 'Those images of the marriage and the name 'Odd Couple' are symbolic of our commitment to [Gnarls Barkley]' says [Cee-Lo Green], sitting in a Beverly Hills hotel suite with Danger Mouse during a recent round of pre-release interviews," reports Cromelin for the LATimes.

"[Cee-Lo] is the bride," Danger Mouse told Cromelin, who told readers, in case they couldn't tell.

"When [Gnarls Barkley] performed [their previous single] 'Crazy' at the MTV Movie Awards in 2006, Cee-Lo dressed as Darth Vader and Danger Mouse as Obi-Wan Kenobi," reports Jeff Chang for the NYTimes.

"During the interview, Cee-Lo wore a white T-shirt and black polo sweat pants, a diamond-encrusted necklace and a sparking Rolex beneath a tattoo of a laughing clown. Danger Mouse wore a thick camouflage jacket and an ironic rock T-shirt."

Hey, more more more!

Gnarls Barkley wedding-dress shtick -- at the LA Times.

Gnarls Barkley wedding-dress shtick -- at the NYTimes.

2008-04-03T13:57:00.000-07:00

THE RICIN CRACKPOTS: White American nut accused of fibbing to authorities

"The cousin of a man who may have been sickened by the deadly toxin ricin has been accused of failing to report that the substance was being illegally produced," reported Associated Press today.

"Thomas Tholen, 54, was indicted by a federal grand jury on the charge of misprision of felony — having knowledge of a crime but failing to report it."

US district attorney Brett Tolman told news agencies that Tholen, Roger Bergendorff's cousin, knew more than he has let on when telling the FBI about how he came into possession of his relative's ricin powder. "Tholen, who lives in suburban Salt Lake City, was collecting Roger Bergendorff's belongings from [a Las Vegas] motel room on Feb. 28 when he gave a motel manager a plastic bag containing several vials ... of ricin powder," reported AP.

Bergendorff has not yet been charged but your friendly neighborhood GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow has predicted he will be as soon as authorities can pinpoint which of the men, or if both of them, produced the ricin powder. Mashing castor seeds into castor pomace exposes the masher to a criminal charge of attempting to produce a biological weapon.

"Both men contemplated production of this for criminal purposes," said Tolman to AP. A motive is still unknown.

Las Vegas ricin crackpot wakes up -- talks to Feds.

Castor seeds & ricin -- not much of a threat.

2008-04-02T13:18:00.000-07:00

BRITAIN'S WAR ON TERROR: Gareth Peirce on justice denied

The London Review of Books has published a long piece on Muslims swept up and tried in British courts for the sake of the war on terror here.

Written by Gareth Peirce, "a lawyer who has since the 1970s represented individuals accused of involvement in terrorism from both the Irish and the Muslim communities," it brings an inside view to many cases which have been in the news in the past half-decade. Pierce's firm was involved in the defense of the alleged London ricin gang and her essay uses that as a benchmark. After it, the British government undertook measures to ensure Muslims caught up in counter-terror dragnets would not enjoy any due processes of law as the rest of the populace understood them.

"In December 2001 it was a small group of foreign nationals who paid the price for Blair’s wish to show solidarity with the US; and their predicament has never been widely known or understood beyond the Muslim community," writes Peirce. She tells of the men swept up in Operation Springbourne, the anti-terror operation that led to the trial of the alleged ricin gang. A jury found all of these men innocent except for one, Kamel Bourgass, of whom much has already been said.

"But joining them in prison today are more and more young British men, and occasionally women," Peirce continues. "Many have little or no idea why they are there, although even more disturbingly, the majority were tried by the courts in conventional trials before conventional juries ... The accusations are [inchoate]:defendants are said to be ‘linked to terrorism’ or ‘linked to extremism and/or radical ideology’. In these cases, the evidence before the court has time and again been found after a search on a defendant’s computer or in a notebook; the defendant is charged with possession of a certain item or this item is held to demonstrate the defendant’s desire to incite, encourage or glorify terrorism.

"The relevant provisos, which underpin the right to a fair trial, are that the law should be clear and certain so that individuals can be confident that their behaviour does not transgress the limits society has set; that the application of the law should never be retrospective; and that there are protections intended to preserve freedom of speech, religion, thought and privacy. Young Muslims search the internet in their tens of thousands, as do non-Muslims. Any internet search, however, leaves an ineradicable trace which can and does provide material that puts its searcher now at risk of prosecution for possession of information that might be ‘of use to terrorists’. They even risk arrest for writing anything that could be said to ‘incite’ or ‘encourage’ ‘terrorism’."

"This is the context of many current prosecutions. The fruits of a police search are uncovered, prosecutions mounted for the ‘possession’ of literature, films and pamphlets bought or viewed on websites, even if that viewing was swift and the item discarded or even deleted. The defendants are stigmatised as potential terrorists and their cases considered by juries more often than not without even one Muslim among their ranks to provide what the concept of 12 jurors randomly selected is intended to contribute to the trial process – a reflection of the collective good sense of the community.

"Two young Muslim women were separately tried at the Old Bailey last year for having written works deemed by the prosecution to be for a terrorist objective. One was the ‘Lyrical Terrorist’, whose appeal against conviction is due to be heard shortly..."

Peirce describes the present legal reality in which simply thinking about terror, or downloading any electronic materials deemed useful to jihadis by professional witnesses, is enough to have you sent over. See here and here in"These documents gets you jailed."

"This is very dangerous territory," writes Peirce, concluding with the following warning: "We are very far along a destructive path, and if our government continues on that path, we will ultimately have destroyed much of the moral and legal fabric of the society that we claim to be protecting. The choice and the responsibility are entirely ours."

The piece is detailed, revealing new information from case histories of current and recent trials in the United Kingdom. It includes news on more prisoners rendered and tortured into confessions as a direct result of the Blair government's decision to vigorously pursue the American way in the war on terror.

Even after jury trial acquittal, those rounded-up in the original counter-terror operation to stop the "ricin gang" were re-arrested. The UK government found the result intolerable even though the gang's existence hung on merely an allegation by Colin Powell "in his attempt to justify the invasion of Iraq to the UN."

"One juror described how for him a moment of truth came early in the trial, when a witness from Porton Down nervously drank three containers of water while in the witness box seeking to explain why an early lab report said to have been conveyed to the police and confirming that there was no trace of ricin, had, curiously, never reached the Cabinet Office," writes Peirce in another tidbit.

DD presumes Peirce is referring to Andrew Gould, the Porton Down official who, instead of informing authorities that the laboratory had found an initial reading to be a false positive -- an error, had instead compounded trouble, informing just the opposite, that ricin had been confirmed. The famous mistake would go uncorrected until the gag order came off at the end of the ricin trial in 2005.

The bureaucratic muddle, made on purpose or by mistake, contributed to an entire raft of distortions made after the trial. The inability to get at the truth until years had passed enabled the UK government to retry the case in the press, overturning the verdict in terms of public perception. Indeed, your blog host still sees a couple references per month, usually from counter-terror experts, on how ricin was made in London by Colin Powell's UK poison gang.

Recently:

Vanity Fair magazine discovers the UK ricin trial.

2008-03-29T15:20:00.000-07:00

MOAB AND THE PAIN RAY: Only the media were shocked, awed and pacified

"Freedom sandwiches for Iraq, on me!" said Uncle Sam. Still flailing half a decade later.

Five years ago, as we hurtled unstoppably towards war with Iraq, I was busy with an alternative weekly column called "Weapon of the Week." At the time journalists were being fed - and in general, were happily eating - a stream of marketing for the weapons and ideas that would make the coming war neat and painless. Well, we know how the main event turned out - but whatever became of the pin-ups?

Of the weapons MOAB, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast, was the war's alpha bomb. The Air Force celebrated its anniversary a week or two ago as a triumph of engineering under pressure.

The omega was the Active Denial System, a Hummer-mounted pain ray that was going to revolutionize the battlefield and pacification.

In their quest for publicity, the weapon's minders worked out a system whereby reporters would be given the opportunity to be burned and awed by it in return for cheerleading notices.

Like the war, both weapons haven't come close to living up to their advance billing. Both are emblematic of the conflict -- start with bragging, cheering and posturing, then try to rip down the goal posts and run off the field in victory before the game is over. When reality stubbornly refuses to bow to national whims, rinse it all down with embarrassed silences, excuse-making and denials.

Read the analysis/recap at el Reg.

Links to selected Weapons of the Week.

2008-03-29T13:51:00.000-07:00

TORTURED: By book on teaching how to be a good worker bee in America

Imagine DD's surprise on Friday upon learning that a book pushed at Keystone Boys State summer camp was popular reading at Guantanamo.

"At the Camp 7 facility for high-value detainees -- which jailers have dubbed 'the platinum camp' -- the book most in demand now is 'The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,' a nearly 20-year old treatise by Stephen R. Covey," wrote reporter Carol Williams for the Los Angeles Times.

"The librarian, who didn't want to be identified, said books are inspected by intelligence agents after each return. Borrowers lose their reading privileges and are disciplined if found passing notes."

It's difficult to imagine Covey's book as an object of genuine interest to prisoners UNLESS it's being used in some way as a camp message tablet or a source of levity. It's a deadening volume of self-help advice suitable only for making yourself over into a brainless slogan-spouting rule-following worker bee.

"The effort to get everyone involved at [Keystone Boys State] manifests itself by having every 'citizen' elected, selected, assigned or appointed to leadership positions throughout the week," states the website for the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Legion. "Each citizen also is provided with text materials based on organizational science and personal development exercises. Much of what we do is a spin-off of the [Stephen Covey] text, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective [People]," it proclaims.

"All citizens should become familiar with parliamentary procedures, 'Robert’s Rules of Order' and Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - NOW ! ! !"

When DD was a ~~detainee~~student at Keystone Boys State week camp in the Seventies, Covey's book wasn't available to beat over the head of teenagers. However, the American Legion ran KBS like a military camp administered by active duty soldiers from the four branches of the US armed services.

Covey's appearance in a story on books generously made available to prisoners at Guantanmo Bay is cause for black humor. If physically and mentally torturing prisoners isn't enough, they can be tortured by being given a book of inspirational exhortations on how to be a more efficient corporate citizen. Was this book donated by the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Legion so that the former jihadis might better themselves while being kept in the national gulag?

We've digested four of the seven tenets of Covey's book, rewritten as it were to be "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Prisoners." (Modelled on a Wikipedia page on the book.)

Be Proactive! Guantanamo Bay detainees can either be proactive or reactive when it comes to how they respond to adversity. When you, the camp-goer, are reactive, you blame others and circumstances for problems. It is not the fault of the United States of America that you've been strapped into a chair and had nasal-force-feeding tubes shoved into you. Being proactive means taking responsibility for every aspect of your life in the camp. Eat!

Think Win/Win! Mutually beneficial solutions are sought that satisfy the needs of the detainee at Guantamo, or, in the case of ERF -- a forcible removal from the camp-goer's cell by the Emergency Reaction Force -- of Uncle Sam and the camper. By way of an example, it is beneficial to both the health of the detainee and the Uncle Sam that you be strapped into a chair and have a nasal-force-feeding tube inserted so that death by starvation does not result, embarrassing America and bringing more heartbreak upon the detainee's beloved family.

Sharpen The Saw! Balanced self-satisfaction is important to the Guantanamo camper. Regain "production capability by engaging in carefully selected recreational activities" like .... hmmm, taking a shower in manacles, being interrogated, or -- if you're a really good boy, learning "basic written Pashtu and Urdu" while shackled to a desk.

Put First Things First! Prioritization and delegation are important in the Guantanamo detainee's time management. The camper delegates the administration of his life to Uncle Sam, freeing him up to prioritize those things which are really important -- like confessing to warcrimes while under duress, implicating casual acquaintances back home so that your bottled water ration isn't withheld indefinitely, obeying camp rules, getting by on fifteen sheets of toilet paper a day, learning to sleep with the lights on all the time and reading Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" now!

A day in the life of a detainee at the Los Angeles Times.

Learn to be a leader -- at Keystone Boys State.

2008-03-26T20:01:00.000-07:00

ROCKSTAR WON'T SEND ADVANCE COPY: Rock critic writes position white paper on social context

Jack White is not a lady, one girl fan informed this blog. He's a big strapping man and will box your ugly face, she added.

"Jack White threw down a glove last week and ushered the music industry into what duelers called the field of honor," wrote Ann Powers of the Los Angeles Times today. Paradoxically, White has often been the beneficiary of straight suck-up journalism in the newspaper's Calendar section, the most recent example of which ran in December.

White was said to be furnishing no advances for "Consolers of the Lonely," a new album by his band, The Raconteurs, formed with "songwriting pal Brendan Benson."

Everyone would get the new record at the same time, an attempt to make sure that music journalists wouldn't do their usual job of jumping the gun on reviews for the sake of appearing timely and cool.

"The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first week sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it," read the pertinent part of a band press release, as republished by the Times and Powers.

Powers then followed it with a treatise on the future and meaning of rock criticism, perhaps imagined as a lecture fresh from an elective college course you would regret having signed up for.

Messing with the availability of advance copies might be a bad thing, came one musing near the end, interfering with the noble function of "[deepening] the way we experience music," as performed by rock critics, our analysts of culture.

Eesh.

"Some writers," opines Powers, "... have wondered whether good criticism will get lost in the dismantling process."

Rock critics were dismantled a long time ago, lady.

Eight years ago, DD wrote on the Highway Kings biography page:

Good word in music periodicals ... was often not quite worth the paper it was published on. Having written regularly on hard rock for various pro publications over the years, I'm fairly sold on the idea that "good" reviews of heavy bands are mostly for the benefit of the "reviewer." That is, they have negligible effect boosting an act's profile. Silly you if you thought that was the idea. Indeed, I could write a chapter on the fine details of this subject.

However, it really boils down to the fact that music journalism predominantly fits into only two categories. The first: Material generated by a large hack/flack corps which can only justify its contribution to entertainment news sections if the subject is served as part and parcel of the regular schedule of mainstream music industry product. This structurally ensures only puff-writing and hagiography in service to whatever is the publicity driver of the moment. Indeed, have you ever marvelled at the need and logic behind editorial choices that result in hundreds or more of almost exactly the same review of the same record nationwide? Quite naturally, many rational people have learned to tune a lot of this out ensuring that it only has effect on children -- or those as suggestible as children.

And second: Music journalism as a flavor of bankrupt pseudo-social science in which pop music trends are analyzed for their value as pure SchadenFreude (that's "glee at the public shame of others") or relationships to things like the scapegoat class, feelgood empowerment movements and/or the current national Zeitgeist. Subscribe to any of the Sunday editions of the three largest US newspapers for a year, scan their Sunday magazines and Arts sections and you'll eventually see what I'm getting at.

Chuck Eddy, my old music editor at the Village Voice from 2000 - 20006 tried to do everything he could to buck this trend. Realistically, it was always a battle waged in retreat. Over that period the Voice relentlessly reduced the size of its articles and in the last year before handover to the New Times company, revised the pay scales for free-lancers downward. It's hard to think of any two things which crimp the furnishing of good writing more.

Being denied an advance copy of a star's CD is really small potatoes in the bigger picture. And it's not novel.

Eddy often specifically went against the grain of delivering reviews exquisitely timed to synchronize release schedules or even jump them. I would not have been able to write a couple hundred reviews and articles for him and the Voice if he had not done this. I didn't time much to coincide with weekly release dates (if I did, it was probably by accident) and would estimate that a good eighty percent of the CDs reviewed were copies I'd bought in a store. The Voice had a system, a good one which I sometimes took advantage of, in which a writer could invoice the publication for the cost of a CD which was the subject of a review.

This was a good thing, as opposed to having your exercise in pro journalism dictated by the release schedules of record companies, which is a bad thing. It cut the journalist free from any potential of a quid pro quo arrangement which, in return for an advance copy, an article is guaranteed. This is not so important for music journalists who are full-time staffers at a news organization where floods of promotional merchandise pile in the door everyday.

But it is important for free-lancers dependent upon handouts from p.r. people. If you don't play the game and place articles, you don't get advance copies. And if you don't get advance copies, you're out of work because the overriding journalistic practice is now to publish only pieces and reviews which can be tightly bound to a release schedule. To do that, work must be submitted weeks before publication and that's not possible without advances. Record labels and the people who handle p.r. know this. They know that the very idea of a stream of timely advances drying up is enough to freeze most free-lancers in their tracks, ensuring the majority go along with the gameplan of puff writing and cheerleading.

As a consequence, serious criticism is ruled out at any music publication with a significant dependence upon free-lancers and even some of those which generate the majority of their copy in house.

I've discussed this with Chuck many times and, coincidentally, he touched upon it in his new blog at Rhapsody, Chuck It All In.

"[A] few weeks back, when a bogus write-up [at Maxim magazine] of the impending Black Crowes album (which freelancer David Peisner [admitted] he hadn’t heard, and in fact, insists he’d only been assigned to preview) became the most famous album review since Almost Famous, it caught me by surprise in more ways than one," wrote Eddy. "Oddly, I had previously been assigned to critique the album for another publication -- a review that never materialized, because, I’d been told, advance copies weren’t available."

Eddy reflected: "[Any] move that challenges the ‘00s music-crit all-reviews-must-coincide-with-release-dates rule – which seemingly kicked off back around the time Entertainment Weekly first reduced reviews to haikus and has only gotten stupider since – can’t be all bad. It’s almost like the band chose not to be reviewed at all. Once upon a time, back in the prehistoric ‘80s, label publicity departments didn’t always set the calendar, and it was quaintly assumed that some albums actually needed to be lived with –- maybe even for a few months and a couple hit singles -– before a critic could accurately evaluate them. Music often sinks in as part of everyday life, after all.

"To hell with news pegs..." he adds at one point.

The record review to which Chuck refers was one which ran in Maxim, a lad magazine. It was made up, informed the Black Crowes, because no copies of their new LP, Warpaint, had been released. The review was around seventy words, a pittance to throw away one's career over.

Does anybody with a lick of sense think a shitty seventy word record review mattered so much it just HAD TO BE PUBLISHED AHEAD OF TIME?

News peg, indeed.

"On this shifting ground, critics feels insecure as everyone else," Powers writes. "Be we can -- we must -- view the Web's interactive as a boon. Musical samples can help illustrate the critical points. Dialogue with readers can illuminate our interpretations and make for interesting reassessments."

To this and other things, I can say: "What you mean WE, kemosabe?"

As for illuminating dialogue from readers hot off the Web, it's another laff riot moment from a Times reporter who perhaps has not quite yet received a suitable amount of pleasure from being accosted by the anonymous living in the enlightened and gentle pages of unmoderated comments sections.

"Besides, the flow of new music is so daunting that critics find themselves buried beneath piles of 'important' new stuff," Powers states. "The channels that help determine which artists 'matter' have multiplied as well. There's no consensus. Established critics need to be knocked from their pedestals."

No consensus?

There's often way too much of it. At a time when there are more new media channels to browse, a quick run through newspaper databases on flavors of the moment usually reveals those pesky rock critics to be excellent practitioners of groupthink in their zeal to be on top of all that's allegedly fresh.

(See Crazy Miranda Lambert, Radiohead dictates the future, and Wolfmother. What was Wolfmother? Oh yeah, like Led Zeppelin!)

2008-03-25T15:09:00.000-07:00

BUY MORE RUBBERS NOW: Nation 'sexually unhealthy,' among other things

An almost fullpage ad for Trojans in today's Los Angeles Times 'A' section:

Without a real daily newspaper delivered to your door how would you get dependable and timely warnings like this, I ask you?

2008-03-25T13:52:00.000-07:00

BAD SCIENCE: The Army way

Whenever you think "research papers" delving into ways of killing and maiming people, paid for by the US taxpayer, can't get worse, another comes along to correct that misconception and brighten the day.

Posted on cryptome.org for your consideration is the declassified "Bioeffects of Selected Nonlethal Weapons," courtesy of the Army ca. 1998.

"Body heating to mimic a fever is the nature of [radio frequency] incapacitation," begins the section on the feasibility of microwaving people. "The objective is to provide [cooking] in a very controlled way so that the body receives nearly uniform heating and no organs are damaged."

"In a study of the effect of RF radiation on body temperature in the rhesus monkey, a frequency (225 MHz) is purposely chosen that deposits energy deep within the body of the animal ... to avoid irreversible adverse effects, the exposure was terminated when a temperature of 42 degrees Centigrade was reached."

One is almost certain the American Humane Society will be impressed.

"Not only is microwave technology used to cook foods, but it is also used as a direct source of heating in many industrial applications," continues the report.

"[Controlled microwaving] will raise the core temperature of the individuals to mimic a high fever with the intent of gaining a psychological/capability edge on the enemy..."

Further in the report muses on using microwaves or visible light to cause epileptic seizures, the latter which persists to this day in the prototyping of mostly pointless "vomit guns" employing flashing lights.

"The effects of lasers on the eye are three-fold: dazzling or induced glare; flashblinding or loss of nigh accomodation; permanent or semi-permanent blinding," the memorandum adds.

To which we are prompted to say: "Hey guys, you can tell the doctor you don't need any more refills on that stupid pill prescription. You're cured."

2008-03-20T16:11:00.000-07:00

FTW: One sensible attitude

Friend Rob Rosenberger in Iraq near Ur sometime after GWB's victory prance.

The above photo came from Iraq to your host sometime in 2003, along with an American flag that had been flown on an A-10 bombing mission. It came in response to mail I'd sent to the warzone. After five years, I found I could no longer even faintly recall what I'd sent or written. The photo had been at the bottom of a pile for most of the duration, undisturbed by the passage of time and shielded from the dust.

Like businesses which supply pizza, soap and toilet paper, however, the Iraq War and the US military are world disaster and recession-proof. Unlike pizza, soap and toilet paper, there's no benefit and quite severe liabilities despite occasional claims that someone like this writer is being defended just so that he or she has the freedom to write annoying stuff.

"Still mountains of taxpayer dollars have been paid to US citizens or businesses in salaries, contracts, supplies, weapons systems, healthcare and services," mused the Los Angeles newspaper a couple of months ago, reasoning that perhaps economist John Maynard Keynes had it wrong in the 1930's. Money spent on guns no longer stimulates the general economy.

From observation, the war has had some trickle-down effect on cable channels where there's been stimulus to a couple of small networks which tapped into minor profits from furnishing entertainments to that part of the male populace which gets an erection over sales brochures for the newest instruments of destruction and how special forces men might insert a trench knife into someone else, preferably smaller and of different color.

However, in every other way the war has been sinking steadily toward a general shunning. Big mainstream dramatic movies on it from Hollywood tank on arrival. Book bestseller lists are remarkably free of exciting combat stories from the eastern fronts.

Way back in mid-January, the National Priorities Project issued a report entitled "Military Recruiting 2007: Army Misses Benchmarks by Greater Margin." It tabulated and analyzed what everyone knows in their guts. Generally speaking, only stupid people or those with sharply inhibited options volunteer to fight.

Calling recruits and servicemen downwardly mobile in relation to the rest of us because they're stuck with the Iraq war as a career is taboo. It's interpreted as cowardly disrespect of the military. To Americans the military is a monument toward which one prays in tones filled with great hypocrisy, espousing vocal support for said shibboleth while behaving in ways that indicate that down deep they really think the exact opposite.

Polling on the war greatly confuses DD. While some show it's still a major cause for concern, there is also now an indifference to it.

"In 2007, upper-middle and high-income neighborhoods - those with median household incomes of $60,000 and greater - remained under-represented [in the army]," stated the National Priorities Project. "The representation of these neighborhoods declined compared to 2004. Low- and middle-income neighborhoods - those with median household incomes of between $30,000 and $54,999 - became more over-represented compared to 2004. As the Iraq War continues ... the burden continues to be borne by low-and middle-income neighborhoods."

Los Angeles County was among the top three counties in the US for volunteers, contributing 917, according to the project. It's a trivial figure in view of the fact the county is more populous than most of the other fifty states.

By another matter of stark contrast, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA, seats about 92,000 on Saturdays during football season. This is two entire orders of magnitude greater than Los Angeles county's puny tally of volunteers. The war simply does not exist at home except for the unfortunate, the cornered and the Marine Corps.

2008-03-19T14:57:00.000-07:00

BACK TO PENNSYLTUCKY: Some politics in the wasteland between Philly and Pittsburgh

"Shortly after [Barack Obama] had finished his speech, I drove to Allentown, just north of Philadelphia, to gauge local reaction," wrote the BBC's Jamie Coomarasamey yesterday.

"It is an old steel town, made famous by a Billy Joel song, where around 70 percent of the population is white.

"That reaction wasn't always easy to find.

"While a Democratic presidential candidate may have decided it was the time to address the race question head on, plenty of ordinary Americans still prefer to keep their opinions on such a sensitive topic to themselves; or - at least - not share them with my recording device."

Coomarasamey made a small but common mistake.

While Allentown was, and to a certain extent still is, home to many old white steel works men, the heart of the local industry was in its neighbor, Bethlehem to the east. And since the closing of steel production in Bethlehem, the two cities have diverged significantly.

In the late Eighties, the very center of Allentown was a burned-out slum worked by a significant mixed criminal element. Since then the slum has only expanded.

In the late Eighties, the south side of Bethlehem, where the dead steel works was located, was also a slum, abutted by Lehigh University, dug into the hillside of South Mountain. The south side of Bethlehem was a place of crappy diners and even crappier dive bars operating for the benefit of Lehigh's student body binge-drinkers and the almost down and out. Cheeseburgers, pizza and hot dogs were the finest fare.

The dive bars -- The Funhouse, The Four G's -- catered to the Lehigh Valley's independent music scene. Bands played for just about nothing in an area where no one cared about noise violations and drunks spilling into the street.

A Lehigh prof owned Wally's, a decrepit wood ballroom often leased out for punk rock shows. It featured exposed wiring and holes in its roof.

After your friendly host wrote about one icy New Year's gig there with The Blissters, a local rock group, a show in which rain poured in through the ceiling and the heating failed, the city came in and condemned the place.

However, while the interior of Allentown continued to deteriorate, Bethlehem experienced a turnaround. Yuppies working in metropolitan New Jersey and in suburban Philadelphia found it a conducive place, way out -- for them -- in the green fields of Pennsylvania. Bethlehem had good schools, some amenities and a world class university. It was ripe for development. And big things were subsequently slated for the site of the old Bethlehem Steel. Called Bethworks, it has spurred a windfall for the city and brought in Sands for the installation of a casino.

This is a far cry from a time in the Eighties when one of the city's key southside intersections, known as Five Points, was just a junction where one could find a couple gas stations, crumbling apartments used for student housing, and a seedy adult bookstore directly adjacent to a seedy strip club.

With the upwardly mobile economics and demographics of Bethlehem, it is hard to know exactly who would vote for Barack Obama and who for Hillary Clinton. To be sure, the city now has progressives and one might think they would be more in tune with Obama. (Update: But perhaps not the mayor of Bethlehem, John Callahan, who introduced former Bill Clinton campaigning for his wife in a recent stop in the Lehigh Valley. See below.)

"I was sure that I was going to vote for Obama," one woman told the Beeb's political reporter. "But [the race thing] has made me think again."

"Others agreed - although the senator did score marks, amongst some, for refusing to do the politically expedient thing and throw his former pastor overboard."

However, the Beeb reporter was in Allentown, an entirely different kettle of fish.

If there are a significant number of Democrats in Allentown, from my experience living in the place, you'd be hard-pressed to find any willing to vote for an African American, something in-line with exactly what Pennsy governor Ed Rendell told a newspaper about the state a few months ago.

North of the Allentown and Bethlehem axis, you have communities like Palmerton, Slatington, Nazareth, Penn Argyl, Lehighton and Jim Thorpe. With the exception of Nazareth, home of Martin Guitars and the Andretti racing clan, these are fairly dire and depressed places.

Palmerton is a small town irreversibly polluted by zinc smelting. It's better known now as the Palmerton/New Jersey Zinc Superfund site.

Jobs at the Palmerton smelter were almost as good as those at Bethlehem Steel and the community sacrificed its future and health on the altar of corporate American metal refining. It would be a challenge to find a progressive voter in Palmerton. If plants from the mountainside colored purple by the smelter could participate, they might vote for a Democrat, but they're all dead.

In the rest of Pennsylvania, the big swath between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, the Democratic candidates are faced with a state that's the equivalent of a red southern one, except with a great white majority living in a poorer and older than typical economy.

It's strongly to overwhelmingly Republican and those Democrats who do get elected to office -- Tim Holden and Chris Carney of the House come to mind -- are fundamentally Republicans in sheep's clothing. They've been seen as preferable to local competitors on the other side of the political fence only because the other party has been successful at creating the impression it's a haven for even more undisguisable demons and devils.

Both Holden and Carney are Bush Dog Democrats who've simply spent their time enabling all the policies of the Republican right as quickly as possible. The progressive left led by Jane Hamsher has targeted Carney for removal but, in this region of the state, these are tough battles to win. For example, there simply aren't any progressives to speak of in Holden's district and one is not elected if one espouses even the slightest adherence to progressive and/or populist beliefs.

Holden represents Schuylkill County, where DD was born. Growing up in Pine Grove, I only knew a handful of adults who vaguely admitted to being Democrats. They were all teachers who worked for the school district. (Note this website for Schuylkill Democrats. The descriptive "pathetic" doesn't really do it justice.)

If Obama campaigns in Pennsyltucky counties from the big middle -- places like Schuylkill, Lebanon, Carbon, Lycoming, Perry, and so on -- it's a waste of his time. Paradoxically, the recent pastor Jeremiah Wright flap shouldn't have hurt him at all. Most citizens from the interior were never going to vote for him, anyway.

"[Stumping] for his wife in Wilkes-Barre, [Bill Clinton] told wildly cheering supporters in a high school gymnasium: 'You have been so good to her and I am grateful beyond my ability to say. We love Pennsylvania,' " reported the Allentown Morning Call here today.

"Hillary Clinton is expected to do well in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton region because of her family ties to the area, and because it has a large population of older, blue-collar, culturally conservative voters," continued the newspaper.

Readers are advised "older, blue-collar, culturally conservative voters" in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton mostly means "Republican." If one thinks of Democrats, they would be Dems in the pre-1963 Strom Thurmond sense, not the 2008 sense.

The Clintons know this and it's why Bill Clinton was campaigning ala Republican-lite in the eastern part of the state.

Bill Clinton told the locals what they wanted to hear and was applauded for it.

Take, for instance, this howler: "Hillary Clinton's plan to ... promote development of renewable energy would begin to restore the country's economic health, Clinton said."

This is a statement of virtually no value to Lehigh Valley voters, although it might sound good. There is no significant opportunity for renewable energy in Pennsylvania, period.

There is only waste coal and plans to capitalize on it under "clean coal" business initiatives.

"The New York senator would 'roll' through the remaining primary elections, Clinton said, if Pennsylvania voters deliver her a decisive win on April 22," reported the Allentown newspaper.

The newspaper noted that the Lehigh Valley can be a bellwether region in a general election. It is an area which was formerly solidly Republican but which is now ups for grabs, not guaranteed to either party.

One of the older central dilemmas of the citizenry in the Lehigh Valley has to do with the fact that it was strongly blue-collar and pro-union because of the steel industry. Paradoxically, these voters trended Republican, traditionally rewarding only those political leaders with beliefs and policies which stood directly against the way their livelihood was protected.

2008-03-17T15:14:00.000-07:00

RICIN CRACKPOT WAKES UP: Talks to brother and FBI for jailhouse prep

"A man who has been hospitalized since Valentine's Day with respiratory ailments and failing kidneys told his brother he believes he was contaminated by the deadly ricin poison found in his Las Vegas motel room," reported AP today.

"[Roger Bergendorff] did mention that he would have never done anything to anybody," the suspect's brother, Erich Bergendorff, told Associated Press. "He himself is under the impression he was contaminated by it — he did mention the ricin and seemed to say something like, 'Gee, it sure worked on me.'"

In original coverage of the news, your friendly neighborhood GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow mentioned that one could not absolutely rule out extreme stupidity or the possibility that the sick man had snorted or consumed a significant amount castor mash.

Readers will now be advised to wait for the FBI to charge the annoying crank who has worn out his fifteen minutes of fame in his fiddling about with attempting to make a biological weapon. And Bergendorff will be put in prison for a few years. In the past, the US government has even jailed a mentally handicapped individual for ricin production, so the pleading of ignorance, the expressing of no desire to cause harm, cooperation with authorities or even diminished mental capabilities are not generally defenses which have been shown to get one off the hook.

"Roger Bergendorff, 57, was questioned by investigators from the FBI and the Las Vegas police on Friday in hopes that he could provide information about the Feb. 28 discovery of the ricin powder and castor beans, from which it is derived, continued the wire service.

"Officials from both agencies declined to comment about what they learned."

In addition to castor beans and a large amount of castor powder police "found our 'anarchists cookbooks' in the room marked at sections describing how to make ricin. Firearms also were found in the [Bergendorff's Las Vegas flophouse] room."

Previously:

Castor seeds and ricin: Not much of a threat.

2008-03-14T16:09:00.000-07:00

TAINTED HEPARIN LINKED TO CHINA: No firings at Baxter and Scientific Protein Laboratories yet

Who wants to be the next buyer for our new line of cheap drugs?

"The contaminant found in the blood-thinner heparin, which has been linked to hundreds of allergic reactions and possibly 19 deaths in the United States, has been traced to a Chinese plant that processed raw ingredients for the drug, U.S. health officials said Friday," according to US News & World Report.

The supplier to Baxter through Scientific Protein Laboratories of Waunakee, Wisc., was the Changzhou SPL plant in Changzhou City, China.

US News reported that Baxter's analysis of the contaminant was not complete but that the compound "was approximately the same molecular weight as heparin and is similar in other ways, which is why standard testing [did] not detect its presence."

The contamination was so widespread in Baxter's drug that the company has essentially been removed from the heparin business by events. Because it was a dominant player in the US market, the entire heparin supply in this country is under suspicion and due for recall.

In a fair country which valued logic and clear thinking, Baxter would be put out of business permanently, along with its partner Scientific Protein Laboratories. Its business leaders would be disgraced men.

Contrast this ongoing case with the fate of the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company of Chino, California. Responsible for the largest meat recall in US history when the American Humane Society released film of its employees killing downer sick cattle for the food supply, the company was put out of business.

Its president, Steven Mendell of Newport Beach, CA, was recently before a Congressional panel, apologizing and explaining that his life had been flushed down the toilet when he lost control of proper practice in his company.

"Obviously my system broke down," Mendell told a House committee intent on grilling him.

"[Mendell] told lawmakers that he had received death threats, that his family and employees had suffered, and that his company [was ruined] and would not reopen," reported the LA Times earlier this week.

Mendell said his life had gone up in smoke.

Mendell was asked whether he would eat meat from cows slaughtered in the way the Humane Society of America video company showed his company was killing them.

"No," he said.

Westland/Hallmark's beef has, so far, not been implicated in illness, unlike the heparin of Baxter. However, downer cows are kept from the food supply because they may be suffering from neurological disease which can be transmitted in the processed meat and which manifests only slowly (with no cure) in human populations.

This was a fact not lost upon Congressmen who commented Mendell might be dead by the time any potential disease shows up, although the risk of fatal dementia was deemed remote.

Westland/Hallmark's beef was sold in Progresso's Italian Wedding Soup, a food that your host regularly enjoys. However, as is the case with food and drug contamination in the formerly good ol' USA of 2008, by the time one reads about trouble in the consumables, one has already consumed them. When news hit that Progresso Italian Wedding Soup should be returned because it contained Westland/Hallmark meat, DD had already eaten what was in the house.

If I feel the effects of prion-caused dementia, I'll let you know in about a decade.

The LA Times on Westland/Hallmark.

2008-03-13T22:44:00.000-07:00

LA TIMES COMPANY HIRES MAN WHO RUINED FM RADIO: Tribune desparate

"Tribune Co., parent of the Los Angeles Times announced that it had hired radio veteran Lee Abrams as its first ever chief innovation officer 'responsible for innovation across Tribune's publishing, broadcasting and interactive divisions," wrote LAT reporter Thomas Mulligan in a story buried on C3 Wednesday.

One presumes the hidden-away-at-the-bottom-of-the-business-section location came out of pure embarrassment.

Having been a music journalist and rock musician for decades, it's fair to say Lee Abrams is not a name that comes to mind when one thinks of growth, openness to ideas and innovation. Abrams is known as the originator of the Album Oriented Rock format on FM radio, a development which effectively led to the fossilization of commecial airwaves. The followers of Abrams froze playlists in favor of only artists that focus groups and market studies had identified as those listeners were allegedly comfortable with. Read another way, that meant only classic rock oldies then and forever.

In critic Robert Christgau's Rock Albums of the Seventies: A Critical Guide, Abrams is dismissed as someone "who was to the 70's what Mitch Miller was to the 50's."

From this writer's standpoint, the Abrams way of FM radio, one which crushed airplay for anyone not extremely well-connected and/or overwhelmingly popular, directly contributed to the creation and rise of the independent rock music world. It was, in a manner of speaking, Abrams' anti-innovations at FM radio which led to actual innovators during their own thing in the indie world.

Deep within the story, the Times reported Abrams' musings about what newspapers need. A slogan, taken from an Eagles lyric, as it turns out.

"Maybe a slogan that's not hokey marketing speak or typical could help define the Web strategy," Abrams said. A slogan such as "Everything ... All The Time might give a newspaper some character ..."

Not included in the story was the info that it also worked for the Eagles, being one of the central lyrics of "Life in the Fast Lane," from where Abrams assuredly lifted it. "Fast Lane" is probably the single most recognizable song chronicle of the life of the rich and famous rock star in southern California in the Seventies. (Joe Walsh's "Life's Been Good," written around the same time, also comes to mind.) But "everything all the time" was in 1976 -- not 2008. How annoying.

"Lee Abrams, [was one] of many consultants hired in the 1970s by managers who lacked the confidence to program their own stations," reported the Hartford Courant in April 2007. "Abrams, a devotee of audience research, shielded listeners from songs that didn't 'test well,' which helped squeeze the life from free-form FM."

Abrams, reported another newspaper, "spawned a generation of [audience consultants], able to sort the universe of radio consumers ever more precisely by age, gender, ethnicity, income, spending habits and music preferences. These categorical types amounted to advertising targets."

"Lamentations about the state of commercial radio have become so standard over the last few decades that they have achieved something of the rote tedium the critics ascribe to the medium itself: how radio consultants -- led by [Lee Abrams], creator of the album-oriented rock and classic rock formats -- have taught station programmers to slice and dice their playlists to appeal more precisely to specific demographics; how more and more stations have come to play fewer and fewer songs," reported the New York Times in an article entitled "One Way to Get Radio Play: Do It Yourself," published in 2006.

Paradoxically, Abrams was hired by XM satellite radio supposedly because the formats and trends he popularized at FM had resulted in playlists with no innovation or variety.

Additionally, Abrams was apparently about to be drummed out of XM, which will be run by its archrival, Sirius satellite radio, if a pending merger of the two companies, now under anti-trust review by the Federal Communications Commission, is approved.

Today, an Abrams essay to Tribune was published around the web.

"The NEW Rock n Roll isn't about Elvis or James Dean, but it IS about re-inventing media with the exact same moxie that the fathers of Rock n Roll had," wrote Abrams to his new business partners. "The Tribune has the choice of doing to News/Information/Entertainment what Rock n Roll did to music ... to be the Ray Charles, Dylan's, Beatles and U2's of the Information age ... or have someone else figure it out, or worse, let these American institutions disappear into irrelevancy. I think Rock 'n Roll is the best choice. America needs a heartbeat, and we can deliver that on 21st Century terms. Rock 'n' Roll musically is behind us. NEWS & INFORMATION IS THE NEW ROCK N ROLL."

"If we can morph the Soul of Dylan ... with the innovation of Apple and the eccentric-all-the-way-to-the-bank of Bill Veeck, the WORLD will be a better place," Abrams continues further in.

Cue the part in "Fast Times at Ridgmont High" where Mr. Hand says, "Are you on dope?"

If one takes seriously public opinion polls which address the regard in which various professions are held, journalists have not been trending toward new rock star status. The new lice, maybe.

Abrams concludes by recommending Tribune people read a long list of bromides, sayings and aphorisms attributed to citizens ranging from John Stewart Mill to Pablo Picasso.

Seeing this happen to the Los Angeles Times is like watching an old friend go crazy. First they were only muttering to themselves. Now they're seeing things that aren't there.

One purses the lips and wonders, "Isn't there any way to get them the help they need?" Would an intervention work? A 2x4 upside the head? Quaaludes, groupies, narcotics and booze?