Sunday, 4 September 2022 - 3:56pm
This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:
- The Frontman of Empire: How Bono’s “Activism” Serves the Powerful — Alan Macleod at MintPress News:
Since his first major foray into activism at the 1984 Live Aid concert (where much of the money raised reportedly went to buy weapons for the Ethiopian military), Bono has become an almost ubiquitous face in the halls of power, being invited to speak at a host of elite events on poverty, including the Munich Security Conference, the G8 summit, the World Bank and at the World Economic Forum. There, he is usually treated as the voice of Africa and an intellectual and moral powerhouse helping to solve the world’s most pressing humanitarian problems. Yet critics would say that, far from helping the poor and challenging power, he has instead bolstered it. As Browne wrote: “Bono has been, more often than not, amplifying elite discourses, advocating ineffective solutions, patronizing the poor, and kissing the arses of the rich and powerful. He has been generating and reproducing ways of seeing the developing world, especially Africa, that are no more than a slick mix of traditional missionary and commercial colonialism, in which the poor world exists as a task for the rich world to complete.”
- Uvalde Police Didn’t Move to Save Lives Because That’s Not What Police Do — Natasha Lennard at the Intercept:
The behavior of the police at Robb Elementary is only shocking if you are committed to a mythic notion of what policing entails. The “thin blue line” does not, as reactionary narratives would have it, separate society from violent chaos. This has never been what police do, since the birth of municipal policing in slave patrols and colonial counterinsurgencies. The “thin blue line” instead separates those empowered by the state to uphold racial capitalism with violence, and to do so with impunity. It is disgusting, not shocking, that police officers would sooner harass and handcuff parents — parents begging them to save their children from a massacre — than they would run in and put themselves in the line of fire. What is striking, though, is how inconceivable it is to so many people that policing is not, in fact, what they’ve been told it is by the police themselves, by those in power, and by the mainstream culture built around those mutually reinforcing myths.
- Via Bruce Sterling:
- AUKUS is not about defending Australia but a possible US attack on China — Mike Gilligan in Pearls and Irritations:
Where might it end? John Lander, former Australian ambassador to Iran and Deputy Ambassador to China, offers professional insights. He sees the Wolfawitz doctrine of 1992 as still influencing US security policy– its aim being to prevent any national power becoming a challenge to US. He argues that the “US has defined China as its principal threat and is working on the strategy of denial so as to instigate a war between Taiwan and China. Arm Taiwan to the hilt, conduct a vilification campaign against China to make it the aggressor in the eyes of the world, encourage Taiwan to separate itself from China and thus instigate a war”. That’s a big call, by an astute observer. Nuclear escalation by an aggrieved, thwarted China could not be ruled out. The US would probably judge it had no choice but to respond in kind. But could the battle be confined to tactical nuclear weapons which merely vaporise aircraft carriers? US planners might not be deterred by China’s strategic nuclear arsenal – outnumbered as it is and lacking the layered countermeasures of the US. Yet let’s not forget that China could obliterate Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in a salvo before breakfast, and still have plenty to take its chances with the US. Why should Australia deploy submarines to fight China for Taiwan? It is not required by the ANZUS treaty. We do not see Taiwan as a nation state. Nor does any respected nation. Taiwan was and remains in international law a province of China. It is not geo-strategically important to us. We have no evidence that China has plans to attack Australia. Nor has China the conventional capability to do so. Evidence does exist that China is growing its own defences, centred on its vulnerability to nuclear decapitation by the US. And its maritime forces including power projection are growing. That is largely explained by a frail base, its focus on Taiwan, claims to adjacent seas, long vital sea lanes and longstanding issues with neighbours including Japan. It is frivolous to give weight to speculation beyond sober intelligence of the China military reality. Yet our government is on the path to joining a fight with China in China’s waters seven thousand kilometres away. For a US objective of global primacy essentially.
- Elon Musk Is Not a Renegade Outsider – He’s a Massive Pentagon Contractor — Alan Macleod, who is apparently on a bit of a myth-busting bender at MintPress News:
From its origins in 2002, SpaceX has always been extremely close to the national security state, particularly the CIA. Perhaps the most crucial link is Mike Griffin, who, at the time, was the president and COO of In-Q-Tel, a CIA-funded venture capital firm that seeks to nurture and sponsor new companies that will work with the CIA and other security services, equipping them with cutting edge technology. The “Q” in its name is a reference to “Q” from the James Bond series – a creative inventor who supplies the spy with the latest in futuristic tech. Griffin was with Musk virtually from day one, accompanying him to Russia in February 2002, where they attempted to purchase cut-price intercontinental ballistic missiles to start Musk’s business. Musk felt that he could substantially undercut opponents by using second-hand material and off-the-shelf components for launches. The attempt failed, but the trip cemented a lasting partnership between the pair, with Griffin going to war for Musk, consistently backing him as a potential “Henry Ford” of the rocket industry. Three years later, Griffin would become head of NASA and later would hold a senior post at the Department of Defense. While at NASA, Griffin brought Musk in for meetings and secured SpaceX’s big break. In 2006, NASA awarded the company a $396 million rocket development contract – a remarkable “gamble” in Griffin’s words, especially as it had never launched a rocket before. As National Geographic put it, SpaceX, “never would have gotten to where it is today without NASA.” And Griffin was essential to this development. Still, by 2008, SpaceX was again in dire straits, with Musk unable to make payroll. The company was saved by an unexpected $1.6 billion NASA contract for commercial cargo services. Thus, from its earliest days, SpaceX was nurtured by government agencies that saw the company as a potentially important source of technology.
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
- Privatising Your Ancestors — Mihail Evans at Tribune:
Ancestry.com want your family photos. They want you to upload them to their website so others tracing their family history can have highly prized images to add to the family trees created from searching historical records. But once they are on their system, they will be charging others to access them without offering you anything. They are effectively hoping to privatise the family albums of the nation, just another field ripe for monetisation. This is the obvious next step for what is, in effect, Big Genealogy. In the last decade or so, almost wholly unremarked, they have already privatised swathes of the public records of the UK. This has largely happened as a result of austerity, when cash-strapped local authorities pressed to digitise have done so on the cheap by handing over the contents of county record offices, built up over centuries, to these massive multinationals.
- Anti-Trans Bills Are Driving a New Moral Panic — Claire Potter in Public Seminar:
Over the weekend, I learned that Republican legislators in that state have jammed through H.B. 151, a bill that imagines a shocking, new attack on women’s right to privacy. […] And here is the creepy part. H.B. 151 permits any person to identify an athlete (this would be a female athlete, of course) as potentially being trans. The accusation would result in immediately pulling that athlete from competition and forcing her to submit to a visual examination of her genitals, as well as a pelvic exam to determine that she has ovaries and a uterus. Should this exam be inconclusive, that girl would be forced to take a chromosome test and have her testosterone level measured. If that girl is deemed not female for any reason—and there are many biological and chromosomal variations even among those who present as, and believe themselves to be, gender normative—her team would have to forfeit any competition she played in. […] In other words, the same GOP that doesn’t want girls to have sex at all is totally fine with children and teenagers having their clitorises measured, enduring a stranger’s fingers forcibly probing their vaginas, and being publicly humiliated in front of the entire school should any genetic or physical attribute appear to be “not normal.”
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith:
Drupal Site Quickstart
Works with Drupal: ^8 || ^9
Create Database and User
mysql -u [user] -p
Where [user] has ALL PRIVILEGES globally
CREATE DATABASE [dbname];
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON [dbname].* TO [dbuser]@localhost IDENTIFIED BY '[password]';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Install Drupal Core from Composer
See Using Composer to Install Drupal and Manage Dependencies.
cd /var/www/
mkdir [dirname]
composer create-project drupal/recommended-project [dirname]
Install Drupal Core from a Git Repo You've Already Created*
* See below.
cd /var/www/
git clone [repo URI]
Rename this directory as required.
cd /var/www/[dirname]
composer i
Configure Apache
Config file template:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin [you@domain]
ServerName [fqdn]
#ServerAlias www.[fqdn]
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^[fqdn] [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://[fqdn]/$1 [L,R]
#Uncomment if production server with HTTPS
#RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =[fqdn] [OR]
#RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =[fqdn]
#RewriteRule ^ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [END,NE,R=permanent]
DocumentRoot /var/www/[dirname]/web
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/[dirname]/web>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
ServerSignature On
</VirtualHost>
Drupal initial setup
cd /var/www/[dirname]
mkdir -p config/sync
mkdir db
cd /var/www/[dirname]/web/sites/default/
mkdir files
cp default.settings.php settings.php
Set this value in settings.php:
$settings['config_sync_directory'] = '/var/www/[dirname]/config/sync';
Also set trusted hosts.
sudo chown www-data:www-data files/ settings.php
Run Drupal installer
sudo chown [you]:staff settings.php
sudo chmod 664 settings.php
composer require drush/drush drupal/devel drupal/admin_toolbar
See also Drush Launcher.
sudo -u www-data drush en devel admin_toolbar media_library layout_builder
(Running as www-data because media module needs to create a directory in 'files'.)
SSL Certificate
sudo certbot --apache
(On live sites only, obviously.)
[Todo: git stuff.]
Database
Backup
drush sql:dump | gzip > /var/www/[dirname]/db/[whatever].sql.gz
Restore
drush sql:drop
drush sqlq --file=/var/www/[dirname]/[whatever].sql.gz
Sunday, 14 August 2022 - 8:17pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Breakfast with the Panthers — Suzanne Cope in Aeon:
Starting in 1969, and for several years afterwards, in church basements and community centre kitchens in cities and towns around the United States, thousands of kids sat around a table every school day morning, eating hot breakfast served by the young adults of the Black Panther Party. At each seat there was a plate and utensil setting, a cup and a napkin. The children learned to use their fork and knife properly, eating eggs and grits and bacon and toast, washed down by juice or milk or hot chocolate – whatever local businesses had donated that week. The Panthers – most of them in their late teens and early 20s, and about two-thirds of them women – had arrived at these community kitchens before dawn to prepare this hot meal for the children, serving them and then checking homework, and giving PE (political education) lessons.
- The Most American Thing That Has Ever Happened — Caitlin Johnstone:
The Biden administration has asked top Democrats to decouple the federal government’s Covid relief spending package from its much larger bill for funding of the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, because one of those two things is too controversial and contentious to pass quickly. Guess which one.
- Tom the Dancing Bug — by Ruben Bolling:
- How America’s Evangelicals Turned Themselves Into an Anti-Abortion Machine — James Risen at the Intercept:
No one who looked at Francis Schaeffer in the late 1970s would have figured him for a fundamentalist preacher. […] Yet by the late 1970s, Schaeffer had emerged as the intellectual driving force behind the political mobilization of Protestant evangelicals across the United States. Barely recognized outside evangelical circles, Schaeffer was nonetheless the man who first made evangelicals care about politics — and specifically about abortion. When the Supreme Court legalized abortion in its landmark Roe v. Wade decision in January 1973, Protestant evangelicals did not protest. At the time, evangelicals were not yet politically involved on any major issue. But just a few short years later, they were at the forefront of what became a four-decade conservative assault on Roe v. Wade, a bitter campaign that now appears to be on the brink of success, thanks in no small measure to Schaeffer’s efforts.
- Psaki Joins The Dems’ Corporate Career Pipeline — Julia Rock
at the Lever:
The skills required to act as a press secretary in corporate Democratic presidencies — saying little of substance, committing to nothing, dispensing snark and scoffs, and never even accidentally challenging power — appear to carry over well to playing pundit on MSNBC, the corporate network that serves as the Democratic Party’s de-facto propaganda outfit. Psaki’s Democratic predecessors have taken similar paths, leaving their press secretary posts to defend corporate Democrats and big business on cable news spots. In fact, every single press secretary of the Clinton and Obama administrations eventually cut out the middleman and went to work directly in corporate PR — ranging from managing crisis communications for the scandal-plagued NFL to setting up Amazon’s vast lobbying and public relations shop. This ongoing history of Democratic presidential flacks becoming corporate lackeys and mouthpieces is proof that when the Jen Psakis of the world are standing behind the dais in the West Wing and dodging questions about campaign promises to cancel student debt or institute a $15 minimum wage, they aren’t just speaking for the president. They are also auditioning for their future corporate employers.
- xkcd — by Randall Monroe:
- Conservative parents take aim at library apps meant to expand access to books — David Ingram at NBC News:
E-reader apps that became lifelines for students during the pandemic are now in the crossfire of a culture war raging over books in schools and public libraries. In several states, apps and the companies that run them have been targeted by conservative parents who have pushed schools and public libraries to shut down their digital programs, which let users download and read books on their smartphones, tablets and laptops. […] The apps often market themselves to schools and libraries as a way to quickly diversify their digital shelves, especially after racial justice protests in spring 2020 drew attention to the lack of diversity in many traditional institutions. But convenience is a double-edged sword. In years past, parents might not have been able to find out what’s in a library collection, giving students a certain measure of freedom to roam the stacks. Now, they can easily search digital collections for books with content they object to and ask school administrators to censor or limit access with a few mouse clicks. “The terrifying thing is that they can be censored with the flip of a switch, without due process, without evaluating the substance of the claims,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association.
- “The Squad” Doesn’t Exist Outside Of Social Media — Caitlin Johnstone:
“I’ve avoided the term, but ‘Fraud Squad’ feels pretty apt,” journalist Aaron Maté tweeted of the House vote. “Challenging the military industrial complex is leftism 101. The Squad just voted to give it another $40 billion via the Ukraine proxy war. So, insofar as they claim to be a leftist contingent, how are they not a fraud?” The best assessment I’ve ever read about the clique of House Democrats comprised of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman comes from Columbia University’s Anthony Zenkus, who made the following observation: “The Squad doesn’t exist. They have never used their power as a bloc to push for votes on progressive legislation or to block regressive legislation. They are not protesting on the Capitol steps or outside the White House. They are a media creation and a brand who won’t disrupt status quo.” That’s it right there. “The Squad” has no real existence outside of the media, particularly social media. It’s a glorified online PR campaign for the Democratic Party, one which only came about because the party’s gerontocratic leaders are too senile to use Twitter and Instagram.
- Dinosaur Comics — by Ryan North:
- The Right’s Creeping Pro-Natalist Rhetoric on Abortion and Trans Health Care — Schuyler Mitchell in the Intercept:
While it’s ridiculous to equate reproductive or gender-affirming health care with forced sterilization, Republicans have been able to comfortably weaponize this language in part due to the progressive movement’s own dark history with eugenics. During the early 20th century, scores of Black, Indigenous, and Puerto Rican women were forcibly sterilized at the hands of the state. Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger supported eugenics and espoused birth control as a tool for demographic control. “Part of what’s so outrageous is the true vulnerability that people face when it comes to their bodily autonomy is real. It’s just being weaponized against them through false pretense,” said Jules Gill-Peterson, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins and the author of “Histories of the Transgender Child.” “We see how much residue is left there, and how many sparks are available for people to weaponize those histories. They can sort of substitute the reality.” There’s another layer to the right’s eugenics rhetoric: Various nationalist authoritarian regimes throughout history have employed pro-natalist or “positive eugenics” methods in attempts to combat the demographic threat of declining birthrates. In 1925, Mussolini launched an aggressive domestic policy known as “Battle for Births,” which banned abortion, restricted access to contraception, and incentivized reproduction via tax breaks and welfare benefits. […] Similar events played out in Nazi Germany: Abortion and contraception were banned, traditional gender roles were reimposed, and economic benefits were awarded to women who focused on homemaking. These policies were explicitly tied to the belief in the superiority of the Aryan race; promoting the expansion of the white population went hand in hand with the compulsory sterilization and genocide of those deemed racially inferior. It’s worth noting that these authoritarian approaches to population goals emerged in the period following World War I into World II, when unprecedented mass casualties had fomented a growing anxiety about birthrates worldwide. In the wake of over 6 million deaths globally from Covid-19, it might not be a coincidence that fertility panic has crept into the current wave of Republican legislation. Today the endgame of constructing a “traditional,” white, Christian nation is an undercurrent in much of the right’s rhetoric.
- The Shovel’s definitive profile of Anthony Albanese:
He joined the Labor Party as a student, and then went off to get some life experience in the real world, trying his hand at all sorts of different jobs within varying arms of the Labor Party. After winning pre-selection for the seat of Grayndler in 1996, his first federal election was a closely-fought battle against the No Aircraft Noise Party (NAN), a single-issue party who fundamentally misunderstands how aircraft work. In the first Rudd Government, Albanese was given the position of ‘Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, Minister for Regional Development and Local Government and Leader of the House of Representatives’. It was later revealed that Albanese had used his contacts in the union movement to negotiate a salary that was directly tied to the number of letters in his job title.
- Health Data — xkcd by Randall Munroe:
- Laugh at Tucker Carlson’s Tanning Testicles Doc All You Want, But the Bulging Muscles and Potent Sperm Imagery is a Fascist Dream — Annika Brockschmidt at Religion Dispatches:
This trailer for Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s new documentary The End of Men has drawn a lot of mockery online—especially when it became clear that the device covering the genitals isn’t a glowing Covid test, but that the naked man standing on a pile of stones is in fact bathing his testicles in UV light—a process, that according to macho fitness influencers, is supposed to increase the sperm count. […] At first glance, the video may seem ridiculous, but it actually offers a chilling glimpse into the ideology of America’s increasingly radicalizing Right. In right-wing ideology—and most notably in fascism—gender roles are inherently political, as numerous historians and other humanities scholars have shown. The historian Michael Hatt writes: “The stability of masculinity depends upon the visibility of the male body; to be learned or consolidated, masculinity requires an exchange between men.” Not only are the depictions of idealized, militant masculinity important propaganda tools for fascists, they also provide viewers with a deep insight into their thinking. Fascism requires a perpetual state of war. This doesn’t have to be a real war—instead, a narrative is built in which the “real” people are threatened from the outside. These enemies are painted as both incredibly powerful, but also as despicable and degenerate. According to this understanding, in order to counter this constant threat fascism needs men—physically strong men, who are not only able to throw large car tires around, but who also deter their opponents through their overpowering physique. The relationship between masculinity and force is crucial: Fascism, as historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes, “links masculinity to the performance of violent acts.”
- On Bush’s Freudian Confession — Caitlin Johnstone:
While criticizing Russia for having rigged elections and shutting out political opposition (which would already be hilarious coming from any American in general and Bush in particular), the 43rd president made the following comment: “The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, of Ukraine.” And then it got even better. After correcting himself with a nervous chuckle, Bush broke the tension in the empire-loyal crowd with the words, “Iraq too. Anyway.” He then quipped that he is 75 years old, leaning harder on his “Aw shucks gee willikers I’m such a goofball” persona than he ever has in his entire life. And Bush’s audience laughed. They thought it was great. A president who launched an illegal invasion that killed upwards of a million people (probably way upwards) openly confessing to doing what every news outlet in the western world has spent the last three months shrieking its lungs out about Putin doing was hilarious to them. There are not enough shoes in the universe to respond to this correctly.
- Calvin and Hobbes — by Bill Watterson:
Sunday, 7 August 2022 - 9:57pm
This fortnight, I have been mostly working, but when I did get to the pub, I read:
- The Fed’s Interest Rate Hike: Salt In The Wound? — John T. Harvey in Forbes:
Here’s the situation. We all know well that inflation is accelerating and that we are facing rates we haven’t seen since the OPEC oil embargo. Fair enough, the Fed has that right. And they are correct to worry that people are hurting from this. But Fed’s solution is nonsensical. They are raising interest rates in the hopes that this will reduce the overall level of economic activity and, once people don’t have as much money to spend, “They expect that to cool demand for goods and services, helping to ease price inflation.” Stop for a second and assume that those pushing this policy don’t have “PhD” after their names. Imagine instead that someone on a street corner is yelling to anyone passing by, “Listen to me, people! Prices are rising and we are all hurting! Demand that your government lower your incomes today!” You’d rush by as quickly as possible, avoiding eye contact and keeping one hand on your wallet. What an idiot: help people afford to put food on the table by depriving them of income? Insanity. […] Nothing in our current scenario suggests that lowering the level of economic activity in the U.S. would be helpful. It is true in a very strict (and bizarre) sense that throwing the economy into recession would lower the prices of gas and food, and therefore overall inflation, since we wouldn’t be able to afford to buy as much. But unless a 10% decline in our incomes led to a >10% decline in their prices, it will actually make us worse off than we were when we started. And as the demand for gas and food is very price inelastic (i.e., we can’t do without them and so we won’t be able to cut back that much), any fall in our incomes will definitely not be matched by a like or better fall in prices. Absolutely, positively not.
- As the Forde report shows, Labour’s right wing is the source of its problems — Ryan Coogan:
After the release of the Forde report last week, you can probably see why other parties don’t tend to make a lot of room for people who are directly opposed to their stated goals. According to the report, Labour officials worked against the interests of their own party in order to undermine its then-leader Jeremy Corbyn and the party’s left wing as a whole, going so far as to divert campaign resources away from winnable seats and towards candidates who were anti-Corbyn. […] The report also confirms that claims of antisemitism against Corbyn were weaponised by his internal enemies in order to create an air of moral panic around the prospect of his leadership; a fact that few will find surprising considering that the right immediately stopped pretending to care about Jewish people five minutes after Corbyn was out the door. […] The fact that people within his own party were terrified of him begs the question: which part of supporting the working class did they disagree with? Which part of Corbyn being on the right side of virtually every social issue for the past seven decades had them lighting the warning beacons of Gondor? How is being terrified of social progress not only a socially acceptable political position to hold in this country but seemingly its default? The real horror of this entire affair is the fact that those factions – the ones that believed it absolutely crucial to attack their own leader in the midst of Brexit chaos and the gradual rise of fascism in the West – won decisively. They are the Labour Party now.
- Via Bruce Sterling:
- ‘Like a public shaming’: a night with the eco-activists deflating SUV tires — Oliver Milman in the Guardian profiles the Tyre Extinguishers:
On a searingly hot night in New York City, a group of mask-wearing activists grasping bags of lentils set out to stage the biggest blitzkrieg yet upon a new target for climate campaigners in the US – the tires of SUVs. The group – a mixture of ages and genders – split up as midnight approached, heading down the streets of the Upper East Side, lined by some of the most expensive apartments in the world and a gleaming parade of high-end, parked SUVs. This type of vehicle is the second largest cause of the global rise in carbon dioxide emissions over the past decade. The Tyre Extinguishers, as they call themselves, furtively hand around bags of lentils ahead of their raid (the legumes are jammed into a tire valve to release its air slowly overnight) and size up their quarry.
- The ‘sadmin’ after my mother’s death was hard enough – then I encountered Vodafone — George Monbiot in the Guardian:
Vodafone continued to charge my dad for a contract that should have ended the day my mum died. Eventually my sister told a call handler she intended to stop the direct debit. He replied: “Do what you like, but you’ll be in breach of contract.” She stopped it anyway, and posted a letter to Vodafone HQ (there was no other means of contacting the company) informing it. Without warning, Vodafone passed the matter to a debt collection agency, which started pursuing my dad for the £33 bill it deemed my mum to have incurred since she died. The agents rang my dad’s landline repeatedly, every time insisting on speaking to him. His carer refused. Had my dad not been shielded, these calls would have inflicted immense distress. […] A fortnight ago, more than four months after my mother’s death, I belatedly snapped, and described our experience in a Twitter thread. My intention was to shame Vodafone into action. I got more than I bargained for. Immediately, the responses started pouring in: first dozens, then hundreds of people sharing similar and sometimes even worse experiences when trying to cancel accounts with Vodafone, especially the accounts of people who had died or whose capacity had diminished. They reported, while in the depths of grief, the same nastiness and lack of sympathy. They reported an insistence on questioning vulnerable and confused elderly people. They described months, in some cases years, of failure to cancel such contracts.
- This Modern World — by Tom Tomorrow:
- The Dollar System in a Multi-Polar World — James K. Galbraith for INET brilliantly spells out what seems bleeding obvious only after it's been spelled out:
A tentative conclusion is that the dollar-based financial system, with the euro acting as a junior partner, is likely to survive for now. But there will be a significant non-dollar, non-eurozone carved out for those countries considered adversaries by the United States and the European Union, of which Russia is by far the present leading example – and for their trading partners. China will act as a bridge between the two systems – the fixed-point of multi-polarity. Should similar harsh decisions be taken with respect to China, then a true split of the world into mutually-isolated blocs, akin to the coldest years of the Cold War, would become a possibility. However the consequences for the Western economies in their current state of dependence on Eurasian resources and Chinese production capacity would be exceptionally dire, so it seems unlikely (though who knows?) that policy-makers in the West would push matters that far. In the present crisis, political leaders in the West have been under the most extreme pressure to wield powers that they do not have, in order to display a resolve that they may not feel. Their reactions must be judged through the prism of this pressure and the requirements of political survival. They have, so far, managed to refrain from taking fatal military risks, while deploying the full force of information-war assets, and concentrating on a sanctions regime that is part of a well-worn toolkit, demonstrably more costly in the Russian case to its designers than to its target. […] Can the United States survive the rise of a multi-polar world? The question is absurd: of course it can. But not without a political upheaval, spurred by inflation and recession and a falling stock market in the short term and eventually by demands for a realistic strategy consonant with the actual global balance of power. The ultimate threat is not to the living possibilities of the country so much as to its political elites, based as they are on global financial rents and domestic arms contracts.
Sunday, 24 July 2022 - 8:20pm
This week, I have been mostly reading comics, cheap gags, and Caitlin Johnstone's incisive rants:
- BMW Heated Seats Subscription Is Real And It Costs $18 Per Month — Adrian Padeanu at motor1.com:
We've been "warned" about how subscriptions could become the automotive equivalent of a video game's downloadable content, and we're beginning to see more examples. On its ConnectedDrive Store in South Korea, BMW owners can pay a monthly fee to have a creature comfort such as heated seats. It costs ₩24,000 or approximately $18 at current exchange rates. Alternatively, you can get a one-year plan for $176 or a three-year subscription for $283. […] If you're wondering about the potential of in-car subscriptions from a business perspective, Stellantis estimates it'll make a whopping $23 billion (yes, with a "b") a year by the end of this decade. With the risk of stating the obvious, you're paying for features the car already comes with, at least if we're talking about heated seats/steering wheel.
- Contra Chrome: How Google's browser became a threat to privacy and democracy — Leah Elliot (PDF):
- Everyone’s Anti-War Until The War Propaganda Starts — Caitlin Johnstone:
Virtually everyone will tell you they love peace and hate war when asked; war is the very worst thing in the world, and no healthy person relishes the thought of it. But when the rubber meets the road and it’s time to oppose war and push for peace, those who’d previously proclaimed themselves “anti-war” are on the other side screaming for more weapons to be poured into a proxy war that their government deliberately provoked. This is because the theory of being anti-war is very different from the practice. In theory people are just opposed to the idea of exploding other people for no good reason. In practice they’re always hit with a very intense barrage of media messaging giving them what look like very good reasons why those people need exploding.
- Sutton Impact — by Ward Sutton:
- No, MMT Didn't Wreck Sri Lanka — Stephanie Kelton interviews Fadhel Kaboub, who says:
Sri Lanka, like many countries in the Global South, began the liberalization of its economy in 1977, and adopted a classic IMF-style economic development model based on exports, foreign direct investment (FDI), tourism, and remittances. This development model remained tamed during the civil war (1983-2009), but it was fully unleashed in 2009, and that is when external debt began to skyrocket, going from $16 billion in 2008 to nearly $56 billion in 2019. The value of the Sri Lankan rupee dropped from 114 to 178 LCU/USD. Thanks to a massive increase in government subsidies and transfers reaching more than 30 percent of government spending in recent years, Sri Lanka struggled to keep inflation below 5 percent. Yet, economists celebrated Sri Lanka’s great achievements with an average growth rate exceeding 5 percent in the decade after the civil war, and a real per capita GDP growth putting the country officially in the upper middle-income economy category. Sri Lanka was following the mainstream economic development model like a good student. In the decade starting in 2009, exports grew from $9.3 to $19.1 billion, tourism quintupled from 0.5 to 2.5 million visitors annually, FDI inflows quadrupled by 2018 to a record $1.6 billion, and remittances doubled to nearly $7 billion annually. These are the four engines of Sri Lanks’s economic growth, but they are also the engines driving the country deeper into the structural traps of food and energy dependency, and specialization in low value added exports. Here is how these engines constitute a trap. An increase in tourism induces more food and energy imports. An increase in remittances means more brain drain. An increase in low value-added exports induces more imports of capital, intermediate goods, fuel etc.; and an increase in low value-added FDI does the same plus the repatriation of profits out of Sri Lanka. On a global scale, these neocolonial economic traps have suctioned $152 trillion from the Global South since 1960.
- Solving Home Problems - Keeping a Tidy House — Phil Are Go!:
- Oh God It’s Going To Get SO Much Worse — Caitlin Johnstone:
The creation of the DHS disinformation board is a far more shocking and frightening development than last year’s scandalous revelation that the White House was advising social media platforms about accounts it determined were circulating censorship-worthy Covid misinformation, which was itself a drastic leap in the direction toward direct government censorship from what had previously been considered normal. We should probably talk more about how as soon as people accepted that it was fine for government, media and Silicon Valley institutions to work together to censor misinformation and rally public support around an Official Narrative about a virus, the ruling power establishment immediately took that as license to do that with a war and a foreign government as well. Like, immediately immediately. We went from a massive narrative control campaign about a virus, which people accepted because they wanted to contain a deadly pandemic, straight into a massive narrative control campaign about Russia and Ukraine. Without skipping a beat. Like openly manipulating everyone’s understanding of world events is just what we do now. Now we’re seeing increasingly brazen censorship of political dissent about a fucking war that could easily end up getting us all killed in a nuclear holocaust, and a portion of the Biden administration’s whopping $33 billion Ukraine package is going toward funding “independent media” (read: war propaganda).
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
- Susan Collins Shocked That Brett Kavanaugh Would Ever Lie to a Woman — Andy Borowitz at the New Yorker:
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Senator Susan Collins, who had been assured by Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 that he considered Roe v. Wade “settled law,” said today that she was “shocked” that the Supreme Court Justice “would ever lie to a woman.”
- Highly selective health nuts — Jen Sorenson:
- “But interest rates were 17% in my day!” complains man who bought house for $67,000 — The Shovel:
A 63 year old man who bought his first inner-city four-bedroom house for under $70k in the 1980s says young people complaining about interest rate rises don’t know how good they’ve got it. “Back then we had to save up for weeks, just to get enough for a deposit!” John Bradly from the eastern Melbourne suburb of Camberwell said.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith:
Sunday, 17 July 2022 - 8:23pm
In the reasonably recent past, on the rare occasions when I have not been too tired to find a quiet corner in the pub from which to read off my telephone screen, I was mostly reading:
- Cocaine, class and me: everyone in this town takes drugs, all the time – they’re part of the civic culture — Tabitha Lasley gives the readers of the Guardian some povvo-porn (via Luke):
In 2015, I quit my job at a property magazine in London and moved to Aberdeen, with two suitcases and a grand plan to write a book about the oil industry. Two years later, I washed up in a refinery town in the north of England, with no money and an unfinished manuscript. I learned my scale. I got a job frying things. Anyway, a man walks into a chicken shop, this chicken shop that I work in, and pulls his top up, for the benefit of the paying customers. He has a knife wound in his chest. It looks fresh. The beads of blood along the gash have barely coagulated. “Now then,” he says to his friend, whom he has spotted in the queue. “Got stabbed the other day, didn’t I?” He doesn’t sound upset. He’s just telling his friend about his week. Violence is part of the local vernacular. If words fail you, you call on other means of communication. One of the first things I learned when I took this job was that it was considered very gauche to remark on a person’s black eyes and split knuckles.
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
- Gary North (1942-2022) Sought to Deny Religious Liberty to ‘the Enemies of God’ — But He Was Willing to Wait Patiently For The Revolution to Develop — Frederick Clarkson in Religion Dispatches:
The Times obit mentions how North favored a “harsh theocracy” with his notions of “biblical economics” at its core. But Christianity Today describes him as a proponent of “theonomy.” North himself explained the difference as he saw it. He wrote that theocracy as it’s generally understood, is a “top down” imposition of a theocratic order, while theonomy is what he calls a “bottom up theocracy” enroute to what he calls a “majoritarian theocracy” that, once empowered, would drive humanism “from the face of the Earth.” “Theocracy is government by God’s law—not just civil government, but all government. It is not a top-down imposition of biblical law by an elite of priests, but, in contrast, a bottom-up imposition of biblical standards over every area of life—areas not regulated by civil law for the most part—by those people who are morally responsible for making decisions. As the process of dominion extends the authority of Christians over more and more areas of life, we will see the creation of a comprehensive theocracy. It will not come as the result of some sort of ‘palace revolution.’”
- From Junk Economics to a False View of History: Where Western Civilization Took a Wrong Turn — Michael Hudson:
We have two diametrically opposed scenarios depicting how the most basic economic relationships came into being. On the one hand, we see Near Eastern and Asian societies organized to maintaining social balance by keeping debt relations and mercantile wealth subordinate to the public welfare. That aim characterized archaic society and non-Western societies. […] Western tradition indeed lacks a policy subordinating wealth to overall economic growth. The West has no strong government checks to prevent a wealth-addicted oligarchy from emerging to make itself into a hereditary aristocracy. Making debtors and clients into a hereditary class, dependent on wealthy creditors, is what todays economists call a “free market.” It is one without public checks and balances against inequality, fraud or privatization of the public domain. It may seem amazing to some future historian that the political and intellectual leaders of today’s world hold such individualistic neoliberal fantasies that archaic society “should” have developed in this way – without recognizing that this is how Rome’s oligarchic Republic did indeed develop, leading to its inevitable decline and fall.
- Rob Rogers:
- The US Cries About War Crimes While Imprisoning A Journalist For Exposing Its War Crimes — Caitlin Johnstone:
I mean, can we take a moment to deeply appreciate the irony of this? Because it’s so obscene and outrageous it’s actually hard to take in unless you really let it absorb. The most powerful government in the world, which serves as the hub of the most powerful empire that has ever existed, is working to extradite a journalist for exposing its war crimes while simultaneously rending its garments over war crime allegations against another government. I mean, damn. You would think a power structure that had recently been caught red-handed committing war crimes and is currently in the process of imprisoning a journalist for exposing those war crimes would at least have the sense not to yell too loudly about war crimes for a little while. But this is how confident the empire is in its ability to control the narrative.
- The Right’s ‘Grooming’ Rhetoric Didn’t Begin with QAnon — You Have to Go Back a Bit Further to Get to the Source — Sophie Bjork-James in Religion Dispatches:
For 45 years Christian Right campaigns seeking to limit the civil rights of sexual minorities have instead framed their efforts as protecting children. A prime example comes in the form of opposition to trans rights bills, often called “Bathroom Bills” by Christian Right groups in order to ratchet up the fear, since they claimed that these bills would put women and girls at risk by allowing male predators into female bathrooms. This tactic remains in play because it accomplishes so much. It works. First, it shifts the conversation away from what these campaigns are actually doing by reframing supremacist movements as a defense of those who are powerless—children. Protecting children is far more popular than limiting the civil rights of a group of people. Polls show that support for same-sex marriage is at an all-time high, and that limiting LGBT rights is increasingly unpopular. So, instead of organizing around a narrative of defending heterosexual privilege and opposing the rights of LGBTQ people, this shift frames supporters of these bills as victims—or at least as defenders of victims. This tactic also creates a moral enemy of one’s political opponents. Anita Bryant’s mantra, “homosexuals cannot reproduce, they must recruit,” rhetorically transformed gays and lesbians from human beings into a nefarious agenda. In this rhetoric, LGBT people aren’t citizens—not teachers, neighbors, parents—but a dangerous force. Today this tactic is being used not only to demonize LGBTQ people, but also anyone who supports LGBTQ rights. As DeSantis’s press secretary tweeted, “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.”
- Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
- Why politicians must pretend to want cheap housing — Cameron Murray:
Affordability is a beautifully vague word. It’s a word that works nicely as a covert signal—that is, a word that means something different to your target audience compared to others. Aspiring homeowners can be led to believe that the word implies cheaper prices to buy homes. Maybe also cheaper rents. They feel their concerns are acknowledged. It appears like something is being done for them. For homelessness and public housing advocates, the word affordability can imply a boost to public housing investment to provide non-market housing options to the neediest. The word makes it appear that something is being done for them too. But the beauty of a covert signal is that the true meaning is known only to the target audience. In this case, large property owners and developers. They know that affordability means that absolutely nothing will be done that puts the value of their property assets at risk. To them, the word is an invitation to participate in the next great property scam.
[If, like me, you prefer ingesting information accompanied by breakfast cereal, the video is here:]
Sunday, 26 June 2022 - 10:37pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Big Tech’s Kafkaesque Approach to Censorship Is Driven by an Abiding Contempt for Its Audience — Ryan Grim at the Intercept:
The politics morning show “Rising,” produced by The Hill and which I currently co-host, was suspended by YouTube on Thursday for allegedly violating the platform’s rules around election misinformation. Two infractions were cited: First, the outlet posted the full video of former President Donald Trump’s recent speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on its page. The speech, of course, was chock full of craziness. Second, “Rising” played a minutelong clip of Trump’s commentary on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which included the claim that none of it would have happened if not for a “rigged election.” […] The crime, we learned, that got the show suspended for seven days from its platform was that neither I nor my co-host, Robby Soave, paused to solemnly inform our viewers that Trump’s phrase — “a rigged election” — referred to his ongoing claim that the election was stolen from him in 2020 and that this claim is false. […] The notion that any viewer came away from watching that segment with the mistaken idea that Trump — whom we described as a fraudster and “an actual madman” — had indeed won the election and that it had been stolen from him can’t be taken seriously. It’s absurd, and The Hill is appealing the decision, so far with no success. But YouTube’s approach reflects a broad problem with Big Tech’s approach to censorship: It has nothing but contempt for the viewer. If we had paused to note that Trump’s gripe about his election loss was unfounded, what voter who previously believed that claim would be convinced by my simple rejection of it? And who was the person to begin with who was not previously aware that Trump disputes the election outcome? It might possibly be the most known political fact in America.
- If Trans Kids Are Able to Transition… — Seth Rubin in McSweeney's Internet Tendency:
If trans kids are able to transition, that would mean that I would also need to transition. I would need muscles as big as Dwayne Johnson’s in order to pass as a man, and then I would get cast in a Fast and Furious movie against my will, and then I would get fired from my job for taking three months off to film car stunts. […] If trans kids are able to transition, they’ll expect me to get their pronouns right. And then they’ll expect me to know other things, like how to crack into a high-tech safe, and then I’ll be forced to come out of retirement to join a ragtag crew of misfits on one last heist. It’s not that I don’t support trans kids; it’s just that I don’t know if I have one last heist in me. Go ahead, explain that to the woke mob parked outside my house.
- Biden's SOTU Mentioned the Deficit Six Times :( — Stephanie Kelton:
First, government deficits were the key to ending the pandemic-induced recession. They are the reason the recession was the shortest on record. They are the reason poverty fell to its lowest rate on record in 2020. They are the reason President Biden was able to boast about presiding over an economy that has created more jobs in a single year—6.5 million—than at any time in in the history of America. And they are the reason Fed Chair Powell was able to declare that “we have the strongest economy in the world now.” Instead of making deficit reduction a centerpiece of the president’s agenda, we should embrace the healing power of fiscal policy and work to educate the American people about how deficits can (and must) be used to deliver an economic agenda that tackles the many intersecting crises we face today.
- Bizaro — by Dan Piraro:
- Rejoinder to Robert Skidelsky: Keynes is on the side of the workers — Geoff Tily in the Progressive Economy Forum:
It is all too easy to revert to the orthodoxy of the industrial revolution, that somehow technology alone set us on the trajectory to today’s prosperity. And even ‘Keynesian’ economists impose the same underlying scenario on their gravely diminished Keynes. But Keynes’s theory and the view from the labour movement tells us that causality is the other way around. Advanced technology hasn’t created more prosperity, more prosperity has advanced technology!
- The American Empire self-destructs — Michael Hudson:
The basic assumption of economic and diplomatic forecasting is that every country will act in its own self-interest. Such reasoning is of no help in today’s world. Observers across the political spectrum are using phrases like “shooting themselves in their own foot” to describe U.S. diplomatic confrontation with Russia and allies alike. For more than a generation the most prominent U.S. diplomats have warned about what they thought would represent the ultimate external threat: an alliance of Russia and China dominating Eurasia. America’s economic sanctions and military confrontation has driven them together, and is driving other countries into their emerging Eurasian orbit. […] The recent escalation U.S. sanctions blocking Europe, Asia and other countries from trade and investment with Russia, Iran and China has imposed enormous opportunity costs – the cost of lost opportunities – on U.S. allies. And the recent confiscation of the gold and foreign reserves of Venezuela, Afghanistan and now Russia, along the targeted grabbing of bank accounts of wealthy foreigners (hoping to win their hearts and minds, along with recovery of their sequestered accounts), has ended the idea that dollar holdings or those in its sterling and euro NATO satellites are a safe investment haven when world economic conditions become shaky. […] Trying to force Russia to respond militarily and thereby looking bad to the rest of the world is turning out to be a stunt aimed simply at demonstrating Europe’s need to contribute more to NATO, buy more U.S. military hardware and lock itself deeper into trade and monetary dependence on the United States. The instability that this has caused is turning out to have the effect of making the United States look as threatening as Russia.
- Matt Wuerker:
- How Did This Many Deaths Become Normal? — Ed Yong in the Atlantic:
While epidemics flow downward into society’s cracks, medical interventions rise upward into its peaks. New cures, vaccines, and diagnostics first go to people with power, wealth, education, and connections, who then move on; this explains why health inequities so stubbornly persist across the decades even as health problems change. AIDS activism, for example, lost steam and resources once richer, white Americans had access to effective antiretroviral drugs, Steven Thrasher told me, leaving poorer Black communities with high rates of infection. “It’s always a real danger that things get worse once the people with the most political clout are okay,” Thrasher said. Similarly, pundits who got vaccinated against COVID quickly started arguing against overcaution and (inaccurately) predicting the pandemic’s imminent end. The government did too, framing the crisis as solely a matter of personal choice, even as it failed to make rapid tests, high-quality masks, antibody cocktails, and vaccines accessible to the poorest groups. The CDC’s latest guidelines continue that trend, as my colleague Katherine J. Wu has argued. Globally, the richer north is moving on while the poorer south is still vulnerable and significantly unvaccinated. All of this “shifts the burden to the very groups experiencing mass deaths to protect themselves, while absolving leaders from creating the conditions that would make those groups safe,” Courtney Boen, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “It’s a lot easier to say that we have to learn to live with COVID if you’re not personally experiencing the ongoing loss of your family members.”
- Don’t Say Straight — Devorah Blachor in McSweeney's Internet Tendency:
Don’t say straight! When kids are small and impressionable, they believe the world is full of possibilities. One kid might want to grow up and live in a house with their two best friends and make bead loom handicrafts, for example. Another might want to create a universe structured around their favorite manga comic. Still another might want to solve crimes by leading a pack of emergency service specialty puppies. It would be a shame to expose children to heterosexual relationships so early and ruin their chances for happiness and fulfillment. Look where all this heterosexual madness has gotten us! Society is breaking down. The heterosexual agenda is responsible for what happened when 62 million Americans voted for a man accused by dozens of women of sexual assault, and who bragged about assaulting women to other men. Kids are way too young to learn about that without becoming traumatized. Let’s protect our children from this terrible knowledge so they can feel safe, and while we’re at it, let’s make sure they don’t know about the existence of Brett Kavanaugh either. What kind of twisted mind would want our children to learn about these degenerates?
Sunday, 19 June 2022 - 6:32pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Farewell to P.J. O’Rourke, America’s Only (Semi-)Funny Conservative — Jon Schwarz at the Intercept:
The conservative writer P.J. O’Rourke, author of 20 books, died on Tuesday at age 74. For decades O’Rourke appeared constantly on television and radio shows because they always needed someone both right-wing and funny, and he was the only such person available. […] if we’re being honest — and O’Rourke would probably say we should be, even the day after he died — we should acknowledge that his prominence was fundamentally due to him being graded on a curve. Conservatism has never lent itself to being funny and never will. Saying “This is as good as humans can manage so let’s never change the structure of power” will generally only make the powerful laugh. But the “liberal” media had to book someone like him, and there he was.
- The cryptovangelist — This Modern World, by Tom Tomorrow:
- Sandy Hook, Uvalde and the Exploitation of American Paranoia — Micah Sifry:
A 2013 poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that a quarter of all Americans thought that the facts about Sandy Hook were being hidden, and an additional 11 percent were unsure. Joe Uscinski, a University of Miami political science professor who studies conspiracy theories, tells Williamson that according to his research, as of 2020, one-fifth of all Americans believed that every school shooting was faked. And not just school shootings; Uscinski says virtually all high-profile mass shootings draw this level of doubt. As a Politifact article on the ongoing skepticism about mass shootings points out, “Search queries for the term ‘false flag’ over the past five years have spiked during mass shootings, including those at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs (November 2015) and the Pulse nightclub in Orlando (June 2016). Interest peaked during the week of the Las Vegas shooting in October 2017, which inspired widespread false flag conspiracies. And searches for the term shot up again after the El Paso and Dayton attacks.” One out of every five of us is living in another reality, where mass shootings can’t be real.
- “Prove to the World You’ve Lost Your Son”:
How a Tulsa grandmother became a vicious Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist—in her own words — Elizabeth Williamson in Slate:
Joe Uscinski, the political science professor, said that in most research, partisanship and ideology are less predictive of conspiratorial beliefs than are “dark personality traits.” People who embrace and defend “antisocial” conspiracy theories like Sandy Hook and QAnon often exhibit traits that psychologists call the “Dark Triad”: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, meaning the willingness to manipulate others to gain a certain result. Once isolated, now they bond online, deriving enhanced status and self-esteem as social media rewards them with likes, shares, and more conspiracy content. The survival of these virtual communities depends on their members’ defending these falsehoods, sometimes with confrontation and violence.
- Doonesbury — by Gary Trudeau:
- The year Australian progressives abandoned the national commitment to full employment — Bill Mitchell:
At present, the unemployment rate in Australia is 4.2 per cent and falling. If the rate of new immigrants remains low for a while as our external borders open, then it is likely the unemployment rate will fall into the 3 per cent range soon. What people are learning is that the claims made by mainstream economists that full employment was anything between 5 and 8 per cent (at various times to suit their arguments) was a lie. It just suited their ideological agenda and flawed theoretical framework to maintain that narrative. Of course, underemployment is still very high, which means that even if the unemployment rate falls further, we are still a way from being at full employment. But with prices accelerating at present, we are seeing calls for government to pursue an austerity fiscal approach, which would prevent the unemployment rate falling further. We have been here before. Today, I document a major turning point in Australian politics, when the Labor government became the first to abandon the national government’s commitment to full employment, a policy approach that had defined the post Second World War period of prosperity. So … back to 1974 we go.
- The Neoliberal War on Dissent in the West — Glenn Greenwald:
This last decade of history is crucial to understand the dissent-eliminating framework that has been constructed and implemented in the West. This framework has culminated, thus far, with the stunning multi-pronged attacks on Canadian truckers by the Trudeau government. But it has been a long time in the making, and it is inevitable that it will find still-more extreme expressions. It is, after all, based in the central recognition that there is mass, widespread anger and even hatred toward the neoliberal ruling class throughout the West. Trump, Brexit and the rise of far-right parties in places where their empowerment was previously unthinkable — including Germany and France — is unmistakable proof of that. Rather than sacrifice some of the benefits of inequality that have generated much of that rage or placate or appease it with symbolic concessions, Western neoliberal elites have instead opted for force, a system that crushes all forms of dissent as soon as they emerge in anything resembling an effective, meaningful or potent form.
- Putin’s Century of Betrayal speech — Branko Milanovic:
Vladimir Putin’s speech on 21 February 2022 at the occasion of the recognition of Donbas and Lugansk republics is one of the most extraordinary political speeches of the present time. It consists of more than 6,000 words, and it was delivered over 55 minutes without the help of a single piece of paper or without a single hesitation. To the extent that one can judge there was no teleprompter either. It is a speech that lays bare, and intends to do so, Putin’s own philosophy of history. It covers the past one hundred years of Russia’s history. It gives one, not unreasonable, but very narrow version of that history, where historical events with multiple causes and multiple meanings are simplified to a single cause and single meaning. It is a form of “J’accuse” speech that tells, according to Putin, a story of a century of betrayals of Russia: by Communists, by Russia’s own elites, and by Russia’s pretended friends.
- The Oatmeal — by Matthew Inman:
Sunday, 12 June 2022 - 6:52pm
This… Sigh. Here's some stuff to read:
- Who owns Einstein? The battle for the world’s most famous face — Simon Parkin in the Guardian:
Albert Einstein died in 1955. In article 13 of his last will and testament, he pledged that his “manuscripts, copyrights, publication rights, royalties … and all other literary property” would, upon the deaths of his secretary, Helen Dukas, and stepdaughter, Margot Einstein, pass to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an institution that Einstein cofounded in 1918. Einstein made no mention in his will about the use of his name or likeness on books, products or advertisements. Today, these are known as publicity rights, but at the time Einstein was writing his will, no such legal concept existed. When the Hebrew University took control of Einstein’s estate in 1982, however, publicity rights had become a fierce legal battleground, worth millions of dollars each year. […] Despite the university’s repeated successes in taking on alleged infringers, critics remain unconvinced that Einstein would have wanted any of this. In life, he resisted attempts to commercialise his identity. Why would he have changed this position in death? One American law professor, writing in the New York Times, described the institution and others like it as “the new grave robbers”. A lawyer for Time Inc called agents acting for the university a “group of tribal headhunters”. The manufacturer of a children’s novelty Einstein costume is among the scores of businesses to have protested against the university’s position, telling a reporter, “[The university] cannot ‘inherit’ rights from Albert Einstein which did not exist at the time of his death.” The university, meanwhile, claims it has not only the legal right, but also a moral duty to protect Einstein from those who would besmirch his name with dubious associations.
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
- The Cantillon Effect and Stock Market Crashes — Matt Stoller:
Financial markets are critical in any free society, because they enable flexibility in production and distribution. Without the ability to borrow money, speculate, and go bankrupt, it is very difficult if not impossible to systemize innovation, kill off old and inefficient firms, or cater to consumer tastes. Yet, finance should be a small part of the economy, because speculation isn’t intrinsically valuable. Banks should serve production, providing capital to ventures that will eventually generate income. Sometimes, however, financiers are able to take control of production, and that leads to wild inefficiencies, speculation purely on asset price inflation, and eventually authoritarian politics. As economist John Maynard Keynes wryly put it, “When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.” That’s where we are now. Compensation for financial intermediaries has historically cost about 2% of GDP; today it’s at 9%. To put it differently, a small number of people are collecting hundreds of billions of dollars in fees running private equity funds, but private equity is no better (and probably worse) in terms of returns than public equity indexes. This is no way to run a country. In a society with a coherent social vision, people would get rich investing in baby formula production, or medical dye, or generic pharmaceuticals, all of which are in shortage. But instead, money has been flooding into cryptocurrencies, weird obvious scams like SPACs, and a manic art market. Christie’s, for instance, just sold a famous Andy Warhol painting, a 1964 silk-screen of Marylin Monroe. The work went for $195 million to an anonymous bidder, which is the size of the annual budget for a small city, like Norman, Oklahoma. When baby formula is in shortage and art markets are insane, the economy has clearly become the byproduct of a casino. […] Essentially, if you own assets or intangible capital assets, you’re doing great. If you rely on your income making or moving something, you’re not. Hence the shortage in stuff that needs to be made or moved like baby formula, and the surplus in bullshit like cryptocurrency.
- xkcd — by Randall Munroe:
- Male economists are freaking out over a NYT profile — Emily Peck at Axios:
A handful of prominent male economists, including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, are freaking out — mostly on Twitter — about a weekend New York Times profile of economist Stephanie Kelton, known for her work on Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT. Why it matters: This Twitter-based econ fight is about more than one economist. It's an argument over a natural economic experiment — the U.S. government spending unprecedented sums to keep the economy from free-falling during COVID. And the gender dynamics — male economists piling on against a female economist and a female journalist, Times' reporter Jeanna Smialek, in ways distinctive from typical academic arguments — look terrible here.
- This Modern World — by Tom Tomorrow:
- The Rules of Commas — Ginny Hogan at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:
You’ve probably used too many commas. In fact, I would go so far as to say you definitely have. As the last stage in your editing process, delete half of them. It doesn’t matter which ones. […] Commas should go in between items in a long list of things. If you don’t have a long list of things, stick the commas in between cushions on your couch. Someplace where they’ll be easy to find later. No one will care if you forget to use a comma unless you’re a woman with a Twitter account.
- The Oatmeal — by Matthew Inman:
- Elon Musk Reveals Jaw-Dropping Ignorance About Social Security — Jon Schwarz at the Intercept:
“Unfunded obligations” is the difference between Social Security’s current projected income and its current projected promised benefits. If these projections are correct, taxes will have to be raised by $60 trillion or benefits will have to be cut by that amount, or some combination of the two. But then there’s the “through the infinite horizon” part. This means that $60 trillion is Social Security’s unfunded obligations between now and the end of time. In other words, we don’t have to come up with $60 trillion right this second, as implied by Musk’s comparison to the present-day U.S. economy. We have an infinite amount of time to pay for this — or more conservatively, 5 billion years, when the sun will turn into a red giant and consume the Earth, at which point we’ll have bigger problems than Social Security. […] A reasonable person might ask whether humans can accurately predict the future over the next hundred, thousand, or million years. The answer, of course, is that we can’t. So why does the Social Security report do it? The infinite horizon number was first included in the annual Social Security report in 2003, thanks to pressure from right-wing wonks who hoped to see the program cut or dismantled.
- Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
Sunday, 22 May 2022 - 12:31pm
This month, I have been mostly starting my life over from scratch (aka #ThePlan):
- “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting,” Ten Years On — John Scalzi:
Ten years ago this week I thought I would write a piece to offer a useful metaphor for straight white male privilege without using the word “privilege,” because when you use the word “privilege,” straight white men freak out, like, I said then, “vampires being fed a garlic tart.” Since I play video games, I wrote the piece using them as a metaphor. And thus “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is” was born and posted.
- Cartoon Copy Shop — by Keith Knight:
- DeSantis Betting That Republicans Want a Stupider Version of Trump — Andy Borowitz:
According to a source close to DeSantis, the Florida Governor has decided to “run to the stupid of Trump” to pick up the support of voters who now consider the former President too intellectual. “When Trump recently said that he got the booster, that was the last straw,” the source said. “In the eyes of a lot of Republicans, Trump is basically Fauci now.”
- Censorship By Algorithm Does Far More Damage Than Conventional Censorship — Caitlin Johnstone:
Arguably the most significant political moment in the United States since 9/11 and its immediate aftermath was when Democrats and their allied institutions concluded that Donald Trump’s election was a failure not of establishment politics but of establishment narrative control. From that point onwards, any online media creator who consistently disputes the narratives promoted by the same news outlets who’ve lied to us about every war has seen their view counts and new follows slashed. By mid-2017 independent media outlets were already reporting across ideological lines that algorithm changes from important sources of viewership like Google had suddenly begun hiding their content from people who were searching for the subjects they reported on.
- This Modern World — by Tom Tomorrow:
- As Florida Attempts to Make it Illegal, an Argument for the Sacred Work of White Discomfort — Robert P. Jones in Religion Dispatches:
The beloved hymn, “Amazing Grace,” captures this dynamic. In the very first stanza, a Christian singing that hymn identifies as “a wretch” in need of salvation. The familiar refrains—“I once was lost, but now I’m found/Was blind but now I see”—begin with lament and confession. Grace is amazing precisely because God accepts us despite our own shortcomings. But we don’t come to salvation, nor do we grow in discipleship, without honesty and this experience of exquisite discomfort. Moreover, the sacred role of discomfort isn’t limited to sin in individual hearts. The Bible is replete with language about the sins of one generation being visited down three or four generations (Exodus 20; Numbers 14; Deuteronomy 5; Jeremiah 32). This transmission isn’t mystical but is both genetic and cultural. Just as abuse begets abuse and addiction begets addiction, prejudice begets prejudice.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith: