The Zero Room

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:
  

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?

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:
  

This month, I have been mostly working on #ThePlan:

• Bizarro — by Dan Piraro:
  
• Your Man in Saughton Jail Part 1 — Craig Murray: Once in the yard, the new prisoners (who on this occasion arrived individually, not all part of the same case), immediately started to call out to the windows of Glenesk block, shouting out for friends. “Hey, Jimmy! Jimmy! It’s me Joe! I am back. Is Paul still in? What’s that? Gone tae Dumfries? Donnie’s come in? That’s brilliant.” The realisation dropped, to be reinforced every day, that Saughton jail is a community, a community where the large majority of the prisoners all know each other. That does not mean they all like each other – there are rival gangs, and enmities. But prison is a routine event in not just their lives, but the lives of their wider communities. Those communities are the areas of deprivation of Edinburgh. Edinburgh is a city of astonishing social inequality. It contains many of the areas in the bottom 10% of multiple social deprivation in Scotland (dark red on the map below). These are often a very short walk from areas of great affluence in the top 10% (dark blue on the map). Of course, few people make that walk. But I recommend a spell in Saughton jail to any other middle class person who, like myself, was foolish enough to believe that Scotland is a socially progressive country.
• Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
  
• I never saw exceptional “hard work” or “intelligence” among the members of the class I was born into — Meghan Bell in Passage: An economic system based on ruthless competition inevitably fetishizes extreme skill and effort, thus incentivizing monopolistic and gatekeeping behaviours. This has led to an increasingly polarized labour market, consisting of what author Daniel Markovits, in his book “The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite,” refers to as wage-stagnated “gloomy” jobs and high-paying “glossy” jobs, such as those described above, which, by design, displace middle-class labour (Markovits uses as an example loan officers who were deskilled by financial technology; a way to climb the wealth ladder is to design or implement technologies that wipe out jobs a few rungs down). The concentration of decision-making power in fewer hands actually lowers overall production within companies, because the monopolization of power and technical knowledge diminishes the potential productivity of all the workers who are pushed to the bottom. In other words, “merit” is not about talent, ability or production so much as it’s about narcissistic control — think of the Wall Street bankers who were bailed out after the 2008 crisis because they were perceived as too big to fail.
• What Scott Morrison’s really saying by aligning with Pentecostals — Roderick St George in Pearls and Irritations: It must be clearly understood that according to Morrison and his Christian ilk there is a literal spiritual war being waged over Australia – a war between good and evil, a war being fought in the heavens between angelic and demonic powers. Morrison’s own language confirms this as evidenced by his speech at the Australian Christian Churches conference on the Gold Coast in April. Social media, he warns is a, “weapon used by the evil one.” (I am not making unsubstantiated accusations; I was myself indoctrinated by Morrison-style church culture for many years.) This ardent belief system explains – in part – why Morrison, as immigration minister, introduced a host of dictatorial and ruthless changes to Australia’s immigration policy, the like of which this country has never known. But, as an Evangelical Christian he was doing God’s work, keeping “those types” out of this Christian nation. One of his first moves was to bar all media coverage of the maritime arrivals on Christmas Island, making it easier to implement his cruel and unusual new edicts. Morrison’s claim to be called by God “for a time and a season” might be a recent revelation to the Australian public, but make no mistake; he likely believes this mandate was “given” to him many years ago.
• Dinosaur Comics — by Ryan North:
  
• America is now in fascism’s legal phase — Jason Stanley in the Guardian: Chapter 9 of Carter G Woodson’s 1933 book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, is called Political Education Neglected. In it, Woodson describes how history was taught “to enslave the Negroes’ mind”, by whitewashing the brutality of slavery and the actual roots and causes of racial disparities. In Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, Jarvis Givens documents the strategies Black educators used to convey real history in the constricted environments of Jim Crow schools, strategies that, tragically, will again become necessary for educators to take up again today. Fascist ideology strictly enforces gender roles and restricts the freedom of women. For fascists, it is part of their commitment to a supposed “natural order” where men are on top. It is also integral to the broader fascist strategy of winning over social conservatives who might otherwise be unhappy with the endemic corruption of fascist rule. Far-right authoritarian leaders across the world, such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, have targeted “gender ideology”, as nazism targeted feminism. Freedom to choose one’s role in society, when it goes against a supposed “natural order”, is a kind of freedom fascism has always opposed.