Marketing is Hard
This is cruel and unfair on the poor people who have to manage the picturesque suburban sprawl drainage ditch Bogan Bay, but as a lesson in how not to do things on the cheap, I must draw your attention to their "Things To Do At Boambee Creek Reserve - Image Gallery".
I stress, this is their context. "Things to do". I'm adding nothing to this; this is all their framing.
- Here's a bridge:
Great. Now what? - Bark chips! A king's ransom!
You've never seen anything like it. Except, well, everywhere. - You can cultivate a splendid beer belly!
- Admire some rust.
Cook on it, if you dare! - Use a stick.
- Think about all the friends you used to have.
- Drop your car keys. Damn.
- Watch the sad dog.
- Oh look, there's that bridge again. Amidst all the grief and loss, I'd forgotten all about it.
- Who is that lady? Is she following me? Is it because of… No! It can't be! That was years ago! I'm all better now!
- Fecking bridge.
- Leaving the car behind for a long, relaxing walk home.
No boy, keep away from the black dog. We both have to keep away from the black dog of Bogan Bay.
Sunday, 26 July 2020 - 4:07pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Dinosaur Comics — Ryan North:
- ‘No mask, no entry. Is that clear enough? That seems pretty clear, right?’ — as told to Eli Saslow of the Washington Post:
Some of them would see our signs, open the front door, and just yell: “F--- masks. F--- you.” Or they would walk in, refuse to wear a mask and then dump their merchandise all over the counter. I had a guy come in with no mask and a pistol on his hip and stare me down. I had a guy who took his T-shirt off and put it over his mouth so I could see his whole stomach. “There. A mask. Are you happy?” I had a lady who tried to tape a pamphlet on the front window about the ADA mask exemption, which is a totally fake thing. It’s a conspiracy theory, but it’s become popular here. She kept saying we were discriminating against people with disabilities. What? Why? How? None of what they say sounds logical. I can’t make sense of half the names they call me. They say I’m uneducated — uh, that’s kind of ironic. They say I’m a sheep. I’ve been brainwashed. I’m pushing government propaganda. I’m suffocating them. I’m a part of the deep state. I’m an agent for the World Health Organization. “How do you like your muzzle?” “Is this going to become sharia law?” “Are you prepping us to wear burqas?” “What’s next? Mind control?”
- Dems' Sternly Worded Letter Won't Stop Fascism — David Sirota:
Two weeks ago, the Associated Press reported that President Trump deployed unidentified agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to Portland, Ore., where they were filmed getting out of unmarked vehicles and abducting protesters off the street. A few days later, House Democrats responded by obediently advancing an appropriations bill that funds the department -- with no apparent restrictions on such deployments. “This bill as a whole will strengthen our security and keep Americans safe while upholding our American values of fairness and respect,” said Democratic House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey, amid growing outrage at the situation in Oregon. With congressional Democrats on their way to approving $50 billion for DHS, Trump administration officials are now boasting about their plans to replicate the Portland invasion in other cities. Those officials seem emboldened to ignore local Democratic opposition to the federal deployments.
- Sleeping — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
- Hack of 251 Law Enforcement Websites Exposes Personal Data of 700,000 Cops — Micah Lee at the Intercept:
A week after Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, knelt on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes while he lay handcuffed in the street until he died, triggering massive nationwide protests, a young political science major in Oregon was contacting lawyers. “I am a long time activist and ally of the Black Lives Matter movement,” she wrote to a Bay Area law firm. “Is there anyway[sic] that I could add your firm, or consenting lawyers under your firm, to a list of resources who will represent protesters pro bono if they were/are to be arrested? Thank you very much for your time.” A lawyer who read this message was infuriated and anonymously reported the student to the authorities. “PLEASE SEE THE ATTACHED SOLICITATION I RECEIVED FROM AN ANTIFA TERRORIST WANTING MY HELP TO BAIL HER AND HER FRIENDS OUT OF JAIL, IF ARRESTED FOR RIOTING,” he typed into an unhinged letter, in all-caps, that he mailed to the Marin County District Attorney’s office, just north of San Francisco. […] An investigator in the Marin County DA’s office considered this useful intelligence. She logged into the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center’s CMS and created a new Suspicious Activity Report, or SAR, under the category “Radicalization/Extremism” and typed the student’s name as the subject. “The attached letter was received via US Postal Service this morning,” she wrote in the summary field. The student “appears to be a member of the Antifa group and is assisting in planning protesting efforts in the Bay Area despite living in Oregon.”
- Don’t Sell Your Mind — Janet Capron in Public Seminar:
After a reading at Shakespeare & Company, I heard my favorite question, which came from an Upper East Side matron and sounded more accusatory than curious: “Don’t you ever regret having been a prostitute?” I paused for a second or two. “No. I’ve searched my soul, and the answer is still no.” Then, with a little gleam in my eye (I like to think), I said, “What I really regret are the more than two decades I spent working in pharmaceutical advertising.”
Sunday, 12 July 2020 - 4:23pm
This week fortnight, I have been mostly reading:
- Beer Mats of the 1970s — Scarfolk Council:
More… - 'All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace': Care and the Cybernetic University — Audrey Watters:
If there is one message that I want to get across to you today, it is that we must ground our efforts to plan for the fall — hell, for the future — in humanity, compassion, and care. And we cannot confuse the need to do the hard work to set institutions on a new course of greater humanity with the push for an expanded educational machinery. We have to refuse and refute those who argue that more surveillance and more automation is how we tackle this crisis, that more surveillance and AI is how we care. We can trace the histories of our schools, our beliefs and practices about teaching and learning, our disinvestment in public institutions, our investments in technological solutions to discover how and why we got here — to this moment where everything is falling apart and the solution (from certain quarters) is software that sounds like "panopticon."
- Strange Bedfellows Undermining Liberalism: Trump And Academia — Bo Rothstein in Social Europe:
It is obvious that, according to Trump, there is nothing that can be seen as a fact. Instead, everything is a matter of interpretation and perspective. However, this approach has also had a strong impact in large parts of academic research, mainly within the humanities, but also within parts of social sciences. Under the heading “postmodernism”, this approach has as its starting point that there can be no true or scientifically established facts due to impartial investigation. Instead, following the much-admired French philosopher Michel Foucault, what is considered true by the scientific community in an area of research is in reality determined by their connection to established power relations in society. According to postmodernist theory, there is no real difference between the knowledge produced by scientific methods and perceptions coming from our ideological orientations or personal experiences. Thus, when Trump and his supporters claim that they base their positions on “alternative facts”, this has a clear connection to the postmodernist approach in academia.
- Ward Sutton:
- How to Use the Past Exonerative Tense to Uphold White Supremacy — Devorah Blachor:
The term “past exonerative tense” was first coined by political analyst William Schneider to describe a construction used by political leaders, which enabled them to acknowledge wrongdoing while absolving themselves of responsibility. Ronald Reagan is thought to be the first American president to employ the past exonerative tense during the Iran-Contra scandal, using a variation of the “mistakes were made” non-apology. […] The past exonerative tense transforms acts of police brutality against Black people into neutral events in which Black people have been accidentally harmed or killed as part of a vague incident where police were present-ish.
- via Bruce Sterling:
- American Passports Are Worthless Now (Map) — Indi Samarajiva on Medium:
It’s not that other nations don’t want to welcome Americans, they just can’t. The point of a passport is that a sovereign power vouches for its bearer, but America can’t vouch for the health of their citizens at all. America’s public health regime is far less trustworthy than Liberia’s (which is actually quite good). Its sovereign is mad. At the same time, you can’t trust Americans. Americans have poor hygiene (low masking rate) and at least 40% of the population can’t be trusted to even believe that COVID-19 exists, let alone to take it seriously. They’re likely to refuse testing, not report symptoms, break quarantine, and generally NOT follow rules. Americans have a toxic combination of ignorance and arrogance that makes them unwelcome travelers. They have a lot of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. Some of them, I assume, are good people, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a plague passport. Return to sender.
- Full Employment — Cory Doctorow in Locus Online:
I am an AI skeptic. I am baffled by anyone who isn’t. I don’t see any path from continuous improvements to the (admittedly impressive) ”machine learning” field that leads to a general AI any more than I can see a path from continuous improvements in horse-breeding that leads to an internal combustion engine. Not only am I an AI skeptic, I’m an automation-employment-crisis skeptic. That is, I believe that even if we were – by some impossible-to-imagine means – to produce a general AI tomorrow, we would still have 200-300 years of full employment for every human who wanted a job ahead of us. I’m talking about climate change, of course.
- Tom Toles:
- What Is It Like to Be a Man? — Phil Christman in the Hedgehog Review:
“What is it like to be a cis-gendered, heterosexual man?” a friend, a trans man, asks on Facebook. “What is it like to feel at home in your body?” The only answer I can come up with is that I never feel at home in my body. I live out my masculinity most often as a perverse avoidance of comfort: the refusal of good clothes, moisturizer, painkillers; hard physical training, pursued for its own sake and not because I enjoy it; a sense that there is a set amount of physical pain or self-imposed discipline that I owe the universe. […] Manhood resists straightforward discussion even as men stand accused—correctly, insofar as any accusation directed at such a broad target cannot fail to hit—of sucking the air from every other conversation. We do have plenty of talk about masculinity, but talk is all it is, aimless and nonconsecutive, never the sense of anything developing. Sophisticated opinion rarely gets beyond the elementary observation that masculinity is a social construct, or a set of many such constructs. As for unsophisticated opinion, it is a dank cellar most impressively represented by the Canadian academic Jordan Peterson, who bangs the table for logic and reason while basing much of his thought on the ideas of a discredited occultist. Peterson’s reliance on the work of Carl Jung is revealing: If you want to defend traditional masculinity as a kind of slaying-dragons-for-its-own-sake, but you can’t offer a rational analysis of why this behavior is necessary, or why it is good, or why you need a penis to do it, the archetype theory offers you a pretentious and grandiose way of saying “It is what it is.” It dignifies tautology. Beneath Peterson, deeper in the cellar, are the vitamin-hawking conspiracy theorists, rape apologists, and Nazis of YouTube, whose pronouncements on masculinity eerily combine the commonsensical with the obscene: one video to tell you how to tie a Windsor knot, another to tell you how to beat a restraining order. But they finally impugn themselves. If you need a YouTube video to help you be a man, then in some essential sense simply being one is already off the table.
- I Have Cancer. Now My Facebook Feed Is Full of ‘Alternative Care’ Ads. — Anne Borden King in the New York Times:
When I saw the ads, I knew that Facebook had probably tagged me to receive them. Interestingly, I haven’t seen any legitimate cancer care ads in my newsfeed, just pseudoscience. This may be because pseudoscience companies rely on social media in a way that other forms of health care don’t. Pseudoscience companies leverage Facebook’s social and supportive environment to connect their products with identities and to build communities around their products. They use influencers and patient testimonials. Some companies also recruit members through Facebook “support groups” to sell their products in pyramid schemes. Through all this social media, patients begin to feel a sense of belonging, which makes it harder for them to question a product. Cancer patients are especially vulnerable to this stealth marketing. It’s hard to accept the loss of control that comes with a cancer diagnosis. As cancer patients, we are told where to go, how to sit and what to take. It can be painful and scary and tiring — and then all our hair falls out. During the pandemic, many of us are also isolated. Our loved ones can’t come to our appointments or even visit us in the hospital. Now, more than ever, who is there to hold our hand?
- Life During COVID-19 — Ted Rall:
- MMT — Keynesianism with an expansionary twist — Lars Pålsson Syll:
[Lance] Taylor may be right on the question of how much — as a macroeconomic theory — MMT really has added to the Keynes-Lerner-Godley-Minsky framework. But there is undoubtedly at least one positive contribution of MMT — especially from a European point of view — and that is that it has made it transparently clear why the euro-experiment has been such a monumental disaster. The neoliberal dream of having over-national currencies just doesn’t fit well with reality. When an economy is in a crisis, it must be possible for the state to manage and spend its own money to stabilize the economy. When the euro was created twenty years ago, it was celebrated with fireworks at the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt. Today we know better. There are no reasons to celebrate the 20-year anniversary. On the contrary.
- After Barr Ordered FBI to “Identify Criminal Organizers,” Activists Were Intimidated at Home and at Work — Chris Brooks:
“I’ve never had any run-ins with the cops before. I’ve never been to jail and have no criminal record, so when the FBI showed up to my workplace, it scared the piss out of me,” says Katy, a 22-year-old who works for a custodial services company in Cookeville, a small college town in middle Tennessee. “I really thought I was going to lose my job. The whole experience was terrifying.”
- Unpresidented — Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books:
Nixon was forced out because Republican-appointed judges and Republican members of Congress joined with Democrats to reassert constitutional checks on the abuse of presidential power. Now the Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc. Trump’s wild response to the coronavirus disaster and to the Black Lives Matter protests must be seen in connection with the refusal of the Republican-controlled Senate even to go through the motions of a trial after his impeachment by the House. “Unshackled,” like he wished the cops to be, from any notion of accountability, Trump has also become unmoored from any relationship to reality. The Senate Republicans told him, in effect, that he can exercise power arbitrarily. Absolute power deranges absolutely. During the 2016 election campaign, Trump was asked about whom he consulted on foreign policy: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain. My primary consultant is myself.” Freed from any need to pretend that there is anyone else he might possibly need to talk to, Trump is now openly talking to himself in public. He is, often on live TV, communing with the voices in his head that tell him that he is a combination of Lincoln and Churchill, that coronavirus will suddenly vanish, that it can be cured by ingesting disinfectant, that Joe Scarborough is a murderer, that George Floyd is looking down on him and rejoicing.
Sunday, 5 July 2020 - 4:24pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Out of Control — Alfie Kohn in Psychology Today:
Autonomous people experience their actions as authentic, integrated, willingly enacted. But that doesn't mean they see themselves as separate from others or in opposition to the larger culture. This critical but often-overlooked distinction helps us to make sense of the finding that a need for autonomy is experienced even by people in collectivist societies. Selfish individualism, by contrast, is not an ineluctable feature of "human nature." Rather, it represents a corruption of our need to have some say over what happens to us. In fact, when people are raised without support for their autonomy—overcontrolled by parents and teachers—two things may happen. They may, upon growing up and finding themselves in positions of authority, try to deny others their autonomy. And they may insist on a warped version of self-determination that looks more like selfishness. If they have grown up feeling powerless, they might come to rage against any person who tells them no. They might see any restriction on their personal freedom, even to benefit a larger community, as tantamount to "tyranny." They might insist that their convenience takes precedence over other people with immune-compromised vulnerability.
- #1516; In which a Visitor proves a Nuisance — Wondermark, by David Malki !:
- It's Time for an End-of-Life Discussion About Nursing Homes — Rose Eveleth in Wired:
Even before the pandemic hit, nursing homes seemed like an odd, collective compromise. Most American adults, in a survey from two years ago, said they wouldn’t want to leave their homes or communities as they aged—and most also didn’t envision that they’d ever end up doing so. In 2016, 1.3 million Americans were residents of nursing facilities. “It's considered completely normal that we would take an individual and force them to give up their home, their family, and their life and place them in this institution. We just take that as a given,” says Bruce Darling, an organizer with Rochester Adapt, a disability rights organization. He and other advocates are wondering if now, finally, in the face of coronavirus, people might reconsider these spaces altogether. The present chaos and horror in nursing homes should come as no surprise. In 2018, 11 children died in a nursing facility in New Jersey from an adenovirus outbreak. A contagious fungus has meanwhile infected over 800 nursing home residents over the past few years, killing half of them. Tom Chiller, a fungal expert at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called nursing facilities “the dark underbelly of drug-resistant infection.” In 2014, a New Mexico nursing home was struck by an outbreak of Clostridium difficile that killed eight residents. These outbreaks happen to be among the ones we know about. As a Reuters investigation showed, many such events in nursing homes never get reported.
- Forget UBI, says an economist: It’s time for universal basic jobs — Pavlina Tcherneva interviewed by Cory Doctorow for the LA Times:
Governments guarantee all sorts of things: loans, contracts. It’s not novel for the public sector to provide guarantees. We don’t rely on the market to solve poverty or education. So, if we’re going to manage unemployment by creating jobs on demand, how should we do it? Not necessarily with big federal projects. Rather, the government could fund jobs proposed by agencies, states and localities, but also folks who are doing social work on the ground, through nonreligious, nonpolitical, nonprofit organizations struggling to fill gaps left by the market. We’d solicit projects: concrete things for the communities where we live. Environmental rehabilitation, renewal and monitoring, the invisible green work that has to be done. On top of that, all our care needs! Being a companion for elderly people, helping with housework and errands. We need to reassess what we class as productive jobs. Community theater is enormously productive. […] I want to stress, this is not punitive. We are providing jobs, not requiring them. The progressive answer to structural unemployment is a jobs guarantee. The reactionary version is workfare. If we leave this to right-wing authoritarian governments, they’ll have punitive public works programs. They’ll make unemployed people build border walls. Unless progressives wake up to something bolder and bigger than just solving this crisis, I fear that the future is bleak.
And, in related but sad news about somebody who took up a government invitation into community theatre: - Carl Reiner, Multifaceted Master of Comedy, Is Dead at 98 — Robert Berkvist and Peter Keepnews do the obit for the NYT:
Carl Reiner was born in the Bronx on March 20, 1922, to Irving Reiner, a watchmaker, and Bessie (Mathias) Reiner. After graduating from Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, he went to work as a machinist’s helper and seemed headed for a career repairing sewing machines. Then one day his older brother, Charlie, mentioned seeing a newspaper article about a free acting class being given by the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal jobs agency. Carl tried his hand at acting, found he was good at it, hung up his machinist’s apron and joined a theater troupe.
- 'Deplorable Act in Face of Global Crisis': Trump Condemned as US Buys Up Nearly Entire Supply of Covid-19 Drug — Jake Johnson at Common Dreams:
The Trump administration's decision to purchase almost all of California-based Gilead Sciences' projected stock of remdesivir through September was also viewed by observers as a glaring example of the "dysfunctional character" of a patent system that gives pharmaceutical giants decades of monopoly control over a drug that could save lives in the near-term. "This is what happens when the world relies on a broken system driven by greed and profit during a pandemic," tweeted U.K.-based advocacy group Global Justice Now, which is urging governments to override Gilead's patent through compulsory licensing. "Governments have a right to override this ludicrous patent system under international law, and they should take the opportunity to do that now, saving the [National Health Service] and patients around the world from the profiteering of these dysfunctional corporations," Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said in a statement.
- Joan Robinson On Public Sector Deficits And Debt — V. Ramanan in The Case For Concerted Action:
The National Government which was formed in 1931 went in for a great economy campaign. Local authorities were compelled to cease work on building schemes, roads, fen drainage, and so forth. An emergency budget was introduced, increasing taxation, cutting unemployment allowances and reducing the pay of public servants, such as teachers and the armed forces. Private citizens felt it was patriotic to spend less. Some Cambridge Colleges gave up their traditional feasts as a recognition of the crisis. All this helped to increase unemployment and make the economic situation of the country still more depressed. Nowadays there is considerably more understanding of how things work and it is unlikely that such a completely idiotic policy will be tried again.
- I have a hard time taking compliments — James Miller and The Oatmeal:
Sunday, 28 June 2020 - 1:43pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- We need a radically different model to tackle the COVID-19 crisis — James K. Galbraith in DefendDemocracy.Press:
To move forward, first of all, debts incurred before and during the pandemic will have to be written down. The energy sector and transport sectors will have to be rebuilt, based far more on renewables and sources other than oil. A large share of basic industries – especially in the health sector – will have to be repatriated so that basic sufficiency exists in this country. Millions of people will be needed to monitor and support public health; jobs for them must be organized and funded by the government. State and local governments will have to be federally-funded, in substantial part, to provide basic public services. New and sustainable housing must be built, in new community structures. High speed broadband must be provided to all. A new financing model – cooperative, with public support – will be required to re-establish small businesses. Local, decentralized cultural and sporting venues will have to replace mass-based experiences; these too will require cooperative structures and public support. In short, the only way out, remotely acceptable to the population at large, will require a comprehensive restructuring of the economy on a cooperative foundation, with the government stepping up to guaranteed funding, employment, and public investments.
- I Like My Cops Like I Like My Surgeons: Cautious, and Not Looking to Kill Me — Pardis Parker in McSweeney's Internet Tendency:
Just by having someone who waits outside of the home with a photograph of the suspect, for example, and who’s responsible for comparing the person in the home to the person in the photo, and who, if the two don’t match with 100% certainty, would be responsible for saying something on the order of, “The person who lives here is 7-feet tall with three arms, but the person in the photo is 2-feet tall with four legs. Weird. It’s almost as if they’re entirely different people. Perhaps we should take a beat to double-check everything before proceeding.” Or maybe they could have someone responsible for cross-referencing the address of the raid with the address of the suspect? “Is this 123 Drug Dealer Lane, where the suspect lives? It’s not? It’s 456 Paramedic Avenue, where we believe the suspect might be receiving mail? So we’re here for reasons that are… postal? In plain clothes instead of uniforms? At 1 AM? With a no-knock warrant? And, like, a ton of guns? Seems weird, doesn’t it? I mean, at the very least it doesn’t seem not weird. Maybe we should double-check everything before proceeding.”
- So Your Landlord Is Trying to Evict You — Ted Rall:
- Donald Trump’s Presidency Is a Saturday Night Massacre That Never Ends — Andy Kroll at Rolling Stone:
David Greenberg, a Rutgers University professor and historian, says SDNY prosecutor Geoffrey Berman’s removal — first announced on a Friday night, with no warning to Berman — reminded him of one of the Justice Department’s darkest days during Richard Nixon’s presidency. On the night of October 20, 1973, President Nixon fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and accepted the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General Bill Ruckelshaus in what was dubbed the Saturday Night Massacre. To this day, Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre remains one of the most searing examples of political interference at the Justice Department. Greenberg, author of the book Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image, says he traces the pattern of worrying decisions inside the Trump-era Justice Department back to the firing of former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and FBI Director James Comey in early 2017. The pattern of firings and suspicious interference by the Trump-era DOJ, he says, is “clearly in line with Nixonian behavior and then some.” “In a normal political environment, a week’s worth of Saturday Night Massacres would lead to [Trump’s] impeachment and probably removal,” Greenberg says. “But we have such dysfunctional polarization, primarily the unwillingness of Republicans to step up and see Trump for what he is, that we’re not in a normal political environment anymore.”
- New York Times’ Style Guide Substitutions for “The President Lied” — Mickey McCauley at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:
“The president once again found himself galloping ahead of reality’s leisurely pace.” “The president dabbled anew in the shallow pond of misrepresentation, filling his beak with succulent morsels hidden among the reeds.” “The president’s most recent encounter with the specter of honesty caught him wrong-footed.”
- In the interests of the health of its customers, McDonald’s has announced it will close all of its stores permanently — The Shovel:
In recent weeks McDonalds has implemented a range of new processes to improve hygiene, such as the crew member placing the bag of food on the counter for the customer to pick up, rather than directly handing it over. But analysis has shown that removing the bag of food from the process altogether improved the health outcome for the customer even further.
- Ben Smith’s NYT Critique of Ronan Farrow Describes a Toxic, Corrosive, and Still-Vibrant Trump-Era Pathology: “Resistance Journalism” — Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept:
In March of last year, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi — writing under the headline “It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD” — compared the prevailing media climate since 2016 to that which prevailed in 2002 and 2003 regarding the invasion of Iraq and the so-called war on terror: little to no dissent permitted, skeptics of media-endorsed orthodoxies shunned and excluded, and worst of all, the very journalists who were most wrong in peddling false conspiracy theories were exactly those who ended up most rewarded on the ground that even though they spread falsehoods, they did so for the right cause. Under that warped rubric — in which spreading falsehoods is commendable as long as it was done to harm the evildoers — the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the most damaging endorsers of false conspiracy theories about Iraq, rose to become editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, while two of the most deceitful Bush-era neocons, Bush/Cheney speechwriter David Frum and supreme propagandist Bill Kristol, have reprised their role as leading propagandists and conspiracy theorists — only this time aimed against the GOP president instead of on his behalf — and thus have become beloved liberal media icons. The communications director for both the Bush/Cheney campaign and its White House, Nicole Wallace, is one of the most popular liberal cable hosts from her MSNBC perch.
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
Sunday, 21 June 2020 - 4:49pm
This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:
- Matt Wuerker:
- Will he go? — Lawrence Douglas interviewed by Sean Illing in Vox:
When I was researching the book, I was asking myself, well, what does the Constitution and the federal law do in order to secure the peaceful transition of power? And one of the things that I realized is they don’t secure the peaceful succession of power. They presuppose it. They assume that it’s going to happen. So if it doesn’t happen, well, no one knows ...
- “Totally predictable”: State reopenings have backfired — Brian Resnick in Vox:
Many states opened up in early May, hoping the economy would recover while a winning battle against Covid-19 continued apace. Unfortunately, it’s now clear that in the areas where the virus has come roaring back, few gains against it were made in the last month. “We managed to disrupt our economy [and] skyrocket unemployment, and we didn’t control the damn virus,” said Jeff Shaman, an infectious disease modeler at Columbia University.
- Preprint — xkcd by Randall Monroe:
- The man who wrote the most perfect sentences ever written — Nicholas Barber on P.G. Wodehouse for the BBC:
Maybe you can spot some deeper themes in his books if you look hard enough. At times I can persuade myself that there is something subversive in Bertie’s lack of interest in the conventional status markers of a career and a marriage, and something instructive in his insistence on helping his lovestruck friends, however ungrateful they may be. I can even argue that Wodehouse was revolutionary because his characters didn’t defeat villains in fist fights or shootouts (although they sometimes stole policemen’s helmets on Boat Race night). Perhaps he was teaching us that we can’t all be high achievers, let alone rugged action heroes, but that we can all be kind and generous. In other words, we can live according to the code of the Woosters. But I admit that this is a stretch. As Stephen Fry put it, “You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection: you just bask in its warmth and splendour.”
- How JK Rowling Betrayed the World
She Created — Gabrielle Bellot in Literary Hub:
That this is the issue she has chosen to focus on in the wake of international protests against anti-Blackness and police brutality—most protests of which contain many LGBTQ people—is all the more absurdly tone-deaf, suggesting her fanatical obsession with trans people. People who deeply despise one group or another—homophobes, racists, transphobes—so often seem unable to let go of those groups, orbiting them like angry moons, scarcely able to function unless we are there for them to denigrate.
- Via Dave Barry:
Sunday, 7 June 2020 - 2:23pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Zoom Last Supper — Unsourced via Boing Boing:
- 'I Took the Helmet Off and Laid the Batons Down': Michigan Sheriff and Police Didn't Disperse Their Town's Protest—They Joined It — Common Dreams:
What transpired was documented in a powerful photo essay by Leni Kei Williams, a local photographer, who posted the experience to Facebook. "We weren't sure what to expect. With everything we have been seeing on the news, it wasn't clear what would happen but as we were walking, it was beautiful to see people of every race, age, demographic come together and unite," Williams wrote. "When we reached the police station, the officers were lined up and everyone immediately took a knee. The Sheriff asked one question... 'We are mad too! What can we do?' and the crowd responded, 'Join us.'"
- Vote Out Hate — Meidas Touch:
- Where did policing go wrong? — Matt Taibbi:
Basically we have two systems of enforcement in America, a minimalist one for people with political clout, and an intrusive one for everyone else. In the same way our army in Vietnam got in trouble when it started searching for ways to quantify the success of its occupation, choosing sociopathic metrics like “body counts” and “truck kills,” modern big-city policing has been corrupted by its lust for summonses, stops, and arrests. It’s made monsters where none needed to exist. Because they’re constantly throwing those people against walls, writing them nuisance tickets, and violating their space with humiliating searches (New York in 2010 paid $33 million to a staggering 100,000 people strip-searched after misdemeanor charges), modern cops correctly perceive that they’re hated. As a result, many embrace a “warrior” ethos that teaches them to view themselves as under constant threat. This is why you see so many knees on heads and necks, guns drawn on unarmed motorists, chokeholds by the thousand, and patterns of massive overkill everywhere – 41 shots fired at Amadou Diallo, 50 at Sean Bell, 137 at Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams in Cleveland, and homicides over twenty bucks or a loose cigarette.
- Joe Biden’s Campaign Strategy — TedRall:
- A 2 a.m. Talk With Rahul Dubey, the 'Absolute Legend' Sheltering Black Lives Matter Protesters — As told to Justin Kirkland of Esquire:
I have a 13-year-old son, and luckily he’s with friends and family up in Delaware; he’s coming back tomorrow. He’s not there, but at the same time, I wish he was because he could see these amazing souls that are in my house are safe and they had every right to be doing what they were doing, and the police didn’t have a right to just beat them down on the street. For now, at least for the next four hours or so, we’re going to be safe here. I’ve never been so excited to get a Ducinni’s pizza in my life. I couldn’t leave it to chance. I called the owner and was like, “Brother, I’ve been ordering from you forever. I need you to do me a favor. We are held hostage,” and he was like, “We got you man.” It’s like a covert mission to get Duccini’s pizza! I’m delirious, but it’s beautiful. It’s absurd that I had to get some stranger to hand me pizza over my back fence through police brigade, but it also shows the human spirit, too, and that’s what this is all about. There’s about 75 people in my house. Some have got couch space. There’s a family, a mother and daughter here, that I gave my son’s room to so they get some peace and quiet. Yeah, even the ledges of the bathtub, and no one’s bitching. They’re happy—no, they’re not happy. They’re safe. They’re cheering. They’re backing each other.
- How to Develop a COVID-19 Vaccine for All — Mariana Mazzucato and Els Torreele in Project Syndicate:
[…] to maximize the impact on public health, the innovation ecosystem must be steered to use collective intelligence to accelerate advances. Science and medical innovation thrives and progresses when researchers exchange and share knowledge openly, enabling them to build upon one another’s successes and failures in real time. But today’s proprietary science does not follow that model. Instead, it promotes secretive competition, prioritizes regulatory approval in wealthy countries over wide availability and global public-health impact, and erects barriers to technological diffusion.
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
- We're knee-deep in shit and drinking cups of tea — Frankie Boyle in the Overtake:
Labour MPs are great in a pandemic (able to maintain a strict social distance from someone simply by imagining that they’re a party member) but the party’s response has been insipid. I’ve seen more statements from Aldi than I have from Labour. Keir Starmer, a sliding doors Tony Hadley with a head so rectangular he uses a bread bin for a cycling helmet, and a voice which, a hundred years ago, would be doing patter over a ukulele. A man so lacking in charisma each time he greets his wife she experiences nothing more than an unnerving sense of deja vu. Sir Kier is wondering about an exit strategy. He must know the way it goes by now — he’ll be undermined like a cottage with Japanese knotweed, then fuck up an election. In the States, Trump is at war with the virus for attention. The way things are going there, next years Oscar obituary segment is going to make The Irishman look like a gif. He likes to refer to the “Chinese virus”, and you almost have to admire the dedication it takes to be racist about a pandemic, which is not that far away from being transphobic about earthquakes. Not that Biden would be any better: he exhibits a terrifying cognitive decline and was recently the subject of a grim sexual assault allegation. Surely if anything could add to the horror of sexual assault, it would be the perpetrator entering you and then forgetting what he’d come in for.
- When I die — The Oatmeal by Matthew Inman:
Sunday, 31 May 2020 - 2:21pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- New Low for a Bad Patent: Patent Troll Sues Ventilator Company — Joe Mullin at the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
You might think that, during the Coronavirus outbreak and concurrent economic downturn, meritless patent threats might ease up a bit. After all, a lot of companies—particularly smaller ones—are having a hard time making ends meet. And about 32% of patent troll lawsuits do target small and medium-sized businesses. But that’s not what’s happening. In fact, lawsuits by patent trolls are up this year—20% higher than in last year, and 30% higher than 2018. By the count of one company that tracks them, patent trolls have filed 470 lawsuits in the first 4 months of 2020. […] Not only are we seeing a rise in overall litigation, but we can see specific cases that are likely to impact companies involved in direct medical response. Last month, we noted the case of Labrador Diagnostics LLC, a patent troll that sued a company that makes and distributes COVID-19 tests, using patents that it acquired from Theranos, the fraudulent blood-testing company. Now, a shell company called Swirlate IP has acquired a patent that describes generic data transmission, and has used it to sue five different companies—including ResMed [PDF], a company that makes ventilators.
- On the Spotify-Joe Rogan Deal and the Coming Death of Independent Podcasting — Matt Stoller:
So what is Spotify trying to do? First, Spotify is gaining power over podcast distribution by forcing customers to use its app to listen to must-have content, by either buying production directly or striking exclusive deals, as it did with Rogan. This is a tying or bundling strategy. Once Spotify has a gatekeeping power over distribution, it can eliminate the open standard rival RSS, and control which podcasts get access to listeners. The final stage is monetization through data collection and ad targeting. Once Spotify has gatekeeping power over distribution and a large ad targeting business, it will also be able to control who can monetize podcasts, because advertisers will increasingly just want to hit specific audience members, as opposed to advertise on specific shows.
- Trump Hails “Good Bloodlines” of Henry Ford, Whose Anti-Semitism Inspired Hitler — Robert Mackey at the Intercept:
“The company founded by a man named Henry Ford,” Trump’s prepared text appeared to say, “teamed up with the company founded by Thomas Edison — that’s General Electric.” But when Trump came to Ford’s name, he looked up from the text and observed: “good bloodlines, good bloodlines — if you believe in that stuff, you got good blood.” Trump has made no secret of his own belief that he inherited everything from intelligence to an ability to withstand pressure through the “great genes” passed on to him by his parents and grandparents. He has also frequently compared the importance of “good bloodlines” in humans to the breeding of champion racehorses, a view that overlaps in uncomfortable ways with those of eugenicists and racists like Ford.
- Enjoy your climate crisis — via Bruce Sterling:
Thursday, 28 May 2020 - 12:25pm
[Have Domino's Pizza] discovered that people actually don't like that much choice and really don't want to wade through multitudinous, and often quite similar, choices? If I was Domino's I would be giving serious thought to this.
As a mover and shaker in retail (i.e. I push a trolley and suffer from essential tremor) for two and a half years now, I can say that expanding and contracting menus are probably tactical.
That is, in competitive conditions, one should pull out the shiny things to attract customers from your competitors. In [near-]monopoly conditions, the shiny things are just cannibalising the sales of your own core lines, so get rid of them.
Sunday, 24 May 2020 - 1:39pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Why Your Christian Friends and Family Members Are So Easily Fooled by Conspiracy Theories — Joe Forrest in Medium:
No one is immune from conspiratorial thinking, but Christians have a bit more to lose from falling for conspiracy theories than the average person. And I think there a few additional reasons Christians may be susceptible to unhealthy paranoid skepticism. Maybe it’s because, from a young age, many of us were taught the “scientific establishment” was out to destroy our belief in the Bible. Or maybe so many of us were convinced by the Left Behind books that a satanic one-world government was on the horizon, it just makes sense we need to be as vigilant as possible right now. Or maybe because we’ve already been conditioned by our own belief system that there exists a hidden spiritual reality that making the leap to a hidden “shadow government” isn’t all that big of a deal. […] Conspiracy theories speak to our desire to be a part of a story bigger than ourselves. And what blows my mind is that Christians should already believe that to be true. Christians shouldn’t need to buy into conspiracy theories to feel special, or to make sense of the world, or to make their lives feel more exciting. But we’re so enraptured with conspiracy theories, I question if we believe serving the Creator God of the Universe is really enough.
- Modern monetary theory, the economy and the virus — Steven Hail in the Economic Reform Australia Blog:
Recently the Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Australia claimed – apparently seriously – that the fact the Government had been on the brink of balancing its budget, and that Australia consequently has a relatively low government debt to GDP ratio, placed him in a better posit- ion to finance what most people are wrongly calling a stimulus package. He is wrong. Countries like Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States have levels of government debt far in excess of our own. This in no sense constrains their budgetary response to the crisis. In the United States, the constraint, as ever, is Congress. The United Kingdom, despite its high government debt and its trade deficit, has been able without any problem, to ‘pay for’ a support package much larger than our own. What should be clear to everyone now is that federal or central governments like those of Australia, New Zealand, the USA, the UK and Japan face no purely financial constraints at all. Never mind a ‘money tree’. They just have a money computer. They can create limitless amounts of their currencies when they need to do so. They are not dependent on the goodwill of the bond market, or of credit ratings agencies.
- The Moral and Strategic Calculus of Voting for Joe Biden to Defeat Trump — or Not — Jeremy Scahill at the Intercept:
Among the wild cards of a Biden administration will be the issue of whether he has the actual mental stamina to govern, or if he is going to be frequently disoriented and infrequently seen or heard. Setting aside the protestations of people who pretend they don’t see exactly what everyone else does when Biden speaks in public, we are not actually being asked to vote for Biden as the candidate, because the Biden we see is a shell of his former self. We are being asked to vote for a spin-off of the Obama show, a cast of familiar characters and a few exciting new additions who would take charge of the executive branch, without the popular star of the original show among the visible cast. The fact that the Democrats have forced through a candidate that many people don’t believe is fully functional and will rely on the strength of “the team” assembled around him is a pretty grim statement about the state of democracy in the U.S. If Biden is the best the Democrats have to offer in the face of Trump, the system is rotten.
- The Myth of “Helicopter Money” — Yeva Nersisyan and L. Randall Wray in Project Sydndicate:
What MMT actually prescribes has nothing to do with sending “cash” to people or banks. Nor is the Fed “doing MMT” when it engages in QE or lends hundreds of billions to financial institutions. MMT merely underscores the fact that the Fed faces no financial constraints on its ability to buy assets or lend; it does not prescribe any particular action in this direction – and indeed is skeptical of such policies. If there is any MMT feature to the US rescue package, it is the fact that it is not “paid for.” Proponents of MMT have always insisted that we must stop attaching such strings – increased taxes or spending cuts elsewhere (the “PAYGO offset”) – to spending bills. Abolishing such conditions may or may not increase the budget deficit. But, regardless of the budgetary outcome, the spending will always take the form of payments made by the Fed on behalf of the Treasury. No printing press or tax receipts are required.
- Bernie Sanders: The Foundations of American Society Are Failing Us — Bernie Sanders:
Should we really continue along the path of greed and unfettered capitalism, in which three people own more wealth than the bottom half of the nation, and tens of millions live in economic desperation — struggling to put food on the table, pay for housing and education and put a few dollars aside for retirement? Or should we go forward in a very new direction? In the course of my presidential campaign, I sought to follow in the footsteps of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, in the 1930s and 40s, understood that in a truly free society, economic rights must be considered human rights. That was true 80 years ago and it remains true today. […] Simply opposing Mr. Trump will not be enough — we will need to articulate a new direction for America.
[Meanwhile, Joe Biden has come up with a nickname for Trump. Keep up the good work, Joe!] - Matt Wuerker:
- Why the Neoliberals Won’t Let This Crisis Go to Waste — Alex Doherty interviews Phil Mirowsky in Jacobin:
Over and above various national and cultural differences, I think there’s one shared point. Neoliberals really believe that people are inherently bad cognizers — they can’t work their way out of their problems just by thinking. Of course, that sounds like a very negative doctrine: i.e., telling us that people are incapable of understanding the nature of their problems and pursuing their own democratic ends. But for the neoliberals, there’s an upbeat answer: the market. And they have changed the meaning of what a market is from earlier economic thought which tended to treat it as an allocation of scarce resources. They tend to think of it more as an epistemic problem — that the market is the greatest information processor known to mankind. This starts with Hayek but then feeds through the other main thinkers. This is important, because it means that people have to be brought to understand politically that they have to, in a sense, concede that the market knows more than they do. So, they have to adjust their hopes, their fears, to what the market tells them is necessary.
- Coronavirus and the prospect of mass involuntary euthanasia — Hamid Dabashi in Al Jazeera:
As journalist Chauncey DeVega explained in a blunt piece for Salon, "Donald Trump and the Republican Party are now openly willing to sacrifice those Americans they consider to be useless eaters" in an effort to "save capitalism". What was merely presumed or suspected before is now in full disclosure. In the now nearly half a century I have lived in the US I had never witnessed such a bold, vicious, cruel demonstration of the laws of the jungle ruling this country. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, one could now see in broad daylight the cruelty that was at work in the mass murder of Native Americans and the business of transatlantic slavery. In good old liberal fashion, the Washington Post and the New York Times opened forums to discuss "the morals" of the choice between sacrificing older people and getting "the economy" back on track, the "pros and cons" of the issue, as they say. Scarcely anyone in such mainstream outlets would question the very foundation of this economics of barbarism.
- Gaping at the Vapid — Wondermark by David Malki !: