Report: Settlement reached in Flintstone House case The Mercury News (david l)
Why Does Anyone Care What Lawrence Summers Thinks? The Big Picture. Barry Ritholtz.
Even Emergency Measures Won’t Save the West From Megadrought The New Republic
Rattlesnakes everywhere: the odd consequences of California’s drought Guardian
‘We Are in a Climate Emergency’: As Temps Soar, Over 90% of Western US Gripped by Drought Common Dreams
Beyond A Joke Dublin Review of Books (AL)
THE LOST HISTORY OF BRITAIN’S SECRET, WILDLY INNOVATIVE MACHINE BUILT TO BREAK HITLER’S PRIZE CODES Crime Reads
The inside story of an Alberta coal mine devastated by a financial crisis The Narwhal
Ideas that work Aeon
More churches burn down on Canada indigenous land BBC
The Battle of Little Big Horn, Explained Teen Vogue
The Promise and Peril of a High-Priced Sleep Trainer New Yorker
Engineer Warned of ‘Major Structural Damage’ at Florida Condo Complex DYNUZ
Anxious Residents of Sister Tower to Fallen Florida Condo Wonder: Stay or Go? NYT
#COVID-19
On the Delta Variant London Review of Books
COVID: New restrictions amid struggle to contain Delta variant Al Jazeera
‘A tough slog’: White House struggles to increase vaccination rates as Delta variant surges Politico
Even mild COVID in young people often leads to long-term symptoms, study finds Ars Technica
BioNTech and Moderna: Heart inflammation after mRNA vaccinations Deutsche Welle
India’s doctors — at home and abroad — face Covid’s unrelenting toll Stat
Brazil’s most vulnerable are struggling to survive the stress of covid MIT Technology Review
Black and Hispanic Americans Suffer Most in Biggest US Decline in Life Expectancy Since WWII Kaiser Health News
Matt Hancock quits as health secretary after breaking social distance guidance BBC
Sports Desk
Tour de France: How many calories will the winner burn? The Conversation
Some donors sticking with Cuomo after harassment allegations AP
Biden Administration
Biden faces criticism for not extending home confinement for prisoners The Hill
‘The Filibuster Functions as a General Block on All Legislation’ Fair
Violent encounters with police send thousands of people to the ER every year NBC (furzy)
Trump Transition
Trump has Georgia revenge on his mind as he returns to campaign-style rallies NBC
Class Warfare
Neoliberalism’s Bailout Problem Boston Review
The Ultrawealthy Have Hijacked Roth IRAs. The Senate Finance Chair Is Eyeing a Crackdown. ProPublica
University of California Student Researchers Are Forming a Union of More Than 17,000 Teen Vogue
A Fight Over Union Democracy at The New York Times Payday Report
Amazon crushed the Alabama union drive – can the Teamsters do better? Guardian
Evictions Aren’t Just a Symptom of Poverty — They’re a Cause of It Jacobin
The Rent’s Too Damned High Cory Doctorow
The Great Game
Warmongering British Actions in the Black Sea Craig Murray
New Cold War
UFO Report Provides No New Information But Plenty Of Fodder For Cold Warrior Policymakers Caitlin Johnstone
Read the Pentagon’s Big Declassified UFO Report Right Here Gizmodo
India
Famished Fifty Two
Modi and Shah’s Humiliating Walk Back on Kashmir is Proof of Their Failed Policy The Wire
China
Beijing Calling: Suspicion, Hope, and Resistance in the Chinese Rock Underground Rolling Stone
Syraqistan
Civil War in Afghanistan Will Threaten Afghanistan, China and Pakistan Counterpunch
Myanmar
Myanmar torches over half-billion dollar drugs stash Yahoo News
Julian Assange
Great reporting by @GunnarHrafnJ on the FBI’s key witness—a serial child molester, fraudster & embezzler who was granted immunity to work as an informant & continued his crime spree while under FBI protection — to build their case against Assange. https://t.co/HCaTDK0WOa
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) June 26, 2021
Liberals and neocons are now in a tight, enduring alliance because they’re both complete authoritarians — @DavidFrum and @MalcolmNance edition: pic.twitter.com/foSlsqpf6i
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 26, 2021
Antidote du Jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
301 comments
Comments are closed.
Ritholz misses the entire point about Summers and why he continues to be influential and listened to.
Performance doesn’t matter if you know how to get on the inside and stay there.
Summers is on the inside and is good at being on the inside. Biden will listen to him regardless of whether or not his ideas are bad ones and his track record is a bad one. Summers is on the inside.
When a blog becomes influential, it grows.
It attracts friends who help find more and more articles. General articles.
Or there is the Caitlin Johnstone blog, strident, all the time.
LOL!
I’ll check it out. Thanks.
Thankfully MSM is there without any of the strident tone of Johnstone. Freedom of the press flourishes.
That’s the third first-time commenter I’ve seen who seems to have something very important to say about Johnstone lately. I wonder which bourgeois interests are scared of her. I mean, they all should be, but.
Hunkerdown there were many such ‘commenters’ on the comments section of the Guardian and indo a few years back telling us with great confidence that Keir Starmer would be 20 points ahead 20 points ahead when he became leader of BLP. We all know how that worked out. Also said ‘commenters’ had an eerily similar tone and post length – not saying they were on payroll of course. Good chance that they were an AI.
Yeah very weird. I guess she’s going places!
Caitlin has got a lot to be strident about. In any case it is apples to oranges here. NC is a professional outfit operating on a shoestring budget while Caitlin is just her and her American husband. Still, I see her tweets quoted by some professional independent media people from time to time so she is getting noticed.
In the summer of 1979, my brother and a close friend all witnessed a UAP together, and it moved in a way that is familiar to these unclassified videos.
She is a great writer, but all she has is opinion here. And I am becoming more certain she is a hammer always looking for nails. I think she is just looking for conspiracies now.
i saw something in 1979 1980 in Connecticut with friends. it hovered over us.
My complaint is that prominent insiders keep saying they’ve got something, something real, something they really can’t explain, but all they make public are these old videos of radar and FLIR screen images, resolution no better than in the 1950s, which actually turn out to have pretty boring possible/probable explanations. They aren’t even making an effort, like they did before invading Iraq.The lack of skepticism and critical thinking is pretty disheartening.
I’m pretty selective with Caitlin’s stuff, but she does have a thought-provoking perspective on some subjects and can be stridently entertaining on others. I like to seek links to her here.
Caitlin Johnstone is never too strident. She’s a breath of fresh air compared to the pablum we get from the MSM.
“strident.” “shrill” would do here as well. Caitlin has arrived as a male irritant.
I dunno, I am a dude and I have no issues with Caitlin’s “tone”. Some people, I do, but she is not one of them.
Susan the other: The same person who I too found to be a breath of fresh air also wrote
this. Without getting deep in the weeds here, I think she’s wildly wrong (w/receipts); so like Pelham I’m selective.
I read your link, and then read it again. Still trying to figure out what she’s wrong about.
But if you have some receipts that prove Russian interference, I’m sure the US authorities would love to see them because so far they’ve got nothing.
Meanwhile, there is this – http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html
It’s astonishing to me, at this particular moment in time, with TYT and Cenk and Ana imploding over their horrific online meltdown and smears against Aaron Mate and Jimmy Dore, that a NC commentator would actually use a Caitlin article criticising Cenk in an attempt to criticise her.
There are a few articles by CJ that I don’t agree with but the one linked to above by Teejay isn’t one of them.
Aaron Maté has now taken to calling ‘The Young Turks’ the ‘Middle Aged McCarthyites.’ Hah!
Hoo boy, that video clip is scary. Is TYT like that all the time? That Nomi Konst person should stick to print journalism — she has a terrible voice for broadcasting, and she shrieks. Cenk is
justnearly as bad. Is it true that thousands of people actually follow them?‘Is TYT like that all the time?’
That’s nothing. A coupla years ago they were running segments like ‘identify that celebrity by the picture of her camel toe’ – and you know that I am not making this up.
Good news is that Jimmy Dore is living in Cenk & Ana’s head so much lately, that he is considering setting up AirBnBs in them.
Strident? Maybe. Disrespectful to her “betters”? Usually. Impertinent? Always. But you can’t deny Johnstone is usually on target.
So, you’re complaining about her tone, not the content she produces. Fail.
The kind of person who tone polices CJ for ‘stridency’ is sitting on top of an effing Pyramid of Imperial/class privilege. Such critics can get stuffed.
WTF are they doing reading this site?
Is that snark or a compliment?
Johnstone’s new agey asides aren’t my cup of tea but her political instincts are top notch.
These UFOs are all bs meant to drive up support for the War Machine.
Caitlins a fn badass!!!!!
Aliens my rearend!
Correct link for the BBC’s Matt Hancock story https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57625508
Fixed it – thanks!
After that bird, I need moar and I was not disappointed
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=animals+looking+upside+down&t=lm&iax=images&ia=images
Wayyyy downthread I wondered whether that bird was stuck to the branch with birdlime. I will re-raise the question here where it is more relevant.
Is that bird stuck to the branch with birdlime?
How many businesses profit most from pain and suffering, directly and indirectly? I am thinking insurance companies profit from the fear of pain and suffering, and do their best not to pay out, but the more possibility of pain and suffering, the more policies they can sell. With these business models, endless growth in profit means endless growth in pain and suffering. With govt involved in promoting continuous growth of the “economy” and now global corporatism, how can we not just be f*cked? When the planet burns to a crisp, I am not thinking even Mars is a satisfactory escape for the uber rich. Where will they park their mega-yachts? I don’t think the ubers have thought this through.
When Big Money goes to hide in its bunkers as the world grows dark I wonder what they expect to find when they leave their bunkers to rejoin the world — assuming they haven’t been sealed in. If things are bad enough for them to seek shelter in a bunker what are the chances the 1’s and 0’s in their scattered tax-sheltered accounts will survive the collapse?
Whatever the rich are, they aren’t great thinkers, and it is pretty obvious that they have no understanding of the consequences of their actions.
Perhaps they are taking for their model the Fall of Rome where the elite moved out to their landed estates and formed their own private duchies with their own private armies. I don’t think it will be like that this time, rather more like the Collapse of the Bronze Age where everything failed, including the elite.
“Perhaps they are taking for their model the Fall of Rome”
Yes, by all means, let’s learn from The Classics ™ /s
As a classical archaelogist/art historian, I assure you there is a LOT to learn from history, including classics.
This comment is nonsensical and rather anti-intellectual. You’re better than that, really.
See for example:
‘The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire
Kyle Harper
How devastating viruses, pandemics, and other natural catastrophes swept through the far-flung Roman Empire and helped to bring down one of the mightiest civilizations of the ancient world’
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166834/the-fate-of-rome
I think you missed his /s….
No, I saw it, but assumed it was modifying the preceding statement, as is usual.
Meaning the idea of “learning from classics” can only be said sarcastically.
Which is absurd, considering it’s 1,500 years or so (from the fall of the bronze age to end of “late antiquity”) of an entire interconnected region. yeah. Nothing to see there, huh.
Sorry, I was the one who misunderstood!
I am anti-pseudointellectual, yes. I am sure you know all about how what is happening to us now has happened before and where and when. And I think, gee, if only someone had studied The Classics, we would know what is happening to us, and how it will end. Nothing personal.
Anyone who has studied The Classics and tries to warn that it is about to be repeated is consigned to the farthest reaches of shunning hell in this society. So studying to “know the classics” is mere mental mast*rbation at this point IMO, hence my /s tag.
Wow.
There is nothing pseudo-intellectual about studying any period of history or culture.
It’s not about “knowing the classics”. That’s not what I’m suggesting. It’s about not dismissing an entire discipline out of hand, that’s just philistinism.
why the animosity towards it?
Yes, the “fall of rome” is a tired trope, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful in some contexts.
It’s all about context. Look, the humanities have been under attack from the right for decades. Now “liberals” are attacking all the humanities, including language study.
As an educator, I believe in continuing to make these fields of study an option. Deriding the study of the ancient Mediterranean as “mastur**tion” is simply absurd and reactionary.
I know your commenting here, and you are way better than this.
“Anyone who has studied The Classics and tries to warn that it is about to be repeated is consigned to the farthest reaches of shunning hell in this society.”
Does that imply you are posturing as anti-classics in order to not be shunned or something? I have little respect for that.
Study your classics, I have no problem with that. Why you are getting all huffy because I object to people saying the reason to study the classics is to learn from them, which to me means now you know not to do that again, when nothing of the sort happens, just more deification of “The Classics,” just more “we must study The Classics because they are so wise and what would we do without them!”
There is plenty of native contemporary wisdom telling us how not to eff up the planet and our lives. Let’s not get so hung up on other people’s mistakes.
Well, the entire discipline is under attack, so rebutting further attacks is necessary.
This is a strawman, no one here is saying this:
“we must study The Classics because they are so wise and what would we do without them!”
All fields of the humanities are valuable, there is no need to tear down any of the subfields.
Why are YOU so huffy? Yours was the initial antagonistic comment, which was really uncalled for.
No one here is denying that one can learn from any and all periods of history. No one is saying only classics should be learned from. No one is claiming exceptionalism. Again, you’re tilting at windmills. Just step off, if you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re only making yourself sound worse.
I think you may be on Twitter too much. Those idiots are not representative of the field, they are just trying to get Twitter famous to boost their own enrollments and careers.
There is profit in destroying educational fields right now. People of principle do not participate in it.
“Well, the entire discipline is under attack,”
Ah. Now I get why you can’t discuss this with me as an individual. Never mind. When a person feels their existential identity is under attack, there can be no discussion.
I am not the discipline. My identity is not the discipline.
I AM discussing with you, about your ideas, not your identity. You as an individual can respond.
And you have the wrong idea about what classics is, it seems. And don’t want to listen to someone actually in the field, who knows what they’re talking about.
What’s been going on, on Twitter (“classics twitter”) the past 5 years or so, is that a handful of idiot rightwingers have been spouting “glory of Rome” bs, which does not represent the field since about 1955. This follows the monstrously fascist film 300, which was, let’s just say, not made by anyone in the field. I found that thing shockingly racist and awful when it came out. As did most classicists. (Roman Empire and the Spartans are popular among fascists NOT IN THE FIELD, mind you. They are just internet trolls.)
Anyway, instead of not feeding the trolls who love 300, a bunch of my colleagues have started their own reactionary cycle of denouncing their own field for their own virtue points, to prove they’re not “one of them” (“them” = the strawman version of the field, again, which hasn’t really existed since the 50’s), and gone on lecture circuits, talking about the 2-3 fascist types in the 19th century, over and over and over ad nauseum, and so now the general public thinks all that crap is actually representative of classics and classicists.
And it’s all bs. All made up, based on doubling down on reactions to reactions. It’s very immature, and is actually harming higher ed.
A lot of times it proves some of the right-wing propaganda about higher ed, which used to not be true.
It’s disappointing you’ve signed onto it, Alfred, but the bigger picture is the defunding of higher ed, and propaganda against the humanities. And yeah, I stand up to that crap.
That is what I see as the crux of the problem–I can respond, but you are the one who knows.
I think I this explains the concept of “the classics” perfectly.
So you have problems discussing with an expert?
There are experts in fields apart from classics, you know. This aspect of the discussion has little to do with “classics” and more to do with you.
it’s really sounding like the way the right wing uses CRT as a catch-all for things they don’t like, you are using Classics the same way.
Both are silly.
Perhaps you have a problem discussing something with someone outside of “your field.” Let’s stop.
Nope, that is absolutely not true. I teach this stuff. Most of the time I’m talking about ancient history it’s to people not in the field, it doesn’t bother me at all.
But one can’t get very far if the realities don’t conform to someone’s preconceived notions, and then they refuse to learn.
That’s a shame. And it’s too bad when classicists have to be “classics-splained” to by people who think they know more about what the field constitutes than experts in that field. Must be nice to have that kind of arrogance.
What field are you in?
Why not dismiss the entire “discipline” of sophistry out of hand as the art of manipulating others into doing your work for you? That’s all the “scholarly” leisure class has ever been.
it’s not “leisurely”: it is work. We are educators and contribute to the corpus of knowledge with our research.
Saying “That’s all the “scholarly” leisure class has ever been” IS sophistry.
Things are different now. It is a profession. Being a scholar is far from being a monolithic continuum. We serve society and democracy. We teach languages, how to form critical thoughts and NON-specious arguments, how to interpret evidence without sinking into conspiracy thinking.
Our work matters.
It’s discouraging to see so much anti-intellectualism and anti-education comments out here. Honestly it is.
People should respect the work of teachers more. Why, what’s your profession. You’re serving the greater good, too, I assume?
In our society, carpenters and plumbers are dependent on property owners with money. But you don’t suggest getting rid of those occupations, because irrespective of how the rest of society is organized, they’ll always be needed. However the same is true of scholars (and professionals and managers). They’ll be needed by any modern society under the sun. Yes, in a better world they would be beholden to society as a whole rather than a wealthy elite, but they’ll still be the same sort of people doing the same sort of things. Your dislike of these occupations is misplaced.
Thank you, LifelongLib, yes, ultimately this is about appreciating the commons (here, public edu and public higher edu). When these things are privatized, education suffers, research suffers, and society suffers.
I still work for a public higher ed institution, but we are under the knife at all times from our crazy tea party state leg. And outsiders telling us (without knowing our material at all!) what we should and should not include in our classes.
And the general public is buying into the propaganda against education, at the worst possible time.
I stand with the the hardworking and technical knowledge skills of all mechanical and service trades. Our entire society is a better one when everyone, no matter their employment, can discuss history and philosophy and art and literature without resentment – because everyone is included in the humanities and the cultural output of the human experience.
If we turn our backs on that, we are impoverishing ourselves. My job as an educator in my classes is to give my students the tools to understand the visual languages of all periods and cultures across history, to better understand how imagery works today. (It’s a huge part of our lives, whether it is understood or not. Better to understand it, than be manipulated by it, right?) The same with writing, and formulating arguments and learning other languages.
We limit ourselves with our current hostile attitude to education, when there is no need to. And as to the ancient past, there are many aspects of the ancients that we have not surpassed, so our presentist arrogance is harming us.
To name a utilitarian example, the ancient Roman formula for concrete was far superior to our modern concrete. It’s been recently found that when wet, it gets *stronger* whereas our modern concrete crumbles.
https://www.sciencealert.com/why-2-000-year-old-roman-concrete-is-so-much-better-than-what-we-produce-today
Have humans changed that much since they began writing down their stories about themselves?
Do we consistently have to repeat the same mistakes humans made in the past?
There is a lot to learn from history about who we are and why we do the things we do. I’m sorry you can’t see that!
The Historian <3
exactly.
That would be fine if anybody every stopped repeating the same mistakes. I wonder if people think ancient history is so sacred that it would be rude to deviate from it.
Alfred: no one thinks that. That is errant nonsense.
Whatever you say, you are the expert here.
“I wonder if people think ancient history is so sacred that it would be rude to deviate from it”
Isnt this essentially a straw man? You’re essentially creating a problem where there was none.
Yeah straw manning and personal attacks is most of what I see here. I mean, there’s a certain aesthetic at NC that is highly critical of what we call the PMC (including higher education professors in some cases) as a class, and with good reason. But unfortunately that also comes with some baggage and a more recent strong connection to hard right anti-intellectual attitudes and talking points. So as with many things these days, hopefully we can take enough care to separate the legitimate left-leaning criticism from the reactionary b.s.
Humans have not changed that much, if at all, but our gods have changed. Ours is an age without heroes. There are only gods and mortal humans doomed to suffer in the world the gods unmake.
Unlike the gods of the ancients, the gods of our age are unhuman – driven by inhuman appetites distilled from the worst appetites of the worst members of Humankind. As our gods deconstruct our civilization and Society, as they craft fragile webs designed for failure, another much older and more powerful god is at work, changing the climate of this world. And the resources vital to our civilization and Society grow more scarce as Populace continues to grow. Resources require ever greater amounts of effort to extract. Our collapse is centered at a confluence of multiple ill winds and the barbarians live inside the gates.
We can and must learn from the past — each one of us — as individuals. We must also learn from the patterns of the present and of the future as far as we can see it. But our gods are blind, deaf to our pleas, and beyond our power.
I can confirm this is happening. Rural west sonoma county has seen a huge spike in real estate prices, as the Bay Area wealthy snap up acreage here. From first hand experience I have seen these rich families inhabit their new rural estates during the pandemic, and now that things appear to have eased, they have all returned to the City. It has left formerly close knit areas very quiet indeed, leaving us without community, and housing prices that make it impossible for working families to live out here..
I suspect they’ll all be back as things continue to deteriorate.
Cory Doctorow covered this in his usual brilliant style in his story The Masque of the Red Death in the book Radicalized. All the stories are good, but you would find that one especially enjoyable, if you have not read it already.
When I wrote an *extremely* favorable review of Doctorow’s Radicalized for Naked Capitalism (he asked me if he could take a blurb from it),
”Who Says Violence Doesn’t Solve Anything?” A Review of Radicalized: Four Tales of Our Present Moment by Cory Doctorow | naked capitalism
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/05/who-says-violence-doesnt-solve-anything-a-review-of-radicalized-four-tales-of-our-present-moment-by-cory-doctorow.html
— I intentionally did not mention his “Masque of the Red Death” because I found it to be so hatefully and violently racist as to be pornographic. I was also upset by Doctorow’s doctrinaire racist assumptions in “American Eagle.”
Doctorow wrote a story called the Masque of the Red Death? You do realize Edgar Allen Poe was the first to use that title for a story. Some might even call Poe’s story a classic. But how could alluding to something that happened going on two centuries ago possibly be of interest today?
They expect to find a de-populated world which they can then re-terraform for nobody but themselves.
Theirs! All theirs.
That is why it is so important that the unters figure out how to have some armed Action Groups able to survive long enough to catch and exterminate every single uber as it emerges from its bunker.
One of the best modern novels (or best novels, ever) is Hayao Miyazaki’s seven-volume graphic novel Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. (Not the movie, which is also excellent, but an incomplete version of the story.) It deals explicitly with this question – what the very rich expect to inherit after destroying the world.
I will not give any spoilers here, but suffice it to say, any expectations you carry with you into the story will be subverted. And if you treat yourself to this work… at least once a year for the rest of your life… you’ll spend some time thinking about its conclusion.
The admission by Assange’s accuser that he perjured himself may not be enough to free Assange.
In any event I expect he will be hounded until the day he dies.
There is no greater crime than embarrassing the powerful, the punishment is overt ( See The Craig Murray prosecution) and severe and what laws are on the books are of no consequence.
Both the USA and the UK have abandoned the Rule of Law and the transition from high trust to low trust societies is proceeding apace.
There’s a parable about a goose that comes to mind..
.
The author of the Assange piece is an old friend and I can attest he’s nobody’s tool. Trust it implicitly.
There’s a laudable little opinion piece in the NYT this morning basically calling out US hypocrisy for constantly appealing to a “rules-based” global order. The rules, it turns out, are never defined. Meanwhile, the US has a deeply ingrained habit of ignoring or defying international law — the closest thing we have to global rules. This comes shortly after Biden last week had the gall to suggest that the US never interferes with other countries’ democratic processes.
The towering hypocrisy and flagrancy of these assertions and denials, I think, are intended. It’s as if to say, “We make the rules and whatever we say goes.” So I don’t think it would matter if every jot and tittle of the case against Assange were to be canceled out. He’s probably in for a continued very rough ride.
The point I take from the prosecution of Assange (and Murray) is that the liberal establishment chooses to operate through law, in the expectation that at some crux the system will be cranked in their favour through the exercise of a judicial discretion or construction. Either case could be precluded by appropriate amendments to existing legislation. We are not yet in a state of exception.
“One hundred and forty-three years [after the Battle of Little Big Horn],” Teen Vogue informs its young affluent liberal attention-seeking demographic, “we Oceti Sakowin still celebrate our ancestors’ victory at Greasy Grass…. The battle didn’t mark the end of the fight. Our lands and resources were stolen, and we were moved onto reservations, forcing us into poverty that continues to this day. Some say the federal government’s bitterness against the Oceti Sakowin continues because of Little Big Horn, since we defeated the U.S. government militarily on ‘American’ soil…. Happy Victory Day.”
Thus concludes “The Battle of Little Big Horn, Explained,” the latest installment, apparently, in “OG [acronym for Old Gangster] History, a Teen Vogue series where we unearth history not told through a white, cisheteropatriarchal lens.”
Rather than indoctrinating vulnerable upper middle class girls — a very large percentage of whom have already been rendered depressed and otherwise mentally ill by our social media monopolists — into the anti-civilizational arcana of Critical Theory, shouldn’t Teen Vogue be telling them uplifting stories about cute shoes and cute boys?
“Teen Vogue informs its young affluent liberal attention-seeking demographic”
This article certainly touched a nerve! But your imagined demographic dismissal makes it all just fluff not to be taken seriously, no worries.
I oppose child abuse. I guess I’m old fashioned (as opposed to old gangsta) in that way.
Name one elite that never abused children. You can’t because abuse is how elites work, how they form, how they reproduce themselves. Why are elitists willing to put forth every lie, every misdirection to sell their lame-ass invidious norms as if sophistry and sophists were not something that should be eliminated from public discourse?
This is hyperbole. Please stop, it just discredits you.
Do you oppose abuse in the form of condescension?
My point is to ridicule the anti-civilizational (when it suits them) multi-millionaires whose current business model involves deluging morally lost teenagers in a miasma of woke mind poison with mass media products like Teen Vogue. The next phase of this post-Catholic Church form of child abuse involves the institutional cheering on of girls who self-medicate on testosterone and then demand that their suburban parents pay for their “top surgeries,” i.e. teenage mastectomies.
Abigail Shrier is, in my opinion, the most clear-headed and outspoken opponent of such upper middle class savagery. See, for example, Matt Taibbi’s Meet the Censored: Abigail Shrier
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-abigail-shrier-db7
I have criticism of the Teen Vogue piece in that I think its timeline is too narrow, I suspect deliberately so because going back another century and providing a broader context makes it harder to push a one-sided “noble warriors defending their ancestral lands” narrative.
But there are no lies within what the article does choose to cover. It isn’t being deceptive about how the US government and military conducted themselves, and how they stabbed the Lakota in the back after signing a treaty with them. It’s ugly history that looks bad because it is bad. The US comes out looking terrible because its actions were terrible.
But what you’re doing is complete non-sequitur. I don’t even have much sympathy for things like Critical Theory or the trans-movement, but they’re completely unrelated to the article in question.
I suspect that you’re not actually mad that Teen Vogue is covering things of real substance, just that you don’t like what they’re covering or the angle they’re covering them from.
Or maybe you really are just mad that they’re covering something beyond what you imagine are the sole interests of teenage girls, in which case I kind of feel sorry for you.
I have a magazine from 1909 called “The Indian School Journal” which has articles discussing the policies and goings on of the schools our nation used to “civilize” the indigenous children of America. There is an essay that contemplates whether it is better to exterminate them (and how best to do so) or civilize them.
If you want to know about child abuse, read up on what has been done to Native people for hundreds of years and still goes on.
From mass graves at these schools still being found, to “troubled” priests and school teachers being relocated to reservations where they can act out their abuse unchecked (still happening), to the epidemic of disappeared native girls that is ignored by most – these are much worse forms of child abuse than educating readers of Teen Vogue on the indigenous perspective of Little Big Horn and the treatment of their people. In fact, maybe a critical read on our history and the modern impact of that might be good for many to know about and contemplate!
https://twitter.com/geophrian/status/1408689051654254593?s=21
Just to add to this, while reading the following passage, guess who the author is-
‘The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.’
And the answer is L. Frank Baum, author of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/10/27/130862391/l-frank-baum-advocated-extermination-of-native-americans
Read much Dickens? How about those Southern textile mills with children working in the factories and breathing the lint? It wasn’t just Indian children who were abused and mistreated in the 19th century and into the 20th.
As for the victors of Little Big Horn, they had earlier driven out other tribes from the buffalo rich plains states.
This is an important bit of context. I don’t really have a problem with the Teen Vogue piece; it’s accurate for what it covers. But it doesn’t cover enough. The Sioux were themselves fairly recent conquerors in the region. Crazy Horse’s famous quote “My lands are where my dead lie buried.” was originally said in response to a white man pointing out that the Black Hills had in fact not been Lakotan for much more than a century.
I condemn the US reneging on its signed treaty and waging war; I don’t want to be seen as trying to excuse that. But the Lakota themselves laid claim to the region through force of arms, and in the end lost it in turn through force of arms.
If we’re going to play a “who did the Black Hills really belong to before they were unjustly stolen” game, the Cheyenne should be first in line.
While I have read allusions to the Indian Schools, the terrible damage these degenerate institutions did was brought home to me when I visited the Museum of Objibwa Culture in St. Ignace, Michigan. As somebody who has experienced social isolation, the experience of these children ripped from family and culture was particularly upsetting. Nothing we can do can wipe that stain from America’s soul and I am more inclined to believe that the culture we have built is cruelty itself.
Would you prefer they only know the approved history taught to them in their high schools?
I want to thank all of you here who chimed in with more true history.
Speaking of history, were the various tribes of Native Americans purely noble? Or did ever engage in practices that we today might find objectionable? I mean among themselves, not just in regard to whites.
For instance, did they ever engage in mutilation, human sacrifice, attempts at conquering or exterminating rival tribes, torture or slavery? And were they good stewards of the land? Did they ever engage in clear-cutting forests or running thousands of buffalo off a cliff?
I ask because as a self-appointed advanced thinker I believe it’s vitally important that we apply up-to-the-minute insights and morality to every aspect of our common human heritage. After all, race, culture, ethnicity, sex and all the nasty little ways we categorize one another are just cisheteropatriarchal inventions that must be swept away! Instantly!
Well, look over there is an oldie but goodie. That sounds like a project you could get your teeth into. How about going around and interviewing all the tribe descendents and reading their tribal history and getting this history down on paper, as a self-appointed advanced thinker should do. If you’ve read “1491” you will see that a lot of “history” written by academics in anthropology was a bunch of hooey when relating to tribal history and origins, and I am sure you can straighten all of this mess out.
There was a recent article on CounterPunch by Louis Proyect that addresses (and debunks) this:
Was American Indian Over-Hunting Responsible for the Near Extinction of the Buffalo?
There is also the book, “One Vast Winter Count” by Colin G. Calloway that covers America before and during Anglo interaction with the Natives. Good read.
What’s is clear is that even a “light on the land” society can be decimated by a changing environment; Cahokia (massive flooding along the Mississippi) and the Pueblo Cliff dwellers (extended drought).
(As for the Indian Schools, I lived near the Stewart Indian School near Carson City, NV and as a city/state official had discussions with local tribal leaders. They know the real history of the US.)
I would say it’s child abuse to NOT take teenagers’ intelligence seriously and respectfully.
What, are you Boko Haram or something? Oppose education for girls, in particular? Because I assure you, teenage girls are smart, and need to have their minds expanded beyond shoe-buying.
(this comment is in response to John Siman)
In my actual life, among others things, I teach Latin literature to extremely bright teenage girls. This tends to leave them with little or no time for social media or woke pornography. That’s the plan, in fact. To educate them.
I can’t even
All elites fancy themselves entitled to abuse weak others. They see it as their duty.
I hope your students don’t see your comments deriding the intellectual capacity of teenage girls, which I guess you do on the side, then, for fun?
wtf, man.
Alfred, there is nothing wrong with learning ancient literature.
Grow up.
Do you just run around comments on blogs, deriding the humanities? Is that your thing?
I think YOU might be the pseudo-intellectual around here.
Not speaking for Alfred, but I don’t see anyone decrying humanities. I see people decrying elitism and the dead-weight useless middle class, and the elitism that was stamped into the liberal arts (the arts of being above slaves) from the very beginning has become the purpose of the entire discipline, and indeed, the gentry has found their role perfectly in it.
These are people who NEED to spend time doing more manual labor and being “crushed” by the “horrible tedious labor” of feeding their own lazy selves, instead of reproducing elitism.
You apparently missed that Princeton is getting rid of its classics department, specifically because it’s dead white male history.
Thank you Yves!
Yes, it is Howard University getting rid of Classics, the only HBCU to have had a Classics dept at all.
It’s a huge tragedy.
Princeton, though, is dropping its language requirements in the name of “inclusion”.
Personally I am for them waiving the prerequisites, but not the dropping of requirements for the major to graduate. It’s just a mess.
:(
whut? read my comments, please. I’m done here, you’ve already made up your mind about me.
OK, I just screen-grabbed & e-mailed enoughisenough’s comment out for their (and their parents’) amusement. I guess that I must be a *fascist* since I insist on teaching Vergil, Ovid, and Livy to young people rather than Satano-Foucauldian theory.
Don’t forget to include your original comment to them!
I’m sure they’ll find it hilarious and not patronizing at all!
“Rather than indoctrinating vulnerable upper middle class girls — a very large percentage of whom have already been rendered depressed and otherwise mentally ill by our social media monopolists — into the anti-civilizational arcana of Critical Theory, shouldn’t Teen Vogue be telling them uplifting stories about cute shoes and cute boys?”
OK, I’ll make it a point to show the folx my “cute shoes and cute boys” line first thing Monday morning. I think it’s hilarious, and I think they’ll find it funny too. But you must bear in mind that I grew up on, as a teenager in the mid-1970s, the comedy of Monty Python, Saturday Night Live, and Richard Pryor — and that, as an adult, I have continued to enjoy sharing caustic jokes with other people. Because it’s fun! The wokesters of today, by contrast, seem to condemn all comedy as an expression of cisheteronormative transphobic colonialist racism. Tant pis pour eux.
“ This tends to leave them with little or no time for social media or woke pornography.”
Mwhahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaa….. cough. gasp. cough. giggle.
You may teach them, but you’ve clearly never raised one. Nor ever troubled yourself to engage in any genuine observation. They’ll find time for all the social media they desire just like young people in every era. If by some weird chance you teach at a freakish boarding school that controls them 24/7/365 and deprives them of all access to media…. they will either sneak it, or grow genuinely addicted to it later in life, when they should have gotten over its ‘charms’.
The casual, and overwhelming disregard the young have for the pet conceits of their elders is now – as ever – one of the chief blessings of mankind. We thrive as a species only insofar as they circumvent this sort of delusional tommyrot.
I teach homeschoolers.
We were homeschoolers and the main benefit of that process for the “students” when done ‘right’ was the student’s development of the ability to self educate. That takes an ability to form questions and then test solutions to those questions. That’s not necessarily an easy endeavour. Homeschooling, often demonized by the surrounding society, also takes courage.
As for “moral” and ethical programming of the students, well, let us say that no one is infallable. Kids will be kids. The real trouble I see again and again is when parents and guardians try to make children “little adults” way before that is appropriate. We always included “play time” in our daily plans for our children’s homeschool education; that plus gardening and field trips.
One thing I have learned over the course of my lifetime is that, very often, learning is it’s own reward. The concept of “well rounded” persons seems to have fallen out of favour in the modern pedagogy.
Somehow this doesn’t surprise me. In fact quite a lot suddenly snaps into focus.
Having read material from the 19th century, I have noticed a trend at the time. When the forces of ‘civilization’ won, it was a victorious battle. When the ‘uncivilized’ people won, it was a massacre. So back then battles like Little Big Horn and Isandhlwana were called massacres that had to be avenged. They just hated giving them the win. If Teen Vogue gives its readers a different spin on historic events, then it may help then look at familiar events with a fresh perspective so why not?
I will mention one other thing. That sketch at the top of that article? It was actually done by a Sioux warrior named Red Horse who took part in that battle. He did a series of sketches a coupla years later so those sketches can be regarded as contemporary eyewitness testimony-
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jan/29/red-horse-stanford-university-native-american-drawings-battle-of-little-bighorn
To be fair when you take no prisoners and execute all the losers that is a massacre. The United States Army has done a lot of massacres too but they don’t recommend doing that at the officers’ training courses. : )
Nah, they teach them to call in an airstrike to cover up the evidence like happened in Vietnam a coupla times.
Why yes, bourgeois liberal values are a pathetic joke to be inveighed against at every opportunity. When all arguments about liberalism reduce to telling me how I should feel about something, you’ve already lost. Demands and chores, chores and demands. Enough of this elite sophistry, this debt to imaginary friends and centuries-dead PMC.
The reactionary right has made it clear that they don’t want young people to learn any history that doesn’t further their economic, political, religious, and social agenda. This is an agenda that’s harmful to young people.
Once they’re done canceling education in schools, maybe they’ll move on to cancelling it in magazines. In the meantime, Teen Vogue does a good job covering issues in the economic and political sphere, including support for the rights of workers and students, and yes, mental health.
the looney left is even more reactionary. the progressives are the ones who are re writing history.
Care to expand on that thought? Like providing examples?
The 1619 “Project” for starters.
Thanks for reminding me to get back to my summer reading list:
Alfred has nothing to show. Just whining and snottiness.
And a well-crafted pretense of feeling injured and aggrieved about this, that and the other.
Discussing the evils of slavery, the extermination of indigenous people, and the legacy of institutional discrimination and repression is a “rewrite” in the sense that these Issues have been ignored or minimized.
Race and Reunion by David Blight – Link
US history textbooks – Link
Current CRT panic (which does also include a critique of some approaches to anti-racism) – Link
The truth is a b*tch, fer shur. And all those august personages thought they had the proper historic perspective nailed down for deserving posterity. What a shame.
Take that chip off your shoulder Alfred. There’s a good boy.
Just admit you don’t know what “left” or “reactionary” mean already.
They’re the left end of the gentry, which is actually center-right. Don’t do free labor for the rich by propagating their ideology and schemata.
Though the phrase “white, cisheteropatriarchal lens” serves to obscure what ought in fact to be described as “capital-expansionist imperialist lens,” ie: it removes any and all class analysis. There’s certainly a LOT of that going around in “the discourse,” most esp. in the discourse promulgated by outlets owned by the corporations which very much want focus to be on every “oppressor” than the class oppressor.
American Manifest Destiny wasn’t down to “cis” people exploiting “trans” people (as if there were any political/legal/economic structure set up to enable that exploitation), nor was it down to straight people exploiting gay people (ditto re structure) or to male exploitation of female labor (which is in fact supported by a political/legal/economic structure.) It wasn’t even primarily about racial exploitation (also through a political/legal/economic structure) though race provided some of the grand narrative. It was and still is down to economic class exploitation.
Teen Vogue is actively working to make sure NO ONE conceives of it that way. It’s narrative is aesthetics disguised as politics, with the politics of the history drained completely away. All the middle-class white (and predominately heterosexual because that’s how the numbers do roll) teens can now rage at the white, male, cis, straight people who, for some reason, decided to take land and resources away from Native Americans in the most brutal fashion.
But why did they do that? The reason they did that, apparently, is because they were white, male, cis, and straight, and that’s just what white, male, cis, straight people do. Who knows why? Out of evil, I guess. An inherent will to power? Maybe they ought to shrive themselves in the public square while everyone not white, male, cis, and straight look on. At least, I suppose, that’s some sort of theory of change.
Meanwhile, the newly-educated white middle class teen girl readers of Vogue can’t shed themselves of their shared evil of race, but they definitely can shed themselves of the “cisheteropatriarchal” evil via recitation of shibboleth: and so something like 25% of teens now declare themselves “trans” or “non-binary” and, like wearing a crucifix to indicate their born-again status, they manifest their purification with a change of hair color, nail polish for boys, or by girls binding their breasts, at the worst by elective double mastectomy and/or cross-sex hormones which, for the girls at least, will likely necessitate full hysterectomy within five years due to organ atrophy.
By similar signs, they recognize others also ritually purified. Politics now twisted into religion. And when we all join the faith, and the “white, cisheteropatriarchal lens” no longer exists, the world itself will be re-born. Eschatology.
it’s bemusing to me how one inane, throwaway neologism in a strapline can trigger these paroxysms of hysteria (and Mr Siman is included in this rebuke). the self-parodistic and poshlosty ‘cisheteropatriarchal’ in said strapline can only induce an eyeroll at worst in me, especially since it’s not language that Ruth Hopkins uses in her piece, and scarcely germane to its content. In fact I daresay
is as “capital-expansionist imperialist” a lens as one could hope to find (Mr Siman, to his credit, actually seems to have bothered to read the piece, which makes his petulant kneejerk reaction harder to make sense of).
Even the ‘Teen Vogue is actively working to make sure no one conceives of it as economic exploitation’ angle doesn’t really work, as Teen Vogue has had a non-trivial labour beat for a couple of years now, as relayed on NC occasionally.
Silly hill to die on.
Or are they referring to the people who wrote the history? White males? I don’t see motivation coming into it except the white male motivation to write their history in a way that made them right and justified in taking and keeping power. And look around–What faces do you see on rosters of VC, PE, billionaires, etc.? White males. When I go to the state capitol, all of the portraits on the walls are of white males, going back to the founding of the state. We had a female governor in there a few years ago, sure–otherwise, white males. History written and perpetrated under the power of white males. That’s being pointed out, and it is just simply what is. How is this some conspiracy to make youth hate white males?
Dandelion’s point I believe is that the focus on race and gender to the exclusion of class is idpol intended to preserve, not dismantle, the power structure.
Those men on the walls were landowners only. White trash never made the pantheon.
Poor white males didn’t write much history. They may have written less history than rich white females. In fact, it serves both gentry and court alike to treat poor people as so irrelevant as to put their historical existence into question and their present existence as a bad omen for deviating from the Great Chain of Being.
It is ridiculous to contend that everything bad springs from historical actions or revisionism by cisgender white men.
What do you suppose governmental portrait galleries in Europe, Russia, India, China or Japan look like. Who writes history there?
The problem was, is and will be class exploitation. Teen Vogue and all the billionaire owned media are the ones writing history. If you’re going to throw all cisgender white men under the bus, how about delving into religion or ethnicity while you’re at it…
Snowflakeism is a tool leading to a dead end.
Not what dandelion is saying, I don’t think. The problem is focusing on race and gender to the exclusion of class.
The white male pantheon whose portraits adorn the halls were also all landowners. There are generations of “white trash” (indentured youth from England were the largest percentage of unfree labor at the start of the colonization of the continent) who are never represented on those walls either.
It will take all the disenfranchised working together to overcome. To the extent that race and gender are used to undermine class solidarity, they are tools of oppression, not liberation: divide and conquer.
” And look around–What faces do you see on rosters of VC, PE, billionaires, etc.? White males. When I go to the state capitol, all of the portraits on the walls are of white males, going back to the founding of the state.”
Are the faces white male RICH faces? Or are they white male POOR faces?
Game, set, and match.
Are white males generally RICHER or POORER overall in the U.S. than “others”? You see there is quite a bit of overlap here with class. Also why are white males the de facto normal against which others are compared? The conditioning runs deep in all of us.
You can take a $30,000 per year white male and you can take a billion dollar a year Jeff Bezos, add their yearly income and divide by two and take the average and pretend the average white male makes 500 million and 15 thousand dollars per year. Figures lie when liars figure.
Are homeless white males generally RICHER or POORER overall in the U.S. than homeless “others”? Are minimum wage white males generally RICHER or POORER overall in the U.S. than minimum wage “others”?
Also, why are white males the de facto normal blah blah blah? Because Alfred made them the defacto normal when she complained about the faces on the Walls of Power all being white male. So if you have a problem with that, take it up with Alfred, since Alfred made it the norm in this subthread.
Anyway, didn’t you once brag to us all about how you plan to become rich by speculating in cryptocurrency adjacent investment hustles? You grew up in poverty and ” as God is your witness, you’ll never be poor again.”
Ha well that’s a nice little bunch of dodging the question, straw manning and personal attacks you’ve written there, but I’ll go ahead and answer: white people are significantly more wealthy than i.e. black people in the U.S. and have been throughout its history. Just like a wage gap exists between men and women for performing the same work. You seem to be trying to imply that that doesn’t really matter, but I think it does. It’s called intersection of class and race. Whether that is simply because there are more white men represented among the wealthiest ruling class or not is irrelevant. Note that I do not believe having equal representation among that ruling class of “others” is any kind of solution. I am for abolishing the ruling class altogether so don’t get it twisted, comrade. I’m not accusing you of any crime for being white, or male.
How very generous of you for “not accusing me of any crime for being white, or male”. That’s mighty white of you.
Dodging the question? I know you are, but what am I?
Does Jeff Bezos having 200 billion dollars give a homeless white person a “contact rich”? Or do you plan to keep dodging that question? Are homeless white people richer than homeless black people? Or do you plan to keep dodging that question?
Nice summation. I’m well aware of this flourishing of gender fluidity — which appeared to me to be little more than a fashion fad — but I hadn’t quite connected it with an attempt to escape the cisheteropatriarchal stain, such as it is. Makes sense.
Relatedly, there’s an attempt among conservatives to paint these and related cultural spasms as a form of Marxism or neo-Marxism. I think they have about half a point. There has long been a tendency among some actual Marxists to toggle from economics to culture as a less direct but more effective route to class consciousness and a socialist state.
But what’s happening now is nothing of the sort. As you suggest, this flight from norms appears to be an end in itself. As such, it certainly can’t be Marxist.
Dandelion gets it right:
“[T]he newly-educated white middle class teen girl readers of [Teen] Vogue can’t shed themselves of their shared evil of race, but they definitely can shed themselves of the “cisheteropatriarchal” evil via recitation of shibboleth: and so something like 25% of teens now declare themselves “trans” or “non-binary” and, like wearing a crucifix to indicate their born-again status, they manifest their purification with a change of hair color, nail polish for boys, or by girls binding their breasts, at the worst by elective double mastectomy and/or cross-sex hormones which, for the girls at least, will likely necessitate full hysterectomy within five years due to organ atrophy.“
I really like “recitation of shibboleth”: It’s haute bourgeois now to be trans! Michael Lind especially would be proud of your devastating class analysis, Dandelion!!
Yeah, when my cisheteropatriarchal bosses and teachers tried to coerce me into sleeping with them by threatening to fire or fail me, I wanted to tell them to go to he!! (I am female).
I’m hoping the newly-educated white middle class teenage girl readers of Teen Vogue will feel absolutely comfortable doing just that, and refusing any other cisheteropatriarchal “norms”. That’s what I think this is about. It is just being portrayed as mentally aberrant because that’s what cisheteropatriarchals do.
This is about power relations that are commutative across all classifications.
Back in the mid 80s when I was 27, a straight white male who worked well with my many gay mostly male colleagues, the second ranking partner in the firm had his secretary tell me we’d be sharing a room on an upcoming trip.
By my surprise she knew it was a mistake, him having an inaccurate understanding of who I was.
Apparently a number of my coworkers went for this sort of thing and I could have let it go had he. Instead, he spent the next two years trying to get me to quit, which eventually I did.
I agree entirely with your sentiments in your comment directly above, but women, gay/bi/ trans or ethnic minorities are just as prone to abuse of power when they have it.
The problem is power. Patriarchy has a long and poor enough history to qualify as a problem in and of itself, but at different times and places, every culture regardless of race has housed its own full suite of power abusers, I expect even in matriarchal societies, how could it be otherwise? Power is power and people are people.
I can’t go along with you either on Teen Vogue’s overall editorial approach or the value of this particular recounting of history. It struck me that the (shall I use?) “triggering” word, a mere editorial insertion in the first place, was perhaps to accomplish a bit of cover for TV‘s coverage of union and other class-centered issues.
But I found your last paragraph very insightful. There’s a lot about the Wokesters that is reminiscent of the Christian Post-Millennialists with respect to both their class origins and their anthropology.
So much this — there’s an awful lot of sophisticated divide and conquer going on here by them that has to disguise the ongoing exploitation of them that ain’t
>shouldn’t Teen Vogue be telling them uplifting stories about cute shoes and cute boys?
OMG. I can’t…even imagine where that came from. Apparently touched a nerve, bro. Would you like to further expound on what you, um, regard as the proper use for teenage girls pretty little heads?
On further thought, don’t.
OG is for ’Original Gangster’. OG is colloquially synonymous with ‘original’, often with an implied connotation of authenticity.
When I was a teen I didn’t read teen magazines or give a damn about shoes or boys. I did read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and couldn’t put it down until I finished it. Sooo, was Dee Brown pushing CRT?
Rhetorical question- the notion is laughably absurd.
I too read Dee Brown as a teen and was astonished at all the history I had not been taught. For those who are interested in the native people of the East Coast, I recommend Facing East.
Considering how bad US history was when I was in school, I shudder to think how it might be these days
The standardized testing with no context used now and the fact that right wing Qanon nuts are probably in charge of text book purchases in most states also gives one pause. Native Americans were the victims of a well planned genocide. The US army slaughtered women, children and babies with Gatling guns, ran them down and shot them multiple times not just at wounded knee and sand creek. In fact we started killing them as soon as we landed here at Plymouth Rock. This continued in the 70’s when activist from the American Indian movement tried to protect themselves from the corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Most of them were also imprisoned or murdered.
I read Dee Brown and it is excellent, As is Black Elk
Speaks. Because I read these as a teenager and didn’t buy into most of the propaganda, I stayed in trouble my entire Four years. Teachers did not appreciate my raising my hand and laying out some truth. I doubt any of those teachers ever knew the truth. The most miserable was California history and the hallowed Mission system. The Catholic Church also killed thousands of natives as here.
I wholeheartedly endorse your statement (!) but will take exception to one issue raised. I don’t believe QAnon nutballs are in charge of text book selection…. that would be evangelicals and was happening well before QAnon existed. In fact I don’t believe QAnon has any power whatsoever, is but a small group of obsessed people (some even have suggested a false flag by national security, however paranoid that may seem) and is actually not worthy of the “conspiracy theory” sobriquet. It’s not CT, it’s ridiculous and few people give it even a moments consideration, imho.
Russiagate… now that’s a wingnut conspiracy theory,
embraced credulously by too many who should know better.
On loan from archive: https://archive.org/details/facingeastfromin00rich/page/n8/mode/1up
“Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” was taught at my Western rodeo-town high school History class back in the ’70s. I still wonder what the ranchers’ kids in their cowboy hats thought of it all.
There was a TV program I saw when I was a kid that affected me profoundly, although I don’t know what the show was or the title, or even how it came out. It was about a kid in maybe grade 7 or 8 who was severely chastised for writing in a report that the Battle of the LIttle Bighorn was a great victory. At one point he was made to — refused to? — write “The Battle of the Little Bighorn was a massacre.” on the board 100 times, can’t remember what happened after that, but it caused me to question the Official History of about everything ever after.
Teen Vogue is doing great work here. And I would not be so quick to draw conclusions about their readers.
Teen Vogue publishes a lot of unexpectedly good stuff. I’m not sure teen girls are its main readership at all. Can’t say that I think that your comment contributes anything.
ooOOOooo! It looks like Teen Vogue hit a nerve, eh John Siman?
If there are any actual historical inaccuracies in the Teen Vogue article, do feel free to point them out to us all.
Classics major here. Reading a book called Constantine and the Bishops right now.
I read the Teen Vogue piece and I can see where some of the facts have likely been embellished, which I’m guessing is what you took umbrage with. My guess would be that Sitting Bull didn’t have a religious vision predicting Custer’s arrival and it was something added after the fact, but that makes a way better story than simply saying he made an educated guess.
I also don’t think Constantine really saw a cross in the sky with a revelation that the Christian god would lead him to victory, but 1700 years later we still consider that history worth reading no matter how that story may have been embellished after the fact.
There are facts, and then there is the narrative constructed around those facts for political purposes. Or for entertainment purposes or whatever. Good critical thinkers are able to suss all that out. But we humans will always enjoy a good yarn. That’s why I and millions before me still love reading Herodotus, even though his facts had already been called into question in antiquity .
Anyway, glad you are still teaching the classics. There’s a lot to be learned from them even if there are no eyewitnesses around today and some of the truth has been lost to the mists of time.
My take is that Constantine was clearly a cynical and ruthless brutal conqueror, and understood pretty plainly that the growing Xtian population could help him cement his reign as sole emperor. So that explains his overtures to the Christians.
The cross in the sky before the Milvian Bridge was sheer propaganda. It worked, too.
The author’s thesis is that Constantine’s adoption of Xtianity was definitely a political maneuver, but not a completely cynical one. He finds it unlikely that Constantine lacked belief since the vast majority of his contemporaries had faith in some higher power, but he also needed an ally with some authority. During the Principate, in general over the long haul emperors held things together by playing the Senate off the military making sure neither gained the upper hand to the detriment of the empire as a whole. The Senate had lost most of its power and authority by Constantine’s time so he looked to the Xtian bishops as a replacement for the Senate to keep the balance of power, since they already had an institutional empire-wide organization in place. Interesting read so far.
KHN A Democratic Party triumph: “ Americans lost 1.36 years, Black Americans lost 3.25 years and Hispanic Americans lost 3.88 years.”
No M4A, only the tiniest possible support for citizens with occasional and episodic material support with the largest bump in corporate wealth ever.
The pandemic is behind us, let’s bribe billionaires by giving them monopoly control of public services like water and power in order to totally crappify all public goods. Midterm triumph is assured: GOP take over, consolidating gains for the rich and removal of any remaining support for the poor.
anything is better than the dystopian hell that is socialism.
How would you know? It really has never been tried on a state level. The USSR wasn’t socialist even though the West tried to pin that label on them. Neither is China with its state capitalism.
The closest the world has ever gotten to socialism is the democratic socialism of the Nordic countries and quite frankly it worked out pretty well for them. It is so sad to see them losing it in favor of their elites getting richer and richer.
tvc would be in hell, it’s always personal with them.
Well I mean they did call themselves Socialist. I’m not saying they really were necessarily but I guess we need to have the conversation about what the word means before going any further.
Well, the current American economy is called capitalist, but I ain’t seeing it. It is like North Korea calling itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or a mule a horse.
ou forgt th sarc tag.
Tell us of your Experience of socialism…
tvc – My Swedish roommate begs to differ – she enjoyed full medical health coverage, her divorced mother, working full time, was provided a subsidized apartment just a 10-minute train ride from Stockholm. The children spent their after-school hours caring for horses (which they were occasionally allowed to ride) until their mother could pick them up. This ‘dystopian hell’ of socialism gave them a decent life they would have never achieved on the salary of their mother. What an outrage!
…and some of those kids probably attend my local California community college, supported by the Swedish government. The local kids are miffed when they learn this.
“….monopoly control of public services like water and power”
America rose to dominate the world in the 1940s, and continued to dominate through the early 2000s…. because it’s people throve in a public works oriented culture. One characterized by the building of public waterworks, highways, electrical generating projects, parks, and libraries. I still use public parks, roads, sewers, and libraries more than any private equivalents. I’m lucky to have them. These infrastructure goods will be turned into cash extraction tools if privatized; they will not be improved, expanded or updated. The recent history on this is very, damningly clear.
The tired, libertarian boi effort to smear these critical things with cries of “socialism!” is asinine. It deserves derision at most. “Investors” who claim they can provide these services “more efficiently” than government are scam artists, not makers. Their only aim is to extract value (generated by others) out of existing publicly owned goods. They don’t do jack to improve our lives, they merely siphon wealth out of others’ hard built creations. They are turning us into Brazil, while China is rising to assume the world leader role that was once ours. China, of course, builds more public infrastructure than anyone out there right now. High speed train networks. Entire new cities. Everything.
I don’t want to be a citizen of some corrupt, pitiable ”Third world” nation. And that’s all we’ll be after Blackrock, The Carlyle Group, and a small horde of less well known extractors own all our infrastructure. Private and privatized infrastructure is crap infrastructure, as anyone who has had to use or avoid the overpriced toll highways in Houston or Dallas can tell you. It degrades the quality of the neglected parallel public infrastructure that most real people actually use. And it always costs more than a good public equivalent. Every time.
Lots of ways to skin a cat. The Boston Review above lays out the options: 1. we can continue with bailouts for the rich (Neoliberalism), 2. We can tell all capitalists to fend for themselves, 3. We can do the Green New Deal. I’ll choose the Green New Deal. I’m expecting all the big money to choose it as well. So where does that leave us? They are digesting the pros and cons of public-private partnerships already. But how can we trust the fat cats that exploited capitalism and brought us to this point? Probably because they are well organized. They only need to make one small alteration (imo) and that is they become non-profit organizations. And transparency and good regulation will be a given because there’s no public trust left. If Blackrock and Carlyle and all the former giant, lurching neoliberals can actually do a good job, then let them do it. It’s one way to assist them to join reality and society by being constructive, not extractive.
All they know is extraction–you don’t get into VC or PE or hedge funds if you think like someone who wants to start a food co-op. It’s like thinking “bipartisanship” is a thing. I like your thinking though.
I just think it is the end of the road for their model of doing business and they’ve got no choice but to stand up and fly right (actually more left).
I wish I agreed, but to me they are like those air force pilots that just keep on trying until they “augur in.” And we are all on the plane. There’s no ejection plan.
To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, the wealthy would rather go down with the ship than give up their first-class cabins.
Why are you doing free messaging labor for private corporations? Has capitalism stolen all your dignity and sold it to the elites? Were you really innocent enough to think any elite ideology’s reproduction doesn’t involve mass murder of all who disagree? Why can’t authoritarians buy their own shoe polish if that’s what they want everyone to eat?
Oh really? I socialism for the rich not dystopian?
And state sponsored corporatism is better for the masses how? Did you read the article from the Boston review? We don’t live in a capitalistic society.
Your last statement is not true. The libertarian fantasy of a no government except for defense would never work; we and many many others have debunked that. We live in a society dominated by market activity. Despite ideology, every market economy has been a mixed economy because they require government action (start with setting weights and measures). The question is then who that government intervention benefits.
Thank you!
And what tvc misses up near the top is the vast range of options for the mix between where it seems to me we are, near the social, political, economic and environmental collapse of a technocratic oligarchy at the one end and Leninist State Capitalism under the euphemistic “dictatorship of the proletariat” at the other.
There’s no evidence in this post that you have the slightest idea of what does or does not constitute socialism. As such it can safely be ignored
How much life expectancy did White Appalachian hill and mountain people lose? How much did they ever have to begin with?
Even Emergency Measures Won’t Save the West From Megadrought The New Republic
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Is this the event that causes collapse of the entire country?
We’ve grown adept at the big lie in much of our lives, in particular the financial realm where make believe reigns and we accept it as the cost of doing business.
Water cunningly doesn’t play that game, being fungible.
As the southwest bakes and what little water there is evaporates at a much faster pace than ever before, the squeeze is on.
Cali has overall the most valuable residential real estate in the country, but what is a house worth if you turn on the faucet and nothing comes out?
…the bigger issue is what if you close the lid and push the lever and nothing goes away.
Well, that’s EAsy.
https://humanurehandbook.com/downloads/humanure_instruction_manual.pdf
The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights report linked in that article was interesting. Their depiction of far-right paramilitarism is certainly scary but the main actors seem more concerned with the effects of the long term drought versus these acute weather events. Good read, anyway.
THE PEOPLE’S RIGHTS CAMPAIGN TO OVERTURN TRIBAL WATER AND FISHING RIGHTS IN THE KLAMATH BASIN
Cory Doctorow nails it, again. Reading through his article and comments brought to mind another image of modern life.
Surplus value extraction through rentals is yet one more version of the Enclosure Movement. There are physical, psychological and other types of enclosures, all of which extract some dignity along with those ancient rights of access and privilege. Driving people off the land, the commons, the heights or any other place reduces them to livestock. The new livestock pens have a self-policing component to maintain what people are told are those good graces, and not run afoul of social, media or other, credit scores.
I was going to do one of my “hey that was great, but…” moves on Cory Doctorow’s excellent piece, but hmmmm… I realized that things have really changed and it will be interesting for sure to see the effects.
I *was* going to say -why do people talk about home ownership in America (F Yeah!) without ever mentioning the brass knuckles of that eternal Go West Young Man which has now become an underlying bedrock of neoliberal thought. The “Young” part is gone, everybody needs to “chase their dreams” (aka be exploited in new surroundings on a regular basis) for their entire so-called career. Buy a house, pay tons of unrecoverable closing costs, and then within 5 years pick up stakes and follow your job somewhere else. Rinse and repeat. Oh and you need two incomes just to complicate everything.
Now of course this is about the professional class, the working class doesn’t really have to move much as factories -which moved South then offshore – got replaced by warehouses and Wal*Marts.. Of course they can’t afford a house to begin with anymore so that’s a different thread. Once upon a time they were the bedrock of the housing market…
Anyway, back to my point: But I say “was” because — people suddenly don’t have to move anymore. Work From Home is not going away. So again, interesting times.
PS: I did have a reaction to Questa Nota — do you think heavily mortaged suburbs are the commanding heights or maybe the new livestock enclosures of the rich? I really don’t know, but I always remember that there is a strong argument that company towns made slavery comparatively unprofitable.
Cory D. writes:
“Those good schools that once made your home more valuable? Today, they’re starved for cash, thanks to the consolidated power of the corporate landlord sector and its ability to fight for lower property taxes.”
Not so fast – he hasn’t noticed what goes on in Texas: this from the recent https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2021-06-04/council-recap-back-at-the-old-homestead-exemption/
“Doubling the homestead exemption shifts the tax burden away from resident homeowners and toward other property owners. According to data provided by the city’s Budget Office, that shift will mostly be borne by apartment complexes and “residential non-homestead” properties – which staff says mostly consists of single-family rental properties. They’ll take on about $13.6 million of the total $27 million reduction in homeowners’ taxes. Other commercial property owners (office, retail, etc.) will take on about $11 million.(These figures all assume a 3.5% revenue increase.)”
No one is lowering taxes – but it is as if “renters” were a different species – designated to bear the burden of rising assessments.
Mike Gravel died yesterday. He never gave up:
Turley:
Report: United States Ranks Last In Media Trust
https://jonathanturley.org/2021/06/26/report-united-states-ranks-last-in-media-trust/
Shockers! /;)
adding: then there are the stories they either ignore or only follow the official narrative without question… like stories about something that starts with “i” and rhymes with “pectin”. /;)
https://twitter.com/husserl79/status/1408759729741041671
That’s a good article that, flora. Who would ever have thought that actions have consequences? Apparently not the main stream media. If about 71% of people do not trust the media, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the readers of NC are nearly all coming from this 71%.
Big Picture – Small Lens
God knows Larry “Lolita Express Honorary Captain” Summers needs to be dust-binned at a minimum for the good of us all but who the heck is this “Big Picture” character?
“Unlike dismal scientists, I hold no special regard for Lawrence Summers. I’m not awed by his intellect nor impressed with his academic credentials.”
I’m willing to bet there are a few “dismal scientists” who are not impressed by Summers one bit. I’d love to hear Richard Wolf on Summers.
“What wows so many economists does not impress me.”
No doubt. I’d bet the same goes for artists, chefs, astronauts, surgeons, world leaders, his doctor, wildlife managers, ice cream vendors. . . . . .
“Indeed, while some see a skillful political operator, I see a public intellectual and policy wonk whose professional history is a continual series of disastrous decision-making across markets, academia, and public policy.”
This sentence crashed through my patio door like a freight car derailing at speed. Does this guy write with hockey gloves on? It’s like he’s building a brick wall with letters. . .
“I find it ironic that Lawrence Summers holds court to opine about things like inflation, government deficits, and fiscal stimulus.”
I think if I were to say this sentence aloud, an ironic black hole would form and consume the Earth.
We learn the greatest crime committed was tanking Harvard’s endowment but no mention of the days Summers whiled away with Epstein and friends. The computer as a model of human consciousness is a deeply flawed one; in this writer’s hands it becomes a blunt instrument. Finally, what in the world is he looking at in that photo? The future? A Brooks Brothers billboard? A particularly succulent calzone? His rapidly departing sense of perspective?
I first read Naked Capitalism because it was on a list of blogs recommended by Barry Ritholtz. That was a long time ago.
I believe our host may know him.
And I’m late to the party here….why is everyone arguing about Teen Vogue? Lambert used to link it regularly but sort of, halfway, as a joke?
And Little Big Horn was a disaster for the victors in the long run. I’m reading a book about the founder attitudes toward the natives and Jefferson respected the Indians but thought their culture was doomed because nothing was going to stop the wave of European settlers hungry for land and, the poor ones, survival. And that’s right. Perhaps it’s not so much about white supremacy as other kinds–technology and above all numbers. There were just too many settlers for the ultimate conclusion to be any differernt.
Teen Vogue has a labor reporter. The New York Times does not.
Had the New World population a genetic defense against small pox and other diseases brought by Old World types, you would probably be speaking Ojibwe today. It was small pox not small bullets that turned the tide for the new settlers.
Jefferson thought the settlers should stop at the Mississippi and turn the West over to the Indians for awhile so they could become agricultural and assimilated–even then the melting pot. Of course the Cherokee in north Georgia did do all those things with farms and schools and still got driven out. And those in the West didn’t like farming on more challenging land.
So it is also about tribes including, hey, even now. But I still think what happened in North America was inevitable. This continent is too ripe a plum. The true great disaster for the indigenous was being discovered in the first place.
I may be dead wrong, but wasn’t the ultimate conclusion somewhat better in Canada?
Let’s see how many unmarked mass-grave-buried Indian children end up being found after all the Residential Re-Education Camps are thoroughly scrutinized . . . eh?
This interpretation would come as something of a surprise to the Beothuk, were there any left to ask
(and yes, I realize that genocide was completed before Newfoundland officially joined Canada, but the point stands)
Because of the ungainly way they spelt ‘revisionist history’ in their section introduction, apparently
re: COVID origin
https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-find-covid-19-virus-was-highly-human-adapted-exact-origins-still-a-mystery/
Other scientists who don’t have a dog in this fight (as in not NIH dependent) disagree on the furin cleavage as smoking gun theory, to the degree that it’s largely disappeared from medical journalism accounts after an initial press boomlet.
The hole here is “tested animal species”. There is a shit ton of bat populations, including in Indonesia, and non-stop flights to places not far from other bat caves.
“largely disappeared from medical journalism accounts”
Yves: so has a lot of other important discourse , no?
Given the eagerness in some quarters to push the lab leak theory, the fact that a former smoking gun has been abandoned is an indicator that it has been debunked. I provided links on that before. Due to my current stressors, I don’t have time to repeat that exercise. And as indicated, the analysis provided is vastly weaker than you seem to think.
La Trobe and Flinders are Australian universities, so not NIH dependent (NIH didn’t supply any funding as far as I could tell from checking the acknowledgements/conflicts in the study, the substance of which remains above my pay grade.)
“Warmongering British Actions in the Black Sea”
Somebody made a boo-boo in the UK by leaving classified documents dealing with how Russia might react to this incursion of Russian waters at a bus stop. Do’h!
https://www.rt.com/russia/527705-uk-classified-documents-crimea-naval-incursion/
mission accomplished!
I strongly suspect that the Supa Top Secret documents were intentionally left at the bus stop.
Who would do such a thing /s
If it was a whistleblower, they certainly have learned the lessons of prior good citizens–hope there’s no camera capture.
I’m inclined to think that I’m probably getting more accurate info by reading the adverts. on busses.
Truly sad news:
“Former U.S. Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska, who read Pentagon Papers into Congressional Record, has died”
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/us-sen-mike-gravel-alaska-read-pentagon-papers-78518730
I always admired him.
F
May his Institute of strident leftist kids live on.
I shook his hand when we met very briefly when I was with the Kucinich group during the 2008 presidential primary in New Hampshire. Very good guy!
See bio here.
Gravel represented the best of American politics. He departs with a long list of accomplishments.
Rest in POWER, Senator!
Very sorry to hear this. He leaves quite an outstanding legacy.
Yes, sorry to hear this. Consortium News has been publishing a nice multi-part series on Sen Gravel’s role in the Pentagon Papers case. In my opinion, given his actions at the time and subsequently, he deserves much more praise than either the NY Times or the Washington Post. Maybe Tom Hanks will play him in a movie sometime. Then again, I’m sure his honest and strongly expressed opinions have poisoned his reputation among righteous Hollywood liberals by now.
Jon Hassell died yesterday. His music was hugely significant to me since 86. Statement from the family https://www.gofundme.com/f/jon-hassell-fund
I wonder if Yves would be interested in a retro on his work in a Saturday Interlude? A couple of superb films of concerts below.
From 1989 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8jnSHZTzs0
From 2009 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pk2J9kPfAY
I was introduced to his work via Ry Cooder. Beautiful music, sitting in the heat and listening to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYXpS2Up73I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zeaTh0f0E4
someone wrote about Hassell: “where Miles would have gone…”
I was a Brian Eno freak, beginning with King Crimson, and that’s where I found J.H. A unique ear for sure.
I sang a lot of difficult contemporary “classical” scores l, i.e. atonal audience killers that inspire empty seats after intermission. Hassell’s sound is different, mesmerizing. I always want to keep listening…
Bloody wonderful music. The sort of thing one does not hear “on the radio.” It reminds me of the times when I worked in the French Quarter, and after closing time at the restaurant I worked at, dropping in on a small bar for a drink and finding a group playing for themselves, late in the night. It has become a cliche because it really happens.
There was a Golden Age.
I saw so many great shows in New Orleans, played there several times when on tour in the late 70s and attended a few Jazz Fests in the 80s and 2000s. I had a high school friend who worked as a nurse in NOLA back in the 1970s, she got to see all the local greats when they were still around and active.
The early Jazz Fests were the best. The Sunsplash reggae, Caribbean etc. fest was really fun too.
New Orleans had it all. Being an international port, it had a lot of “outside” influences. I’ve heard it called the best European city in North America.
If your friend worked at Charity, then she had a real education in medicine. Back in the 1970s in New Orleans, which I caught the tail end of, you could see almost any musical style, and usually for cheap. One really great place to see live bands was, and still is, Tipitina’s, down on Napoleon Avenue. That place hosted anyone and everyone. Also reasonably priced.
“Modi and Shah’s Humiliating Walk Back on Kashmir is Proof of Their Failed Policy”
Modi may not have had a choice. Come September the US/NATO will be out of Afghanistan. OK then. So what happens if the Taliban offers their services and training to those Kashmir militants. You would only need a few dozen trainers to make those militants much more effective. Would India’s army be able to cope? Would the rest of the Quad offer their help to India? Would Pakistan try to stop this or would they look the other way while India gets put off-balance. For Modi, going back to the status quo would be a win if it makes the region more stable and does not give a huge opening to Taliban fighters. Come to think of it, the Taliban are fighting ISIS in Afghanistan. So what happens if it is instead ISIS fighters that cross over into Kashmir. I wonder if Modi thought of that.
Ham-fisted doesn’t begin to describe Modi’s Kahmir policy. He basically gave up trying to govern the province and treated it like a conquered land to be plundered. He may have been trying to distract the Indian public from the currency fiasco.
Seriously, can this Modi do anything competently, other than divide and rule?
Sadly, that may be enough for him to maintain a grip on power. Because Our Tribe.
That Forbes article about AI causing a 50-70% decrease in wages – yea, sure! Sounds like this is just the neoliberals trying to say: “Look! Squirrel!”
Are home health care workers automated? Are restaurants automated? Is construction work automated? Are those sweat shops in Bangladesh or China automated? When you look at most of the lowest paid jobs out there, are any of them automated? Sorry, rich people, your propaganda has gaping holes in it!
Sure, automation is going to cost some jobs but those jobs could be replaced by fixing our infrastructure so that it doesn’t go to hell – but of course, we won’t do that!
You’re making the same (mistaken) assumption that the “rich people” you decry make: people are all intercheangble cogs.
How many of those people displaced by automation will be able to get jobs doing construction–will there be enough of them and in the right places? Not to mention that, depending on job, construction can be very hard on the body–not everyone can handle the physical demands.
As for sweat shops, I suggest you google “dark factories.” Automation is absolutely coming for manufacturing, as well–the technology is on the cusp of allowing factories, at least some, factories operate without any humans on site.
Cement plants and chemical plants have had such technology for at least twenty years. Nobody wants to pull the trigger because a dark factory means any idiot can come in and rip things off. This includes truck drivers who’d have unrestricted access to the entire site. It means means entrusting the entire company’s operations to some tech guys who are considered flakes and flunkies that cannot be relied on.
Not that I disagree with the sentiment but the capital cost and overhead of making all the machines work is a lot compared to cheap third world labor. Only when the third world becomes inaccessible (either due to a gas shortage, climate change, war, or the worldwide communist revolution) will such things happen.
Actually, no, I am not. Have you ever worked on a major infrastructure project? It isn’t just the pick and shovel people who work on them. You need architects, engineers, lawyers, accountants, program managers, geologists, real estate people, environmental experts, computer professionals, and yes, even archeologists, and of course all of their administrative help. There will be plenty of jobs other than just pick and shovel jobs!
Not to mention the heavy equipment operators, pipefitters, electricians, mechanics, etc…
Our family policy toward businesses,
and I that it should become every reader’s as well, is;
“No human interactions, no spending.”
And, it’s OK to steal from robots;
https://therooster.com/blog/master-art-stealing-self-checkout
News you can use, as Lambert says.
Automation/AI is more of a rhetorical scare device to beat down labor than a game-changing revolution in the offing. They just want to put the working class on their back feet and increase general feelings of precarity, which the ruling class of course requires to rule. Instilling feelings of impotence and fear is necessary for any small group to rule over masses.
Why on earth would you automate low paid jobs, overwork expensive machines, and decrease profits?
Re: Forbes article about AI causing 50% to 70% decrease in wages:
The study apparently includes the effect of CNC machinery and “specialized software replacing clerical workers”. Neither of these are necessarily AI…
Wait, the writer thinks offshoring and wage arbitrage has nothing to do with deceasing wages? I have a bridge to sell him. /heh
I doubt worker-owned businesses would vote to offshore their own jobs.
The question then is why worker-owned businesses are not the norm rather than the exception?
And part of the answer has got to be government privileges for the banks since these preclude the need to justly share wealth and power with the workers.
Excellent point. I was startled by the headline. AI has been that devastating in just the brief time it has been around?!.
But there’s this in the article
:
“For now, college-educated, white-collar professionals have largely been spared the fate of degreeless workers. People with a postgraduate degree saw their salaries rise, while ‘low-education workers declined significantly.’ According to the study, ‘The real earnings of men without a high-school degree are now 15% lower than they were in 1980.’”
For me, this cuts to the core of the drive to have college debt forgiven. This is nice and possibly justified. But it would also effectively give a boost to the very people who have suffered least from the devastating effects of the past 40 years of tech displacement. And you can bet opponents would attack with the charge that non-college-educated Americans would be paying taxes to bail out their college-educated superiors — their despised managers, in many cases.
Given the mistaken but nearly universal belief that taxes fund government spending at the federal level, this makes sense. And it would be a fine cudgel for Republicans to apply to Democrats, who apparently see no problem with forgiving the college debts of their voters while leaving Trumpian deplorables to twist in the wind.
The people who appear to suffer most from student debt are not those with postgraduate degrees.
CNC machines have been around making things for over sixty years. This is not new technology:
CNC History: The Origination and Evolution of CNC Machining
https://www.rapiddirect.com/blog/cnc-history/
But the major machine tool makers that did exist in America have largely disappeared, and been replaced by offshore companies. Good tool makers and machinists (i. e. the people required to MAKE CNC machines) in America are also in very short supply.
Same with the “specialized software replacing clerical workers”, very old technology. And the IT which did this is also increasingly offshore.
Unfortunately, we are still stuck with American CEOs making the same decisions they have been making for over twenty years that have WRECKED the American industrial base.
As to wage decreases, this is ALL due to trade treaties and the destruction of good jobs in America.
So much this — see Judith Stein’s “Pivotal Decade” for a detailed description of just how long this process has been going on
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300171501/pivotal-decade
Excellent article about the U.S. war against native americans in 1876, but there’s a better description of the two major battles. Mari Sandoz has written a well-researched and well-written biography of Crazy Horse which describes the two major native victories against the U.S. army entirely from the native american point of view. Cheyenne women fought alongside the men in both battles and perhaps some Sioux women as well. The first battle was sometimes known as “the battle of the woman who saved her brother,” because when a woman warrior saw her brother in serious trouble she rode to help him and was such a furious and effective fighter that she drove off his attackers and inspired her comrades. This was the major battle of the two. Crazy Horse, who had chosen the site of the battle, devised a new tactic that won the day. Previous battles had usually featured the native americans attacking in a closed, tight formation and then the calvary soldiers pulled their pistols and inflicted heavy losses at close range. This time the Sioux and Cheyenne feigned the usual mass charge and then at the last minute spread out to surround the enemy on three sides. The warriors forced the soldiers toward the open end where hundreds of warriors were hidden on a wooded hillside. They opened fire with such a deadly volley that General Crook ordered a retreat. Crook’s army was routed. When the warriors returned to the main encampment, the battle against Custer was already underway. The tide of that battle was turned right at the start. When the natives saw the approaching cavalry they poured out of the camp “like bees out of a hive.” A Cheyenne husband and wife were the first to meet the cavalry charge and they unleashed such an intense volley of fire that by themselves they forced the horse soldiers to dismount. The cavalry didn’t have a chance after that. The Sandoz book is titled “Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas.” (Univ. of Nebraska Press)
Red Clouds war on the US is very similar. The US army gave up and left after Red Cloud wiped them out multiple times, burning the fort, killing replacement troops, cutting their supply lines etc. The military has always been lead by over confident dolts like Custer and others.
My favorite anecdote about Red Cloud’s War is the quote attributed to Fetterman: “Give me 80 men and I can ride through the whole Sioux nation.”
He had 80 men and officers under his command when he left Fort Kearny to relieve the besieged wagon.
I’ve always secretly liked to think that Red Cloud knew about that statement when he devised the trap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXnJVkEX8O4
From the Forbes article on the disruption caused by AI and automation:
A lot of people have been trying to make this a case of the “deserving” white collar worker versus the “undeserving” service workers, when in reality a lot of jobs are going to be affected–the fact that you are an educated white collar worker doesn’t automatically mean you’re safe.
With respect to retraining, one the difficulties is the gap between where somebody is and where they need to be.
Form some people retraining will be, perhaps not easy, but doable but other people it is quite frankly going to be very hard–what do we do with these people? Universal Basic Income and job guarantee are both floated as solutions but also have their own set of problems.
The whole issue is a really difficult one to contend with–there aren’t a lot of easy or good real world solutions but if we don’t get this right, the consequences will be catrastorophic, not just for the individual but for the country and society as a whole.
It was mentioned yesterday that J&J is talking about boosters. Here’s a Moderna CEO:
https://www.marketwatch.com/articles/moderna-ceo-covid-vaccine-booster-shot-51624646804?mod=mw_latestnews/
Some excerpts from the Q&A style interview:
How has your thinking evolved on booster shots? Do you still think that the booster market is as large as we imagined it was two months ago?
“Yes. Even larger.
More than ever, we believe that coronavirus vaccines won’t provide lifelong immunity.
The big unknown is the variants, of course. The more [the virus] migrates away from what has been coded into the original vaccines, the lower [the vaccine’s] efficacy is going to be. And you have waning immunity over time….”
“…Immunity is going to wane because of time, and because of variants. So the question is, are we going to be two months too late, or two months too early at boosting? I propose we should rather be too early as long as you have the safety data, two months too early isn’t going to hurt anybody. But two months too late you’re going to have people in hospital and dying, and the economies in lockdown again two months too early, than two months too late.”
Can I ask you one more thing? Where do you think the virus came from?
“The hypothesis of a leak from Wuhan, I think it’s possible. Because humans make mistakes. The theory that it was leaked on purpose, I believe is a very low probability….”
” biochemical engineering from the University of Minnesota and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School”
Now I know how much trust to put in Moderna. Hopefully Novavax is the real deal.
Wow, Forbes writes an article about automation with a headline about AI. Click bait or VC cheerleader — Why have just one!
“COVID: New restrictions amid struggle to contain Delta variant’
Report from Oz. We are playing Whack-A-Mole with this virus across most of the country right now though case numbers are low. The major lesson on how to deal with this virus is to go in early and go in hard. So with an outbreak in NSW, the Premier only put the city in lockdown when there was no other possible choice and even then, it is really only a partial lockdown. Meanwhile people from NSW have spread it to other States and some Aboriginal communities may be at risk as well. Prime Minister Scotty from Marketing was helping the NSW Premier by saying that, you know, all the borders should really stay open-
https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/scott-morrison-has-made-a-fresh-plea-to-states-to-remain-open/news-story/047d669e45f640d9f73d6802f8d1d963
So the States have been slamming their borders shut to NSW as has New Zealand. I would assume that the contact tracers are working like Trojans to find all possible infected people and the police have already dished out a few $1,000 fines to people who don’t know how to follow quarantine directions. Right now is the period where you have to test people and wait for some people to get sick to know if it is getting away or not. For the benefit of the uninitiated, this is what “learning to live with the virus” looks like down here. :(
At a wider scale, globalism + closed borders + spot factory disruptions + severely disrupted long supply chain shipping … equals… spot and longer term shortages + rising prices due to shortages + wages not keeping up with rising prices … equals… Stagflation…again. (We were assured in the 80’s if we let unregulated finance and “the job creators” make policy decisions we’d avoid future stagflation. There goes that theory.) My 2 cents.
On a more cheerful note I have had a pair of Crows as neighbors for the last 4 years, they know I cook bacon on Sundays ( Eggs a la Bourdain this morning) and that they can expect stale bread ends fried in grease plus a a little fruit.
If it isn’t out by 7:30 they stand on the deck rail and yell at me.
I put water out daily, the food only on Sundays and the Crows only show up on Sundays…
What fun! You know, crows live a long time, and you can never move. I hope you like your house, or can sell with a crow bacon grease-bread with a side of fruit on Sundays contingency!
Alfred, I live in a summer home built on weekends with a lot of beer over quite a few decades, most of it has no foundation.
It’s built of old growth redwood and it is still solid after more than 100 years
Excellent ventilation, no insulation to speak of and it’s in a redwood canyon, double and triple canopy rainforest.
It is a peaceful and quiet spot near the end of the road and an easy walk to the Russian River.
It is a serene spot, the dappled light coming through the redwoods and maples is beautiful this morning.
And it’s cheap.
Thanks for that description, an idyllic spot! I live in the North Woods and see the occasional black bear (yesterday, in fact, ambling past my house in the afternoon snacking on my plants). I had no idea that he might have been the one eating my garden, but looked it up and yes they eat tons of vegetation, even grass. I can’t see myself arguing.
My place is cheap now too, and serenely quiet. Cheers to us!
I put out suet roll with hot pepper in it for the birds. The hot pepper keeps the squirrels and deer away but birds are immune to the hot pepper so they chomp away.
The suet roll is in a cage and hangs from a crook neck hanger.
Crows discovered the meal and were eating a suet roll every couple of days. Since they are about $70 for a box of 8, I was forced to figure out how to deal with them. They held onto the vertical metal pole with their claws and scarfed down the suet.
Many years ago I put wheel bearing grease on the cars. I put lots of it on the pole so if they tried to hang on the pole they were heavy enough to slide down. The first batch of grease was wiped clean so I put on more. There was a pow wow with 5 crows one day on the ground below the suet, but they have given up.
I won!
Tom Stone: We have a mated pair living in a cedar tree out back who we have made friends with and now we’re seeing their young one regularly. The parents seemed to have instructed the child to wait on to our shed roof while they picked up our offerings and took it up to feed it. There is also a lone crow who is part of our circle and it often lands on our roof and sidles up to the window of the room where my wife studies – and occasionally knocks on it to ask if she has anything for him. That crow seems to fully understand when she says “wait a minute” and goes to get something for him and the “sorry, I have nothing” hand gesture as well. In the current heat wave they all seem to really appreciate the bird bath. Every now and then some Stellar Jays come by and take their turn at the food and bath and we also had wrens use our birdhouse for the second year in a row – four chicks this spring.
“I put water out daily, the food only on Sundays and the Crows only show up on Sundays”
I don’t doubt that but it’s really fascinating—but perhaps not surprising—that they can learn that bit of timing.
I recall reading something similar about the (in)famous crows of Chatham-Kent, Ontario. (You’ll no doubt recall this comment about them by Rev Kev a few years back.)
As related in this article: “Every day, the city of Chatham collects garbage from a different neighbourhood. And somehow, every day, the crows know exactly where to go.” The behavioral contingencies are perhaps simpler than “knowing” which day is Sunday: the crows don’t really have to keep track of which day it is, they just have to go on a day-by-day basis in a specific order to various locations. They’re apparently not bad with times of day, either: “When city workers made nightly rounds to disturb them, the crows learned that the workers clocked out at 11 p.m., and simply waited until 11:01 to head into town for the night.”
During winter I put out shelled roasted peanuts for them in the morning before going to work. They’re always waiting for me, whether it’s on the peak of a neighbouring house, or in a nearby tree. They wait until I get into my car before walking and flying up to the feeder(I put the peanuts on the ground for them). They’re fascinating to watch. There’s a group of 3-5. Once in a while I find a large piece of gravel on the deck next to the feeder, and there’s no other way it could have gotten there unless one of them put it there. Sadly I’ll be moving from this location soon and will no longer be able to feed and interact with them, or birds of any kind. I am going to miss them a lot.
“…or birds of any kind.”
Say it isn’t so! That sounds like you are going to live in an underground bunker dormitory. I sort of knew that working in the sciences in America was becoming like working under Speer’s Ministry of Armaments, but I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition so soon! [Cue ominous music.]
We hope you find happiness at your new ‘digs.’
(How’s the vaccine exemption program working out?)
Stay safe!
Ah it’s a tiny 2nd floor apartment in town, no yard. No porch, no deck, nowhere to stick a bird feeder. Will also miss the fireflies. Saw a few of those tonight. I really hope some day to be able to afford a little shack in the woods.
Re the vaccine waiver-was told to start with my GP(who I’ve never actually seen), then if that doesn’t work out, this person said they’d help out but I’d need to technically become their patient and a note stuck in my medical file. May just go the other route like we mentioned.
I hope you and Phyl have had a nice weekend. Please tell her hi for me.
The murder of crows know where of they caw. / ;)
Ahhh, the Flintstone House woman has my respect. To hell with her tasteful PMC neighbors! Cheers for her victory in court! Yaaba daaba doo!
I actually love that house. Definitely not one of the boxes we all plant ourselves in!
Boeing 777X ‘realistically’ will not win certification approval before mid-2023 – U.S. FAA [Reuters]
Time for another stock buyback.
Thanks for Barry Ritholtz today. Good summary of Summers. BR had some great lines, one was that Larry was so smart he could make worse decisions faster than anyone else.
‘We Are in a Climate Emergency’ All of a sudden, after not hearing a peep from the state or agencies tasked with managing CA’s water… “WE ARE IN A TERRIBLE DROUGHT AND THERE IS NO WATER IN OUR RESERVOIRS!!!”
https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/if-california-is-facing-a-rare-mega-drought-why-is-the-state-releasing-water-from-reservoirs/
(…)
New title for second post: “Why should anyone care IF Larry Summers thinks?”
DRUNK
How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization By Edward Slingerland (NY Times Book Review)
There is no doubt in my mind that drunks got us where we are today.
Alfred
June 27, 2021 at 3:49 pm
Having logged on after JUST returning from a bar, I say mmumph arrghhhh flump!
who could argue with that?
I’d like to buy the world a home
And furnish it with love
Grow apple trees and honey bees
And snow white turtle doves
I’d like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
I’d like to buy the world a tequila shot
And keep it company
That’s the real thing
I’d like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
And I’d like to buy the world a whiskey sour
And keep it company
It’s the real thing
I’d like to buy the world a banana daiquiri
And keep it company
It’s the real thing
I’d like to buy the world a scotch
And keep it company
It’s the real-
Regarding the Florida complex collapse. I just don’t understand who would move to Miami, especially on the coast (likely the best real estate). How could one justify a 30 year mortgage there? Beyond me.
Besides the denialists, don’t underestimate how many “science believers” fully expect to pray climate change away. “Belief in science” has always been a tell.
Chris Matthews had the “famed” solution to simply Apollo Project the Deepwater oil spill disaster away and wondered why we couldn’t simply send submarines down, even offering up the idea of getting all the smart people in a room to solve the problem.
Florida Man …
We need a national stealth-movement to get all the global warming deniers to move to Miami and all the other “Miami’s” so that the global warming reality-accepters can afford to move away from Miami and all the other “Miami’s”.
We need to gather all the deniers into the future sacrifice zones they helped create by their active and spiteful denialism.
I wouldnt have a problem putting 3 percent down for a 30 yr mortgage… a better question might be how could one justify lending for 30 years there
I can’t bring myself to watch this
THE CON – World Premiere & Live Panel *EXCLUSIVE*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XGZ7F3IPY8
Paul Jay is doing a lengthy series on this with Bill Black — currently on episode 6 of 9. It is outstanding.
https://theanalysis.news/bill-black-pt-6-the-best-way-to-rob-a-bank-is-to-own-one/
“THE CON” is among the few movies I will gladly go out of my way to pay for
Kendi peddling his wares in The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/our-new-postracial-myth/619261/
This guy thinks racism is at the root of everything. But then again, always be selling…..
Talk about selling, Tucker Carlson makes his living and his Fox new bosses happy preaching such.
Well reading Kendi’s own account it seems that everything he reads is about race/anti-racism. It’s all he teaches and all he researches. It’s probably all he talks about and all he thinks about. So there is nothing else. Name any topic and he can find race in it. Anybody who doesn’t defer to this is clearly a racist!
On to Covid. This is a real thought provoking letter published by Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche on a fundamental problem with mass vaccination during a pandemic. He advocates halting vaccinations right now to avoid (though it’s likely too late) variations that can subvert the effectiveness of vaccines and/or our own natural immune systems. Very compelling, but he even mentions that the WHO, CDC, NIH, et al have essentially ignored him. There’s no short term profit to be made by stopping vaccination.
He describes the mechanism that enables Covid to avoid being killed by vaccines and to escape immunity by the host. He also describes how a “booster vaccine” won’t be effective.
His letter: https://fos-sa.org/2021/03/12/open-letter-to-the-who-immediately-halt-all-covid-19-mass-vaccinations-geert-vanden-bossche-dmv-phd/
Disconcerting, but a very good read. Keep your guard up and research ivermectin.
Assertions from unproven hypotheses with no citations (combined with pumping for a ‘new, different kind’ of vaccine – an industry he happens to work in, as he declares himself a speaker at a vaccine conference. He does this without any disclosure of conflicts of interest or lack thereof) fail to compel, let alone convince. A knackers read.
More churches burn down on Canada indigenous land BBC
“The Canadian government has formally apologised for the [residential school system] system.”
**********
If apprehended I doubt the arsonists will be able to apologise and just walk away.
But for Canada’s ultra rich tax evaders, they don’t have to even apologise, they just walk away:
“CRA audits of ultra-wealthy Canadians yield zero prosecutions, convictions
CRA’s former director of criminal investigations calls the dearth of criminal charges striking”
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/cra-audits-of-ultra-wealthy-canadians-yield-zero-prosecutions-convictions
Hey, Inspector Clouseau, CRA is hiring.
It’s a lot easier for the CRA to go after the middle class and poor. They can’t afford the lawyers and accountants. Wages can be garnished, interest and penalties applied etc.
Beyond A Joke – Dublin Review of Books (AL)
Nice to see someone notice that Jordan Peterson is just pretending to be smart. Peterson is even always wronger than Steven Pinker, in the same way that one infinity can be larger than another infinity, e.g., Pinker never debates someone smarter.
Modern Times: Camille Paglia & Jordan B Peterson
https://youtu.be/v-hIVnmUdXM
Maybe he just hopes something to rub on him too. He never wonders though how is it that almost always the 20% successful among the 100% (he buys the idea of Paretto distribution), are the offspring of the previous generation’s 20%… And he sees himself and wants to be among the 20%…
C Paglia is great…
that was a very fun piece
In the photo . . . is that white eye stuck to that branch with bird lime?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birdlime
From the movie ‘Time Bandits”:
What sort of surpeme being created such riffraff? (riffraff being us)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmS_hMnFNVM
and of course
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rdpJztS28A
and speaking of parrots. / ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9xaikDoY2I
He’s definitely not pining for the fjords.
What about niacin? https://osf.io/uec3r
Very interesting. It looks like there has really not been much research on anti-virals before this Pandemic got up and running.
Happily, I take niacin daily to counteract some of the sideeffects of my ststins meds.
Tried posting this earlier. So delete if this gets repeated. https://dailyreckoning.com/rickards-theyre-wrong-about-inflation/
From the reddit . . . here is an article about Cuba bringing out a covid vaccine of its very own. I don’t quite understand the logic, but perhaps people here can understand and explain it.
https://www.dw.com/en/cubas-covid-vaccine-rivals-biontech-pfizer-moderna/a-58052365
It seems different from an mRNA neo-vaccinoid like Pfizer and Moderna, but it doesn’t seem to be a classical weakened or dead virus based vaccine either.
From Wikipedia, it is a Subunit vaccine. It goes in a link to say that ‘A subunit vaccine is a vaccine that presents one or more antigens to the immune system without introducing pathogen particles, whole or otherwise. The word “subunit” simply means the antigen is a fragment of the pathogen, and the antigens involved can be any molecule, such as proteins, peptides or polysaccharides. Just like inactivated vaccines, the vaccine is completely “dead”, and is therefore less risky.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdala_(vaccine)
I’m no medico, but it sure sounds safer than the mRNA vaccines being offered. I see no word of side effects so I hope that it is a thing. Did you see the paragraph buried in that article though-
‘”Here there is an unprecedented level of trust in the Cuban health system,” he said. “For example, we never have problems finding volunteers when it comes to clinical trials. In Cuba, people are extremely eager to be vaccinated. No one here would think of not getting inoculated because everyone knows how important vaccinations are.”‘
Neoliberalism’s Bailout Problem: “This represents a curious conjunction: theoretical disdain for government alongside practical reliance on it.” With divide and rule politics this is even more accented by the splintering into tribes that cannot talk to each other about it.
An example of corporate state exploitation is the coronavirus pandemic. The 50 State public health systems have not and continue not to work. Except the federal government is quite willing to fund the “Warp Speed” vaccine campaign. At a modest $100 dollars a jab (manufacturing, delivery and injection) times Total Vaccine Doses 381,282,720 equals 38.13 billion dollars in the USA alone.
The Delta Variant is spiking in highly vaccinated Israel and UK.
https://tinyurl.com/wbyuvwvk
If the Delta Variant spikes in the USA too, despite the mRNA vaccines, this will be money for nothing except for the newly minted pharmaceutical billionaires.