Category: Politics

Heartland

Heartland, by The The, from the album, Infected. As poignant today as it was in 1986.

Beneath the old iron bridges, across the Victorian parks
And all the frightened people running home before dark
Past the Saturday morning cinema that lies crumbling to the ground
And the piss-stinking shopping centre in the new side of town
I’ve come to smell the seasons change, and watch the city as the sun goes down again

Here comes another winter of long shadows and high hopes
Here comes another winter, waitin’ for utopia
Waitin’ for hell to freeze over

This is the land where nothing changes
The land of red buses and blue-blooded babies
This is the place where pensioners are raped
And their hearts are being cut from the welfare state
Let the poor drink the milk while the rich eat the honey
Let the bums count their blessings while they count their money

So many people can’t express what’s on their minds
Nobody knows them and nobody ever will
Until their backs are broken and their dreams are stolen
And they can’t get what they want, then they’re gonna get angry!
Well it ain’t written in the papers, but it’s written on the walls
The way this country is divided to fall
So the cranes are moving on the skyline
Trying to knock down this town
But the stains on the heartland can never be removed
From this country that’s sick, sad, and confused

Here comes another winter of long shadows and high hopes
Here comes another winter, waitin’ for utopia
Waitin’ for hell to freeze over

The ammunition’s been passed and the Lord’s been praised
But the wars on the televisions will never be explained
All the bankers gettin’ sweaty beneath their white collars
As the pound in our pocket turns into a dollar

This is the 51st state of the U.S.A.
This is the 51st state of the U.S.A.
This is the 51st state of the U.S.A.
This is the 51st state of the U.S.A.
This is the 51st state of the U.S.A.
This is the 51st state of the U.S.A.
This is the 51st state of the U.S.A.
This is the 51st state–

You’re being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly…

Source: You’re being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly…

TL;DR: You know that Russia and other governments try to manipulate people online.  But you almost certainly don’t how just how effectively orchestrated influence networks are using social media platforms to make you — individually– angry, depressed, and hateful toward each other. Those networks’ goal is simple: to cause Americans and other Westerners — especially young ones — to give up on social cohesion and to give up on learning the truth, so that Western countries lack the will to stand up to authoritarians and extremists.

And you probably don’t realize how well it’s working on you.

This is a long post, but I wrote it because this problem is real, and it’s much scarier than you think.

The best part? The very best part? Reddit is one of the biggest parts of the problem, and I don’t see anyone in the comments with either that realization, or the guts to say it. The site got used like a 3-dollar whore in the run-up to the 2016 election, in favor of Trump. Then they “fixed” that algorithm problem, and now the entire front page is almost always filled with posts about people being awful to one another, in various forms. It’s ALL hatred towards “others.” It’s ALL moral superiority over someone else. Just zoom out and look at it without being logged in. It’s kind of like junior high, but way, way worse.

You’ll Own Nothing, and Be Happy

If you’re wondering why house prices have DOUBLED in the past few years, this is why: private equity. That is, large investment groups, like Blackrock and Vanguard, which own substantial stakes in nearly EVERY US corporation.
 
These firms are buying up single-family homes, to turn around and rent back to us, paying WAY over asking price to snap them up. This lady points out that we knew it was happening, we just didn’t know how fast. And it’s bad. Really bad. TWICE as bad as we thought. In less than a dozen years, an average family will simply not be able to buy a house. Period.
 
“You’ll own nothing, and be happy,” say people at the World Economic Forum.
 
I blame private equity for just about everything bad happening now, but I’ll save the full rant for another time.
 
@tiffanycianci

Replying to @Gumie35 #greenscreen #PrivateEquity has acquired as much is 44% of all single-family homes in the United States in the last year, and we are on track to have a full-blown #monopoly of all single-family #housing in the next two years! And the politicians we trust have been taking donations from the same firms that are forcing out #workingclass #Americans from homes and rentals all across the US! This has exacerbated the #housingcrisis and the #wealthgap while all but ensuring they have the donations they need to get reelected and keep their donors happy!!! #lobbyists#lobbying#corruption#monopolies#ImFeelingFrench#boycottkelloggs#LetThemEatCake#eattherich#boycott#housing#housingcrisis#housingmarket#realestaterealestateinvesting@@OpenAI#blackstone#blackrock#vanguard#hedgefundkennedy24@@Robert F. Kennedy Jr#jeffjackson adamsmith@@cancelthisclothingcompany@@Tony@@Real Wicked Witch of the West

♬ original sound – TiffanyCianci

Pluralistic: You can’t shop your way out of a monopoly (05 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

That’s why the only serious competitor to Google is Bing, another Big Tech company (Bing is also the primary source of results on Duckduckgo, which is why DDG sometimes makes exceptions for Microsoft’s privacy-invading tracking):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Controversies

Google tells us that the quid-pro-quo of search monopolization is search excellence. The hundreds of billions it makes every year through monopoly control gives it the resources it needs to fight spammers and maintain search result quality. Anyone who’s paid attention recently knows that this is bullshit: Google search quality is in free-fall, across all its products:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

But Google doesn’t seem to think it has a problem. Rather than devoting all its available resources to fighting botshit, spam and scams, the company set $80 billion dollars alight last year with a stock buyback that was swiftly followed with 12,000 layoffs, followed by multiple subsequent rounds of layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Source: Pluralistic: You can’t shop your way out of a monopoly (05 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

If you want to know why everything sucks, that was it, in a nutshell. Corporations are colluding to get to 2 or 3 per market, so as to avoid the strictest definition of a “monopoly,” so they settle for duopolies and triopolies. And then they work together to take ALL the profit out of the entire ecosystem, and do things like use that money to buy back stocks and then sell their options and put that money in their pocket. Good for the people at the top, with those options, I guess. Everyone else? In the entire world? Suck it.

2024 Cummins Inc. Vehicle Emission Control Violations Settlement | US EPA

“Today’s landmark settlement is another example of the Biden-Harris administration working to ensure communities across the United States, especially those that have long been overburdened by pollution, are breathing cleaner air.” “Today we’ve reaffirmed that EPA’s enforcement program will hold companies accountable for cheating to evade laws that protect public health.” – EPA Administrator Michael Regan

Source: 2024 Cummins Inc. Vehicle Emission Control Violations Settlement | US EPA

In case it wasn’t clear before, this is being trotted out by the Biden administration as some sort of moral victory against fossil fuels. The real problem here — and I said this about the Volkswagen “dieselgate” — is that squeamish liberals in Congress passed diesel emissions restrictions that are so restrictive that they are almost impossible to meet, and still produce a vehicle that’s worth driving. It doesn’t help that Cummins was part of the process, and nodded along with the effort, just as they’re now doing with the most recent, proposed, further California restrictions. Now they’re paying $2 BILLION dollars because they didn’t have the spine to tell Congress that their standards were absurd. I know people involved in documenting our emissions compliance, and there’s no question that they were NOT INVOLVED in some sort of conspiracy here. Whatever details come to light about this — and there was a lot after the Volkswagen scandal — they may as well just go ahead and make personal on-highway diesel vehicles illegal. The increase in the price over a similar gas-powered vehicle because of all the emissions equipment and engineering required to actually meet the emissions certification requirements will just make them unviable.

The reality of the Danish fairytale

The point is that the Danes understand that they can’t both have a safe, open society where young children can be out alone at night, take the metro by themselves, and enjoy the play parks by themselves, if they also allow druggies, vagrants, beggars, and the mentally ill to roam the streets on their own accord. A strong civil society relies invariably on strong norms that are judiciously enforced by both customs and cops.

Source: The reality of the Danish fairytale

This article provides a counterpoint to the supposed utopia that American liberals like to reference in Denmark, and the compromises to liberty and income it incurs.

Jeffrey Epstein ‘victim’ Johanna Sjoberg claims predator told her ‘Clinton likes them young’ in bombshell newly-released court documents | Daily Mail Online

Johanna Sjoberg, who was recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell when she was 20, told the lawyers in 2016 that Jeffrey Epstein told her ‘Clinton likes them young, referring to girls.’

Source: Jeffrey Epstein ‘victim’ Johanna Sjoberg claims predator told her ‘Clinton likes them young’ in bombshell newly-released court documents | Daily Mail Online

By the numbers:

  1. The UK press doing the job the US press won’t do.
  2. We knew about Bill from the flight logs. Lots of names show up on the list once or twice. Clearly, people were allowed to use the plane as a sort of manifest laundering exercise. Bill flew a lot.
  3. He denied everything. Who wouldn’t?
  4. So he’s finally, directly implicated. Who cares? Everyone knows that Bill Clinton is untouchable. He proved that with vigor in the 90’s.

Seems like a non-story, and from several points of view. If “the list” is “in the wind” now, where are the rest of the names?

Office of Public Affairs | Attorney General Merrick Garland Statement on the Agreement in Principle with Cummins to Settle Alleged Installation of Illegal Defeat Devices in Engines | United States Department of Justice

Engine manufacturer Cummins Inc. today disclosed that it has reached an agreement in principle with the United States and State of California to pay a $1.675 billion penalty to settle claims that it violated the Clean Air Act by installing emissions defeat devices on hundreds of thousands of engines.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland: … “As part of the agreement, the Justice Department will require Cummins to pay $1.675 billion, the largest civil penalty we have ever secured under the Clean Air Act, and the second largest environmental penalty ever secured.”

Source: Office of Public Affairs | Attorney General Merrick Garland Statement on the Agreement in Principle with Cummins to Settle Alleged Installation of Illegal Defeat Devices in Engines | United States Department of Justice

I’m not clear what Cummins has done, or what they even could have done. I work here, and I just can’t imagine anyone in this modern, enlightened environment doing anything like what Volkswagen did. Despite my initial dismissal of that case as most-likely being run by a few, well-placed, rogue elements, it turned out to be a surprisingly deep engineering effort that extended all the way up to one level below the boardroom. Maybe more facts will come to light, but, right now, this feels like a shakedown, by a liberal administration, of a company that makes a product that’s politically-unpopular with its voting base.

Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records | WIRED

According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well.

The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure—a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States.

Source: Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records | WIRED

I mean, I keep saying that they’re doing all of this, in the open, despite the clear intent and letter of the Constitution, but, here we are, and here we will continue to be, unless someone like Vivek Ramaswamy can get elected, and shut it down. Unfortunately, we’ve already witnessed our “deep state” kill three prominent national leaders to prevent them from changing their agenda, and watched in slow motion as no one was ever held accountable for these conspiracies, so it’s not like they’ll let him — or anyone like him — anywhere near the presidency.

Pluralistic: “Efficiency” left the Big Three vulnerable to smart UAW tactics (21 Sept 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

In this project, they are greatly aided by Big Car’s own relentless pursuit of profit. The automakers – like every monopolized, financialized sector – have stripped all the buffers and slack out of their operations. Inventory on hand is kept to a bare minimum. Inputs are sourced from the cheapest bidder, and they’re brought to the factory by the lowest-cost option. Resiliency – spare parts, backup machinery – is forever at war with profits, and profits have won and won and won, leaving auto production in a brittle, and easily shattered state.

Source: Pluralistic: “Efficiency” left the Big Three vulnerable to smart UAW tactics (21 Sept 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

This has been my complaint about all the mergers that happen up and down and side to side in various industries: the activity is driven by the desire and intent to extract all the profit from every level subsumed. To oversimplify, the effort is one to streamline all consumer activity, from raw material to your door. This is the result. No extra capacity. No ability to handle a shock to the system.

Car bosses have become lazily dependent on overtime. At GM’s “highly profitable” SUV factory in Arlington, TX, normal production runs a six-days, 24 hours per day. Workers typically work five eight-hour days and nine hours on Saturdays. That’s been the status quo for 11 years…

A hundred years ago, in a magical company called Arvin, they implemented the Toyota Production System, and called it the Arvin Total Quality Production System. It was the only corporate training that I’ve ever had that was actually worth anything. Part of the work was simulating a production line with poker chips and dice rolls, and it brilliantly demonstrated the improvements by going to small lot sizes and just-in-time delivery.

If we ran behind due to bad dice rolls, we would just run a little overtime, and make it up. Better to pay a little OT occasionally than spend the capital to invest in a new machine, right? Even back then, as naive as I was, what immediately struck me was how easy it was for the company to just rely on overtime to make production instead of investing in new equipment to reduce manpower needs to prevent a regularly-occurring crunch, and it was obvious that this would always be the case.

Sure enough, all these years later, every time I hear a story like this, I see the company’s refusal to invest capital to do the work, and just “throw bodies” at the problem. Having taken an accounting class, and understanding the future value of money, I understand there’s a pretty simple calculation you can make in individual cases to determine if you should buy something to help, or just plan on using human fodder for the job. Then, as soon as the profit line dips a little, you cut a bunch of people lose to appease Wall Street. It’s inhuman, and we need the pendulum to swing, quickly and far, to the other side, in favor of people again.