When people die because they don't have health care, I had to bury them

My Sunday movie was the documentary That Pärt Feeling, about modern Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. I’ve known about his music for quite a while and have heard several of his pieces both on the radio and live in concert. I think his most famous piece is Fratres. This documentary featured Pärt coaching Cello Octet Amsterdam. There were also several other leaders of various instrumental and choral ensembles describing what it’s like to perform his music as we heard their groups perform. This included an orchestra in Kinshasa, Congo. Pärt is quite spiritual and religious. In spite of his musical success he leads a simple life. His music is described with words like simple but hard to get right. Like thin ice, beautiful yet full of danger. It’s serene and draws people into connection. He was born in 1935 and his musical training was when Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union. His early compositions were under that influence. In the mid 1970s he saw that style and influence was not for him. He withdrew from musical life for a bit to come up with his own style. An example of that simplicity and serenity is his piece Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror) for violin and piano. This piece was not included in the movie. There are performances on YouTube, one with a score, many without. Dartagnan of the Daily Kos community discussed Republicans and the Supreme Court. The Court has been issuing a string of conservative rulings to the delight of Republicans. But at the end of the last term the Court issued a not conservative ruling – Alabama was ordered to redraw its Congressional districts to create a second black majority district. It looks like Republicans have no trouble ignoring rulings they don’t like. The Alabama legislature did redo their map and a second district has more black people, but it isn’t the majority the Voting Rights Act and the Court required. The original plaintiffs are, of course, back in a lower court. Some say Republicans may be OK if the court draws new maps – as a way of saying yeah, there’s another black district, but we didn’t create it. Others think no matter what the lower courts do the case will be back before the Supremes. Dartagnan noted Republicans also want to ignore laws that the nasty guy broke. Which means in the conservative mind the only laws that matter are the ones that coincide with conservative interests. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Ishmael Reed of El País in English:

Rather than exist in a society where members of all ethnic groups have an opportunity for success, millions of American whites would approve of a dictatorship. Ten million would restore Donald Trump to the presidency by force. Recent polls show that Biden and Trump are tied in the presidential race even though Trump said he would suspend parts of the Constitution and construct an all-powerful executive branch with him as the head.

Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos discussed Project 2025, a blueprint for whichever Republican can get into the White House. The document is over 900 pages and it is a battle plan to dismantle the nation’s regulatory framework. Among its goals: block expansion of renewable energy and close the Department of Energy renewable energy office. Cut the EPA environment justice office. Prevent other states from adopting California’s car pollution standards. In summary: stop the federal government’s climate work, block the transition to clean energy, and shift government agencies from regulating the fossil fuel industry to supporting it. Of course, this was released at the end of the hottest month in 125,000 years and when green energy projects are contributing to keeping the economy humming.

To sum up, this horrifying, planet-killing initiative would likely make climate change orders of magnitude worse while undermining the domestic economy and benefiting narrow, entrenched, obscenely wealthy interests. In other words, everything Republicans have been doing for decades—only more so.

Hunter of Kos discussed the heat and the effort of Pablo Manríquez of The New Republic who asked several Congressional Republicans about the heat their own constituents are cooking under. And Hunter heard that “the mocking contempt for the question positively drips from every mouth.” Steve Scalise dismissed the weather as “Southern Louisiana is always hot.” Ted Cruz said, “There are lots of people who have political agendas, and whatever happens with the weather they attribute to climate change. That's not science, it’s ideology.” So the phrase, “Hottest on record” is meaningless and is only a chance to mock. NPR host A Martínez talked to Rev. William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign about the federal minimum wage that hasn’t been raised in 14 years. We’re at a point where full time at $15 isn’t a living wage – $20 is. Some of the things Barber talked about: Both Republicans and Democrats could have raised the minimum wage – and haven’t. Both parties praised the pandemic essential workers and the minimum wasn’t raised. Barber mentioned four lies that have kept the minimum wage where it is: 1. Raising the minimum will increase inflation. Debunked by economists. 2. Personal immorality rather than societal immorality that doesn’t provide a living wage. 3. The current $7.25 puts one above the poverty level. 4. The culture wars – trans people, immigrants – are the problem when they’re really a distraction so we don’t notice the culture warriors are the same ones blocking living wages. Barber explained why he is a leader of this campaign:

I was a pastor for 40 years, almost - 30 years at one church. When people die because they don't have health care, I had to bury them. When people are stressed out and die, stroke out because they working so hard, I had to bury them. And I could not stand up in that pulpit and say, God called them home, and this was a natural death. This is policy murder. I've had to watch families be torn apart because they couldn't - they never were home with each other 'cause they were trying to do everything they could. And they are just living in so much anger because they would see these politicians getting all this money and all these CEOs getting this money, and all they wanted - all they wanted was a living wage, that's all. They just wanted the basics of life.

Aaron Mendelson of the Center for Public Integrity interviewed Santiago Mayer of Voters of Tomorrow that has the goal of boosting Gen Z voting. The interview was posted on Kos. Here’s one exchange:

Q. In recent months in 2023, we've seen this concerted effort from Republican-controlled legislatures in states like Ohio and Idaho to make it more difficult for young people to vote. The conservative election denier Cleta Mitchell recently said, “They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm. So they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed.” Why do you think these politicians are so aggressively going after student voters? A: Because they're terrified of us. That's the simple answer. They are terrified because they know that young people are not buying what they're selling. We've seen it in 2018. We've seen it in 2020. We've seen it in 2022. Young people are turning away from the hate-filled platform that many people on the right have. I don't think that describing Gen Z as a Democratic generation is accurate. What Gen Z is really looking for is a future that works for them, and a government that works for them, and that protects them. And what we have seen from people on the right, especially over the last few years, and with people like Cleta Mitchell, is that they acknowledge what is happening, they know young people are rejecting them. But they refuse to really turn their platform around. And they are much more interested in continuing this wave of hate and harassment against LGBTQ+ rights, of turning back rights that my generation has never lived without, like abortion rights.

Mark Kreidler, writing for Capital and Main and posted on Kos wrote about the Hollywood strikes.

“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” one executive told the news site Deadline. Added another, “It’s been agreed to for months, even before the WGA went out.” A third industry source called the tactic “a cruel but necessary evil.”

Kreidler then tied the Hollywood strikes to the strike by the Los Angeles hotel workers. They haven’t gone on general strike, but are targeting a few hotels at a time.

Decades of deregulated takeover and consolidation across major U.S. industries have struck a hard blow to labor power. Unions are often in the position of negotiating not with their direct employer, but rather with one facet of a much, much larger conglomerate—one with nearly limitless resources and a constant eye on stock price. These corporations, often multinationals, can wait out almost any single labor situation. They may not always want to, but they can. That tips the balance of power, creates a new layer of anxiety for those with livelihoods on the line, and potentially makes negotiating brutally difficult.

There has been a lot of consolidation on both the hotel industry and in Hollywood.

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, who was formerly a labor and employment lawyer for several Hollywood studios, wrote recently that for these conglomerates, “The production of entertainment/content might be a sliver of their overall business. …If some banks are ‘too big to fail,’ these companies might be ‘too big to successfully strike.’”

Writing off whole schools as needing detention not education

One day after writing about a book I’m writing about another. This one is short – only 125 pages of text and another ten of photos. The book is How We Sleep at Night by Sara Cunningham. It is her story of coming to terms with her son Parker being gay – when he told her she definitely did not sleep well at night. The Cunningham family attended a Baptist church, mostly because that was the one in the neighborhood. They became deeply involved in the church because they felt cared for, not that they were strong believers in every point in the doctrine. But when Parker told her he was gay her main thought was: How do I keep my son from going to hell? It took her a while to see that he wasn’t. She saw when he fell in love with a man he became more confident. During her process she became annoyed with the way her church treated her and the kinds of prayers they said for her son. It’s been many years since I’ve read these kinds of stories. Alas, they’re still happening (though this one is almost ten years old) and some with much worse outcomes. Cunningham doesn’t work through the Bible passages used to condemn LGBTQ people, though she does list a few books that do. Each chapter of the book ends with the lyrics of one of Parker’s songs. A website is included so the reader can listen to Parker sing it. Alas, ten years later that is now an Asian site. I did find a YouTube video of Parker singing, but a song that was not related to the book. An online search of Sara shows that she offers “Free Mom Hugs” at pride events and has offered to be the mom at any gay wedding. Dartagnan of the Daily Kos community discussed that the nasty guy and Putin desperately need each other. To evade jail the nasty guy needs to get reelected and get his Department of Justice cronies to call off the cases against him. And to do that he needs Putin’s election interference that he enjoyed back in 2016. To not lose in Ukraine Putin needs the nasty guy to get elected. Once in office the nasty guy will pull out of NATO, thus weakening it, and put an end to America’s supply of military equipment to Ukraine. To make all that not happen a few other things should happen. First, the nasty guy should be convicted well before the 2024 election. Second, Ukraine should push Russia out of its territory before our election. And third, we need to be prepared for the onslaught of interference. That interference is definitely already being planned for, the onslaught not so much. And as part of that preparation we need to improve our capabilities to thwart that interference. Americans have a right to know what hostile foreign agents are trying to influence our voters. Related to the nasty guy’s criminal liability Mark Sumner of Kos wrote about more indictments against him. Media was expecting indictments related to Georgia election tampering or to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. But those haven’t dropped yet. This set of indictments are additions to the case of failing to turn over classified documents. The main part of this is an attempt (I’m not sure, did he succeed?) to destroy surveillance camera images, the destruction of evidence he was told to preserve. There are also additional charges against the nasty guy, the big one being he waived around a classified document at his Bedminster resort. The nasty guy is up to 40 indictments, a few more were added to his valet Walt Nauta and a few were given to aide Carlos De Oliviera. Hunter of Kos reported that “libraries in at least 28 Houston public schools are being repurposed into ‘disciplinary centers.’ ” Students who misbehave will be sent there. They might watch lessons virtually, work alone, or work with other detained students. The books will still be there (that’s quite a concession!), but the librarians and media specialists were laid off. All this is being done by the new state-appointed superintendent of Houston schools.

This is what a failed state looks like: lots of guns, lots of focus on discipline, and lots of contempt for anybody who looks like they might grow up to be a book-learner. ... But "most" of the 28 schools that will have their librarians relocated to other campuses "are located in low-income communities of color," notes Houston Public Media, and again: You can't get a more on-the-nose example of how Republican-led states are trying to reshape our schools than removing school librarians in communities of color so that they can repurpose the rooms into disciplinary centers. Are we supposed to pretend this is anything but what it looks like? Because it looks like writing off whole schools full of kids as needing detention rather than education.

I’m finally getting to a pundit roundup by Greg Dworkin for Kos originally posted December 17, 2022. Pundits were talking about classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and COVID vaccines. There was also a pair of quotes from Noah Smith tweeting and writing on Substack. The tweet is from August 28, 2017 and says:

15 years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet.

And from Substack in 2022:

Five years ago I was sitting around drinking a beer with my college buddy Dayv. I was scrolling through Twitter and watching people get mad at Donald Trump’s latest outrage, and I said “You know…fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now the real world is an escape from the internet.” “Tweet that!”, Dayv said, so I did. That banal observation became my most popular tweet of all time, and the quote has now been posted ad infinitum on content mills all over the web.

There was a hearing in Congress about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (formerly known as UFOs). I’m not going to get into that. Though one frame of a comic by Brian McFadden of Kos comics is worth sharing. It shows Mr. Spock of Star Trek saying:

Earth is experiencing multiple crises that require immediate action and you’re investigating imaginary phenomena? Highly illogical.

Let's name extreme weather after the fossil fuel companies that caused it

I grew up near Flint, Michigan. Perhaps a year ago Brother commented that we had all we needed in our small town – schools, church, and shopping. We occasionally ventured into the city for the cinema and to Sears or some sort of district wide church event. So while I grew up near Flint I can’t say I knew a lot about Flint. For instance, I didn’t know what Chevy in the Hole meant. I mention it because I just finished a novel by that name by Kelsey Ronan. That phrase refers to the site of the Chevrolet plant along the Flint River, a bit west of downtown. It is where the famous 1937 sitdown strike happened (I had always thought that happened somewhere near the huge Buick City complex that had been towards the northeast of the city, only thinking now that Chevrolet and Buick are not the same thing, though both are a part of General Motors). That Chevrolet plant was torn down long ago (as has Buick City) and the area is now a riverside park officially named Chevy Commons. This is the story of August Molloy, who is white and nearly dies of a drug overdose and returns to Flint to be with family as he recovers and works toward sobriety. This happens in 2014, just before the Flint Water Crisis. Along the way he is fascinated by Monae, who is black and the lead person at an urban farm near the factory site. Much of the story is about their relationship and how the water crisis affects it. The rest of the story is about their ancestors in important moments in Flint history. That sitdown strike and the affect it had on the wives. WWII and Flint as a part of the Arsenal of Democracy. The 1953 Beecher tornado and Billy Durant’s ventures into bowling alleys. The 1967 riots, somewhat in sympathy with the Detroit riots that year. I wish the author had supplied a genealogy chart of the two families so I could keep track of who’s who. One name mentioned in passing is a central character a few chapters later. Even so, I enjoyed the book. An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reported that even though July isn’t over it can be declared the hottest globally on record. The only thing that could keep July from claiming a record is a sudden ice age, which isn’t in the forecast. Most of the time a month will break the record by hundredths of degrees or maybe a tenth. This time July will pass the record by at least 0.2C. And Phoenix has passed 27 days above 110F. Last Saturday Kos of Kos posted a Ukraine update. He begins by noting a crucial difference between Russian and Ukraine – Russia doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes. It looks like Ukraine does. Kos also looked at what the Russian propagandists are saying after Russia pulled out of the deal that let Ukraine ship grain to the rest of the world. Visegrád 24 has a video of Russia Today’s Margarita Simonyan:

All our hope is in a famine. The famine will start now, and they will lift the sanctions, and be friends with us, because they will realize it is necessary.

Kos responded:

Note, this “famine” isn’t Europe. Ukrainian grain destined to European markets get there via rail. This famine is Africa. Russia wants African to starve, because then, maybe, the West will cave to Russian cruelty. The problem for Russia is that the West doesn’t actually care about Africa. That’s been the problem all along. Russia certainly never learned the adage that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Their propaganda isn’t about working together with allies for the common betterment of all. For Russia, that’s weakness. They’re all about threats and nuclear weapons blah blah blah.

That propaganda bit prompted a cartoon from Jeff Danzinger, posted on Kos. One person is cutting a loaf of bread labeled “Ukraine wheat.” Another says:

Ok, now our next step is to starve people who we don’t even know. This should lead to victory very quickly.

In an update on Wednesday Kos wrote that Ukraine’s counteroffensive appears to be picking up strength. Ukrainian sources are being very quiet, though Russian sources are freaking out. In Thursday’s update Kos reported that the Pentagon is saying Ukrainian officials told them that an enlarged Ukrainian force will try to advance south towards Tokmak and Melitopol. Other sources also say that Ukraine is making significant gains. Kos included a tweet (can one still say that?), well, a satellite image posted by Michael Cruickshank that shows where the front lines have been for several months. There’s the white of the dried up reservoir bed, then a swath of green, which is fields that haven’t been harvested because doing so is too dangerous. Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote that the nasty guy is well known for his manipulation of the legal system. Over his business life he’s filed 3500 lawsuits to punish or intimidate his opponents and bury them in costs and hassle. And if a lawsuit was filed against him he knew how to counterattack, undermine, work the press, delay, and lie. If forced to settle, he would claim victory. That strategy works well in civil court where the opponent is a regular person or a regulatory body, where losing means writing a check (or declaring bankruptcy). Bu the nasty guy is now facing criminal court. Those tactics don’t work so well. Prosecutors seek justice, not compromise. They’re not easily rattled as civil litigators might be. And losing means jail. That the nasty guy hasn’t realized the difference is shown by his handling of classified documents. He could have returned the documents – and was given many opportunities to do so – but he put himself in legal peril by hiding them. The tactics that have served him so well for 50 years don’t provide the same options in criminal court. Joan McCarter of Kos reported that the No Labels group is saying a third-party candidate is appropriate because, as national co-chair Larry Hogan said, “almost 70 percent of the people in America do not want Joe Biden or Donald Trump to be president.” But Kos and their Civiqs polling found:

Voters might not be thrilled with the choices, but they are definitely not clamoring for a third-party option. In fact, they reject that idea pretty soundly in that 66% would not vote for a spoiler. ... The high voter motivation combined with a very healthy dismissal of a third-party candidate shoots every justification by No Labels for interfering in this election to hell. So why are they doing this? Maybe it’s just the grift. Maybe they just like to be assholes. Or maybe they’re simply Republicans who can’t stomach supporting Trump. Whatever the motivation, they’re playing a dangerous game.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a few quotes worth mentioning. First, from The Messenger:

Republicans view President Joe Biden as ripe for defeat in 2024. But recently, they’ve been zeroing in on who they see as an even easier target: Kamala Harris. As Harris has stepped up her role as campaign trail attack dog, GOP presidential candidates are leaning even harder into attacking the vice president as a way to highlight voters’ wariness over Biden’s age. Given that the 80-year-old Biden is the oldest person to ever occupy the Oval Office, the argument goes, a vote for him is equivalent to elevating Harris — who by many measures is even less popular than her boss — to commander-in-chief.

A bit of a quote from Greg Sargent of the Washington Post discussing the law that calls teaching difficult historical topics in an “impartial” (as in not biased and not woke):

But this idea is deeply flawed. An outbreak of resistance to anti-woke hysteria in Tennessee shows how. This week, a group of teachers filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate Tennessee’s law limiting the teaching of race and gender. The statute, signed by Republican Gov. Bill Lee in 2021, is absurdly vague: It prohibits pedagogy that includes allegedly divisive concepts without defining what that means, leaving teachers fearful that even neutral mentions of such concepts could violate the law.

In the comments is a cartoon by Rob Rogers showing a white man whipping a slave and saying, “I’m just adding to your resumé... You’re welcome!” And a cartoon by Megan Herbert showing a meteorology center where a woman is handing a man a report:

He: This is... A list of fossil fuel companies…? She: Yes, our shortlist of names for this season’s catastrophic storms.

Yes, lets “start naming extreme weather events after the fossil fuel companies that caused them. They knew. They profited. They continue to profit. The world boils.”

Ocean that's hot tub hot

An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reports that the water temperature in Manatee Bay in Florida has set a new record of 101.1F (38.4C). They list some reasons why this may not be taken as an “official” reading that would break a record. The article reminds us: “Hot tub maker Jacuzzi recommends water between 100 and 102 degrees (37.8 and 38.9 Celsius).” When coral gets too hot, above 86F (30C) it expels the algae that gives it color and it turns pale, a process known as bleaching. And the coral near Florida is doing a lot of that. Sometimes it recovers when the water cools. Sometimes it is weakened and dies. Until the 1980s coral bleaching was rare. Now it is routine. Even so, this year it started earlier in the year, making climate scientists nervous. Mark Sumner of Kos shows Postcards from a world on fire. The images show: Fire burning the village of Gennadi on the Greek island of Rhodes. Fires also across Sicily where temps reached 47C (117F). Violent hailstorms in Italy with some stones the size of hands. When combined with flooding it looks like a “shattered Arctic.” High speed winds in Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe that strike without warning. Flooding in Junagadh, India when a flood control system broke and the Nallah River overflowed. Crop failures in Serbia and Belgium. And charts showing rising North Atlantic sea temperatures and shrinking polar ice caps, both much further from the average than in prior years. As Biden signed documents declaring national monuments honoring Emmett Till and his mother Mamie Till-Mobley, Merlin196360 of the Kos community talked about what happened to the men who abducted, tortured, and killed Till in 1955. The whole incident began in Bryant’s grocery store. Carolyn Bryant claimed Till wolf whistled her and grabber her arm. Roy Bryant and half brother JW Milam decided on revenge and killed Till. The all white jury acquitted the men. After that is what gets interesting. Blacks boycotted Bryant’s Grocery. Its income faltered. The two men described to Look magazine what they had done and they were indeed the killers – and were paid $4000 each in desperately needed money. After that whites also boycotted the grocery. They objected not to the murder, but that it brought the scrutiny of uppity northerners. They sold the store and moved to Texas. But even there they were shunned. Milam was reduced to menial jobs, then convicted for bad checks, assault and battery, and using stolen credit cards. He died of painful spinal cancer in 1981. Roy Bryant barely survived on odd jobs and was convicted of welfare fraud. He died of cancer in 1994. His wife Carolyn admitted she lied about what Till had done to her. She wrote a book claiming to be a victim, which prompted a backlash. She also died of cancer. Till may not have gotten justice in the courtroom, but the black community made the murderers pay. In a pundit roundup by Chitown Kev for Kos he quoted Charles Blow of the New York Times, discussing Christian Nationalism, which few people have heard of and fewer can properly describe.

But Christian nationalism isn’t merely “patriotic Christians” and it’s not Christianity, but rather, as the University of Oklahoma sociologist Samuel Perry put it, can be understood as “an impostor Christianity that uses evangelical language to cloak ethnocentric and nationalist loyalties.” And DeSantis is a paragon among the impostors. His anti-woke crusade is a manifestation of the intolerance and battle-thirst of Christian nationalism, and Florida’s distortion of Black history and its attempt to rehabilitate the image of slavery is part of it.

In the comments a cartoon by Mike Luckovich that is titled History according to DeSantis shows Lincoln saying, “I’m ending slavery...” and the slaves responding, “Then how’re we gonna develop new job skills?” A cartoon posted by Marko Silberhand shows Lady Liberty seated and bound and the nasty guy holding a gun to her head while the government buildings behind him are in flames. A cartoon by Kevin Siers shows the GOP logo in a trash heap with pieces of paper that say such things as “Defund FBI,” “Jan 6: Normal Tourism,” “Hunter & Hysteria,” and a few more. The logo says, “When it comes to wrecking a brand, Elon Musk is an amateur!” A cartoon by Cathy Wilcox showing a small boat named Business as Usual. The front of the boat is on fire. A child tries to alert the man lounging at the back. The man says, “What’s the panic? It’s all the way up the other end of the boat.” In the comments of another pundit roundup Garth German took another swipe at Florida education. On the board is “Florida’s new history curriculum: U.S. Slaves developed skills for personal benefit!” A white kid answers – causing a black kid’s head to snap around – “So, you’re saying that paying for college or trade school is a sucker’s deal when I could learn so much by being a slave!” Luckovich posted a cartoon on Kos showing GOP approved versions – Handmaid Barbie, Pay Gap Barbie, Student Debt Barbie, and Forced Birth Barbie.

How unacceptable it is to make masculinity look really stupid

Yesterday I wrote about an article by Laura Clawson of Daily Kos that discussed the conservative condemnation of the movie Barbie. After she wrote that article she went out to see the movie. Of course, she discussed it on Kos. Yes, it is funny and touching. And then there’s what the movie says about men.

We’ve all been exposed to slickly packaged feminism-lite over the years. Mocking and critiquing masculinity, though, is much less expected and accepted. ... But it’s not expected from a movie like this. The scenes in which Ken discovers patriarchy, tries to wrap his mind around it, and tries to import it to Barbie Land (or “Kendom,” as he wants to call it), are some of the funniest and freshest parts of “Barbie.” The sheer right-wing rage over the depiction of Ken—a character none of these people had given any thought to in years, if ever—highlights how unacceptable it is to make masculinity look really, really stupid. Gosling’s Ken doesn’t even understand how the patriarchy works—he thinks it involves horses somehow—but he likes what he sees nonetheless.

Remember this is a capitalist product to boost the Barbie brand. Mattel approved all jokes about itself and its product. But it could have done that with a more traditional kids’s movie, rather than this one geared towards adults and is a bit subversive. It is one that says audiences can be feminist and still like Barbie. Also remember those attacking it are doing so to boost their careers, even if they also show how out of step they are. But the attackers also show how fragile and scare they are, always looking for the next thing they claim is oppressing them. Now that Twitter has been rebranded as “X” Mark Sumner of Kos wonders why Musk bought it in the first place. First, about the name change: Since Mark Zuckerberg has trademarked “X” for “software and social media” and Xbox has copyrights for the name in communications. Musk just bought himself a bunch of litigation. In addition most people associate “X” with porn. But back to why he bought it. The technical platform? It’s not all that complicated and he’s doing his best to trash it. The advertising base? He’s trashing that too by scaring them off. The user community? That depended on moderation and he’s trashed that. The brand? He just changed it. Did he buy it for the express purpose of killing it? I’ve heard (and mentioned) this idea. Twitter is a news source not dependent on the corporate news gatekeepers. But Sumner says that gives Musk too much credit – Musk seems more the guy who is clueless. As for all the other things, such as money transfers, Musk says he’s going to add... Musk can’t even keep Twitter running well. Maybe Musk is just ... a twit. Joan McCarter of Kos wrote about McCarthy dealing with the Freedom Caucus in trying to avert a government shutdown in October. It’s not going well. I’ll let you read the details for yourself, though as I read it I kept thinking about what I’ve heard about other supremacists. You give them what they demand and they demand more. Put another way: They do something outrageous. If that goes well, they do something more outrageous. As they keep getting what they want they get more extreme.

Whatever McCarthy does, it will not be enough to appease the extremists. They have no reason to back down—not when they’re getting what they want and being rewarded mightily for it.

McCarter also reported McCarthy went on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News to say the House’s investigation into the Bidens is “rising to the level of impeachment inquiry.”

The “information” McCarthy is referring to, as Mark Sumner wrote last week [and I discussed], consists of: “Seventeen audio tapes that don’t exist; One WhatsApp message that’s a fake; One “informant” who has been dead for over a decade; One “informant” who is on the run from international authorities after skipping bail; One disagreement by a disgruntled IRS employee who thought he deserved a promotion.” But sure, go ahead and do an impeachment. The government is two months—and just 16 legislative work days—away from running out of funding. How can the American people expect the Republican House to do the work of governing when they have this Donald Trump agenda of revenge to carry out?

Kerry Eleveld of Kos, with numbers from Celinda Lake of the Washington Post, discussed some electoral math. About 4 million Gen Z people age into the electorate every year. The oldest Gen Z are 26 now. About 2.5 million elderly Americans die each year. Some of the elections in 2020 and 2022 were decided by very small margins. So even if Biden has a rematch with the nasty guy the electorate will be different, one that is more interested in policies than candidates. And Republicans seemed to have missed the memo about that last point. Davidkc of the Kos community wrote he will soon have to move out of Florida. There is a new law, Protections for Medical Conscience, that allows refusing medical care for “sincerely held religious, moral, or ethical beliefs.” And he’s gay. Since he’s approaching retirement and medical needs will likely mount and since he and his husband refuse the closet, leaving is the only safe choice.

Republican lawmakers behind the law claimed that it had absolutely nothing to do with discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community. However, the law clearly states that health care providers can't use the law to deny health care based on a patient's race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and Republican lawmakers rejected attempts by Democrats to extend those protections to gender identity and sexuality. That’s a tell right there.

I had reported that Ohio abortion rights groups had submitted enough signatures to get a constitutional amendment on the November ballot. An Associated Press article posted on Kos reports that state officials have certified there are enough valid signatures and the proposal will be on the ballot this fall. Now to get past the August vote featuring a different constitutional amendment to raise the threshold to get constitutional amendments approved.

Gov't shutdown, not over runaway spending, but abortion

Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos reported that Republicans are seeing two in three counties with major universities are trending much more Democratic. And they’re getting worried. They wonder how to quash college voters. The big example is in Wisconsin. Dane County, home of Madison and the University of Wisconsin, cast more ballots in the recent state Supreme Court election than the most populous Milwaukee County. And 82% of Dane County’s votes went to the pro-choice Judge Janet Protasiewicz. She won by 11 points in a 50-50 state. Yeah, the problem is these younger voters – not the policies that are ticking them off. See... Joan McCarter of Kos reported that while Republicans can’t get a national abortion ban through Congress and past Biden right now, they are forcing anti-abortion (and anti-trans) poison pills into every must-pass legislation. The big agriculture bill has an amendment that would force the FDA to stop allowing abortion pills be sent by mail (as they prevent the FDA from regulating nicotine in cigarettes). Bills to fund bank regulators, the IRS, and other government departments have amendments to deny coverage of abortion service and gender-affirming care to federal employees and their families. And that’s just the start. The method is to overwhelm the Senate. If the majority Senate doesn’t go along, Republicans are fine with forcing a government shutdown. This maximizes disruption (which they want) and maybe some of their efforts succeed. There’s a convoluted reasoning that any federal support of abortion is an attack on states’ rights – even where abortion is legal. But since their goal is a federal ban on abortion to supersede states rights no need to try to wrap your head around their reasoning.

All of these poison pill amendments are a means of softening the ground for what comes next from Congress. If Republicans keep the House and get the Senate, then get the trifecta by winning the White House, that national ban will be job one. That is where Republicans are playing with electoral fire. By injecting abortion into every single funding bill, they’re going to make the shutdown fight about our reproductive rights and their push for a de facto national abortion ban. Republicans won’t be able to put the gloss of the deficit or “out-of-control spending” on a shutdown. It will be all about abortion. Government shutdowns are never popular, but when the issue threatens a fundamental right, it will be disastrous for Republicans.

The new movie Barbie set a record for the largest opening weekend of female-directed movie. Which means, as Laura Clawson of Kos reported, all the conservative angst trying to get people to boycott the movie didn’t work. There were complaints of “disappointingly low T from Ken.” Meaning he wasn’t macho enough. Another called it a “man-hating Woke propaganda fest.” Since “doctor Barbie” is played by a trans woman there is a complaint the movie was taken over by the trans mafia.

It’s important not to lose sight of what this is about: It’s part of an effort to enforce gender roles according to right-wing preferences, a backlash against the movie’s undermining of the ways Barbie has represented femininity for generations now. Although interestingly, they’re really upset about the representation of Ken, as if Ken had ever been some major figure in American visions of masculinity. ... One reason for the frenzied rage over the movie’s message about gender as a whole is the sense that masculinity and femininity as universal, unchanging truths are being undermined. The idea that Ryan Gosling as Ken is not a rippling specimen of dominant manhood links to anti-trans bigotry. The anger about both is rooted in the belief that a rigid gender binary is sacred and in the fear that it’s slipping away from them as the kids these days move away from strong adherence to said binary.

That strong adherence to the gender binary is because of their belief that men are supposed to be superior to women. A guy who isn’t sufficiently dominant or a person who defies their gender role gets their swift condemnation. In the comments of a pundit roundup for Kos is a cartoon by Michael Franklin showing Lisa Simpson in front of a screen that says, “If felons can’t vote... then felons should not be allowed to run for president.” We’re familiar with the big guys of renewable energy, wind and solar. Mark Sumner of Kos discussed a little brother – geothermal. There may be a breakthrough to expanding what it can deliver. Geothermal can work even when the wind blows and at night and doesn’t need the storage. The way it works is simple: pump cold water into the ground, hot water comes out. That gain in energy can drive a turbine. To make that happen the heat source has to be within a reasonable drilling distance and the rocks have to be permeable to allow water to be pumped through them. The breakthrough is in the case where the rocks are hot but are too dense and impermeable. Fervo Energy has a demonstration system that showed that problem can be fixed through ... fracking. This should – in theory – have much less environmental impact than the fracking used to extract natural gas. There are fewer wells and since they are much deeper there should be less threat to polluting or depleting ground water. Even so there is still the risk of small earthquakes. This has exciting possibilities to our energy hungry world. We need that alternate energy source because... Pakalolo of the Kos community reported that the Antarctic ice has melted to an all time low. One might think with the heat dome over Phoenix this might be expected. But Antarctica is in winter – and a very cold winter this year. How cold? Today’s reading was -82.9C (about -117F). Yeah, that cold. Yet the sea ice is melting due to the warmth of the surrounding oceans. A chart of sea ice extent over the last few decades shows 2023 way lower than other years. In the comments of another pundit roundup is a cartoon by Peter Kuper. It shows two men sitting on a park bench. Both wear masks because of the swirling smoke. One tells the other, “...But it’s a dry smoke.” Just a bit further down is one by Matt Golding. A parent and child look at a blazing hillside. The parent says, “One day, all this will be yours...cough!...to deal with.” Charles Jay of the Kos community had, as part of a previous gig, did a few interviews with Tony Bennett, who died recently. In amongst the stories is this, first Jay, then Bennett:

“I Left My Heart in San Francisco” was released as the B-side on a single, but it would earn Bennett his first two Grammys, including Record of the Year, and become his theme song. But Bennett said the song impacted him in another way:

“The greatest thing that ever happened to me as an entertainer was hearing how the soldiers waiting to come home from Vietnam were sitting around the fire and singing ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’ because when they came home they’d first have to come through San Francisco. Even today because of the Iraqi war, every time I sing … ‘When I come home to you San Francisco,’ I think of the boys coming home.”

Diversity hire through affirmative action doesn't mean unqualified

My Sunday movie was Broker, a Korean film from 2021. I was intrigued by it because it features two men taking care of a baby. No, they’re not gay. They deal in underground child placement. For a price. This particular case seems a bit sketchy from the start. A church has an orphanage and as part of that has a baby box by the door. One woman places a baby on the ground near the box. Then a woman (the same one?) shifts the baby into the box. The men retrieve the baby – and delete the video of the baby in the box. The men find a note saying the mother will come back. They disregard it because they see lots of those notes and never see the mother. But the next day she shows up and she joins the men on a trip to another city to meet a potential couple because she wants to approve who will raise her child. There are two women police officers trying to nail the men for infant trafficking. There’s also the widow of the baby’s father who sends goons after them. Along the way they stop at the orphanage where one of the men grew up and one of the boys hides in their van. The question is will the two men (or maybe one of them), the mother, the stowaway boy, and the infant form a family? There are a lot of hints they might and hints they might not. I enjoyed this one. Aldous Pennyfarthing of the Daily Kos community reported a bill has been introduced in the Ohio legislature would make some drag performances a felony. Penalties increase if a minor sees the performance and up again if a child under 13 sees it. The bill is part of a long list of Republican efforts in many states targeting the LGBTQ community. One of the sponsors claims it really isn’t about drag and insists the term “drag queen” isn’t in the bill.

As the Plain Dealer noted, the bill’s definition of “adult cabaret performance” instead identifies drag queens as “performers or entertainers who exhibit a gender identity that is different from the performer’s or entertainer’s gender assigned at birth using clothing, makeup, prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts, or other physical markers.”

Which pretty much sounds like a drag queen. So, as in many other places, Republicans are not real good with honesty. Singer Tony Bennett recently died at the age of 96. I admire his long career, though he didn’t perform the type of music that I like (which is classical). Even so I appreciated this thread (on Threadreader) by Michael Harriot about Bennett’s big break. Most of the thread is about the rise of the Harlem Renaissance after WWI. His story ends with Pearl Bailey organizing shows at a white club in Greenwich Village in 1949. Every black entertainer would have been delighted to be a part of it, but Bailey wanted to make her show “diverse.”

So she hired a white opener, probably the least famous musician in the place So when Bob Hope asked who her opening act was, bc he wanted someone to take on the road, Pearl Bailey was like “Some local kid named Tony Bennett. You like him?” The rest is history. Now here is the moral of the story: Just because Tony Bennett was a diversity hire who got his job through affirmative action… It doesn’t mean he wasn’t qualified.

Tevye of the Kos community told the story of Shayden Walker of Amarillo, Texas. He’s 11 and has several conditions, including autism, ADHD, and bipolar. He gets bullied. A lot. On July 3, Shayden knocked on the door of Brennan and Angell Ray. He was lonely and in desperate need of a friend. He had met the couple before and knew they were kind. Shayden asked if they knew and kids his age. But the ones Brennan mention had become bullies. Brennan and Angell posted a video of the situation and started a fundraiser. They wanted to show how sweet Shayden was and how destructive bullying is. It went viral so fast Angell had no time to warn Shayden’s mother. Within 24 hours the fundraiser hit $37,000 and they shut it down. Some of the money went to Shayden for a vacation. There were several offers for travel destinations. Some money was donated to nearby tornado victims and towards relief for Ukraine. The video has topped 100 million views and Shayden now had friends around the world. Local residents created a “Shine Like Shayden” to offer their support and to take a stand against bullying. Attendance was quite good. There are bullies in the world. There are also a lot of wonderful people. Down in the comments rebel ga posted an image that says:

Coupon for: One Free Hug. Infinite uses. Redeemable at any nearby friendly person.

They should believe in conspiracies. Because they’re conspirators.

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos wrote about election conspiracy theories:

Republicans should believe in an elaborate scheme involving thousands of individuals and hundreds of officials cooperating to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Because that’s exactly what happened.

Those thousands included those who stormed the Capitol. Over 600 have plead guilty, 124 have faced trials. They’re merely foot soldiers. Members of Oath Keepers were convicted of seditious conspiracy. They are the followers. This week Michigan AG Dana Nessel charged the 16 people who falsely claimed they were Michigan’s electors in the 2020 election. In all there are 84 false electors from seven states. And many were prominent in the Republican Party in their state.

These 84 people aren’t just mid-level officers in the insurrection: They’re people who absolutely knew better. They weren’t people picked off the street, or even volunteers from a Trump rally. They were insiders. Those who showed up at the Capitol to scream and break windows may have been ignorant enough to believe Trump and the angry rhetoric flying their way. These false electors were fully aware they were lying when they signed their names to fake certificates while claiming to be duly appointed representatives of their state’s voting results. They were knowledgeable, willing participants in a scheme to overturn the outcome of a free and fair election for president of the United States.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, helped the scheme on other ways, such as showing video clips edited to imply election workers were committing fraud. We know who was at the top of the scheme: the nasty guy, Meadows, Eastman, Clark, Flynn, Powell, Giuliani and many others. They are the authors of the scheme.

Keeping Trump in power was the goal of the scheme, but Trump wasn’t alone. There were literally hundreds of Republicans who were aware of what was going on and took part in the efforts to defeat the outcome of a democratic election. They should believe in conspiracies. Because they’re conspirators. And they’re excited about giving it another try.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworking quoted Sean Illing at Vox discussing how racial resentment is killing white people.

Why do many working-class white Americans support politicians whose policies are literally killing them? This is the question sociologist and psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl tries to answer in his new book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. The book is a serious look at how cultural attitudes associated with “whiteness” encourage white people to adopt political views — like opposition to gun laws or the Affordable Care Act — that undercut their own health. … “You can’t really understand why people might support those agendas if you just start the conversation today. There are long trajectories of anti-government sentiment that course through the South that Trump has tapped into. There are also concerns about what it means to have the government intervene in ways that equally distribute resources that working-class white populations fear might undermine their own sense of privilege.

That last bit reminds me of the story of a white man with a severe illness that could be cured with treatment through Medicaid. But his state has curtailed Medicaid. He supports that limited access, even though it dooms himself, because it keeps black people from getting it. His position in the social hierarchy is more important than his life. In the comments is a cartoon by Rod Emmerson of the New Zealand Herald. The cartoon shows a woman with a grocery cart and a long receipt on an ice floe. On an adjacent floe are two penguins and one says, “Personally, I’d say the cost of living is the least of your worries – but what would I know.” Kos of Kos discussed Putin pulling out of the grain deal. He noted the deal had also protected Russian shipping. If President Erdogan of Turkey wants to play hardball he could protect Ukrainian ships. If Russia attacked Turkey would likely win. But that brings NATO into the war. Putin would likely back down, but Biden has been adamant NATO avoid anything that might broaden the war, especially if most of this food goes to China and Africa. Europe does get a lot of Ukrainian grain – shipped by rail. NATO isn’t protecting the ships because at Ukraine’s request Turkey invoked the Montreux Convention which closed the Bosphorus strait. Warships may not pass unless returning to their home ports. That also means Russia can’t send ships from other ports. And neither can NATO. Russia said it would assume ships heading towards Ukrainian ports to have military cargo. Ukraine can flip it around – any ship headed to Russian occupied Ukraine may be assumed to have military cargo. And that is no longer an idle threat. That means shipping to Crimea is in danger. In a post from back in April Laura Clawson of Kos discussed the ideal retirement age. She was prompted by a piece in the New York Times that comes across as propaganda for raising the Social Security age. The piece says a worker should continue working as long as their work is not compromised – until the worker is no longer of use to the employer. The article then misuses life expectancy as part of its argument. Many discussions of retirement – going back to German Chancellor Otto von Bismark in 1881 – talk about life expectancy at birth. When it was difficult to survive childhood, having those deaths influence when an adult retires is dishonest. The Times article misrepresents – Clawson describes it as ragingly dishonest – that Social Security began as “political smoke and mirrors ... a symbolic offering, accessible only to the lucky citizens who managed to survive well into old age.” So, apparently someone with a desk job should work until their work is affected. It takes the article 15 paragraphs to admit that not everyone works at a desk job and has good health care. There are people who do manual labor. Black people tend to have lower quality health care and develop disabilities at earlier ages and fewer of them get Social Security.

The idea that retirement should not just be a matter of the convenience of employers, available only to those workers who absolutely cannot do their jobs effectively any longer, only shows up in the very final paragraphs of the piece. Nor does the article consider that, in a country that doesn’t require paid sick leave or paid parental leave, let alone paid vacations, for many people retirement is the only time in their lives they’ll have to relax and do things for themselves.

A subtext is that the question of retirement age applies only to people who need Social Security in retirement. Few people can live on Social Security alone – people do that because work has become impossible. The goal should not be, “How many more years of work could employers squeeze out of people without seeing the work product suffer too much?” Disclosure: I retired from a corporate job more than a decade ago. They nudged me out. I am not yet taking Social Security. I did spend five years in a career that would not have paid me enough to live on – I could indulge in it because I had the corporate pension.

$50 million isn't enough, neither is $2 billion

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos posted an update about the weather and climate. Several cities broke temperature records. It wasn’t by tenths of a degree, but some by as much as 3 degrees. Phoenix broke a record for the number of days above 110F. The record was broken at 19 days and the new streak is at 21 days (actually at 22 now because Sumner posted this yesterday. Because of crop failures there could be significant shortages of food soon. The heat dome over the American Southwest (there is also one over southern Europe and probably a couple more around the world) is a high pressure area that traps heat, which increases the pressure and the heat. Eventually, it will become unstable – but not soon. By the middle of next week that heat dome may spread all the way to Missouri. When it gets that hot people will run the air conditioner, stressing the electrical grid. Texas, whose grid is often unreliable, is being saved by solar energy. In a pundit roundup Denise Oliver Velez posted cartoons in the comments. In a section on cartoons about the climate is one by Jack Ohman with “New climate change vacation destinations...” One could “Surf Vermont, Fish downtown Miami, Smoke Jump New York, or Sail the North Pole!” I listened to an episode of Gaslit Nation hosted by Andrea Chalupa, this one was the first part of a discussion with Douglas Rushkoff. He has written several books, the most recent being Team Human and Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. Rushkoff was accepted into the Tech Bro world because he provided insight into where some technologies might be headed. Because of that acceptance those billionaires also started sharing their plans for how they would ride out the apocalypse. They proposed self-contained bunkers with Navy Seals to keep away the rabble. Rushkoff started pushing back with questions. When the economy collapses and your fortune becomes worthless what keeps the Seals loyal to you? Won’t you need to include your neighbors in how you stock supplies so they don’t turn on you? Well, yeah, that’s a good point. What about their neighbors? After a couple rounds of that they begin to wonder where this is going. Rather than retreating to your bunker perhaps you should spend some effort in preventing the world from reaching the apocalypse? Rushkoff noted the greatest polluters are the 1%. If we all lived as if we had only $5 million our global warming would be halted. Rushkoff also talked about capitalism and how it is practiced here in the US. The concepts of a job and wages happened in the late Middle Ages. Before then people had their own small businesses. But these business owners were getting too rich for the aristocracy. So they were banned and charter monopolies were created and one had to work for them. Our tax system, including the capital gains tax, is messing with our economy and environment. A company could be quite effective if it stayed rather small and sustainable. It could provide a good living for the owners and workers. But our tax system puts the focus on the stock price. For tax reasons investors want that to grow. The only way to do that is to keep the company growing. Rushkoff asked students at a business school whether they would be satisfied with making $50 million. Most of us would be ecstatic to have $50 million. But the students all said no, that’s not enough. Even though they would be much happier with $50 million than $1 billion and had a much greater chance of reaching that smaller goal they wanted the big bucks. Early in its life Twitter was making $2 billion a year. Who wouldn’t want to tell their parents their company was making that much? But Wall Street said that wasn’t enough. It had to keep growing. Tech companies face an additional expectation that growth should be infinite. To combat that mindset Rushkoff has a few things to think about. Do you value your kids for their utility and production to the future? Or are they of value as they are are? Does your child have value even before they speak or read? Make sure they know that value. Do you have a job because there is work to be done or do you have a job for society to justify you participating in the spoils of capitalism? As part of a discussion of AI he said we should let the machines do the work. We humans would then be able to to leave STEM and return to the humanities. Joan McCarter of Kos reported on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s passing a bill for ethics form of the Supreme Court. The vote was along party lines. It next goes to the full Senate. Considering how the Republicans acted in the committee the full Senate will filibuster it. Some of McCarter’s reporting:

Republicans on the panel were so worked up about this you’d have thought the committee was considering impeaching all of the conservative justices rather than saying that they should probably disclose when a super-wealthy friend takes them around the world for free on his luxury yacht. ... The Republicans were predictably shrill in defending the indefensible and hypocritical and in doing so, proved that the court they’ve constructed is undeniably political. ... Their performance was as shameless as ever, particularly when it came to circling the wagons around Thomas. Their defense of Thomas was so impassioned that one could justifiably wonder if they were playing to an audience of one: Leonard Leo and his checkbook.

Leo is the head of the Federalist Society, which engineered this conservative court. The latest story about him is a $1.8 million campaign to create film praising Thomas, advertising to boost positive content about him in internet searches, and a book about him. Don’t forget the “Justice Thomas Fan Account” on Twitter. All this support of the Court by Republicans as a Quinnipiac University poll showed that 70% of Americans think the justices are too influenced by politics. Navigator Research released focus group results where participants called the court, “corrupt,” “brazen,” and “infuriating.”

Republicans are doing their best to put a negative spin on the unveiling of this corruption. They insist that ”far-left dark money” has financed these revelations in the media about the largesse being heaped upon conservative justices by the Leo network of billionaires. They’re not denying the truth of these stories: They’re expressing outrage that their Supreme Court justices are the subject of public scrutiny.

I had written why Ron DeathSantis was out to flip New College of Florida from progressive to white supremacist. Laura Clawson of Kos reported the latest consequence – those in the faculty who can flee are. Out of fewer than 100 full-time faculty 36 are leaving. Richard Corcoran, the DeathSantis puppet now serving as college president whined the departing faculty wasn’t considerate enough. The tiny violin is appropriate for Corcoran, but for the students this is a real problem.

There will be just one neuroscience professor this academic year, down from three, the Tampa Bay Times reports, which means there will be no upper-level neuroscience classes. That’s a big problem for juniors and seniors who have started a major in neuroscience that they now can’t finish.

DeathSantis also decreed that textbooks include the sentence “Slaves developed skills, which in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” In the comments of another pundit roundup Denise Oliver Velez posted a cartoon by Pia Guerra with that sentence on the board.

Teacher: “Class what is our greatest take-away here?” Class, shouting as one: “That anyone who says this with a straight face can not be trusted with our vote!”

Way down in the comments is a tweet by Dr. Marvin Dunn showing the hull of a slave ship with the occupants saying:

We can't wait to get to America and those "personal benefits" of being slaves. Maybe we will be lucky and get taken to Florida!

Hunter of Kos looked at the current chapter of the saga of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the efforts of Republicans to try to turn it into a scandal. He works from a post by Marcy Wheeler of Empty Wheel that discussed some of the many oddities in this story. My summary will leave a lot out. There were a bunch of changes to Hunter’s iCloud and email accounts consistent with a phishing attack at a time when he was in rehab. Meaning he was hacked. Then there was this laptop left for repair that was never picked up, implying it wasn’t Hunter’s but filled with his data and planted by someone else. A copy of the data gets in the hands of Rudy Giuliani – and right there we can tell the whole thing is rigged. Along the way there is, of course, ties to someone in Russia.

Oh, and there also hasn't been much found on the laptop that wasn't already known: Hunter Biden has suffered through addiction, has spent substantial cash on drugs and sex workers, and has muddled through his troubled life slightly better than most addicts might due to his perceived closeness to his well-connected father. But it would be a hell of a thing if this episode turned out to be exactly the Giuliani-assisted foreign operation it appeared to be from the moment the New York Post wrote it up.

A drag show is not a foreign threat

Just three days after finishing one book I’ve finished another. This one is Dear Martin, by Nic Stone. The main character is Justyce. (Only three books back was another with a character named Justice – a trend?) This Justyce is black, 17 years old, and getting through his senior year at an elite preparatory school in Atlanta. He lives on campus and is one of eight black students. And he’s dealing with a whole lot of racism. In the opening chapter he’s come to the aid of his ex-girlfriend who can pass for white and is quite drunk. After he gets her into the back seat of her car so he can drive her home he’s arrested and handcuffed. The cop won’t tell him the charge and won’t let him speak. In his Societal Evolution class, which discusses issues of the day, Jared blathers on about how racism is over and affirmative action is now reverse racism. And the racist incidents pile up from there. Not all is bleak – he does have enough successes to keep the reader cheering for him. To help him sort through the racial issues he writes letters to Martin Luther King in his notebook. He also studies King’s letters and sermons. But as the racial incidents pile up and get stronger he wonders: King was a good man. They still shot him. So why be good? He does all he can to do what he’s supposed to – study hard and make good grades – and people still see him only for the color of his skin. Youthful missteps are turned against him. He feels he can’t win. So why be good? As the incidents pile up I began to wonder if the author was trying to cram all the racial situations faced by black male teens into one book, perhaps making them more relatable by having them all happen to a character we get to know and root for. But having them all happen to one guy in one year doesn’t really happen. Does it? That’s when I reminded myself I’m not black. I don’t experience racism. This could very well be what young black men go through every year. This isn’t exactly a book one enjoys, though there are plenty of enjoyable moments. I kept going to see how Jus would answer the question he posed. I’ve talked about Michigan’s barely Democratic majority, 56-54, in the state House and what they’ve been able to do with it, including gun control laws. So it’s disappointing, but not surprising, that, as David Nir of Daily Kos Elections reported, conservative activists have launched recall campaigns against five House Democrats. Petitions are being filed with the State Board of Canvassers to soon start to collect signatures. Since there was record turnout last November to keep Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in office the number of required signatures has gone up. And – oh, look here! – the window to gather those signatures is only 60 days, thanks to the previous Republican majority who thought they would be in power forever. The reason why activists want to recall these representatives is they voted for the new red flag law that allows courts to removed guns from those who might endanger themselves or others. Well, also the activists think they’re vulnerable. Another aspect of this effort is that the Michigan Republican Party is essentially broke. There is a great deal of infighting and donors have closed their wallets. As part of a pundit roundup for Kos Denise Oliver Velez posted cartoons in the comments. A few of them are about RFK Jr. I’m old enough to remember his father who was his brother’s Attorney General and helped get the Loving v. Virginia case to strike down bans on interracial marriage before the Supreme Court. I also remember when RFK was the hope of the Democratic Party in 1968 – until he was assassinated. We were all asked to “Pray for Bobby.” His son is ... quite different. Yeah, he’s running for president in the Democratic Party, but he’s much more pleasing to Republicans. His big thing seems to be vaccine conspiracy theories. On one cartoon Taylor Jones showed a famous line from the father and a line the son might say.

RFK: Some men see things as they are and ask, “Why?” I dream of things that never were and ask “Why not?” Junior: I see things that don’t exist and ask, “Why not twist them into bizarre conspiracies?”

Adam Zyglis drew a cartoon of Camelot, where JFK wears a crown and RFK Junior Joker wears a jester hat. Velez included a tweet from Laurie:

Kerry Kennedy is denouncing the antisemitism espoused by her brother Robert Kennedy Jr., and does not represent what his father stood for. RFK Jr’s family does not support his bid for the presidency either. Time to drop out of the race!!

More comments say Joseph Kennedy III and perhaps a couple other cousins have also condemned Junior’s run. Hmm ... Is Junior suffering trauma from his father’s murder 55 years ago? Not that I’m an armchair psychologist. Mark Sumner of Kos posted a Ukraine update that answered some of my questions. A couple days ago I wondered exactly what was meant by Putin declaring he was pulling out of the deal that allowed Ukrainian grain to travel through the Black Sea to feed the world. Putin has shown us what he meant: * There have been several waves of missile attacks on Odesa, the primary grain port. Much of the attacks focused on those grain ports. * Putin declared any ship in the Black Sea heading towards Ukrainian ports will be assumed to carry military cargo and will be treated accordingly. That’s not just ships with Ukraine’s flag, but all ships. Is attacking all ships all bluster? Someone might like to test that. But Turkey is much less likely to risk ships to escort Ukrainian ships. And because insurance companies won’t insure ships going to or from Ukraine other countries are less likely to test for bluster. Also, I wondered whether Putin would go to the BRICS conference in South Africa in August and risk arrest for war crimes. The word now is he won’t attend. One item to be discussed at that conference is how to undercut the dollar as the world’s default currency. The decline of the Russian economy makes progress on that goal less likely. The replacement currency certainly won’t be the ruble, with the way it has been falling lately. Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos reproduced a debate between Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan, who is gay, and Florida Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart. They were at House subcommittee debate on defense spending and topic was drag shows at a military installation. I had mentioned this a few days ago. This is part of the defense funding debate because Republicans, especially Sen. Tommy Tuberville, have attached a whole bunch of culture war things to the defense bill. Part of that is this drag queen issue and part is because the military pays for service members and family to travel out of state if the state where they are posted has banned abortion. First Pocan established that the drag shows cost $21K in an $850 billion budget. They also paid for a few $25 pride flags. Then the fun part: During WWII the movie This Is the Army, with Ronald Reagan – the Republican St. Ronnie – in the cast. The movie was about soldiers putting on a show and some of them are in drag. It raised $10 million for the Army Relief Fund. That’s three times what the Wizard of Oz had earned by that time. Pocan concluded:

Now, so, for all the worries about, I think you said, the focus on foreign threats that we’re dealing with. A Pride flag is not a foreign threat. A drag show is not a foreign threat. Ronald Reagan is not a foreign threat. But having this kind of rhetoric on the floor so you can get people who want to pander and fundraise to certain aspects of your base is a threat to this democracy. So I just want to put it out there. I didn’t plan on debating, but every time you put this stupid crap up that has nothing to do with appropriations, I’m going to stand up and say something.

Of course, I looked up the movie. One can watch it online. I watched a trailer and think I’ll skip it. It was the highest grossing movie musical until 1954 when White Christmas beat it out. It’s still in the top 40.

Voters on both sides fearing the destruction of their way of life

Last weekend my friend and debate partner asked what I knew of and thought of the group No Labels. I had heard about them and knew this is a group trying to claim they were non-partisan or moderate, or something like that. But my sources (mostly Daily Kos) called the group Republicans, with all the freight that has acquired these last few decades, pretending they’re not. My friend agreed with me. This group could be trouble. The question before us is whether they would pull Republicans to their cause or pull independents or centrist Democrats. Joan McCarter of Kos reported on the No Labels appearance in New Hampshire, featuring Sen. Joe Manchin, the guy who calls himself a Democrat but blocked key parts of Biden’s first two year agenda. The talk was a lot of blather about “common sense,” meaningless both-sides pabulum on abortion, vague explanations of why they really aren’t a party embarking on a campaign, and gosh of course not denials they’re funded by rich people in their effort to oust Biden and his threat of higher taxes. They claim they won’t allow the nasty guy back in office as they say they won’t be spoilers but won’t say how they will avoid that. In a pundit roundup Greg Dworking of Kos quoted Jill Lawrence of The Bulwark in a piece titled Joe Manchin is Attacking Democrats As If He’s a Republican.

My theory based on the evidence to date is that ultimately, when Manchin announces his decision at year’s end, he will tell us he is running for re-election. But first he will tease state and national Republicans with the prospect of an open Senate seat and/or a bipartisan No Labels ticket that polling shows would drain votes from President Joe Biden and elect the GOP nominee. If that is Donald Trump, it’s no stretch to predict disaster will follow.

Yeah, Manchin is doing all he can to keep the spotlight on himself and to be the spoiler, the one controlling events. It’s a very superior attitude. In another roundup Dworkin quoted Aaron Zitner and Simon Levian of the Wall Street Journal:

The animating force in the Republican presidential primary, many voters and policy leaders say, is a feeling that American society—the government, the media, Hollywood, academia and big business—has been corrupted by liberal ideas about race, gender and other social matters. Democrats, in turn, feel that conservatives have used their political power in red states and in building a Supreme Court majority to undermine abortion rights and threaten decades of work to broaden equal rights for minority groups. That has turned the next race for the White House into an existential election, with voters on both sides fearing not just a loss of political influence but also the destruction of their way of life.

Back in March NPR host Ayesha Rascoe talked to sociologist Matthew Desmond, author of the new book Poverty, by America. His main point: The rich – really anyone who isn’t poor – benefits by keeping people poor. Desmond said:

We consume cheap goods and services. We invest in companies that have a record of union busting and exploitation. We protect lavish tax breaks that accrue to the wealthiest Americans, and that starves anti-poverty spending. And then we have the audacity to ask, how can we afford to drive down poverty in this country? - even though the country does a lot more to subsidize affluence?

Over the last 20 years evictions are up. The number of homeless school children is up. Those living on incredibly small incomes is up. Those living on just food stamps is up. But people so miserable should shame us in a nation with this many resources. The amount of money allocated to the poor is quite good. But the amount actually reaching the poor is much smaller. For the TANF program only 22 cents of each dollar reaches a needy family. TANF is distributed as block grants and states have a lot of discretion in how they spend it – like for Christian summer camps, anti-abortion centers, and sports stadiums. Republicans like to complain about welfare dependency. Not surprisingly, data doesn’t support that claim. However, there is a problem of welfare avoidance – about 20% of people who qualify don’t take the benefit. They’re terrible at being dependent. Desmond didn’t say why they don’t sign up. There is a mindset, some of it baked into how these systems work, that this is zero-sum and divisive. Why do they get money when it comes out of my taxes? But we should reject that.

A recent study showed that if Americans in the top 1% of the income distribution just paid the taxes they owed – not paid more taxes, or, you know, had a higher rate, just paid what they owed, stop evading what they owed, we, as a nation, would raise an additional $175 billion a year. OK, that's almost enough to lift everyone out of poverty. ... If a lot of us decided, look, I'm really investing in these companies that treat their workers right, I'm going to show up at my zoning board meeting on Tuesday night and I'm going to stand up and say, no, I want affordable housing in my community, and if I'm going to write my congressperson and say, what you're doing is too small, we have more resources, reach for something better, all this poverty around me is unacceptable – and if we did that to virtue signal, you know, I could live with that for now.

Another $175 billion would lift most people out of poverty? How big is the military budget this year? Back in 2012 I read and wrote about the book A Political Reading of the Life of Jesus by George W. Baldwin. I first learned about the advantages of keeping some people poor – the inexpensive goods and services – and all of us who aren’t poor are complicit in it (how many people switch to Walmart because of the low prices that kill off other stores in their area?). This book also got me thinking over the last decade about another aspect of what’s going on. We want other people to be poor so we look better in comparison. We’re too invested in the social hierarchy, which then mandates someone must be lower than ourselves.

Parents send their children into danger because home is more dangerous

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reports on a COVID milestone. One of the ways to measure the deadly effects of the virus is to estimate the number of deaths if the virus hadn’t been around and compare that to the actual number of deaths. This difference is the excess deaths attributed to the virus. That can also be shown as a percent. And in the US for the first half of this year that has been 0%. In terms of deaths, the pandemic is over. Yes, that means people are getting sick, sometimes quite sick, from COVID, but they’re doing a lot less dying. There are a couple factors at work. One is that the circulating variants are quite similar to Omicron. So between people having caught it already, having been vaccinated, or having already died about 96% of Americans are protected. The other is medical workers know a lot more about how to treat the virus, reducing the rate of death. Variants of the virus are out there. It can still mutate. The next big wave may never come or may come next week. For now, let’s celebrate the milestone. Sumner had been convince living with the virus would be impossible. He thought we had to eradicate it and were doing a terrible job of it. This news is much better than expected. Kos of Kos asks an important question: Would you prefer to live next to the person complaining about what immigrants are doing to the country, or would you rather live next to the immigrant? At the top of this post is a photo of the words:

No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.

Those against immigration dehumanize them as criminals or opportunists, those hoping to take advantage of hospitality. Yet, data are clear that immigration supports our economy. Florida is now struggling to get enough farm workers. There seems to be a big disconnect in those who can’t get enough farm workers yet still think the nasty guy is the best president ever.

People don’t leave their homes on a lark. They don’t say goodbye to everything they know, the people they love, and the communities they belong to for funsies. They don’t get on rickety boats to cross the Mediterranean, like the one that recently sank and killed over 600 Pakistani, Egyptian, Palestinian, and Syrian migrants, simply because they want a higher-paying gig. It is always an act of desperation. ... The people making these trips are just as desperate as the Latin American immigrants who brave the gauntlet of thieves and rapists, a dangerous river, and a blistering hot desert on the American side full of even more bandits, plus right-wing militia nutbags. Parents will send their children into danger because gang and drug violence at home is even more dangerous. So let’s ask that question again: Who would you rather live next to? The people who risk everything to come work, to find a better life and send money to their families back home, or those who would steal water left for migrants in the desert, point guns at them, and vilify them for their desperation?

A ProPublica article written by Paul Kiel and posted on Kos discussed some of the tax avoidance tricks used by billionaires. The example in this case is Harlan Crow, revealed a few months ago as the sugar daddy for Justice Clarence Thomas. The article focuses on the way Crow uses his yacht, which frequently hosted Thomas, to reduce taxes. The big way to do this is have a wholly owned corporation own the yacht, then write off its cost through depreciation and business expenses. To actually claim the yacht as part of a business it must be chartered. No problem – the company charters it to Crow. He pays for its use, though well under what the company shells out. The company loses money. And Crow gets a tax writeoff. As a billionaire he paid a 15% rate, lower than many middle-income workers. ProPublica got a trove of IRS data with tax info on thousands of wealthy people. I read parts of the original ProPublica article. It’s a long one. They say the data was provided to them after they published a series of articles scrutinizing the IRS. Beyond that they are not disclosing how they got the data. The stash includes returns from Crow. What Crow did is likely illegal. There is no evidence the yacht was chartered to anyone else, which means the charter service isn’t a real business. The article discusses a second way of getting around the law. Above a certain threshold gifts are subject to a gift tax. What Crow gave Thomas is likely way above that. But Crow claims he doesn’t need to report or pay it because his company still owns the yacht – which ignores the value of such things as the services of the yacht’s staff. Since the rich rarely report these sorts of gifts the only way the IRS learns about them is through an audit. That’s a big reason why Republicans were so intent on keeping the IRS budget so low that it didn’t have the manpower to audit the rich.

“A lot of these tax rules were developed in an era where there were a few millionaires and the tiniest number of billionaires,” [Pace Law School professor Bridget] Crawford said, “and now there are many. This is becoming a more visible problem.”

Charles Jay of the Kos community discussed the current situation of Yevgeny Progozhin, the head of the Wagner group that staged a mini coup in Russia. A photo of him has surfaced, the first since the coup, perhaps taken at a camp in Belarus. Of more importance is that for now Russian authorities have dropped insurgency charges. He has already been described as a traitor, so maybe Putin will threaten him with investigating his finances. But there’s still an arrest warrant for Prigozhin in the US. He was indicted for his role in running a troll farm that interfered in the 2016 election. He was placed on the FBI’s most wanted list and there is a reward for information on Russian interference in US elections. Progozhin has both denied he interfered in our elections and boasted that his interference was successful and that he founded and was financier of the Internet Research Agency, the troll farm. Hunter of Kos discussed the Turning Point Action conference that was held last weekend. One of the things that happened was a straw poll showing 95.8% of them voted against supporting, “U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine.” The conference leadership is known to be brazen liars, so it is hard to tell if the they made up that poll result or if the attendees actually voted that way. Hunter says either is possible – the nasty guy was the keynote speaker. Support for Ukraine among voters is about two-thirds. Among Republicans it’s a bit over half. And here’s a bunch that’s 95% against Ukraine. So don’t say that candidates and politicians are supporting Russia because their voters tell them to. The only ones demanding the US leave Ukraine are the activists. But it means candidates have to placate this anti-Ukraine crowd or try to evade the questions. Since those activists were aggressively interventionist towards war in Afghanistan, a second war in Iraq, and wanting one in Iran, why do they now say Ukraine is none of our business? The best answer that Hunter has come up with seems to be the obvious one: Money. It seems to have started with Paul Manafort making serious cash boosting Russian interests in Europe. Then there was Rudy Giuliani, the nasty guy (who was impeached for his efforts), Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, and many more activists trumpeting Russian disinformation. Sumner posted a Ukraine update yesterday about noon that has two important topics in it. The first is the Kerch Bridge, the one between Crimea and the Russian mainland, has been hit again. The first time was last October. This time a section of the vehicle bridge has dropped several feet. Perhaps a pillar underneath has been damaged. It is closed. There may be no damage to the adjacent rail bridge, but that is also closed while it is checked for damage. The strike was reportedly done by the Ukrainian navy using sea drones. Russia says it will be repaired in a month, though if that support pillar was damaged, repairs will take longer. The closed bridge will affect Russia’s ability to supply its forces on the southern front of the war. All travelers to Crimea will now have to take a ferry or add to the heavy traffic along the coastal highway in occupied Ukraine, a war zone. The other big topic is that Russia has ended the deal that allowed Ukrainian grain to be shipped to the rest of the world. While the deal was in place 33 million metric tons of grain was shipped. That reduced world grain prices by 20%. Some reports say Putin ended the deal not because of Ukraine, but because Turkish president Erdogan had annoyed him with a couple other actions. The question is what happens now? Will Russia attack the grain ships, causing a halt to getting grain to the rest of the world? Will Turkey escort the ships so that if Russia fires on them it brings all of NATO into the war? Will alternate methods of shipment be found? No clear answers yet.

The outrage economy

My Sunday movie was Mrs. Harris goes to Paris. This is a delightful and sweet movie that I enjoyed and recommend. It’s 1957 and Mrs. Ada Harris is a cleaning lady in London. Her husband did not come home from WWII. At the home of one of her upscale clients (one that is slow in paying her) she sees a gown by Christian Dior and is captivated by it. Se decides to save up to buy one for herself. IMDB’s trivia about his movie says 500 pounds in 1957 is about $12,000 in 2022. So a lot of saving to be done (and a few lucky breaks). She figures she’ll fly to Paris, pop into the Christian Dior store, buy the frock, and head home. Two days max. It doesn’t work that way. The gowns are modeled and the upper crust clients resent her being at the showing. And gowns must be fitted, which takes two weeks, well perhaps we can do it in one. That gives her time for her sweet, direct, and unstuffy personality work on those around her. This movie was filmed in 2021 so in the credits were such things as a COVID testing company. The last time I discussed a book was about six weeks ago. This is a long time given the rate at which I usually read books. Six weeks ago I started an issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine. It’s only 200 pages, but it took me five weeks. A big reason is that my eyes were still healing from cataract surgery. There were nights in bed when both my standard glasses (with post-surgery lenses) and drug store readers weren’t working for me. Several nights I gave up after reading only a couple paragraphs. Reading at the table (and in the bathroom) were also a struggle. My vision has improved and the readers work well for reading in bed, at the table, and in the bathroom, when I remember to slip them on. And after I read the magazine I was able to get through a 325 page novel in less than a week. That novel is Him by Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy. The story is of Ryan Wesley or Wes from Boston, and Jamie Canning from San Rafael, California. They met at hockey camp at Lake Placid in middle school and are best friends through high school. Then Wes, infatuated with Jamie, did something he regrets and ghosted his friend. The story opens with Wes and Jamie as seniors in college on opposing teams at the Frozen Four hockey playoffs. Both have offers from professional teams, Wes in Toronto, Jamie in Detroit. Before reporting Jamie returns to Lake Placid as a coach for the hockey camp and Wes decides to join him there. This is another gay love story written by a woman (two in this case). I had heard some women enjoy writing sex scenes between two men. And there are several (and an R rating isn’t strong enough). It is also a story where one, Wes, is definitely gay, and the other, Jamie, isn’t. He has a female friend-with-benefits. So should Wes get involved with a straight guy? Wes is also adamant that he spend his rookie year in Toronto being celibate. He doesn’t want the news of being the first out player in the NHL distracting him from his rookie year. While he may be right about the distraction we know the celibacy thing isn’t going to work. While I enjoyed this one, in spite of the several f-bombs in the first few pages and liberally thereafter, I’m debating whether to get the sequel. Online reviews say the lads would do a whole lot better if they would just talk about their issues. Meteor Blades of Daily Kos discussed about a new peer-reviewed paper soon to be published in Environmental Research Letters. Blades wrote:

For years, natural gas—composed primarily of methane—has been touted as a bridge fuel to a new world of sustainable clean energy, a way to get off coal without waiting for renewables (and many would add nuclear) to fulfill all our electricity needs. This has worked in the United States to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40% since 2005, with coal’s share of U.S. electricity generation dropping last year to less than 20%. That’s because burning methane releases on average about half the greenhouse gas emissions of coal. But there’s a big problem. Over 20 years, unburned methane has a global warming potential that is 84 times greater than that of carbon dioxide emitted by burning coal.

A natural source of methane is melting permafrost – and the Arctic is warming 4 times faster than the planet’s average. Human source of methane are agriculture, landfills, leaks from oil wells, and natural gas fracking operations. It takes only a tiny leak for natural gas to be as harmful as coal and fracking sites are notorious for leaking. So the idea that natural gas can serve as a bridge fuel should be rethought and discarded. As for the rest of the fossil fuel industry, no new infrastructure should be built. Clay Bennett posted a cartoon to Kos. It shows a man in a bookstore finding the Farmer’s 2023 Almanac with its weather forecasts in the horror section. I’ve taken one trip on a cruise ship. That was 15 years ago and I went with my parents to Alaska. This seemed the easiest way to see the parts of the state we wanted to see. I knew we would have over 30 meals together so I took a notebook and asked them about their lives. I’m very glad I got that first hand account while I could. We had an enjoyable time and saw some amazing scenery along the way. I haven’t been on a cruise ship since and no desire to do so. The kinds of things the ship offered as entertainment on board – shows, casino, spa, and I don’t remember what else – had little interest for me and there was little to do beyond that. The shore excursions were pleasant, but mostly seemed too regimented (we took some and went on our own at other stops). I’m glad I had that time with my parents, but once was quite enough. That leads to a discussion by Hunter of Kos about the Icon of the Seas, by Royal Carribbean, due to take its first passengers next spring. This cruise ship is huge! It is able to host 5,610 guests (I think the one I was on could hold 2,000). It is too big to permit anything that people take cruise ships for – no spray of the sea 20 stories up, no rolling waves, no way to get anywhere close to the quaint seaside villages. But why would one need a ship this big? Cruise ship designers figured out being on the boat is boring. Between the restaurants, bars, pools, spas, water park, mini golf, arcade, shows, gift shops, and whatever else they have on this ship one wouldn’t need to actually go to port. That sounds like a mall with a hull and lifeboats. Since the future can only be boats bigger than this one and because cruise ships are more polluting than airplane travel...

What's even the point of turning this thing into a boat? We're pretending it's travel? Here's a better suggestion: Build the next generation of cruise ships as oceanfront hotels. Just stick them on the beach in the general vicinity of Miami and instead tow the quaint Caribbean villages to them. ... In fact, we can do even better: We can put multiple cruise ship-sized luxury hotels on one big floating wheel, anywhere in landlocked America. You board from a single entrance, and each evening the wheel slowly spins while you're asleep so that you wake up with a completely new theme park outside your window. Every day brings new sights and new things to do.

Hunter suggests some of those theme parks could be the quaint Caribbean village, a water park, Westworld, Jurassic Park, and Blackjack Lagoon.

We wanted to sail off to new adventures, we got floating germ bombs with gift shops. I don't think we're going to bring back bloodthirsty megafauna, even. We'll just get a stuffed tiger in a cruise ship gift shop after all the wild ones have gone extinct, and it'll cost you $10 to get your picture taken with it.

Charles Jay of the Kos community wrote about California Gov. Gavin Newsom taking on Moms for Liberty. The Moms pushed to elect three conservative people to the board of the Temecula Valley Unified School District. Just after being sworn in they passed a resolution condemning critical race theory, which got them an appearance on Fox and Friends. In May the board reviewed new social studies books for grades 1-5. They rejected the one recommended by the state because the teacher’s supplement, not the actual textbook students see, had a photo and short biography of Harvey Milk, the gay San Francisco supervisor who was assassinated. Board president Joseph Komrosky repeated a now common but false slur when he said, “Why even mention a pedophile?” There is a parent backlash. Politico wrote:

“We don’t want culture wars. We don’t want Fox News appearances,” Alex Douvas, a parent of two kids in the district who previously worked for two Republican congressmembers in Orange County, told the board recently. “Our schools are not ideological battlegrounds. They’re not platforms for religious evangelism. These are institutions for learning and growth.”

Newsom, who is becoming known for taking Democratic ideals on the offense, got involved because refusing to upgrade their social studies curriculum means the district is now in violation of state law. In response Newsom said if the district didn’t lift its ban the state would buy the banned book, send it to the parents and students of the district, and bill the district for violating state law. Mark Sumner of Kos wrote about the outrage economy. He begins with:

We live in a capitalist society that has spent centuries inventing tools to aid in the concentration of wealth. The end result of that evolution is corporations: money-moving engines which remain, to date, the most efficient form of turning the work of thousands—and the needs of millions—into a fat stack of cash for a very, very few. ... Just as late-stage capitalism is engrossed in wiping away every benefit workers gained over centuries of negotiating the relationship between labor and reward, the outrage economy has risen up to guarantee that, no matter the intention, every venture into social media trends toward disaster.

The reason is because social media is a system that rewards those who gain and hold public attention. Prizes range to likes and views, to money, to appearances on Fox News. Reasonable people doing reasonable things is boring. Which leaves ... outrage. One can be outrageously funny, outrageously sweet, outrageously talented, outrageously brilliant, or outrageously vile. To be funny, sweet, talented, or brilliant one must work at it. But anyone can insult others based on race, gender, sexuality, religion, or anything else. “It doesn’t take years of training or research: It just takes a willingness to take joy from causing pain. The more pain, the better.” On many social media platforms this tolerated and it’s profitable. And if it draws outraged replies it increases the payout. And that drags the site down. Sumner wrote this post because Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads, his competitor to Twitter, will have automated moderation, with settings controlled by the user. That sounds like trolling won’t be banished from the site, just (maybe) banished from your feed. Sumner concludes:

The only thing that can arrest that slide is moderation. That moderation must be done by people who understand the subtleties of meaning, rather than trying to match replies to a set of simplistic rules. But moderation costs money. Good moderation costs a lot of money. And why should Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk want to moderate in the first place? This is the outrage economy. Bring on the outrage.