$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.