Their entire strategy relies on convincing their base they are victims

An update on the train derailment and toxic spill in East Palestine, Ohio. A week ago Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reported the crew spotted a problem and started stopping the train, but it was already too late. There are sensors along the tracks can detect the kind of problem – a hot wheel bearing – this train had. Fifty miles before the wreck the bearing was 38 degrees above air temperature. Forty miles before it was 103 degrees above, but still below the 170 degrees that would set the alarm. At twenty miles before the sensor detected 253 degrees above air temp and the alarm was triggered and the engineer began to slow the train. At that twenty mile sensor there was already a visible glow at the problem bearing. Clawson doesn’t get into this: I did the math. If the train was going 47 mph when the alarm went off it would take 25 minutes to go 20 miles, longer as the train slows. Does it really take more than 25 minutes to stop a train? Or did the alarm not prompt sufficient urgency? The train union workers say that the wayside sensors can supplement human inspections, but they’re being used to replace human inspections. Norfolk Southern, the rail company in this case, says its safety procedures are adequate. Rail may be the safest form of transportation, but that excuse shouldn’t block efforts to make it safer, though company action has been making it less safe. The Environmental Protection Agency has stepped in to ensure the cleanup is done properly. If NS doesn’t do it right the EPA will, then bill NS for up to three times the cleanup cost. Dartagnan of the Kos community reported that the nasty guy had shown up with his own brand of bottled water to make himself the center of attention. Also, Gov. Mike DeWine had at first rejected Biden’s offer of assistance. Then Dartagnan discussed:

Yet few have bothered to point out just how clearly this incident—and more importantly, its fallout—exemplifies the Republican Party’s attitude toward its own voter base. Because their real legislative aims—such as they are—are generally unpalatable to most voters, Republicans’ entire strategy towards their base now relies on convincing them that they are victims. Increasingly, this strategy seeks to portray red voters as victims of reverse racism. It’s a matter of insinuating that Democratic policies invariably favor those who Republican voters are taught to regard as undeserving: Black people, Latinos, the LGBTQ community, women, and undocumented immigrants, among others. But the reality, never acknowledged, is that GOP voters are more often than not victims of Republicans’ own policies, writ large over decades throughout American society—and now an especially permanent feature of the so-called “red state” rural landscape. ... The East Palestine disaster sits at the ugly intersection where the so-called “populism” of the Republican Party collides with the reality of their policies. Republicans who now belatedly point fingers at Norfolk Southern for the toxic train derailment—or worse, at the Biden administration for its response—have simply forfeited their credibility on such matters. In fact, they did so when they consciously elected to prioritize corporate interests and corporate profits over measures (through regulation and otherwise) that would protect American citizens. The only “abandonment” that happened in East Palestine is the conscious abandonment by the GOP of any interest in the general welfare of the American public, including any concerns for the health and safety of their own voter base. And that ship sailed a long, long time ago.

On reading a tweet by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene that fumed that Biden went to Ukraine and not East Palestine, Kelly quoted Ron Filipkowski:

OHIO: GOP Gov GOP Senate GOP House Train derails in GOP county Train CEO is a GOP donor GOP Gov burns chems causing disaster GOP Gov initially refuses to declare disaster Republicans – It’s all Democrats fault.

Lalo Alcaraz of the Kos community posted a cartoon that includes smoke labeled “Trump era safety deregulation” coming from a train crash. A maiden is tied to the tracks looking up at the nasty guy saying, “Help has arrived” as he offers a roll of paper towels. In response to Tucker Carlson of Fox News saying “East Palestine is being neglected because they’re white,” Adam Zyglis tweeted a cartoon wondering, “How do these FOX pundits keep a straight face?” Beside Carlson and those words are two laughing black people, one wearing a New Orleans shirt, the other wearing a Flint, MI shirt. For many years I read the Dilbert comic strip written by Scott Adams. I worked in a corporate cubicle farm he wrote about. But after a while I got tired of his constant dreariness. I stopped reading when I heard he was strongly conservative. A week ago OK Dodo of the Kos community wrote that Adams, in his podcast, went on a racist rant. Included was Adams advising white people to get away from black people (using much stronger language). In the opinion of Mark Sumner of Kos the Dilbert strip hasn’t been funny in quite a while. And Adams has increasingly shown himself to be drifting further right, even becoming a strong supporter of the nasty guy. In that time papers starting dropping Dilbert. Then the day after Adams released his podcast a lot of newspapers and newspaper conglomerate companies dropped the strip. That essentially ended Dilbert. Oddball Longfellow tweeted:

Scott Adams Says cancellation of his cartoon strip Dilbert signals that free speech in America is under assault. No, Scott, your free speech rights aren't being violated. It's just that people think you're an asshole — and they're showing you the door.

Longfellow included an XKCD that amplifies that sentiment. Back at the 100th anniversary of the birth of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz near Thanksgiving I included the story that when Schulz introduced Franklin, a black boy, several papers asked him to change it and he refused, threatening to stop drawing the strip. Ted Littleford tweeted a cartoon in which Franklin has a few things to say to Dilbert:

You know how to define progress? When Charles Schulz drew me in 1968, newspapers threatened to drop “Peanuts” because they were racist. Today, newspapers are dropping you because you’re racist.

In the two years I lived in Germany I saw the Carnival parades can be quite political. These parades are held on Rose Monday, two days before Ash Wednesday. That is the start of Lent in which many believe frivolity should be set aside. So Carnival is one last big party before the long Lenten season. Deccan Herald has photos of this year’s Düsseldorf parade, which has the reputation for being strongest in mocking world political leaders. There is Putin in a bathtub of Ukrainian blood. Putin kissing the devil. Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group that has been attacking Bakhmut, finding Nazis all across Europe. Robert Habeck of the Green Party trying to swallow policies he would decry when in opposition. And a few more. Keefknight of Kos Comics tacked the saying “Racism will go away when all the old people die off!” It’s a sentiment I’ve heard a few times related to LGBTQ oppression. But racism (and oppression in general) is a systemic thing that outlives the folks who sustain and perpetuate it. So when he hears that statement he hears a person declaring they don’t want to be the one to do the work to change things. Joan McCarter of Kos wrote about Democrat Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia and Independent Angus King of Vermont supporting a Republican scheme to cut Social Security. This at a time when Biden has been criticizing Republicans use of false information in their efforts to cut the program. So why is Kaine on the side of Republicans? McCarter then took statistics from Americans For Tax Fairness:

As of Feb. 28, anyone making more than $1 million had paid all of their Social Security taxes for the year, because the payroll tax cap is set at $160,200. After someone earns that, everything else they earn for the whole year is exempted from payroll taxes. The rest of working Americans—94% of us—keep paying that 6.2% payroll tax the rest of the year. Because that is helping our retired loved ones live with at least of modicum of security and comfort. Do we need to look any further for ensuring the future of Social Security than making millionaires and billionaires actually pay their share? Why would we look any further than that?

Another stat: Billionaires stopped paying the first day of the year. Leah McElrath quoted a tweet from Steven Rattner, the former head of the Obama Auto Task Force and now a Morning Joe Economic Analyst. Rattner included a chart showing polling data back to 1984, saying:

71% of Americans think the US should spend more on "assistance to the poor" ... but call it "welfare" and that number drops to 30%

McElrath added:

Republicans have spent decades falsely characterizing social “welfare” programs as something used only by non-whites.

I’ve written about the number of books I read last year (46) and that I have a shelf in a closet full of books yet to read (I figure I’ll read them all by October, if I don’t buy more, which I will). So I am amused by a tweet McElrath quoted. It’s by Wendell Albright, and says:

Native English speaker but I love the Japanese word tsundoku, meaning acquiring books and letting them pile up without reading them.

That prompted Anne to respond:

I feel like I've suffered from a form of Tsundoku most of my life. For me, there's almost nothing worse than having nothing to read, so always having books to choose from soothes my soul. It's why I love libraries & bookstores. New worlds, new people, new adventures await!

I make sure I have books to read – and I read them (well, a few have been on the shelf for decades). Perhaps I should do something with the piles of books in my basement that I’ve read.

What people call “wild,” we’ve called home for thousands of years

I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated on Tuesday. I now have more than 1000 days of data. This is not good. The last few peaks in new cases per day are 1320, 1091, and 1617. That’s definitely going in the wrong direction. The number of deaths per day remains in the 10-30 range. Peter Hong for Capital and Main of Daily Kos held a discussion with Rick Wartzman, who is also a part of Capital and Main and wrote a book about Walmart titled Still Broke: Walmart’s Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism. There are two basic ideas from the book and from this discussion. First, since 2015 Walmart has improved the pay of its workers by quite a bit. Second, it’s not enough, especially from a company as prominent and as rich as Walmart. As to the second point, the average Walmart workers make less than $29K a year. That’s not a living wage anywhere in America. Many still need Medicaid and food stamps to get through a month. Choosing between food, medicine, and rent is an awful choice in the richest country on earth. As for the first point, yes, since 2015 Walmart spent over $5 billion in higher pay and better benefits. But on the day that was announced the company’s stock price dropped, losing $20 billion in value. And also since 2015 the company has bought back $43 billion of their own stock, which benefits the shareholders. Many companies that improve the fortunes of their employees get punished by Wall Street. Wartzman says corporations will never go far enough to meet the needs of their employees. That means the government must mandate a much higher minimum wage. The current federal minimum is under $8 an hour. There is a campaign to raise it – a Fight for $15. But it really needs to be $20. Mark Kreidler, also for Capital and Main, discussed the compensation packages of corporate leaders. The big example is the package for Tim Cook, CEO for Apple. Back in 2021 it was nearly $100 million. The Board of Directors awarded that package even though a shareholder advisory firm recommended against it. This is 1,447 times the median pay of Apple employees. I did the math. It shows the median pay of Apple employees is about $69,000. Compared to what I was paid when I retired as a computer programmer 15 years ago, this isn’t much. And a great number of Apple employees are paid quite a bit less. My math leads to a question I’ve heard many times. Let’s compare Cook’s compensation to $69,000, that of the guy in the middle. I’ll assume that person worked a full 40 hour workweek. Did Cook, who likely put in a great deal of time beyond 40 hours, still work 1,447 times harder? Is he 1,447 time more important than that middle worker? More important? Yes. 1,447 times more important? In my understanding, no. Kreidler discussed a new report by the Economic Policy Institute on CEO compensation packages. Between 1978 (before Reagan’s infamous tax cuts) and 2021 the CEO packages at the top 350 US corporations grew by 1,460%. In that same time the compensation of typical workers rose by 18.1%. Only about 10% of a top CEO’s compensation is in salary. The rest is stock awards. So don’t congratulate a CEO who declares he’s forgoing a salary. Also, taxes on capital gains on stock sales are much lower than on salaries.

But it’s in the fundamentals that the CEO pay system looks truly broken. While few people would argue that top executives of growing and profitable companies shouldn’t be well compensated, the question of how much is enough—and how much is way too much—is almost never asked.

Another question that isn’t asked is whether the company – and the society as a whole – would be better off if a lot of a CEO’s salaries were instead paid to the workers. The average CEO package is $28 million. Would a CEO not work as hard if paid half that, only $14 million? Is the bloated deal necessary to keep the CEO from jumping to another corporation that pays more? There doesn’t seem to be a shortage of CEO talent. What can be done? Where a company’s workers are unionized their CEO packages tend to be reined in because it is debated during labor negotiations. Also, EPI recommends higher tax rates and increased corporate taxes when there is a high ratio between CEO compensation and worker pay. And shareholders should ask whether they’re getting good value for that CEO’s pay. Joan McCarter of Kos discussed:

The slow-rolling demise of Twitter has proven more clearly than anything that out of control wealth is toxic. For no other reason than he could, Elon Musk spent $44 billion on Twitter and then proceeded to burn it to the ground. Because he could. That’s the extreme version of billionaire psychopathy and everything wrong with wealth distribution in our society, so it makes a handy jumping off point for this discussion: how much richer the rich have gotten in recent years and how wide the income gap has become even since the Trump tax scam. ... “Million dollar and up positions are the fastest growing jobs in America both in growth rate and pay,” Johnston found. “And the rate of growth is accelerating.” In 30 years, the “executive class” making more than $1 million has grown 325%, while the rest of the job force has increased by just 33%. The rich aren’t just getting richer, they’re multiplying. Last year—just last year—those $1+ million jobs grew 95 times faster than all the rest of the jobs. That’s while the rest of us are facing an erosion of the purchasing power of our wages because of inflation. ... Fixes to the tax code can’t happen with a House GOP, but Democrats can and should be laying the groundwork for doing it when they get a governing trifecta again. And then they should just f---ing do it.

In a post from last Friday Dartagnan of the Kos community reported that Elon Musk will begin reinstating Twitter accounts of those who had been banned. Yeah, these are the people who had been banned because of violent threats, harassment, and misinformation. Yes, this is quite dangerous for marginalized communities, especially the LGBTQ community. The news since then has confirmed that has happened. Dartagnan quoted an article by Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post:

Alejandra Carabello of Harvard law school, also interviewed by Lorenz, says that the impact to those at the mercy of autocratic regimes will be devastating: “You have journalists, activists in authoritarian regimes in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia who are now even at the mercy of even more vicious trolls with no ability to fight back,” said Caraballo. “It’s literally life or death for people.’ ” ... By announcing that he will reinstate nearly all banned accounts (excepting only those who have “broken” some unspecified country’s “law” or engaged in “egregious” spamming), the billionaire has practically ensured that the only hope of keeping the platform afloat will be either through autocratic (e.g., Russian or Saudi Arabian) petrodollars, funding from others similarly situated, or through his own money, as advertisers are simply going to exit en masse.

That raises an intriguing question. Is Musk being paid to end Twitter, or at least turn it into a site that only far right people use, because autocratic leaders are paying him? Since a great number of protesters around the world have been communicating and organizing through Twitter, killing the site will remove a way for protesters to demand their human rights. The situation is getting bad enough that there are calls that Apple should ban Twitter from its app store because all this hate speech violates Apple’s terms of service. Some European nations are beginning to talk about banning Twitter because it violates their laws on hate speech. Two days ago David Neiwert of Kos reported that while Musk has opened Twitter to all the far right garbage he has started suspending progressive voices. It isn’t because any of their content violates Twitter’s terms of use. It appears that Musk is suspending them because a far right buddy or two pointed a finger, claiming they are antifa and calling for violence, even though it isn’t true. Those so suspended appear to have nowhere to appeal the decision. A couple weeks ago Sarah Kendzior tweeted:

When Twitter debuted, it offered an alternative and challenge to MSM. But that media world is dead -- local news gutted, websites paywalled, cable news siloed into paid streaming outlets. Twitter is where people go to work around a media designed to keep people uninformed. If Twitter collapses, news gathering will collapse to an extent, because this site is where people go to elude paywalls, debunk propaganda, find primary sources. It's an archive. A very messy, flawed archive. But an incredibly valuable one, esp when the old world is dead.

Mark Sumner of Kos wrote an essay with a few interesting comparisons, especially for me, a guy who reads Science Fiction and enjoys (some) Science Fiction movies.

The very first episode of the latest Star Trek series, Strange New Worlds, does something extremely clever. In the midst of one of those bog-standard Star Trek speeches, as the captain of this particular Enterprise is talking down an alien culture from the brink of disaster, he explains to them why the Federation is the way that it is. Why are they so concerned about cooperation and the greater good? Why are they so willing to put themselves on the line for others? Why are they just such a dedicated, altruistic, eternally optimistic pack of do-gooders? The answer is: Because they went the other way first. The Federation is as it is, because first Earth disintegrated into fascism, racism, sectionalism, and global war. Then another war. Then another. It’s a speech that draws on all of those bits of faux-history that have been mentioned over the course of seven live action series and a brace of films, but it’s also one that extends directly from where we are today — including showing footage from January 6 as an example of where things fell apart. The world of Star Trek is a post-scarcity society, one in which there is no money and no one need work to have essentially anything they need. However, it’s also a world in which thousands of people voluntarily engage in years of labor, subjugating themselves to an organization that’s a bizarre mix of the military, Greenpeace, and the State Department in an effort to ensure that things stay nice. Dammit.

Star Trek doesn’t explain everything. If one has a can-do-anything life, why would they spend it as a waitress? Even so, it is effective in highlighting social issues of our own society and has done so since the original series. That’s in contrast to Star Wars, which is a dystopian vision of an evil Empire of marching space Nazis, pampered nobles and orphans raised in scrapyards. “It’s all the worst aspects of both feudalism and capitalism. With space ships.” Sumner then discusses The Culture as presented in books by Iain M. Banks. I haven’t read these books and from this description I won’t. The books describe a society also without much need, but also with no laws. And that brings out the worst in people. They may not attack each other – the AIs running the place mostly prevent that – but they don’t sound like people I’d want to spend time with.

However, in many ways it’s a vision of humanity’s future that’s more welcoming, more diverse, and more celebratory of individual differences. Except that The Culture ceased to be a human civilization almost from he moment it was created. It’s a machine society, in which human beings are absolutely dependent on he benevolence of the AI that is many generations removed from, and many orders of magnitude beyond, its human creators. And now you know why Elon Musk is so intent on making Teslas drive themselves. ... Even when it comes to Twitter, Musk has described his latest acquisition in this way “Because it consists of billions of bidirectional interactions per day, Twitter can be thought of as a collective, cybernetic super-intelligence.” He’s not just a fan of The Culture. He’s trying to build it. ... Just be glad he didn’t like Star Wars. Because that place sucks.

Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that the Cochise County, Arizona, board of elections, has not yet certified its more than 47,000 votes. It has been so long Katie Hobbs, current Secretary of State and soon to be Democratic governor, sued them for refusing to do their job. Kori Lorick, the state Elections Director, says there is no evidence of impropriety. The board is MAGA controlled and, yeah, that’s expected. What isn’t is the voters are mostly conservative. And if these votes aren’t certified they aren’t included in larger totals, which must happen by next week. If that happens one US House seat and a state schools chief could flip from Republican to Democrat. Is the explanation that they don’t trust computers make sense? Whatever the reason we have the case of a Democratic Sec. of State suing Republican county officials so that Republican candidates will properly win. Sheesh. I’ve since hear a court has ordered the certification to happen. Pakalolo of the Kos community reported on a study by the Columbia Climate School. That report was about the heat dome that settled over British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon in 2021. Temperatures got up to 121F. The report essentially says this could not have happened without climate change. The combination of weather events that created the heat dome and parked it over the region for many days was a series of coincidences. But they were driven by climate change. McCarter reported on the work of Chuck Sams, the director of the National Park Service and the first Native person in that job. Sams has been in that role for almost a year. McCarter quoted High Country News discussing his philosophy in guiding the NPS. One particular bit caught my attention.

As I go around the country and have conversations with folks, I remind them that wilderness is a colonial, Western European ideal. What people call “wild,” we’ve called home for thousands of years.

His own people don’t even have a word that means “wild.” When I was young I was a big fan of the Peanuts comic strip. One time our small town grocery store had a display of Peanuts books and I somehow convinced my mother to buy all the books all at once, rather than one at a time. As a freshman in college I played Charlie Brown in a production of You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown directed by a student (it was my last attempt at acting). My mother even made me a shirt with his zigzag stripe. Even now I have a gifts of a Charlie Brown doll and a Snoopy doll (playing handbells) on top of my desk. Sitting above my computer screen is a Christmas ornament (though I think it is too heavy to hang on a tree) showing Snoopy directing a bell choir made up of Linus, Sally, Lucy, Charlie Brown, and Peppermint Patty. I have a Christmas nativity set with the various Peanuts characters playing Mary, Joseph, shepherds, wise men, and with Snoopy as one of the sheep. Of course, I’ve seen the Halloween and Christmas TV shows, though it has been many years. Somewhere, maybe I’ve loaned it to Brother, is the book The Gospel According to Peanuts. My favorite characters are Schroeder, Linus, and Snoopy. So I paid attention when several programs, including a couple on NPR, marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz this past Saturday. I listened to one show replay an interview with Schulz as I drove to visit Niece on Thanksgiving Day. Schulz died back in 2000. He and his children said that no one else would be allowed to take over the strip when he no longer could draw it. Alfredo tweeted an image of Linus and Franklin shaking hands. Along with it are the words:

When Charles Shulz’s distributor pressured him to eliminate Franklin from “Peanuts” because he might offend pro-segregation Southerners he told him: “Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit. How’s that.” Inclusiveness is what makes America great.

This is my performance group’s concert weekend and Brother is coming for a visit. So I may not post for a few days.