Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning striking workers and financial predators.

Long story short: tell port CEOs to accept striking portworkers' demands, and tell your government to protect us from financial predators in the green lending industry. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell port CEOs to accept portworkers' demands. 45,000 port workers went on strike this week to protest low pay (no, really, only $20/hour for that work?) and automation (ho hum, corporations making billions in profits want to give as many jobs as possible to robots). On occasion, legitimate, life-improving technological progress forces people out of work, but robots ain't that – robots will screw everything up while CEOs make even more money forcing the world to accept incompetence. These CEOs deserve to fail – but they won't, unless we pressure them to give in to their workers' demands.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell various federal agencies to protect good Americans from financial predators in the green lending industry. Lending programs that help folks deal with pollution and climate change are relatively new – which means they probably have a disproportionate number of scam artists, since new areas of our economy tend to get the necessary regulatory scrutiny much later than more established ones. And you know right-wingers stand ready to declare the green lending industry "unreliable." Their hell will be just as hot as ours, but why should any of us live in hell?

UPDATE. Port strikers have reached a tentative agreement with management, one that would raise pay 62% over the next five years but does not address automation. Go ahead and send your message anyway, amending it as you need to. Once you win, you need to keep fighting to keep your wins, and big bosses need to know we’ll do that.

Action: concerning AI abuse and voting rights.

Long story short: tell California's Governor to protect citizens from AI abuse, and tell Georgia's Governor to investigate ethics complains against that state's election board. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Accountable Tech helps you tell California Gov. Newsom to sign legislation protecting us from AI abuse. If you need more convincing: big tech corporations hate it, and a legislature can always improve law in the future. Indeed, this is why right-wingers have always fought any voting expansion, because they knew once we gave (for example) non-land-owning men the vote, then everyone would eventually get the vote. Right-wingers don't like that, for some reason, just like big tech corporations don't like anyone telling them they can't just run roughshod over our laws.

Civic Shout helps you tell Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to investigate ethics complaints against Georgia election board members who just gave themselves the power to nullify election results. You might be saying to yourself: self, we're counting on Brian Kemp for this? But he's already survived the Wrath of Trump, having easily beaten back a Trump-blessed primary challenger/ex-U.S. Senator in 2022, and with Mr. Trump looking ever more vulnerable, Mr. Kemp may see political value in pushing him over. Of course he should just do the right thing for the right reason, but I want to help you imagine why he might.

Around the table: green shoots rise above the muck, part 883.

When you hear that growing different crops on the same land not only enriches the soil but repels pests, you should be tempted to say well, no duh! But big ag corporations, anxious to write over our collective memory, insist that pounding the soil with endless rows of single crops is the only "efficient" way to feed people, though the only thing it does "efficiently” is redistribute worker income upward to executives. And while you can't just put any bunch of plants together and get the best results, keeping plants apart is far too good a metaphor for the anti-cooperative framework Our Glorious Elites incessantly push on us.

U.N. buys 3D printer called the Crane WASP to build homes for the nearly-four million unhomed households in Colombia. Inspired by the Mason wasp, which creates nests using mud, the Crane WASP can make a home using mud, clay, cement, and even farming waste; the printer costs $180,000, but can print a home for about $1,000, so maybe it could also fight homelessness in America – except that American right-wingers would yell that surely nobody aspires to live in a little home like that! Of course, right-wingers would just build more McMansions, which does little for our civilization except give bloggers something to laugh at.

Another day, another reminder that AI sucks up so much energy that it causes "stress on local power grids" and "mass water evaporation," that latter item especially problematic, as it may take a year for mass amounts of water used in AI development to return to the planet, whereas the water you use to, say, brush your teeth goes right back into the sewer, and gets cleaned up and used again fairly quickly. Google, naturally, blames its excessive energy use on its suppliers. Remember all of this the next time some organization claims that YOU AREZ TEH OPPRESSURZ!!!! if you oppose AI, because they do that now.

From the Indianapolis Star we learn that not only has school voucher cost gone up almost twentyfold in a little over a dozen years, but now families that are in no way poor get to use them, which should make you suspect anyone who says don't get so upset about vouchers, because they help poor people. Helping people pay for private schools is, of course, nowhere near as good as funding public schools properly, even if it doesn't look as sexy. And when former Indiana Governor/Bush Mobber Mitch Daniels tried to reassure everyone back in 2011 that his voucher program wouldn't be so big, he was fronting – now he's proud of how big his program has become, even though it's just corporate welfare for private schools.

While it's true that Donald Trump should really stop saying on TV that he plans to interfere with the 2024 election if it doesn't go his way, particularly when Special Counsel Smith has just secured another election interference indictment, we would do well to remember that when he refers to "interfering with a presidential election, where you have every right to do it," he's signaling to his votaries that they have "every right" to consider anything they don't have as something someone else stole from them – and that they have "every right" to hurt anyone who "stole" it. Certainly we shouldn't be surprised when folks throw bricks through the windows of neighbors with Harris/Walz signs on their lawn.

Proving, once again, that large amounts of money constitute no impediment to stupidity, Elon Musk endorses a theory supposing that only "high-status males" – and certainly not women or "low T men" – should get to run a Republic that's "only for those who are free to think,” which of course means "free to think exactly like us." Well, it sure is a good thing nobody in the world ever attains "high-status" by committing massive fraud or hurting as many people as possible! I kid, of course. I guess only "low T men" give a shit about anyone or anything other than themselves.

Gannett shuts down its notorious AI-infected bad journalism website, which would be good news if it didn't also mean a lot of actual human beings will lose their jobs. Then again, for today's big corporations, that's killing two birds with one stone – destroy journalism with bullshit machines that don't have families and don't need time off, and then fire all the real workers who do! Gannett's CEO, of course, made $4 million last year; I wonder how much he whines that other media moguls make more.

Finally, former Vice President/Sith Lord Dick Cheney says he will vote for Kamala Harris in November because "there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump” and because Mr. Trump "tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him” and "can never be trusted with power again.” So, two things about that: one, given Mr. Cheney’s role in the 2000 election, one can’t help but wonder if his real problem with Donald Trump is that he’s bad at coup-ing. Two, a lot of Trumpholes make fun of Dick Cheney now, but damn near all of them were war-on-terror voters who called their family, friends, and neighbors “traitors” if they opposed the Iraq War.

Action: concerning robocalls, monopolies, and taxes.

Long story short: tell our FCC to crack down on AI robocalls, tell the Biden Administration to keep Lina Khan exactly where she is, and tell your Governor to opt in to our IRS’s free Direct File program. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to crack down on AI robocalls. But wait, you say, haven't they cracked down on robocalls generally? AI robocalls give their makers the illusion that "nobody" made them (even though someone did most certainly make the AI program that makes the calls), so they're not subject to previous robocall regulations! That argument might convince a fourth-grader or a right-wing judge, but not civilized adults like us, so we must act.

Demand Progress helps you tell the Biden Administration to stand behind FTC Chair Lina Khan. A month ago, a major Kamala Harris donor said, out loud, after donating millions of dollars to her campaign, that she had to fire Ms. Khan if she won the election. I'd have thought you'd make that threat before donating the money! But Ms. Khan has done a great job standing between monopolists and total control of our economy, and no matter how many times they say that like it's a bad thing, it's a good thing.

Finally, the Coaliton on Human Needs helps you tell your Governor to opt in to our IRS's Direct File program. Because working families deserve to file their taxes for free, instead of pay some middleman hundreds of dollars to do it! But these tax-filing corporations still have enough power that they've made our government put obstacles in front of free tax-filing, like making state Governors opt in on their citizens' behalf. And some of them don't want to do it! Which is why we get in their grills about it.

Around the table: the drama, it still burns!

Some 500 psychologists told ProPublica why they left health insurance networks; you won't hear from all 500 here, but the feeling you get – that good Americans can't get good mental health care because the big health insurance corporations can't make stupid money from it – will be no less oppressive. God forbid you or I find ourselves holding broken glass to our wrists while our therapists' health insurer cuts us off because our therapy's gone past whatever arbitrary deadline they demanded. Big corporations made efficiency their god and made the rest of us pay for it; what a work to take to the Pearly Gates!

Ho hum, our "liberal" media cares little that French President Macron is throwing a giant tantrum and refusing to form a new government respecting the fact that more French voters voted for leftist officials than for centrist or far-right ones. Of course you'll also recall that our "liberal" media also lost interest after right-wingers scored early polling leads that turned out to be completely illusory! But, you know, stability centrism sensibility compromise business-friendly. Remember that unreasonable people make things better.

Surprise surprise, car buyers surveyed by JD Power say that too much "advanced technology" in their cars doesn't do anything useful. People do like their rear cameras and blind spot monitors, but not their automated parking or their passenger screens, and certainly not their facial recognition systems (what, keys suck all of a sudden?) and their "gesture controls,” which I imagine good Italian Catholics like myself would find especially frustrating. Wait until JD Power gets to ask car buyers about their subscription-based brakes service!

No, Donald Trump will not vote for Florida's pro-choice constitutional amendment no matter what he says. He knows that some seven out of 10 Floridians will likely vote for it, but he also knows that his stated preferred position ("six weeks isn't enough") isn't actually on the ballot, so this is all noise, drama, misdirection, fodder for Trumpholes to gaslight people by saying Trump isn't as bad as you say he is, you know the deal.

In a related note, I can't decide whether that two-time Trump voters MSNBC talked to who now says she's actually "afraid" of him getting elected again has reached an unusually high level of wisdom or is just playing us. No, wait, I've decided; she's playing us. I mean, I try to believe the best about people, but I don't let that turn me into a schmuck, especially if Trump voters want to shoot up my house for having a “Love Wins" sign on my lawn.

Steve Benen asks why "Republicans keep forgetting who was in the White House in 2020," when the White House supposedly suppressed an anti-Hunter Biden report. Of course, Republicans pretend to forget – one might even say they perform a drama of forgetting – because they want you to forget. Remember all those Republicans who blamed Mr. Obama for the 2008 bankster Armageddon when George W. Bush was President? Remember all those Republicans who extolled Mr. Bush's record "protecting this country" after 9.11 happened on his watch? They hope you don't. But we do.

Finally, Rick Perlstein interviews David Neiwert about "the election story nobody talks about," that "a substantial bloc of American politics is talking about committing acts of violence and bringing down the government." Mr. Neiwert paints a very unpretty picture – vigilantes "helping" the Border Patrol, counterprotestors shooting at protestors if Mr. Trump wins, bad people trying to obstruct the vote-counting again, more domestic terrorism if Ms. Harris wins. Two things we need to do, then: one, vote Donald Trump into oblivion, and two, shame and ostracize his supporters until they remember they're not the only people who have ever mattered.

Around the table: the “free state of Florida,” and other absurdities.

How bad are union-busting campaigns these days? Compass Coffee baristas allege that their employers have hired nearly 125 new “employees” at seven locations to dilute unionization votes there. These “employees” include CEOs at other corporations – including one forced to pay $25,000 in back wages to five organizers they illegally fired – as well as friends and family of Compass’s CEO. Compass virtually stamped out previous organization efforts by, well, firing virtually all of their workers during the pandemic, but union organizers are back, because you can’t keep good people down. Hear that, Supreme Court? (As an aside, one Uber lobbyist’s suggestion that she was somehow misled into being hired is absurd. How do you know? By the phrase “Uber lobbyist,” which describes a class of person who typically does not need a barista job on the side.)

Shipt workers, frustrated by smaller paychecks, band together to prove their employers use algorithms to shaft them. The amount of work these folks had to do – along with a non-profit and a Ph.D. student – to prove their point is staggering, and I can’t help but point out that if, you know, these workers were organized they wouldn’t have to work as hard to protect themselves. I know, a lot of folks fall into this line of work, for some it’s not a primary source of income, and some even prefer what bosses like to call “flexible” work schedules, but Jesus Mary and Joseph do we really think corporatists don’t know all of this and exploit it? And should we really let them keep exploiting it?

Ari Paul rues that our “liberal” media – so concerned about the alleged anti-Semitism of opposing anything Israel does these days – has by and large missed (or, perhaps, “missed”) the story of anti-Semitism within the youth movement backing Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Could that be because our “liberal” media presents Ms. Meloni as a “pragmatist”? Yes, it could be. All of this is peculiar, since actual video of young morons sieg-heiling and celebrating Mussolini would be sensational in the manner of sensationalism our “liberal” media adores. Why, one might start to think our “liberal” media only likes sensationalism that makes right-wingers look better!

Washoe County, Nevada election commissioners refuse to certify a recount, presumably because it didn’t go the way they wanted it to go. After all, they didn’t exactly present a vast trove of evidence proving wrongdoing or incompetence! Although a “local activist,” with the unfortunate name of Robert Beadles, says “an artificial intelligence supercomputer” told him the election couldn’t possibly have gone the way it did. Mr. Beadles has been whining about nonexistent election fraud for years, and another name for “artificial intelligence supercomputer” would be Bullshit Machine.

Independent Presidential candidate/brain worm puppet Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says he “won’t take sides” on various 9.11 conspiracy theories, but I will! No, Tha Bush Mobb didn’t plan and execute 9.11 – seriously? Him? Plan a thing like that? It is to laugh! Besides, that’s not how power works anymore – the powerful see nothing but opportunity in failure, and they never see opportunity in success, plus they break everything, point out how broken everything is, and then posit themselves as the only people who can fix it, as if they weren’t the ones who broke it! Also, if Saudi Arabia did the deed, I think we’d know it by now; it’s hard to keep secrets like that, even in totalitarian states – and also in states like ours, where we’re all so damn proud of what we know.

Local media find Florida’s new “Welcome to the Free State of Florida” signs generating “mixed reactions” among the locals, but sadly we don’t learn as much about that as we deserve – just reactions from one liberal citing book-banning and one right-winger who almost certainly calls himself an “independent” talking about “people stuffing stuff down our throats,” and I’d lay money that “stuff” is deserved shame over his neanderthal opinions. Meanwhile, enjoy your freedoms, Florida – the freedom to die from COVID, the freedom to get run over by right-wingers, the freedom to lose your home to climate change, the freedom to get bullied if you’re gay and/or trans, the freedom to throw tantrums just to keep other people from reading books, and the freedom to die in mass shootings perpetrated by whiny young men, all because your government prefers the drama of a “Free State of Florida” sign to providing the services you pay for with your taxes.

Finally, a Republican strategist thinks Joe Biden – still being put through the ringer over a two-week-old debate performance – is actually in a “commanding position politically” against Mr. Trump, and though I wouldn’t blame you for thinking this is a false flag, it also rather resembles the truth. Incumbents are hard to dislodge anymore – why, you’d have to badly mismanage a pandemic to lose re-election these days! – and, as better minds than I have pointed out, the alleged “dementia” of Joe Biden (I’ve had family members with dementia, and he ain’t like that, period, end of, full stop) sure hasn’t manifested as chaotic governing. Economy still adding over 200,000 jobs a month, inflation down and wages still outpacing it, antitrust enforcement still vigorous and effective, wars in Palestine and Ukraine managed about as well as possible without American bloodshed – yeah, that’s some “dementia,” there.

Action: concerning facial recognition, sexual deepfakes, and IRS Direct File.

Long story short: tell state and local governments to ban facial recognition software in schools, tell Google to stop enabling sexual deepfakes, and tell your state Governor to opt in to our IRS’s Direct File program. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Ban Facial Recognition helps you, guess what, tell state and federal governments to ban facial recognition software in schools. Because it sucks! Because one wrong accusation can ruin a kid’s life anymore! Because it can’t tell Black people apart any better than your MAGA hat-wearing uncle can! Because it’s yet another way private corporations collect data on good Americans and sell it to those who shouldn’t have it! Because any trove of data might as well wear a HACK ME sign on it, and that kind of hackery ruins lives! Anyway, let me know if I’m not making myself clear. Many have told me I hold back on my emotions far too much.

Ultraviolet helps you tell Google to stop enabling the spread of sexual deepfakes on the internet. Actual porn stars get exploited enough; now comes the advent of artifically-created sexual images – often of famous people, but it could be you, too, if someone’s mad at you! – made without consent. Gosh, it’s like the future sucks! You thought it’d be all transmats and jetpacks, but it turns out it’s all fake sexual images and AI telling you to jump off a bridge if you’re depressed and banksters repossessing prostethic limbs after slamming patients with surprise medical bills. Anyway, Google’s full of billionaires, so they have the power to stop this crap from happening.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your state governor to opt in to our IRS’s Direct File program. The Direct File program – which lets good Americans file their taxes for free with our IRS, rather than have some middle-man skim a few hundred bucks to do the same – did so well in a dozen states that good Americans in all 50 states can take part next year, if their governor opts in to the program. A lot of right-wing governors will say no, and a lot of right-wing blowhards will pretend this is all TEH BIG BRUTHURZ!!!!! Well, that’s why we communicate our will to our elected leaders – to cut through the drama and hysteria.

Action: concerning banksters, AI, and women’s health.

Long story short: tell our government to crack down on bankster ownership of health care assets, tell big tech to stop using our personal data to train their AI models, and tell our government to force big health insurance corporations to cover birth control at no cost and without a prescription. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our government to crack down on private equity ownership of health care assets, like hospitals, doctors’ offices, emergency departments, and medical equipment manufacturers. Welcome to another exciting edition of Banksters Ruin Everything! Banksters will buy up all of these things and consolidate them so that services are worse but income gets redistributed upward to executives, and they’ll also indulge in “loot-and-strip” practices like usurious management fees and sale-leaseback arrangements (right, Red Lobster?). Result: more money for no-work-doing pricks, and illness, death, and misery for the rest of us. We deserve better.

Eko helps you tell big tech corporations to stop using our data to train AI models. Not least because AI models are pretty slow learners, if recent evidence is any guide (“just deal with depression by jumping off a bridge”!), but also because it’s private, regardless of what cynics tell you. Nothing is private on the internet ha ha ha snort – cynics are such useless people. Anyway, this action could well be the basis of future lawsuits that won’t necessarily make us rich – or even restore to us what we’ve lost – but would punish corporations severely enough that they’ll think twice about doing it more. That may sound a bit long-game, but it’s worth doing.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our government to require health insurance corporations to cover birth control without cost and without a prescription. Don’t believe isolated anecdotes about the “harms” of birth control medication! The people telling those anecdotes just want to hurt women! That’s all they want to do! Sorry, I just don’t think folks are that complex anymore. President Biden can do this with the authority the Affordable Care Act already gives him, just as former President Trump did the opposite with the same authority, and there’s no good reason working families should have less access to the pill than rich folks, so let’s get moving.

Around the table: today with 43% good-news-I-guess.

Our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) has proposed eliminating medical debt from consideration in our credit reports – which makes a lot of sense, since surprise medical bills can slam anyone at any time regardless of “how well people take care of themselves” – but of course the debt collecting industry is whining about it! Seriously, their “government picking winners and losers” argument is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard a lot of stupid in my time. Just remember: whenever someone whines about “government picking winners and losers,” they really mean they’re enraged that they don’t get to pick the winners and losers.

Our Supreme Court unanimously strikes down lower court decision banning mifepristone and misopropol (the drugs used in home abortions), saying the plaintiffs – who could not prove they had ever been made to prescribe these drugs against their will – lacked standing to bring the suit. That’s good news, and I guess it’s also good news that “standing” still means something to our Court, because I’ve had my doubts about that. But our Court – perhaps more mindful of how little regard good Americans have for them anymore – may simply be waiting for the “right” lawsuit that lets them snuff out mifepristone and misopropol for good.

Matt Stoller notes recent coverage of the numerous sexual improprieties allegedly committed by former FTC Commissioner/George Mason University professor Josh Wright, perhaps America’s leading intellectual pro-monopolist and also “the Harvey Weinstein of antitrust.” Mr. Wright stands accused of “advanc(ing) the careers of students at law firms and in government...based on whether they were sleeping with him”; he’s lost his job at George Mason as a result, which right-wingers will no doubt blame on the “woke mob.” Why does it matter? Because “(i)t takes a village to abuse power the way that he did,” and “he was allowed to act with impunity for almost twenty years. He was benefitting monopolists, so he could do whatever he wanted.” It sure does seem like using women for sex and believing yourself too powerful to be put in jail come from the same impulse.

You already know AI search answers might tell you to eat a rock or jump off a bridge, but Scientific American reminds us that AI searches also waste a lot of energy – it uses 30 times more energy to “generate” an answer than a regular search uses to simply find one. You’ll remember that “manufacturing” bitcoin also eats up a lot of energy, and you’ll also remember that bitcoin is also a stupid scam, and you may begin to see a pattern. What’s wrong with paying people to do a job again? Oh, right, the CEO can’t redistribute as much income upward to himself if he has to pay people to do a job.

Minnesota Republican Senate candidate Royce White – who used to be a hell of a basketball player, until his fear of flying did him in as a pro – submits for your approval a map purporting to show rising crime in Minneapolis when it actually shows the location of drinking fountains in Minneapolis. This should be the kind of mistake that ends a campaign, but my guess is he knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew he’d get caught, too – first, he stokes a feeling of deprivation about crime, and then another one about how all the liberals got him like Jesus. But like George Santos, he may soon learn that only Donald Trump gets away with being Donald Trump. To the degree he will from now on, anyway!

When I hear that an Arizona man planned to mass-murder Black folks at an Atlanta rap concert in order to spark a race war, all I can say is: what a fucking clown! Mass murders happen so often anymore that it’s virtually impossible to create one that’ll start anything larger! Why, mass murders don’t even prompt politicians to pass common-sense gun control legislation! And this is why I say our “liberal” media can’t give so much oxygen to the “motivations” of mass murderers. I mean, these “motivations” run from being mad at absolutely deserved rejections to thinking the world is “bigger than everyone else knows” but in a really stupid way.

Finally, Donald Trump demands that Joe Biden remove an ad citing the numerous documented instances of Mr. Trump cutting down our soldiers as “losers” and the like. He says he never did any of that, and although you and I weren’t there, fairly mainstream news outlets have reported them, and everyone just saw him get 34 felony convictions over trying to cover up something he said he never did, so I could understand if you didn’t believe these denials. Anyway, this is the age where you just don’t take ads down. He understands that better than anyone; he must be whining because it’ll incite that familiar ragey feeling in his votaries. They need a steady diet of manufactured outrage, of course, lest they get bored and turn to something like gardening.

Action: concerning birth control, animal cruelty, and autonomous weapons.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to make health insurance corporations cover over-the-counter birth control pills without prescriptions or co-pays, tell our government to stop hunters from going after wolves with vehicles, and tell our government to ban autonomous and AI weapons from the battlefield. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell the Biden Administration to mandate that health insurance corporations must cover over-the-counter birth control pills, with no prescription and no co-pay. After all, it’s safe and won’t be a controlled substance, so why would women need prescriptions? So someone can control them, I guess! But that’s not a good reason to do it. Personal to folks who claim “religious” “consciences” about the matter: I never demanded back my tax money used in the Iraq war, so you can sheathe that “conscience,” which is only meant to guide you anyway.

Environmental Action helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service to stop allowing hunters to go after wolves with vehicles. Even if hunters weren’t running over wolves with snowmobiles, it’s not very sporting, frankly, to give yourself such a tremendous advantage over your prey. I mean, they are trying to relive how their ancestors lived, are they not? Well, our ancestors didn’t use such high tech; I hope I never see the day hunters go after wolves with laser rifles. Personal to those who profess to worry about wolves eating cattle: we can’t solve problems with just any old solution.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to forbid robot fighter jets and/or any other autonomous weapon from the battlefield. Remember the Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon”? War was so easy for the aliens in that story – “targets” “destroyed” as if in a video game, with citizens willfully marching off to gas chambers afterward – that it went on for five centuries! Remember the Philip K. Dick short story “Second Variety”? The drones in that one started to wage war on humans – who are on the ropes when we come in – until ultimately starting to wage war on each other. Ultimately I bet autonomous weapons are like AI and bitcoin – scams for rich suckers. But why appease scam artists?

Action: concerning Boeing, Israel, and AI deepfakes.

Long story short: tell our government to nationalize Boeing and stop selling weapons to Israel, and tell big tech corporations to stop people from using AI to hurt other people. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell the Biden Administration to nationalize Boeing. That’s right, our government should just take ownership of Boeing, because how could our government possibly run that corporation worse? Boeing used to care about building good planes, but now all they care about is making money, and if anyone shouts TEH SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! at this idea, kindly remind them that American taxpayers (via the Department of Defense) are already Boeing’s biggest customer and thus deserve more say in how it operates. Also maybe remind them that they drove roads and drank tap water and used electricity and breathed clean air today.

Demand Progress helps you tell the Biden Administration to stop selling arms to Israel as long as they’re committing genocide in Palestine. I actually think President Biden has handled this whole thing about as well as one can – especially given that he’s one of our most pro-Israel Presidents ever – but you don’t let up when you get some of what you want, you demand more. Hey, it always works for right-wingers! And our pressure has (finally!) driven a wedge between American politicians and the reflexively pro-Israel lobby, and has even prompted Sen. Schumer to condemn Mr. Netanyahu, so again, we need to keep up the pressure.

Finally, Ultraviolet helps you tell big tech corporations to stop people from using AI to create non-consensual deepfakes and thus harm other people. Is the genie out of the bottle here? Hell no! It should be laughably easy to limit folks’ access to AI apps, or to certain AI app functions, so it should be laughably easy to limit the harm AI apps can do. And not for nothing, but women bear the brunt of that harm, with their images used non-consensually in over 95% of all internet deepfakes. So don’t brook any folly from tech bros who call themselves “founders” and “indispensable men” but act all helpless when asked to stop the harm their products cause.

Around the table: the truth is obvious, part 987.

Good news, everyone: America now produces 40% of its electricity without pumping out more carbon emissions. I’m old enough to remember when Alaska paced the nation in renewable energy with a mere 25%, that figure goosed up by the 80 zillion miles of coastline Alaska could use to develop hydropower. If right-wingers want to call our decreased dependence on coal a “war on coal,” they might want to address why no one calls the antibiotic era a “war on bacteria,” but they’ll probably just settle for posting alleged pictures of electric car graveyards, when electric cars are no more the be-all-end-all of renewable energy than ethanol production ever was.

Ho hum, despite right-wingers’ incessant attempts to claim that the January 6 rioters were “antifa,” everyone they accuse of being antifa turns out to be just another garden-variety Trumphole. Because they all keep saying they’re Trumpholes on social media! Of course right-wingers never cared about proving their point, but only asserting it enough times that tired people will just accept it. And they certainly don’t care about their point being disproven, because they’ll just ignore it and try to enrage people about something else.

the Wisconsin state Supreme Court has found state legislative maps unconstitutional, and will redraw districts themselves if the state legislature won’t. If you’ve noticed Democrats getting more total votes statewide in state legislative races yet still winning only one-third of the seats, you have already anticipated this outcome. And if you’re still hearing right-wingers whine about the court’s “partisanship,” then you know they have no shame. (As an aside, I wince whenever someone calls a state a “purple” state, because bruises are purple, too.)

Surprise, surprise, very, very few British citizens now think Brexit has really benefited their nation, and while I was never particularly against Brexit regardless of how many assholes also supported it, I also thought Greece needed to leave the EU way, way more than England did. Why, the EU let England keep their own currency! Anyway, anyone who believed the $350-million-more-for-health-care per week lie was a fool, though I’m sure most of the folks who mouthed it didn’t really believe it. But though I’m sure Brexit delivered victory to the Tories in 2019, I still think inflation will mean more to British voters than Brexit does now. If only today’s Labour party wasn’t somehow even worse than Tony Blair’s.

Bruce Schneier is about the only person I’d ever listen to about the possible benefits of Artificial Intelligence (or AI), and though I’m sure he’s absolutely right that AI can, in fact, streamline a lot of processes for the better, there’s a reason we think inside a lot of boxes concerning AI: because we understand that Our Glorious Elites will never give up power without a fight, and they’ll leverage AI only to keep that power, which means, at this stage of what folks optimistically call Late Capitalism, preserving their nearly-unlimited power to skim money off all our doings while sitting on their asses. And then they’ll just tell us to work harder if we don’t want to spend all our money on rent.

Trumpholes are threatening the lives of the Colorado state Supreme Court justices who struck him from that state’s primary ballot because of course they are. The best people support Donald Trump! And they include the kind of person who’d threaten someone’s life in an online forum composed only of dittoheads but who would never have the guts to kill someone in real life. I just can’t wait until these fools whine that their threats are somehow “free speech,” when our First Amendment doesn’t protect terroristic threats.

Finally, you weren’t wondering what Joe Lieberman was up to, but I feel compelled to note that he’s now stumping for third parties, and he sounds as stupid as ever. It’s easy to say “I’ve never seen this much anger at the two major parties” when you a) are perfectly happy to pretend righteous anger against Republicans and masturbatory rage against Democrats are the exact same thing and b) never, ever look for anything else that might be happening around you. And can we not call him a “maverick” in headlines, please? He spent a quarter-century in the Senate sucking up to corporate power; “mavericks” don’t do that.

Around the table: more trials and tribulations of Teh Stupid Party.

Good news: a road in Detroit now has about a mile of wireless-charging infrastructure, which in a few years will be able to charge adequately-equipped electric cars. Since it’s not fully-realized technology (at least in the United States), Joe Biden probably won’t run on it, though you just know Donald Trump would pretend he gave everyone a free electric car if this had happened on his watch. And not for nothing, but this happened in one of those cities in which Republicans now say you’re never ever ever going to be safe again, even though both violent and property crime levels are half what they were 30 years ago.

UCal-Berkeley researchers find what you probably already intuited: that Artificial Intelligence (or AI) systems “Excel at Imitation, but Not Innovation.” I mean, yeah, AI can bullshit a college-level essay, but not particularly well, because insight demands a higher level intelligence than repetition, or even synthesis. Thus, “(i)nstead of viewing these AI systems as intelligent agents like ourselves, we can think of them as a new form of library or search engine.” Even I’ve noticed AI searches for information pretty well, but corporate CEOs will pretend that means replacing workers with AI is a good idea. At least they'll goose up their stock prices in the short term, which is all Our Boldest and Brightest Entrepreneurs really care about anyway.

It sure looks like Rep. Mike Garcia (E-CA) sold a boatload of shares in Boeing right before his committee (run by Democrats that year, BTW) issued a pretty scathing report about Boeing’s negligence in 737 airline crashes, and then didn't report the sale as required by law. In a sane and moral world, his next re-election effort would be toast, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, where we all agree to the fiction that Donald Trump could be President again even if he’s in jail, I can’t say for sure what’ll happen. But the good voters of California's 27th Congressional district could say for sure what'll happen!

Ho hum, Rep. Don Bacon (E-NE) says there’s “probably not” very much evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors on the part of President Biden, but voted in favor of launching an impeachment investigation anyway. No use arguing that voting to start an impeachment investigation isn’t the same as actually voting to impeach, and certainly no use arguing that “we can’t find out if he’s done anything unless we launch an impeachment investigation" – I mean, if I started an impeachment investigation, that'd mean I already have enough information to impeach. This has been yet another installment of The Uselessness of “Moderates.”

Kellyanne Conway tells Republicans that they’d better embrace contraception if they want to blunt the effect of their own abortion extremism in 2024, and she’s probably right, but the far right-wing voters who hate any freedom for women won’t tolerate such a thing, and anyway Republicans (with a few exceptions, like Rep. Cole) have been banging the saucepan about the supposed evils of birth control for a few decades now, and nobody's memory's that short. I mean, folks don’t think that Hobby Lobby ruling – the one that said a “closely-held” corporation didn’t have to cover birth control in its health insurance planning, thus allowing people of means to inflict their “religious” “beliefs” on their employees – came about by accident, do they?

Finally, when I hear that 31% of Republican voters say they wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump if he gets convicted of a felony, I’m tempted to say that’s a telling result, since he can’t win without Republicans who would be holding their nose to vote for him (or making you think they're holding their nose to vote for him!), but it’s still almost a year out, and another year of wall-to-wall coverage of Mr. Trump’s various and well-earned trials might induce a lot of these folks to pretend they’re disgusted with all the drama and vote for Mr. Trump to “end” it. Granted, “ending the drama” would be a peculiar reason to vote for the biggest drama hound ever to be President, to be sure, but party loyalty leads to all sorts of peculiar arguments.

Action: concerning taxes, AI, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand the Child Tax Credit without poison pills, protect American workers from AI, and pass the Affordable Insulin Now Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021 that put $250 and $300 checks per child in working families’ bank accounts. You know, I feel like I don’t need to justify that action any further – fewer kids in poverty, more money for strapped working families, what else needs saying? – but it’s December, which means it’s end-of-year budgeting time, which means Congress will try to pass a bunch of noxious crap they’d never get through without it being an “emergency,” so go ahead and tell your Congressfolk to pass a CTC expansion with no poison pills attached! That means no corporate welfare and no more tax cuts for the rich – do the right thing, and nothing else.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect American workers from the spectre of Artificial Intelligence (or AI). We just watched the Hollywood actors’ union fight management’s attempts to replace them with AI-generated doppelgangers, but that won’t just happen to them – it’ll happen to any American worker who has a CEO who twirls his mustache at the prospect of replacing all his workers (and all their “costs”) with mounds of dung, and “any” includes you and you and you and I. Hell, it’s already happened, for real, at call centers all over the world. You ever try to fix a problem and wind up yelling “operator!” into the phone? Then you know what I’m talking about. Our economy needs more people in it, and fewer “big,” “bold” “entrepreneurs” who live to kill our jobs.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Insulin Now Act, which would extend the benefit Medicare recipients get – namely, their insulin costs capped at $35/month – to all Americans. What a shame that we have to stop big pharma corporations from charging literally an arm and a leg for insulin, and what a shame we have idiots like Herschel Walker telling us that if we just eat right we won’t have to use insulin, which will definitely not impress anyone born with diabetes (or those who are rationing their insulin while keeping spreadsheets about their calorie intake). And if anyone starts ranting about “price controls,” you have a number of good rebuttals. Like you say “price controls” like it’s a bad thing. Or 1973 called; it wants its right-wing talking points back.

Readings for October 3, 2023.

So you’ve heard that our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has sued Amazon for monopolistic practices. You already know Amazon’s a monopoly if you’ve ever uttered the phrase “just get it on Amazon,” but our FTC’s complaint is a bit more complex. I’ll try to summarize: Amazon leverages its Prime service to trap small businesses into using its platform exclusively, and because they have nowhere else to go, Amazon can charge them whatever onerous fees they like, fees that now amount to half of Amazon’s revenue. There’s even more to it than that, but note well that it’s not necessarily about customers like us, but rather the customers who use Amazon to help sell their wares. I’m old enough to remember when it seemed like you could cut out all those pesky middlemen like publishers and advertisers and just reach out and find people on the internet. I was naive, of course – not solely because I didn’t fully grasp that there’d be new middlemen like Amazon, but that’s the only reason that’ll help you make this world a better place.

Billy Periggo at Time describes “What the Luddites Can Teach Us About Artificial Intelligence.” Reminding us that the Luddites weren’t anti-machine but anti-exploitation, Mr. Periggo – drawing heavily on Brian Merchant’s new book Blood in the Machine – explains how big corporations will use AI to make films that are plainly inferior to what today’s artists make, just as factory owners in the early Industrial Revolution made goods that were plainly inferior to what the day’s artisans could make. The factory owners ultimately muscled those artisans out of the market despite the Luddites’ best efforts, but it looks like the writers’ union has protected themselves from a similar outcome – for now. In any case, “if new technologies erode wages and increase wealth inequality, it’s a result of a political choice by the owners of that technology, not a result of the inevitable and unstoppable march of progress.”

Penny rants for September 25, 2023.

Here’s some big, good news: our Commodity Futures Trading Commission (or CFTC) has banned corporations from using derivatives to essentially bet on Congressional elections. The CFTC argues that betting on elections is far beyond its purview, and the corporation trying to bet on elections refuted that argument point by point, right? Ha ha ha ha! “It’s a known fact that radical innovation often requires time to be understood and accepted,” its CEO said. As I’ve said before, facts don’t need to announce themselves as facts, let alone “known" facts, and a lot of “radical innovations” do, in fact, suck, like this one does. If you know a lot of folks who bet on sports – which is very easy now, thanks to our internet and smart phones – then you know that almost everyone who bets on sports thinks all the games are rigged now. Now imagine everyone citing organized betting to suggest that “elections are rigged,” and you will know that no corporation should create a betting hall for elections, ever. Hell, I'd go further: I think horserace polls should be illegal.

Donald Trump apparently thinks that his legal troubles make him a sort of honorary Black American – and his campaign thinks it can capitalize! “Paying hush money to a porn star, allegedly mishandling classified documents, and attempting to overturn a free and fair election” are all far worse offenses than “brandishing a cellphone,” “carrying a toy gun,” and “telling a police officer you’re carrying a gun for which you have a permit,” all of which have induced police to execute Black folks in America. But Mr. Trump's strategy is, sadly, not as stupid as it sounds, and not just because of the actual “weaponization of law enforcement” I've just described. Democrats sure don’t reciprocate the love when Blacks routinely give them 90% of their votes, and George W. Bush showed us in 2004 that every little bit helps. He got 11% of the Black vote that year, versus Donald Trump’s 8% in 2020, and though that wasn’t the only reason Mr. Bush won, it sure didn’t hurt.

Dig this: the University of Florida, now headed by former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, just handed a $4.7 million no-bid contract to McKinsey & Company to “help develop the university’s vision for the future.” It’s a “no-bid” contract not just because of crony corporatism but because everyone knows by now that it’s a stupid idea to contract with the notorious McKinsey about anything, let alone creating a “vision” for your university! And I bet you thought vision was a college President’s job. Of course, that’s what leadership is all about these days: forcing other people to do your work for you, and then saying it’s not your fault when they screw up, and if Mr. Sasse didn’t know that before he was in our Senate, I’m sure he learned it there. Yikes, they could have paid me a lot less to develop a vision for education. Here it is: teach people to detect bullshit well enough that folks would be ashamed to hand out $4.7 million to big corporations to diddle themselves.

Finally, sure it was funny to hear Sen. Collins (R-ME) say that with the disappearance of the Senate dress code she might decide to wear a bikini on the Senate floor, but far less funny is hearing her say “I think there is a certain dignity that we should be maintaining in the Senate, and to do away with the dress code, to me, debases the institution.” Ah, do they think there’s any dignity to serving in the U.S. Senate? Have they looked in the mirror? Ron Johnson debases the institution with his endless stream of noxious, nonsensical crap, but at least he always looks sharp doing it! Meanwhile, Bob Menendez just got indicted, again, and still says I’m not going anywhere like anyone should care. Is it any wonder folks would take the guy in a hoodie and shorts who actually helps people over the guy in a suit who ensures that job-killing corporations get tax breaks?

Action: concerning government oppression, net neutrality, forced arbitration, and political campaigns.

Long story short: tell Iran to free Toomaj Salehi, tell our FCC to reinstate net neutrality protections for internet content, tell our CFPB to end forced arbitration clauses in banking consumer contracts, and tell our FEC to prevent AI-generated falsehoods in political campaigns. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to stop detaining hip-hop artist Toomaj Salehi, because that’s what snowflake governments do when people use art to criticize them. Seriously, imagine Richard Nixon putting Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young in jail after “Ohio.” Bet he thought of it! Bet today’s right-wing politicians would say it out loud a lot more easily! (About whom, though? Taylor Swift? Todd Snider?) But I digress: criticizing a government (for killing a woman for wearing a hijab “wrong,” no less) is no reason to put a guy in solitary and beat the stuffing out of him. I’m sorry that even needs explaining.

Free Press helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate network neutrality protections for internet content post-haste. Our FCC finally has five Commissioners now, so they have no excuse anymore. Probably no issue has united liberals and conservatives like net neutrality – virtually everyone who’s not a big telecom PR hack wants you, not some corporation, to decide where you go on the internet, without big corporations blocking or throttling your favorite websites or forcing websites to pay for faster delivery. Naturally, confronted with this unanimity of public opinion, the Trump FCC told the American people to fuck off and repealed net neutrality. But the battle has been joined again.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to end forced arbitration in banking industry consumer contracts. Arbitration used to be for big corporations so they could fight each other outside of the court system, but now big corporations routinely force arbitration clauses on you just to buy or use their products, and banks are no different. Don’t believe the BS that the “average” arbitration award is much higher than what you’d get out of a class action suit, because if you lose, averages won’t matter – and your opponent may be able to extract a large award out of you. So yeah, you’re much better off relying on your right to a day in court, even if it doesn’t make you rich.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Federal Elections Commission (or FEC) to clamp down on AI-generated lies in campaigns. People want to unleash AI all over everything these days, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t do it! And “fraudulent misrepresentation” of a candidate’s words is already illegal, so it shouldn’t be any different if AI enables it. I guess AI’s creators would say if AI did it, and AI isn’t really sentient, then nobody’s to blame! But you see the problem with that argument in the phrase “AI’s creators,” I trust. Yikes, this shouldn’t be that hard.

Around the table: the trials and tribulations of evil, part 989.

I hear that several airline corporations are finding fake parts in their planes, but Jesus Mary and Joseph it’s not a “supplier scandal,” regardless of how badly any particular supplier acts, but an executive pay scandal. I mean, why aren’t airline corporations making their own damn parts? Because that would require them to employ people who do that, and everyone knows slashing jobs is the way to goose up stock prices. Fly the friendly skies!

Ho hum, producer of putatively anti-child trafficking film gets nailed for fondling an underage girl’s breasts. He can say he was going undercover to expose evil and playing a part all he wants, but if he does that, he can’t also say anyway, I thought she was 18! That’s what they all say when they get caught, and saying so means he wasn't confident in your excuses, for some reason. Because they’re lies. That's the reason.

University of Toledo scientists develop method for keeping snow off solar panels, so now would be a good time to mention that when you hear that snow causes a 5 to 15% power loss, keep in mind that’s not a reason to abandon all renewable energy like right-wingers would have you do, but it is a reason to work to make solar panels more effective. We don’t let the perfect murder the good, as right-wingers would have us do, but we still strive for the best.

Judge orders loanshark freed by Donald Trump to repay millions to all the small businesses he bilked. Please don’t let Donald Trump’s follies sour you on the concept of mercy, since that’s almost certainly what he’s trying to do, by being so bad at doling out mercy. I am a little confused as to how going after financial predators could be “partisan.” “Because Letitia James’s doing it” is not a reason.

If I were more (or less) spiritually-advanced I might laugh at the news that several of Rudy Giuliani’s former lawyers are suing him for $14 million in unpaid legal bills, given that Donald Trump appears to have stiffed Mr. Giuliani for similar reasons. As they say, shit rolls downhill. But maybe these clowns can write them off as pro bono hours?

When I hear that Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) might be looking for a gig as a punditoid on CNN, I feel compelled to say that he’s a better Congressman than I ever thought he’d be after his awful Tea-Party-by-the-numbers 2010 Senate campaign, but I also feel compelled to say that all the things he’s been good on (tech monopolies, the Biden impeachment) haven’t yielded actual results. Why, it’s almost like that’s the whole idea, again. I’d be happy to be wrong! But I’m probably not wrong.

Finally, when I hear that now-former Fox News Chair Rupert Murdoch hired Tucker Carlson because he thought he was a moderate who’d balance out Sean Hannity’s rabid Trumpism, all I can say is: pimp, stop lying. Rupert Murdoch knew perfectly well what he was doing, which was continuing to make money off keeping Americans in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage. After all, it beats working for a living!

Readings for June 19, 2023.

Ho hum, the Washington Post is miffed that the debt ceiling “deal” didn’t do slash Social Security and Medicare benefits like they’ve wanted to do since time immemorial, and all I can say is oh STFU already. The real driver of debt is our continuing failure to tax the rich and corporations as hard as we did in the 1950s; we taxed millionaire income at 91% and corporations at 55% then, but now we do that at 37% and 21%, respectively, and with a lot more loopholes now than then. The Post didn’t go as hard after Medicare, which I suppose is progress, but also didn’t mention that Medicare-for-All would save us about $1.6 trillion annually in health care costs – and that figure comes from the right-wing Mercatus Center, not that they exactly foregrounded it. The one letter-to-the-editor FAIR quotes in its article is worth the price of admission.

Wondering exactly what to say to your right-wing uncle who says the Trump indictment is no big deal? You know, besides I don’t do Flat Earth Society crap? Judd Legum at Popular Information refutes the four main counterarguments of the right, including “Hillary did the same thing” and “Biden did the same thing” (each individual cooperated with our Justice Department, while Mr. Trump, per the indictment, did not, and anyway Mike Pence “did the same thing,” too, except he also cooperated and won’t be charged for what he did). The worst, of course, is “this all sets a dangerous precedent where the party that comes into power just goes after its enemies,” an utterance not merely of cowardice but hubris. After all, if Republicans hadn't acted with such restraint after Bill Clinton’s 1992 election, they might have set a precedent.

Maxwell Strachan at Motherboard writes about a Texas couple who bought a house planning to rent it out via Airbnb, only to be banned by Airbnb for being “closely associated with a person who isn’t allowed to use Airbnb," in this case a homeowner’s parent’s partner, who had two non-violent offenses (one drug-related) in his background. In the couple’s account, Airbnb did a terrible enough job handling (and ultimately denying) their appeal that they suspected that algorithms handled it more than people did. They got Airbnb to reverse their decision after going to the media about it, but in the meantime we witness what happens when we a) don’t strangle monopolies in their crib, b) act like putting people in jail is the only duty a civilization has to perform, and c) let bosses fire all their employees because algorithms don’t call out sick.

Around the table: ChatGPT is "way stupider than people realize"! And other total non-surprises.

Now it can be told: an AI expert informs us that “ChatGPT is Way Stupider Than People Realize,” because “large language models are good at...saying what an answer should sound like, which is different from what an answer should be.” If you were one of the many teachers who easily detected your students farming out their essays to AI, you already understand this. Of course, if you’re a CEO desperately trying to cut jobs so you can pretend your corporation’s “efficient” and thus goose up your stock prices beyond what any moral or economic reality would justify, then your job depends on you not understanding this. (And sadly, “(i)t gives an answer with complete confidence, and I sort of believe it. And half the time, it’s completely wrong” might as well describe almost any politician you’ve heard of.)

Ho hum, Gov. DeSantis (F-FL) is putting his state workers’ pension funds into the grubby hands of underperforming hedge funds that donated to his campaigns because of course he is. After all, if you want to present yourself to rich right-wing donors as an electable candidate, you can’t just do the culture war stuff, you also have to do the grift! Meanwhile, public employees in Florida haven’t gotten a cost-of-living increase in 15 years! I’d say it doesn’t pay to make everything subservient to one man’s power, but a significant part of Florida’s population apparently doesn’t care, and deserves whatever horrors befall them. (My estimate that a quarter of the electorate is batshit insane applies nationally; surely some states have more batshit insane voters than others.)

Lo and behold, former Rep. Kurt Schrader (D?-OR), who did his damnedest to kill Medicare drug price negotiation even though over 80% of Americans strongly support it, has just gotten a job for a big pharma lobbyist. I wonder if that’s a good hire, considering that his name is now dogshit. I’ll never forget the why-am-I-here-don’t-waste-my-time-just-elect-me-already look on his face as he “debated” the woman who ultimately defeated him in the 2022 Democratic primary – or his whining afterward that the Republican wave of 2022 would begin in his district. His district did flip, but narrowly, and, ah, what wave? I would like to think the times are passing Kurt Schrader by, though big lobbying money might prevent him from realizing that for a little while.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that our Surgeon General says that social media can present “a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” When you’re on social media, you always feel like you’re performing, and why do kids really need that sort of pressure? So they can handle it later? That’s like setting people on fire to prepare them for an eternity in hell. This is why sane people like us have been telling social media to avoid roping kids in. After all, our Congressfolk are about as hands-off about social media as they are about guns – or financial predators. (Our Surgeon General’s advisory does inform us that social media can help marginalized folks find each other and support each other. I have no doubt that’s true – until Elon Musk takes over!)

Ho hum, ”The U.S. Is Unhappy That Mexico Is Spending Money on Its Own Citizens.” One day we’re going to take a good, hard look at our history – and not just our history, but the history of every nation that ever ruled the Earth – and we’re going to find that even when we treated our own citizens well, we did it on the backs of nations that treated their citizens like dung. My hope is that when regular folks read sentences like “President Lopez Obrador’s federal budget for 2023 gives priority to social spending and signature infrastructure projects, rather than the investments needed to address bilateral issues with the U.S. such as migration, security, and trade,” they’ll see it for the whining it is. (AMLO has cooperated with the U.S. more on immigration, though I doubt he’ll ever get much out of that.)

Finally, because the news can’t be all bad, scientists at U. Mass-Amherst have developed technology that can harvest electricity from air moisture, even in the Sahara desert. All my peeps on the Eastern Seaboard are no doubt exclaiming at last! A use for all this damn humidity!, but this technology can work with any amount of humidity in the air, though I imagine it’ll be less effective in the desert. Now comes the part where the big corporations that fund scientific breakthroughs sit on the funding that could make this technology affordable and available to all. Have I mentioned that government funding would comprise an alternative to this reality? Yes, I believe I have.

Around the table: featuring the latest college admissions hustle, and other follies.

I’ll admit I’m torn about our Supreme Court’s decision to shield Twitter from being sued under the Anti-Terrorism Act. I mean, we do brandish the word “terrorist” too easily, I always fear good Americans getting ruined over trumped-up “terrorism” charges, Section 230 remains a major impediment to suing social media corporations, and I prefer to blame actual terrorists for actual terrorism rather than the social media platforms that (at best) enable them. On the other hand, Twitter didn’t merely host terrorists’ content, but actually went out of its way to ensure its users saw it; no law (or “commitment to free speech”) compels them to do that, and we ought to do something about that. (I would hope anyone would recognize “the algorithms did it, so no one’s responsible” as horsedoodle.)

When I hear that “The Newest College Admissions Ploy,” according to ProPublica, is “Paying to Make Your Teen a ‘Peer-Reviewed’ Author.” I have to say it sure does seem like another way to keep poor/Black/Brown kids out of colleges, as most of them can’t afford $2,500 (or $10,000!) for pretend-publication of “academic research.” It’s also a way of filling teenagers with even more angst about that college education they’re going to spend the rest of their lives paying off. But wait, there’s more! Some journals seem to publish just any old thing, and some of the students’ mentors lie not just about how much of the kids’ work they did but about their credentials. “Ph.D.” or “Ph.D. student,” who can tell the difference?

I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you! that our IRS has admitted that it audits Black folks up to five times more often than taxpayers of other races. Why, it’s as shocking as hearing that they go after mostly poor people because they can’t afford the lawyers! Full disclosure: it actually is a little shocking to hear them actually admit it, rather than just do it and not admit it. And stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but our IRS blames a flawed algorithm for all the audits of Black folks, which lends credence to the notion that when the programmer’s biased, the software’s biased. More money for our IRS should help this problem, too, since now our IRS can go after some rich tax cheats, instead of just picking low-hanging fruit among folks who might have wrongly declared eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit.

I hope our Food and Drug Administration does approve over-the-counter birth control pills, and I know it’ll help women who don’t have enough health insurance or who live in areas that don’t have family planning clinics, but I still worry about the cost. The pills I take are much, much cheaper in large part because I get them via prescription even though they’re available over-the-counter. I would hate for price to be another obstacle for poor women, nearly as much as I hate it when Republican ball-swingers pass comprehensive abortion bans and then can’t understand why a constituent dies from an ectopic pregnancy or a doctor is afraid to give chemotherapy to a pregnant woman.

Finally, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (E-AL), who thinks there’s a lot more in the Durham report than there actually is, says on Newsmax that “(i)f people don’t go to jail for this, the American people should just stand up and say, ‘Listen, enough’s enough, let’s don’t have elections anymore.’” Always right-wingers love democracy until it tells them what they don’t want to hear! Alabama had the dumb luck of having Doug Jones, who put two of the Birmingham bombers in jail, as their Senator, but apparently they preferred a guy who thinks democracy is all about him stamping his feet and getting his way.

Readings for May 16, 2023: special "AI's creators still suck!" edition.

Naomi Klein surveys the AI landscape and concludes that tech CEOs are “kidding themselves” that AI will “benefit humanity.” Benefit their continuing efforts to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes, maybe! “There is a world in which generative AI, as a powerful predictive research tool and a performer of tedious tasks, could indeed be marshaled to benefit humanity,” she writes. “But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life.” They’d also have to happen in a world where big corporations had any respect for data and the folks who create it, which, of course, they do not. Also too, it’s a bit rich for Our Glorious Elites to say “AI will solve the problems” that Our Glorious Elites could already have helped us solve, if they but had the will.

In a related note, Alex Pareene at Defector reminds us that “The Computers Are Coming for the Wrong Jobs.” AI “is well-suited at the task of blandly rewriting copy, which makes it the perfect employee of the sorts of content mills that exist to aggregate and rewrite tech or entertainment news,” but not so good at, you know, any kind of expression that requires an understanding of language, which certainly includes the kind of scriptwriting that big corporations seem to think is so easy for some reason. (No use telling me most big Hollywood scripts follow the same template these days, because, as we all know, those templates come and go.) Also, “AI as it currently exists – that is, “large language model” programs like ChatGPT – only appears ‘free’ or even ‘cheap’ because it is being heavily subsidized by investors and tech companies that hope to eventually pass along the costs of training and operating these programs to clients like, say, large film and television studios.”

While we’re still on the subject of scriptwriting, turns out the Hollywood writers’ strike “shows how to fight back” against corporations wanting to “replace” you with AI. They’re demanding that studios not replace them with AI, and if they can hold out, they’ll get what they want – and they’ll teach the rest of us that we can protect our jobs, too, since corporations are coming after all of them, not just the ones that produce words. And don’t be heartened by the notion that big entertainment corporations just want to generate scripts with AI and have humans rewrite them so they don’t suck, because studios pay less for rewrites than for original writing. Anyway, don’t watch any scab- or AI-written entertainment; it won’t kill you to give, say, Mad Men another go, and remind yourself what real writing is like.

Finally, this Associated Press report warns that AI-generated ad content could be far worse than deepfakes and memefarms. “Sophisticated generative AI tools can now create cloned human voices and hyper-realistic images, videos and audio in seconds, at minimal cost,” they write. “When strapped to powerful social media algorithms, this fake and digitally created content can spread far and fast and target highly specific audiences, potentially taking campaign dirty tricks to a new low.” Indeed, the Republican National Committee has already created an ad full of AI-generated images (which they identified as AI) of boarded-up storefronts and crime waves coming from Brown people, but at least two can play at that game. Just wait until I get around to creating an AI ad showing what America would be like if Republicans took over; I bet Congress would ban AI in campaign ads with a quickness!

Action: concerning algorithms, bad media, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell big corporations to stop using algorithms to discriminate against people, tell big cable corporations to deplatform Fox News, and tell our USPS Board of Governors not to slash letter carrier jobs and pay. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Consumer Reports helps you tell big corporations to stop using algorithms to commit acts of racial bias. You have likely already realized that they only use algorithms so they won’t have to pay workers, but you may not have fully realized that when biased folks write algorithms, they produce biased algorithms, which help corporations discriminate against women and Black and Brown folks. But this actually represents an opportunity to get corporations to look at their own algorithms and fix them so that they don’t, for example, deny Black folks loans when they try to move to the suburbs. And if right-wingers call that “woke,” just ignore them, because they’re wrong.

Inequality Media helps you tell big cable corporations to deplatform the Fox News Channel. Because it has done uncountable harm to our country for over two decades, trapping millions of otherwise good and decent Americans in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage, and though we can’t reason with those folks anymore, we can at least cut their drug off at the source. And even if you’re not watching Fox, you’re still paying for it – more for it than every other “free” cable channel except for ESPN, in fact. And for the hundredth time: our First Amendment does not guarantee you a platform for your speech, only that our government won’t put you in jail for it. Our pressure’s worked before, so let's make it work again.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors not to slash letter carrier jobs and pay. They’ve raised prices, cut services, and slashed jobs, and now they want to cut jobs and pay of postal carriers – particularly rural ones – and why? Because an algorithm told them to! Think maybe they only write algorithms that tell them what they want to hear anyway? We don’t need fancy software to tell us that rural communities need our Postal Service perhaps even more than urban ones – not just for life-saving medicines, of course, but also for voting by mail, since a lot of rural communities don’t even have polling places. So it’s time to give our USPS Board of Governors hell, again.

Action: concerning AI, social media, and judicial ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban AI in weapons systems, reject efforts to give our President the power to outlaw social media, and force our Supreme Court Justices to adhere to a code of ethics. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban the use of Artificial Intelligence (or AI) in weapons systems for all eternity. If AI weapons turn on us – and we have every reason to suspect they will – then all the soldiers’ blood we’ve saved won’t mean a damn. Now, your right-wing uncle will say “but that’ll make it harder to win wars!” To which we might reasonably respond: we can only hope! Nations tend to fight wars they think they can win, after all, and anyway war should be hard! It’s like no one’s ever seen “A Taste of Armageddon.” Even if other nations want to use AI in their weapons, there are such things as treaties. Diplomacy! It’s not actually a cuss word.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the RESTRICT Act, since it would give our Executive branch the power to outlaw using social media platforms, and you can think of a few Presidents who should never have that kind of power, right? You know, besides all of them. Folks who have real concerns about the power of social media to distort the truth – and, frankly, that number should include all of us – have no obligation to pursue just any old solution in order to rein in social media. Better solutions would include forcing social media corporations to hire real live human beings to moderate their content, but they won’t do that – unless we make them.

Finally, both Daily Kos and Public Citizen help you tell your Congressfolk to force our Supreme Court Justices to adhere to a code of ethics. Not just because of Clarence Thomas’s troubles (including, let’s not forget, his wife’s participation in January 6), but also because of Justice Kavanaugh’s dozens of ethics complaints, Justice Gorsuch's suspicious home sale of 2017 Justices Sotomayor and Kagan owning land while ruling on eviction moratoriums, and Chief Justice Roberts’s wife’s recruitment of lawyers for corporations that had business before the Court. It’s like the Augean stable, isn’t it? So our Congressfolk need to start shoveling.

Around the table: greed is still the problem, part 877.

Diana Moskovitz at Defector reminds us that “Greed is Still the Problem” with internet media outlets blowing up like Buzzfeed’s news division just did. Everyone thinks it’s “news doesn’t make money” when the truth is that news doesn’t make unearned stupid-money for speculators. Yes, the Google/Facebook ad monopoly is also a major obstacle for internet media, but the main problem isn’t that they can’t literally charge people per screen view like they used to be able to charge people per newspaper, but that the banksters controlling internet media are used to making billions of dollars without doing any real work of any benefit to anyone, so they kill it off and drain their blood like the vampires they are. (And anyway, they could charge folks a buck – or less – a month for unlimited views and I suspect they’d be fine.)

At least six of our nine Supreme Court Justices are millionaires – worth at least $24 million as a group, not counting homes or retirement accounts, so that figure’s undoubtedly considerably larger. “Not counting homes or retirement accounts” may explain why Justice Thomas – in trouble for receiving free vacations from a "good friend" who might well have business before our Court – isn’t one of them; I could explain Justice Kavanaugh’s non-presence on that list differently, of course. Seriously, though, money corrupts; Justices Kagan and Sotomayor are landlords, and though they both voted to keep the Biden eviction moratorium, “their positions as landlords could have weakened their will to convince other justices to join their side.” At least in theory!

Count me as not caring that 44 percent of Republicans don’t want Donald Trump to run for President in 2024. He’ll get the 25% of the electorate who are bat-guano insane (I expect these folks comprise most, though not all, of the Republicans who’d say they want him to run for President), and he’ll easily get at least 20-22 more percentage points from people who “can’t stand him” but will “hold their nose” because of all their imaginary complaints about Joe Biden; as history has shown, that might be all he needs. Polls arguing that Democrats don’t want Joe Biden to run are meaningless for somewhat similar reasons (except that our complaints about Donald Trump are quite real).

I wonder if we should even keep pointing out that Ron DeSantis isn’t fighting Disney particularly effectively – Disney easily beat back his effort to take their relative independence away, and his “revenge” plan of maybe one day putting a prison near the park will hardly inconvenience them, but of course the drama he’s creating is not only the strategy, the drama is the point. The masturbatory-rage crowd won’t say he’s “petty” for demanding more monorail inspections, they’ll say he’s “sticking it” to the “woke” crowd. Of course, if Mr. DeSantis could govern, let alone lead, he wouldn’t need to create these dramas.

Finally, physicist Michio Kaku explains why we shouldn’t go very far out of our way to contact alien life forms disk – because they might crush us without feeling animosity toward us, or even noticing us. And that could well happen! But another possibility, one I entertain more frequently, is that we shouldn’t contact alien life forms because we’ll just infect them with all our decadent maladies. Perhaps I’m arrogant for thinking that, but thinking that is a better way to get us to change our ways that than thinking we’re just ants on a turtleshell.

Around the table: evil people run from good people.

Supreme Court pauses lower court ruling on abortion drugs until appeals can work their way through the courts, meaning mifepristone will still be as widely-available as our FDA has mandated. Naturally Justice Alito writes a dissent casting doubt on our government’s willingness to enforce the law, which sure seems to me like a doubt Justices could deploy when it suits them. Also, folks yammering on about the Comstock Act might want to look at the Second Circuit’s United States v. One Package ruling from 1936.

From Emily Drabinski at TruthOut we learn about one way we can block right-wing book banning efforts: strong public library boards. They vary in strength – the ones in Florida generally operate in advisory capacities only, meaning they can’t do very much about Ron DeSantis – but others are stronger, and we can always make the weak ones stronger. Going back to childhood I’d always presumed I could handle everything I read, and I suppose maybe after all these years there still might be something out there I can’t handle, but I sure can handle a lot more than these right-wing book banners can – or more likely, want you to think people can, or kids can.

A Republican Muncie, IN county council member suddenly starts identifying as a “woman of color.” No, not for real – I mean, he did say it out loud, but I didn’t need the emoji-wink to tell he was doing some hardcore trolling; probably he imagines himself a satirist of Pythonian power. (Now would be a good time to mention that one of my favorite-ever filmmakers, Terry Gilliam, should really stop feeding into such nonsense.) Sadly, his trollery isn’t a teachable moment on transgender issues, but a teachable moment on, you know, not being a complete asshole in public, so better to point out his folly once and then let him sink into the oblivion he deserves.

Matt Stoller discusses how AI impacts anti-monopoly actions against Google. Hilarious to read that Google says it’s not a monopoly anymore because AI search engines exist; one almost suspects they sat on their own AI technology for years just so they could one day make this excuse. But any monopoly is an unqualified evil. No, there aren’t “good” monopolies, as our recent supply chain issues have (hopefully!) reminded us. A big problem is folks can’t imagine what an anti-monopoly world can do because they live in a monopoly world. You know what an anti-monopoly world did once? Oh, only defeat the Nazis.

Finally, the grandson of the man who shot Ralph Yarl for the heinous crime of accidentally going to the wrong house to pick up his siblings said his pappy imbibed a lot of right-wing media. And THAT! Is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD! Moreover, the fact that he wouldn’t STFU about Stand Your Ground laws makes it less likely he’ll be able to deploy that argument in court! Seriously, though, it might also be time for a mass movement to get cop shows off the air. When you watch someone kill the bad guy a million times, you invariably start thinking about killing all the bad guys in your life, though your life is a thousand times more complex than a TV drama.

Around the table: right-wingers eat each other, and other horrible truths.

Uh oh: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been accepting very expensive vacations almost annually from a single Republican donor, without disclosing a one, meaning he’s apparently broken the law and, not incidentally, failed to adhere to considerably looser ethics standards than other federal judges. Right-wingers will say “there’s no quid pro quo,” but a) that seems unlikely, given how people with money are so interconnected with each other, and b) in a civilized society we also avoid the appearance of corruption, particularly if we’re leaders, as Supreme Court Justices surely are.

I’d love to celebrate the discovery that injecting a heart failure patient’s own stem cells back into their heart reduces their risk of stroke and heart attack by almost 60%, but I’m also reminded that right-wing hysteria held stem cell research back all through Tha Bush Mobb years, has held us all back generally going back many centuries, and continues to hold us back to this very day. It’d be nice if our “liberal” media would stop covering right-wing hysterics like they’re jes’ folks; right-wing hysterics should have to fight for coverage, like they did in the old days. At least it’d build character.

Mike Ludwig at TruthOut reminds us that while our FDA did us a solid by making the overdose-reversal drug Naloxone an over-the-counter drug, the drug is still fairly expensive, which will limit the number of good Americans who can get it. You’re looking at between $42 and $100 per dose without insurance – health insurance corporations should really cover it, since dead people can’t buy any more health care – and a lot of folks (what right-wingers call “those people”) don’t have that amount of cash lying around after paying bills and buying food and raising kids. No use retorting well, don’t do drugs, then, since that’s not how addiction works. (Assuming Naloxone will “encourage” drug use is also not how addiction works.)

See if you can follow this Moebius strip of a story: three-fifths of a very, very right-wing school board resign after the other two-fifths won’t STFU about critical race theory and “grooming” – this, after said very, very right-wing school board had long eradicated any trace of anti-racist or pro-gay teaching in their classrooms. On second thought, this isn’t that hard to understand: right-wingers constantly cannibalize their kind, because what else can they do? Right-wing ideology still dominates American discourse, and still limits the options our political leaders will consider, so right-wingers must find ever-more fantastic enemies, lest the rageheads snap out of their wage. They sure got lucky back in the day when they hunted a President who was an actual serial adulterer.

Finally, a pair of researchers explain AI’s critical shortfall: because “it takes a body” to understand the world. We don’t analyze trillions of words to figure out how to smooth out wrinkles in a shirt or keep a fire going; we do it through seeing and manipulating objects with our hands. This maps on to what I’ve been saying: that AI is, at present, little more than a good bullshit artist. The problem, of course, will be when humans won’t see that because they can make good money not seeing it. I’m pretty sure that’s the dystopian future toward which we’re headed at present, not the one where “there’s so much AI no one can tell what’s real anymore.”

Around the table: down with Drama Kings!

Good news on abortion rights from another red state, as the Oklahoma Supreme Court rules that the state constitution guarantees a right to an abortion “at any point in the pregnancy” when a doctor finds “with a reasonable degree of certainty” that denying the abortion would “endanger the woman’s life.” It’s a narrow right, to be sure, but it expands the only right offered by state law, which only allows abortion when a woman is in “actual and present danger” of dying. Personal to those who think the doctor’s determination is a loophole women will drive a Mack truck through: ain’t you the folks who say government should never get between doctor and patient? Or did you just mean you, and not “those people”?

University of British Columbia researchers find a way to get rid of the notorious PFAS “forever chemicals” from our water. The UBC process not only promises to get rid of 99% of all PFAS chemicals but obliterate them as well, via “special electrochemical and photochemical techniques”; destroying the chemicals would rid us of the problem of “more highly toxic solid waste that will be another major environmental challenge.” So maybe the big corporations will cajole our EPA into loosening standards well before the technology becomes widely-available? Hey, if I thought of it, I’m sure they did. In the meantime, I wish the UBC researchers the best of luck in solving an extraordinarily difficult problem.

From the “It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Guy!” file: big advertisers still haven’t returned to Twitter, almost six months after Elon Musk took over, at least in part because they have little confidence Mr. Musk can’t/won’t keep Twitter from becoming, to borrow Mr. Musk’s own phrase, a “free-for-all hellscape” where racists and other bigots run rampant. I think Twitter’s reputation as a not-free-for-all hellscape before Mr. Musk bought it is rather overstated, but let’s not set the bar too low here. And I’m not of the mind that we should just let big corporations eat each other – the law may not recognize Twitter (and other social media sites) as publishers per se, but that’s what they are, and that would make content moderation literally job one at Twitter, regardless of Mr. Musk’s distaste for that task.

Ho hum, now Gov. DeSantis (E-FL) wants to expand Florida’s notorious “Don’t Say Gay” law to all the higher grades as well as the lower ones. Remember when your right-wing friends said “it’s not for all kids, it’s just for the really young ones who hardly understand sexuality anyway”? Now we know that they were either stupid or lying, neither of which is a good look, and anyway we ought to just go with “lying,” since the facts don’t justify giving right-wingers the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, Governor, come get your poll tax, if you have the guts.

Speaking of the Drama Kings, both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have now said that Mr. DeSantis would not be Mr. Trump’s running mate if Mr. Trump secures the Republican Presidential nomination in 2024, which should surprise no one, since both men are residents of Florida and Article II, Section 1 of our Constitution prohibits the President and Vice President from living in the same state. (The 12th Amendment, which largely rewrites the relevant part of Section 1, maintains this prohibition.) So, how about we never speak of this possibility again? No, not even to goad right-wingers into dreaming of the impossible; they do that enough anyway.

Finally, from the “Dystopia is Here Now!” file: clothing corporation Levi Strauss & Co. will use artificial intelligence-generated avatars in order to “increase diversity” among its models! And here you thought diversity was about helping real people get more opportunities to succeed in life, but not to the corporations that would never pay any worker any money if they could get away with it! I have to infer all of that, because Levis says it can’t fulfill its diversity obligations using just real people without explaining why. I mean, it's not like corporations can't find Black actors or models, as you know if you watch almost any TV.

Around the table: pushing back against bankster horror.

Biden Administration announces that the Deposit Insurance Fund, and not taxpayers, will make depositors whole after the Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed; DIF funds come from fees assessed to banks, not taxes per se. I did not know the DIF currently had $100 billion in it! So feel free to push back against know-nothing right-wingers who declare it “just another bailout,” and also feel free to ask if any of them did a damn thing in 2008. I mean, many right-wingers did, but many also did not!

Ho hum, Silicon Valley Bank employed two former aides to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to lobby our government for weakened banking regulations, such as the kind that permitted Silicon Valley Bank to fail last week. Yes, the 2018 legislation weakening Dodd-Frank reforms (which were themselves not so vigorous to begin with) was a bipartisan mess, but few lobbied for it harder than Rep. McCarthy did. Presumably he will feel the appropriate amount of shame and make amends for his mistakes. I kid, of course.

Norfolk Southern sure is having a bad winter, as another train derailed in Alabama as its CEO testified before a group of angry Senators, the second such derailment since the East Palestine derailment, though neither of those, thankfully, carried toxic and/or carcinogenic chemicals. But heartened as I am to see Sen. Vance (R-OH) actually argue for something that might make a difference, I sure hope this event doesn’t become another in a long list of times our Senators grilled a CEO hard before letting him do whatever he wanted.

Pew Research Center poll finds that a staggering 83% of Black folks think our economic system either “needs major changes” or “needs to be completely rebuilt,” and I’m sure right-wingers will use this data to assert that “Black folks can’t govern themselves.” But given most Americans’ experience with capitalism, particularly lately, that argument won’t convince anyone outside the Batshit Insane Quarter (hereafter referred to as the BIQ) of the electorate, and likely not all of them, either.

Jason W. Osborne at The Conversation notes that the seemingly-exponential growth of legalized gambling “may pose a threat to college athletes,” and if you’ve ever heard (name of sport) is rigged! in your work locker room, you already know there’ll be more and more threats against athletes perceived to have cost gamblers money. And it’ll get worse, as gambling replaces work as the main money-maker in our economy for too many Americans – not that I could blame them much, since we’ve all watched financial predation replace work as the main money-maker in our economy over the last few decades.

Finally, I guess I feel a little sorry for Tennessee’s Lieutenant Governor after he got caught slapping heart-emojis on photos of a particular half-naked gay man on social media, though I must also note that his “evolving” views on LGBTQ+ issues have done nothing about the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Tennessee. But his spokeshack’s suggestion that he was just connecting with a constituent demands mockery! We shouldn’t have to send butt-grams to get our elected officials’ attention, after all.

Around the table: cost-cutting your way to prosperity! And other fictions.

Ho hum, Disney plans to lay off 7,000 workers – right as they’re facing union workers agitating for better pay and working conditions. The layoff continues the fiction that “cutting costs” makes your operation more “efficient” and that “efficiency” should “earn” you higher stock prices. Funny how big corporations always treat labor as a “cost,” rather than, you know, as the one thing that keeps them from spiraling into oblivion. But these are, as you know, the fictions big corporations have foisted on us for the last 40 years, and the result is a hollowed-out economy that no longer rewards work. And remember this when you cheer on Disney for “fighting” Ron DeSantis; their “fight” is just as much drama to them as it is to him.

Speaking of the fiction of “cost-cutting” your way to prosperity: doctors at a Florida HCA hospital allege that they face “unsanitary” instruments, roaches in operating rooms, an overloaded Emergency Room, and “anesthesiology errors that resulted in patients waking up while in surgery,” and how’d you like to be that patient? You’ll never guess the rest of the story: management has done nothing about these concerns though they’ve known about them for over a year, and the hospital’s parent corporation is, sigh, “highly profitable” and “its stock is an investor favorite.” Used to be we didn’t expect hospitals to be big money-makers because, you know, they have a purpose higher than mammon, but when you put mammon-worshipers in charge of everything, civilizations crumble and people suffer.

Amazon deforestation fell dramatically in Brazil during the month of January, as Lula’s administration has pledged to end the rainforest destruction that his predecessor, the irredeemable asshole Jair Bolsonaro, foisted on the world. Lula still has an uphill battle, as said asshole predecessor gutted environmental enforcement during his reign of error, and I would also imagine that enforcement is a lot more hazardous than it is here – in Brazil, I would think you’d have a lot more rage-filled developers shooting at you. Nonetheless, I hope we’re able to observe further progress in the years to come.

The Sentencing Project describes why it’s not necessarily good news that the prison population has gone down 25% since 2009. For one thing, that’s 25% over a dozen years, plus a big chunk of that drop came in 2020, as prisons let a lot of folks out so they wouldn’t die of COVID. And considering that we still put more folks in prison than any other country, and that incarceration went up 600 percent between 1980 and 2009, clearly we’ve got a lot of work to do. Decriminalizing pot and moving to a treatment model for drug addiction would sure go a long way toward erasing this stain on our nation.

Ho hum, our “liberal” media still resorts to the same tired tropes when covering Bernie Sanders, in particular his “scowl.” Read the whole thing – if you can name a sin of shallowness, our “liberal” media commits it in covering Mr. Sanders. That reminds me of all the times I had to correct Trump supporters about Bernie’s “yelling” by reminding them that their guy was the Yeller-in-Chief, and of course the problem is broader than that: our “liberal” media lets conservatives throw tantrums they’d put their own kids in time-out for, while reporting on the mildest objections of liberals as evidence of our utter lack of civilization. Maybe liberals should smile more!

Finally, the Indian government has damn near taken over control of the internet there – and big tech corporations (except to some degree Twitter, though I don’t imagine that courage continuing under their new management) have enabled them. I don’t want to hear that big tech corporations should put up with the abuse of “emergency powers” so they can sell ads to the 800 million Indians who use the internet, because the best of us don’t let money dictate every damn decision we make. Also, they said powerful corporations could be a bulwark against a government that abuses its power, and clearly they were wrong. And on purpose, I’m pretty sure.

Readings for February 7, 2023.

James Steinhof at TruthOut tells us that “Buzzfeed’s AI-Produced Content Experiment is a Glimpse Into a Bleak Future.” Once Buzzfeed outsourced some of its more clickbaity works to AI – which doesn’t get sick, doesn’t have families, and doesn’t need to go on vacation to recharge from stress – its stock prices went up, though, really, fuck the stock market that we’ve made into a god. Other corporations will see the promise of “reduced labor costs” – you love having your work described as a “cost,” don’t you? – and hope for a similar goosing of their stock prices. Any teacher can tell that a ChatGPT-produced essay is BS, but our boldest and brightest entrepreneurs will pretend there’s no difference between writing produced by real people and writing produced by a machine that’s guessing at what being a human is like. The question is why we, as civilized people, would tolerate such a thing.

David Sirota at The Lever notes that a private hedge fund industry rag has said, and I quote, that “private equity returns are a major threat to pension plans' ability to pay retirees in 2023.” So there’s the danger to pensions we’ve been hearing about for the last couple of decades! I kid, of course – banksters have been using pension-related hysteria to justify gobbling up public pensions themselves, even though they don’t do any better than other investment firms, though they do charge more on commission. I guess the truly enterprising right-winger would blame the Fed’s interest rate hikes for all of that, since one of the (highly awesome and entertaining!) side effects of those rate hikes has been all the money that hedge funds have lost over the last year or so. But I doubt we’ll see that, not when there are transgender athletes and anti-racist books and litter boxes to whine about.

Finally, the incomparable Matt Stoller explains why a judge ruling against our FTC in its suit against Meta for buying a virtual reality competitor might be a “pyrrhic victory” for Meta. Long story short: “what we have learned is that the judge ruled against the FTC on the facts, but not on the underlying legal theory,” meaning that the Judge did agree that “acquisitions of nascent companies can hurt competition and that companies not currently in a marketplace can still have influence over the marketplace,” but ruled that our FTC simply didn’t make that case well enough. Courts have spent the last 40 years trampling on such theories in antitrust law, even though there’s plenty of precedent for them, so that’s actually a big deal. Folks, this is why we always try to do the right thing – even when we fail, we set an example (or even a precedent!) for those who follow us.

Around the table: I have seen the future; brother, it is murder.

“Brain-computer interfaces” (or BCIs) might enable soldiers to fight remotely, and might even allow soldiers to “turn off” their fear, but here’s an idea: don’t do any of that! "What might soldiers accomplish if they just weren’t afraid?" is the wrong question to ask, particularly in this era of guerrilla warfare, where hackers will probably win the battle with BCI-enabled soldiers anyway! BCIs have more humane uses (i.e., helping the disabled), and some folks have given the ethics a great deal of thought; if only America had a way of stopping the unethical use of technology, you know, like with laws and such.

An artificial intelligence agent gets good enough at Stratego that it now outranks almost every human on Earth. Machines may not have egos like people do – study any military history and you’ll be amused and/or disgusted by how badly Our Glorious Elites have botched wars just to appease their own egos – but again, how about we don’t leave wars up to machines? I mean, yes, it’s interesting that an AI agent play a game with “imperfect information” so well, but instead of imagining how we could “fight wars better” – again, a dubious notion in the guerrilla warfare era! -- how about we imagine how we can avoid wars better?

Ho hum, right-wingers claim that vaccines kill people with blood clots, naturally by blowing one fact (that the J&J vaccine, accounting for 3% of all vaccine administrations, cause a kind of blood clotting in literally four out of every million doses) way out of proportion, pretending that postmortem blood clots aren’t common, and repeating a whole slew of other debunked claims. Also, too, just because someone dies after getting the vaccine, that doesn’t mean the vaccine killed them. If I shoot a diabetic in the head, no reasonable person would claim he died of diabetes, but right-wingers would make a movie saying exactly that if they thought they could enrage enough people.

Marion County (IN) Superior Court Judge blocks Indiana’s abortion ban – on religious freedom grounds! After all, mainstream Judaism and Islam both authorize it in certain circumstances, so banning abortion more broadly interferes with those folks’ exercise of their First Amendment-guaranteed religious freedom. Will our Supreme Court, with its stated concern for religious freedom, uphold rulings such as these? I kid, of course – nothing matters to the far right wing of our Court except imposing their will on America. Why, I bet they’ll figure out a way to rule that the Jewish/Muslim/other non-Christian women who filed the suit “don’t have standing” to challenge it!

Our Senate has passed the Respect for Marriage Act. The bill they passed wouldn’t compel churches to hold gay weddings, but as long as our government recognizes them, most folks couldn’t care less if churches do. The bill would also repeal the noxious Defense of Marriage Act, confer federal benefits to any gay couple legally married, and force states to recognize marriages legal in other states. However, the bill wouldn’t compel those 35 states that have anti-gay marriage laws on the books – laws those states will enforce if/when our Supreme Court overturns Obergefell v. Hodges – to legalize gay marriage, and that’s a thing that’ll come back to bite us. Verdict: it's progress, but it's not quite justice.

Finally, our Senate has passed a bill that’ll keep railway workers from striking – but also rejected a separate measure that would have given railway workers seven days of paid sick leave, which had (justifiably!) been a sticking point in negotiations. One has to wonder why our House put the seven sick days in a separate bill, one more easily rejected by our Senate, instead of daring right-wing Senators to oppose the whole package because they hate giving workers time off. Sadly, the only answers I can come up with are “cowardice” and “evil," which reduces to "evil" or "evil."

Around the table: don't mess with Katie Porter's whiteboard! And other important lessons.

Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) demonstrates via her famous whiteboard that sharp increases in corporate profits drive at least half of our inflation, and at least one TV station fact-checks, and confirms, that finding. Now that one media outlet has spread the word, the forces of evil face more of an uphill battle. But it’s getting late, so this message needs to be in Democrat ads, like, yesterday, and they should couple it with an anti-monopoly message – and they should remind everyone that Republicans are pro-monopoly and will defund all the federal agencies that fight monopolies if they get control of either or both houses of Congress.

Tired of hysterical Republicans squealing about TEH CRIMEZ RATEZ GOINGZ TEH UPZ!!!!!!? Then perhaps Justin Nix at The Conversation can help you help benighted souls make sense of “the crime rate.” Of course, if you’ve noticed politicians talking about “crime going up” and then justifying it by using data showing one crime (like murder or carjacking) going up, you won’t be surprised by anything you read. And if your relatives all think crime is going up because they’ve been watching the same six clips of violent crime on their news programs for years on end, ain’t nothing we can do for them anyway. We minister to the redeemable; the rest we leave to God.

You’ve heard of auto corporations trying to put some of their features (like heated seats) behind a subscription-enabled paywall? Well, New Jersey state legislators are mulling a bill that might make such things illegal, which might make it the most popular legislation ever, since literally any sentient being can foresee a future where your “subscription” to your brakes “lapses” at the worst possible time. But the bill would still allow subscriptions for software services in cars, and big automakers could drive a Mack truck through that loophole. Of course they’re still whining about it: “the bill would significantly impact the ability of automakers to offer consumers the choice of purchasing additional convenience features through a subscription model,” one law firm says. Didn’t know a corporation’s “right” to force an unwanted “choice” upon you was sacrosanct, did you?

Ho hum, Mississippi wants to privatize Jackson’s water system after that city’s residents went without water for much of August and September, but Naomi LaChance at The Lever instructs us that partial privatization has already helped cause the problems Jackson has been having! The state has received some $75 million in federal funding under the 2021 infrastructure law; how much of that money has gone to Jackson, where the water was brown as coffee for a bit? Zero dollars, naturally. This story also has pollution and bankster interference going for it. Says one observer: “If you can’t afford to improve your water system, how could you possibly afford to have profits extracted from your community just to pad the bottom line of a corporation?” It’s a question worth asking!

Armed Arizona “poll watchers” are already “guarding” ballot drop boxes, even accusing certain individuals of being “mules.” I’m glad they’re not calling me that, because my response would be what’s your address so I can serve you with a slander lawsuit? And this is only the beginning! Just wait until Doug Mastriano’s armed thugs try to prevent any mail-in ballots from being counted in Pennsylvania on Election Day. Hey, it’s not like he’s running ads, raising money, doing interviews, or participating in debates, so how else is he going to win?

Finally, Michael Moore, who predicted Donald Trump's 2016 Presidential win, thinks there’ll be a “blue tsunami” at the polls this November. Too many independents watch the news now and decide there’s no use voting because Republicans "have momentum" – or, worse, decide to vote for Republicans because they "have momentum," how perverse! – but Mr. Moore’s analysis maps onto mine; after January 6, liberals ain’t so much afraid of right-wingers as angry at them, and that anger ain’t subsiding anytime soon. And Democratic ads, for all their faults, actually show a lack of fear for once. And like I said, this “movement” toward Republicans among the electorate is based on nothing. Certainly not Republicans’ declaration that they’re going to cut Social Security and Medicare! I mean, who knowingly votes for that?

Around the table: starring bad people and William Shatner.

Sonali Kolhatkar writes that if Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (a.k.a. Lula) wins the Brazilian Presidency, “he must not only rebuild the social investments that Bolsonaro destroyed, but also restore trust in a nation damaged by fascism’s sophisticated propaganda machine.” Like fellow irredeemable asshole Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro has wreaked a lot of havoc on the good citizens of Brazil, and if paragraph 5 seems a little extreme to you, recall all the times American media celebrated the prospect of a Bolsonaro presidency because it’d be “good for business.” Also recall that the “orchestrated effort to attack democracy in Brazil” included the Car Wash “corruption” probe that toppled a liberal President and briefly put Lula in jail. And finally, recall that the main difference between a foreign dictator and an American corporate executive is that an executive has the luxury to act civilized.

“The CIA Thought Putin Would Quickly Conquer Ukraine,” writes James Risen and Ken Klippenstein at The Intercept. “Why Did They Get It So Wrong?” Long story short: “U.S. intelligence missed the impact of corrupt insider dealing and deceit among Putin loyalists in Moscow’s defense establishment, which has left the Russian army a brittle and hollow shell,” and they missed it because they relied more on high-tech surveillance observing things like troop movements than, you know, people on the ground who might have told them the Russian government is totally corrupt. Machines failing to do the work of people: where have we heard that story before?

You might not expect to hear from William Shatner that going up into space actually caused him “overwhelming sadness,” but while he’s not the only person who ever went up into space and experienced the void as, well, a void, we should remember that most the times we’ve “seen” space we’ve seen it in sci-fi films and TV shows, which their creators construct to excite and entice us. The first group of people who cross the void to another place will be profoundly lonely, and we won’t even know how they fared in our lifetimes. Read the whole thing, though – Mr. Shatner implores us to be aware “not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant” – the grandeur of being on Earth, that is.

I expect exactly zero right-wingers to care that J.D. Vance’s anti-opioid non-profit completely fizzled after five years, two op-eds, and two Twitterings – as we’ve just been reminded with Herschel Walker, right-wingers care about nothing except winning, and they tend to think showing up equals winning – but making a big show of caring about a problem and then doing nothing about it seems absolutely toxic to me! And if one guy's absence could really capsize the whole effort, as Mr. Vance claims, then it wasn’t much of an effort. I will say the ads Tim Ryan is running about this feel rather odd to me – regular folks don’t sound this scripted in real life; maybe Mr. Ryan’s not as good a candidate as I thought. But Mr. Vance is such an absurdly bad candidate that maybe he doesn’t have to be.

When I hear that Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI), the man who gives the Citizen Legislator a bad name, actually suggested we ought to repeal the federal minimum wage, all I can say is: what will it take to send this man home for good? I actually take some comfort in his relatively good polls recently, not just because attacking Mandela Barnes in late September and early October ain’t as good as attacking him in late October and early November, but because maybe this time Wisconsin Democrats aren’t leaving Mr. Johnson for dead. Also, Russ Feingold, the man who couldn’t campaign without tying at least one hand behind his back in 2010 and did victory laps for months in 2016, isn’t running.

Finally, I don’t know if Sen. Tommy Tuberville (E-AL) thought he was killing two birds with one stone by saying that Democrats “want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that,”but I do know that calling Democrats “pro-crime” is quite desperate, particularly from a guy who has reportedly violated the STOCK Act at least 130 times since assuming office not even two years ago. Republicans really have nothing of consequence to offer anyone, do they? Just remember, folks: no matter how stupid Tommy Tuberville looks or sounds, he’s not stupid. He’s evil.

Action: concerning Social Security, crypto, and the war on Yemen.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, stop treating the crypto “industry” with kid gloves, and end our involvement in the war on Yemen. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723/S. 3071, the Social Security 2100 Act. This bill would provide the kind of reforms Social Security really needs – like increasing benefits, adjusting cost-of-living increases more realistically, and taxing income over $400,000 into the system – versus the kind of “reforms” our “liberal” media says it needs, like cutting benefits and privatization so it can go up and down and up and down and up and down just like the stock market does. But people don't want Social Security to go up and down; they want it to be there, and do well by us, and the Social Security 2100 Act will help it do that better.

Americans for Financial Reform helps youtell your Congressfolk to avoid handing out corporate welfare to the crypto “industry.” Some call it my prejudice, but crypto ain’t real money, and “managing” it ain’t real work. How did crypto corporations spend $30 million lobbying Congress, then? Same way any elite does it: by rigging the rules to get far enough ahead so they can redistribute worker income upward to themselves and come up with new scams at will. Sadly, a lot of our Congressfolk think their crypto buddies are the future. They’re not – people and love are the future, like always – and we should regulate crypto so it does no harm, not let Congress go light on them.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a War Powers Resolution that would end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Why are they waging war on Yemen? Because the Saudis didn’t like Yemen’s new government many years ago. Why didn’t they like the new one? Damned if I know, and I’ve tried to find out! Only things I can say are a) the war has driven Yemen to the brink of famine for many years and b) the Houthi rebels who are supposedly the Saudi/UAE coalition’s target are some of the best fighters against al-Qaeda in the world. But ask the Kurds how much grace such a title gets you. It’s almost like Our Glorious Elites want to keep the “war on terror” going. And that’s why we fight them.

Around the table: the history of the plea bargain, and other surprises.

Does Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp have so much “reason to fear indictment” that he’s avoiding testifying before the Atlanta grand jury investigating Donald Trump’s notorious “find 11,000 votes” phone call? Greg Palast thinks so! “If Trump, as reported, demanded the Governor call a special session of the legislature to de-certify Joe Biden’s victory, and Kemp told him to go fly, then Kemp’s off the hook” – but if Mr. Kemp then “suggested Trump make those calls to the man who did have the power to reject the vote count,” i.e., Secretary of State Raffensberger, he could be in bigger trouble. And Mr. Palast reminds us that SB 202, the notorious election “reform” law, essentially gives Mr. Kemp the power he couldn’t use for Mr. Trump – to decertify Democrat statewide victories. And he’s up for re-election in November, so I imagine he’d use it for himself first – unless he gets indicted before then!

Tom Dannenbaum, Alex DeWaal, and Daniel Maxwell at The Conversation provide a short history of civilian starvation as a war-making tactic, you know, like Ukrainians and Yemeni, among others, are currently suffering. You won’t be pleased to see how often the United States appears in that history, but hey, tough lessons build character, right? As it happens, the Geneva Conventions have prohibited inflicting starvation on an enemy civilian population since the mid-’70s, but I’ll give you one guess which country you call home hasn’t ratified those conventions.

Ho hum, the Wall Street Journal seems to think the best climate change strategy is extracting resources with no regard for the rights of indigenous folks who live on lithium-rich lands. (Lithium is a main ingredient in electric car batteries.) The Journal no doubt wants credit for even thinking climate change is a problem worth solving, but I’m such a churl I’ll only credit them for doing good works, whenever that’s going to happen. Remember: The Man wants you to think you have to choose between treating folks fairly and saving the climate, but even worse than that? They want you to think negotiation simply doesn’t exist as an option. A civilized person would try to reach an agreement with Chile’s indigenous that satisfies everyone, but corporatists won’t be happy unless they win before the game starts. (Also, when folks say things like “Latin America specializes in killing golden geese,” I really want to punch them in the face.)

From Dan Canon at TruthOut we learn that “The Plea Bargain Originated as a Means to Undermine Working Class Solidarity.” Specifically, juries suddenly got powerful in the Northeast in the 1840s, with universal white male suffrage allowing unlanded working-class men to serve on juries, which could not only evaluate evidence but interpret the law; legislators took that latter right away from juries by the 1850s, and then, instead of trying to break the backs of labor unions in court (very difficult with sympathetic jurors!), started cutting deals with individual laborers on trumped-up and/or vague charges like “vagrancy” or “drunk and disorderly.” This is what right-wingers defend when they attack public prosecutors who won’t detain people indefinitely on the smallest charges, or won’t demand bail for a guy caught peeing against a wall.

University of Illinois-Chicago study reverses Alzheimer’s-related memory loss in mice by enabling them to create more neurons. Specifically, the researchers deleted a particular gene within mouse neurons that promotes cell death; one wonders what kind of trouble deleting such a gene might cause long-term, and other studies would need to confirm the results, but this could be a watershed moment for those who suffer from Alzheimer’s (and those who take care of them), and I wish researchers all the best in making process against this horrifying illness.

Finally, President Biden has wiped out $10,000 in student loan debt for folks (or children of folks) making less than $125,000 annually, plus he’ll extend the student loan payment moratorium through the end of 2022. I do wish the $10,000 forgiveness had extended into the future – that would essentially make community college free in America – but, as usual, it’s something. I am highly amused to read folks claiming that these policies would be “inflationary,” when a) cutting $10,000 out of student loan debt won’t do much for folks with much more than that and b) the payment moratorium has been going on since early 2020 anyway. But I guess some folks just think they can fling around the word “inflation” and create an argument without having to do any more work.

Around the table: how billionaires could ruin even more of the world, and other horrors.

Surprise, surprise: Work Opportunity Tax Credits – which aim to help marginalized folks get permanent jobs – too often go to corporations that give such folks temporary work. Which makes it what, class? Corporate welfare! Turns out this is especially true for workers with felonies in their past, which is why we’ve tried to “ban the box” on job applications. Right-wingers will cite this example as YET ANOTHURZ REASONZ TEH GUBMINTZ DOESN’TZ WORKZ!!!!! – even though the Work Opportunity Tax Credit is a right-wing policy prescription from the ‘90s! – while reasonable people will more likely say we ought to at least reform the program.

Ho hum, Pennsylvania Republicans appear to be rallying around their gubernatorial candidate, Doug Mastriano, despite Mr. Mastriano’s long history of being a right-wing extremist. This is not exactly unexpected! I often chide Democrats for their lack of courage, but we shouldn’t underestimate the cowardice of Republican politicians, either. Still, Mr. Shapiro leads by 26 points among independents in one poll, which is the clearest sign that while Democrats should stay on their guard, they shouldn’t panic. I also think (contra at least one GOP operative) that concentrating on abortion and election denialism is a winning combo for Democrats pretty much everywhere this year. People hate having their rights taken away, and independents hate people who can't stop whining about things that happened two years ago already.

When I hear that Arizona and Nevada will probably have their share of Colorado River water cut, and all 40 million Americans who rely on the Colorado will likely face some pain in the near future, I’m reminded that when I was in Arizona over a decade years ago I thought the Colorado River was running awfully low, and that less than a decade before that when I was in Nevada I thought the same thing, though it wasn’t as pronounced. I also thought that maybe running all those fountains at Las Vegas casinos wasn’t such a good idea. I mean, between that and everyone’s drinking and bathing water, the choice should be easy.

3rd District federal judge blocks Utah law barring trans girls from playing on girls’ sports teams, writing that blocking trans girls, but not cis girls, from sports teams represents “plainly unfavorable treatment.” Sadly, Utah still “vets” transgender athletes by “evaluat(ing) a player's wingspan, weight, and height – and whether a player is taking hormone blockers – to determine if a transgender girl, in particular, might have an unfair advantage in a sport by being born male,” which isn’t just creepy, it’s stupid. One player with a wider-than-expected wingspan for her age automatically spells victory, as if no opponent could possibly strategize around her? Gosh, too many people want to win before they even play anymore.

Our Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) certifies a switchblade flying car (so named because the wings could fit under the car’s chassis) as airworthy, meaning it’s ready for test flights. I’ll admit flying cars have always intrigued me, and not just because I don't ever want to sit in a traffic jam again again. Many regulatory obstacles remain, and of course the proper attitude toward those obstacles isn’t DITCH ALLZ TEH REGULASHUNZ!!!!! but “let’s make a flying car that’s safe on both ground and air.” After that, it’ll take a long, long time for regular folks to be able to afford a flying car – unless gajillionaires buy up the corporations that make it, in which we’ll never be able to afford it.

Finally, some very good news: our FDA has greenlighted over-the-counter hearing aids, which could be in stores as early as October. The most expensive OTC hearing aids will cost a little less than one-eighth as much as prescription hearing aids, which most health insurers, private and public, don’t cover (you remember Sinemanchin being on the wrong side of that policy discussion last year too, right?), and while even $300 (for the cheapest OTC hearing aid) is a lot of money, more folks will be able to get them – not least because they’ll be dealing with the pharmacists who are both more plentiful and more accessible than audiologists. One also hopes they’ll eventually come down in price and help break the hearing aid monopolies. But again, if billionaires buy them up, all those bets are off.

Around the table: tabulating even more drama from right and center-right!

National Republicans appear to be putting one of Steve Bannon's plans into action, by training an "army" of poll workers and linking them up with local Republican D.A.s. In the short term, I expect this plan could work pretty well in places like Michigan -- though it'd work better if their gubernatorial candidates could get enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, amirite? -- but it won't work as well in places like Hawaii. I'm pretty sure 2022, which Republicans figure will go their way wherever they like though voters could prove them wrong, is just a dry run for a much bigger operation in 2024, when the party's biggest dick runs for President again.

Political Wire's Taegan Goddard, writing about why he has a membership model for his website, describes pretty well why the advertising model doesn't really work for our internet anymore. If you still think the world is all publications going out and getting advertisers so they don't have to charge customers, note well that the internet advertising model involves very little active involvement from publishers; too many middlemen control the process, hence you're bound to see an ad you can't stand. Like so much of modern life -- Amazon, social media, Bluetooth-enabled appliances, pharmacy benefit managers -- internet advertising cartels may make things easier, but they don't make them better. And they don't even make things easier for you, unless you're a CEO who hates doing real work.

Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Charles Booker runs a campaign ad with a noose around his neck. I wish it were 42 seconds shorter, of course, and at first I thought attacking Rand Paul for holding up anti-lynching legislation might be a mistake, since Mr. Paul eventually co-sponsored a similar anti-lynching bill that became law and will be more than happy to tell us that repeatedly. But what if that issue's a feint? After all, Mr. Paul will still happily tell you that Medicare-for-All is slavery, and his problems with the Civil Rights Act were the first thing anyone learned about him! And those charges will stick while he thinks he's brushing the other one aside. At least, I hope it works that way. And folks won't just remember the noose around Mr. Booker's neck; they'll remember him removing it at ad's end. All in all, pretty good, but, at the risk of sounding like Gordon Lish, make it 30 seconds -- or 15.

I'm pleased to see that professional athletes (and their bosses) have doubled down on their support for gun control legislation even though (because?) professional whiners like Sen. Marco Rubio (E-FL) didn't like it. (Want me to evaluate Mr. Rubio's complaints about China's treatment of Uyghurs and the NBA's complicity therein? Nah, screw that -- every time Marco Rubio seems sympathetic or smart, it's a feint, meaning to draw you into some offensive drama you'd otherwise never let yourself get bogged down in.) Watch out for Philadelphia Union soccer player Alejandro Bedoya, who says "(i)t ain’t freedom that we have to now look over our backs all the time." I'd like him to become a political consultant at career's end; America suffers too much from all the numbnuts who do that now.

When I hear, for the 443rd time, that Joe Manchin really, really wants to do something about prescription drug prices by the end of the year, I am compelled to note that it's a bit rich to hear the guy most responsible for Democrats Not Doing Enough suggesting that Democrats didn't do enough. Also, he better not forget to check with America's Other One True Great and Awesome Real American President, Kyrsten Sinema, who vetoed Medicare drug price negotiation and higher tax brackets on the rich and on corporations in 2021. My advice to Democrats, not that they'd ever take it, would be to cut through the Manchinema drama, produce a bill that addresses all their "concerns," and make everyone vote on it immediately. And if certain people vote it down because "it would strangle innovation" or "it's not bipartisan enough" or "it didn't go through the committee process," then let their words hang them. We don't need more Democrats as much as we need better Democrats.

Finally, buried in this horserace account entitled "Biden battles CEOs in inflation blame game" -- everything's a "game" when losing causes someone else to suffer, right, Politico? -- we get this shameful whinefest from an unnamed "CEO of one of the country's largest banks": "They said everything was going to be different under Biden and they would be more engaged with us, and they weren’t." And all I can say is: having all the power ain't enough? We shouldn't ask banksters for advice about anything, since they've amply demonstrated over the years that they don't care about anyone but themselves; really, we should be breaking their sorry asses up into much smaller and less harmful banks, which work I hope our FTC will begin soon.

Around the table: featuring people who fought for things!

Thomas Alter II at In These Times writes about "The Radical Immigrant Farmers Who Helped Defeat the Robber Barons." And by the end you might be saying oh, so that's why so many right-wingers seem to be so anti-immigrant these days! You might also be reminded that a lot of what we take for granted these days -- or, at least, what we took for granted half a century ago -- came about only because folks smeared as "radical" and "socialist" held their ground and fought for a better life. These farmers fought slavery in Texas, too; I don't know how many of my contemporary Americans would have fought slavery if they'd lived in Texas in 1848. But I do know how many of them are doing nothing about fascism in America today.

Speaking of which, Russian anti-war activists, facing jail time for the nefarious offense of opposing Mr. Putin's little adventure in Ukraine, have had to get a little more creative in spreading the word. We're not as close to an era where a One True Great and Awesome American President can just put people in jail for opposing his wars, but we are much closer to an era where a One True Great and Awesome American President can incite his votaries to smash heads of anti-war protestors. So if you see a lot of Paladin memes on Facebook during that time, that might be a good way for American anti-war protestors to find each other. Facebook's algorithms sure won't do it, because that only works for racists.

It's not a big surprise that pro-choicers overstate the case somewhat that abortions since Roe v. Wade are safer -- one would imagine technology has improved over the last 50 years! -- but right-wingers no doubt cite this very fact (though not likely from Snopes!) as if winning a point in an argument is exactly the same as winning the entire argument. It's a form of personal attack -- ha ha, you're incorrect on a technical point, therefore I win the whole game just for pointing it out! Let's see any of those clowns inflict their morality on their daughters when they get pregnant. They'll all be saying "it's her choice" at that very moment. And I'm not inclined to see that as a strength, but as a weakness -- I mean, if your values don't challenge you, they're not very good values.

Can we really know if "your practice of Buddhism through listening to podcasts or use of meditation apps is 'authentic'"? Not to put too fine a point on it, but yes, if you don't sit in awe of podcasts and apps as this completely unprecedented technology, or as a direct conduit to magic learning. Anyway, long story short: "If digital Buddhist practice approaches the good life as eudaimonic -- as leading to human flourishing based on the pursuit of a deeper meaning -- it can be judged to be authentic. An inauthentic practice is one that just furthers hedonism by merely peddling bliss and relaxation."

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (E-NC) lost the Republican primary for his own House seat last week -- after a series of scandalous behaviors came to light somehow, and please understand that by "somehow" I mean "by the will of other state Republicans" -- and, well, he's not taking it too well: "I am on a mission now to expose those who say and promise one thing yet legislate and work towards another, self-profiteering, globalist goal...It’s time for the rise of the new right, it’s time for Dark MAGA to truly take command." What does "dark MAGA" mean? Does it mean MAGA but actually shooting people? Seriously, the right needs to reinvent itself as a "new" right every few years because it has nothing nourishing to offer Americans; how many more of these must we sit through?

Finally, a Utah hunting guide faces jail time for baiting a bear out for Donald Trump, Jr. to shoot -- and he baited him out with "a pile of grain, oil and pastries"! I sure do hope "pastries" is what everyone remembers about this incident. Here's what else I hope folks remember: pretend-hunting -- hunting that isn't for subsistence, or even for training for the possibility of having to hunt for subsistence -- is uncivilized enough. But cheating at it is even worse! How lousy a shot is Trump the Younger?

Around the table: from a small victory on Title 42 deportations to a larger victory on plastic recycling.

And now for another exciting chapter of "Partly Good News": the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that President Biden can't deport undocumented families "to places where they will be persecuted or tortured," though our President can still use Title 42 to deport single adults and families that don't face such horrors in their birthplace. The ruling also questions whether Title 42 -- which allows our President to deport folks during a public health emergency -- should be discarded, saying it "looks in certain respects like a relic from an era with no vaccines, scarce testing, few therapeutics and little certainty." Right-wingers will interpret this ruling as a mandate to "let everyone in," but that's lazy. Or do I mean because that's lazy?

I'm linking to this one because of the headline: "Florida Just Passed The ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bill, Another Prong In Agenda-less Republicans’ Faux Outrage Machine." Folks need to remember that all the Republicans' posturing about flag-burning and gay marriage in 2006 didn't help them keep their House and Senate majorities; I don't know that it hurt them that year, since Democrats by and large didn't mention it in their attack ads, but if Democrats run ads about it this year -- in the context of "Democrats ended the pandemic and kick-started the economy while Republicans went after gay kids" -- I believe it will hurt Republicans. We had better not be so sick, immoral, and decadent a society that bad people can continue to be bad without facing any consequences.

Ho hum, idiot Republican says gas prices were lower under Donald Trump in 2020, smart Democrat slams her for saying so. Doing a victory lap over low gas prices in the middle of a pandemic when no one wanted to spend any more money than they absolutely had to would be a little like if Democrats had done victory laps over low gas prices during Barack Obama's first year in office -- they didn't, because those low gas prices were entirely due to the bankster Armageddon of 2008, when, again, nobody wanted to buy anything. Naturally Republicans slammed Mr. Obama when gas prices went back up, citing the entirely useless gas prices of 2009! (The article also reminds us that building Keystone XL would not, in fact, help keep gas prices down, since it wouldn't even be done by now. We know what's causing high gas prices: big oil corporations price-gouging us.)

Also ho hum, Olivia Riggio at FAIR informs us that "Murdoch-Owned Outlets Ignore Their Own Role in Hate Crime Surge." More specifically, Fox News/the New York Post/the Wall Street Journal et al "often spread anti-Asian and antisemitic tropes, while taking no responsibility for the xenophobia that fuels these hate crimes in the first place." Like when Jesse Watters, whose apparent goal in life is to be as big an asshole as his mentor, asked "funny questions" to Chinatown residents or demanded an apology from China over COVID. Or when Dennis Prager, founder of a "university," tells us liberal anti-Zionists, and not white supremacists, cause anti-semitism against Israel. Or when Tucker Carlson drew breath.

PA House Rep./Senate candidate Conor Lamb used to be BFFs with Joe Manchin, but now he's "distancing himself" from the Penguin, saying in fundraising emails that he supports Build Back Better and the Women's Health Protection Act and would end the filibuster if elected to our Senate. They say a public servant ought to keep his finger to the wind, I suppose, but he's also hung onto his big donors, and supporting Build Back Better is very far from the most liberal thing a legislator could do. Has he changed his mind about Medicare-for-All, which also enjoys near-supermajority support in America? Of course not. Sadly, Mr. Lamb might get the nomination, given that John Fetterman and Malcolm Kenyatta are basically vying for the same voters, almost like that's the whole idea.

Finally, this might actually be unqualified good news: scientists may have developed a way to recycle plastic, at room temperature, in a mere 20 minutes. Currently, recycling outfits melt plastic, which has a sort of Xerox effect on the resulting quality, but University of Bath scientists used a zinc/methanol mix to break down commercial BPA beads, and moreover, were able to isolate the notorious bisphenol-A chemical you don't want in your clean water. The mix also broke down several other kinds of industrial plastic. The Bath scientists have only worked on a small amount of plastic, so we don't yet know if state, local, and federal governments or private recycling corporations (which would have a lot more plastic to break down) can use it yet. Still, we a little more hope today than yesterday.

Action: concerning Yemen, algorithms, labor, small businesses, antibiotics, and Presidential misbehavior.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end our involvement in the war on Yemen, hold corporations accountable for their algorithms, pass strong labor legislation, protect small online businesses, make antibiotics strong again, and investigate former President Trump's removal of official documents to his private residence. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end all American support for the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Specifically you'll ask that your Reps support a War Powers resolution aiming to end our involvement there; it'd be nice if our government would only go to war when Congress specifically authorizes it, as used to happen in the old days, but in the meantime, I'd take a War Powers resolution. 16 million good Yemeni sit on the edge of famine, and for what? Because the Saudis don't like the Houthis? The Houthis are some of the world's best at fighting al-Qaeda, but then so were the Kurds, and we sure sold them out to an even more odious dictator. How about if we stop making foreign policy decisions that constantly put us on the wrong side of decency? Our Founders didn't think that was too much to ask.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6580/S. 3572, the Algorithmic Accountability Act. A CEO's only job is, literally, to make decisions, but now lazy CEOs farm out their decision-making to algorithms, and it ain't just about Facebook algorithms automatically creating groups that let racists find each other much more easily than if they had to put some work into it -- it's also about algorithms charging some people higher prices, hence the recent controversy over Tinder, which was apparently charging older daters more money -- on the precept they'll swipe left more frequently than younger folks more mesmerized by appearances? It's a question worth asking! "Personalized pricing," Tinder called it, but "personalized price gouging" might be a better name, and we should fight that.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act passed our House almost a year ago, and given all the good things it would do -- it would stop corporations from trying to make all their employees into "contractors," it would stop employers from forcing their workers to sit through anti-union propaganda, it would outlaw forced arbitration in union contracts, it would prohibit corporate retaliation against whistleblowers, and it would give workers more choice in how they would vote for unionization -- it's hard to see how a sane, moral, and decent Senate would oppose it. We must conclude, therefore, that our Senate is not sane, moral, or decent. So we must make them so, by communicating our will until they can't deny it anymore.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the inclusion of the SHOP SAFE Act in larger trade legislation. What would the SHOP SAFE Act do? In the name of "protecting intellectual property," it would force online small businesses to jump through additional hoops about the products they sell, to make sure they're not "counterfeit" -- and then subject those small businesses to abuse anyway, since the internet marketplaces that host them will use, you guessed it, algorithms to detect "counterfeit" items, and they'll be just as good at that as facial recognition software is at telling Black folks apart. Politicians constantly talk about "protecting small businesses," and then they go and pull shit like this. Unless we stop them.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3932/S. 2076, the PASTEUR Act. The PASTEUR Act would fund development of new antibiotics, which we need mainly because we've abused the ones we've got so badly that superbugs rise up all over the world. Yes, "abuse" is the right word there -- we give seven out of every 10 antibiotics to nominally healthy farm animals so they can endure squalid conditions in family farms, instead of, you know, sick people or sick animals. The result? The world is full of superbugs! Also, too, exposure to COVID leaves folks vulnerable to another, bacterial infection -- which means hospitals treat all of their COVID patients with antibiotics out of an abundance of caution, thus antibiotics become less effective. Creating new antibiotics will give us a little more breathing space, at least.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate former President Trump's removal of some 15 boxes of Presidential records from our White House to his Mar-a-Lago residence. It's almost comic how often this man implicates himself law-breaking, but our failure to hold him to account for his many sins is no laughing matter at all. Anyway, the Presidential Records Act of 1978 doesn't let you just take any old document home, and not just because some of them might be classified "Top Secret," as they were with Mr. Trump. Why, you might be hiding something the American people deserve to know! It's almost comic how little respect Donald Trump shows to the people, but the fact that so many Americans think he's their Personal Lord and Savior is no laughing matter at all.

Action: concerning racism, slave labor, facial recognition, false advertising, and right-wing media.

Long story short: tell Oregon legislators to end the use of non-unanimous juries, tell your pension fund to pressure Apple to fight slave labor in China, tell our IRS to stop using facial recognition tech, tell our FTC to stop employers from advertising fake pay rates, and tell AT&T to stop funding OAN. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Oregon residents, take note: Color of Change helps you tell your state legislator to pass SB 1511, so that everyone in Oregon convicted of a crime by a non-unanimous jury vote can get a retrial. States have historically used non-unanimous juries for certain criminal cases pretty much so they could put more Black folks in jail, but by 2020, when our Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional (citing the racist origins of the non-unanimous jury therein), Oregon was literally the last state in the union to use them, having even been outclassed by Louisiana, which outlawed them in 2019. Unfortunately, our Court didn't require retrials for those convicted by a non-unanimous jury before their ruling; SB 1511 would fix that, and thus help close a sad chapter in American history.

Sum of Us helps you tell your pension fund to pressure Apple to stop using forced Uyghur labor in China to make its products. More specifically, you'll tell your pension fund to vote for two shareholder resolutions at the next Apple shareholder meeting on March 4. Apple supposedly has systems in place to root out slave labor from its supply chain, but now that journalists have found at least nine of Apple's suppliers rely on Uyghur slave labor in Chinese concentration camps, we have, ah, reason to believe those systems aren't working, so one shareholder resolution would require Apple to account for that. A second resolution would aim at Chinese government requests to remove apps from Apple's app store, and since journalists have used some of these apps to find out about Chinese treatment of Uyghurs, Apple needs to account for that, too.

Fight for the Future helps you tell our IRS to stop using facial recognition or biometric surveillance tools. Facial recognition technology sucks, is racist, and far too frequently results in innocent people getting arrested, but for the purposes of this discussion, those are symptoms of a far bigger problem -- if facial recognition technology can't even get your face right, if it too easily gets flummoxed by a person aging or getting disfigured in an accident, how can it fight identity fraud, which is our IRS's purported reason for using the now-notorious ID.me? ID.me also collects a lot of personal data -- I mean, it works with our IRS! -- meaning the fact that it only shares some of that data with other corporations shouldn't ease your mind. We may fear malice more than incompetence, but let's not allow incompetence to run so rampant it looks like malice.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to outlaw fake pay rate scams. What's a fake pay rate scam? It's when an employer puts out a job listing with a higher pay rate than they have any intention of paying; they also advertise hourly rates as "plus tips" when they actually include tips, plus they advertise managerial jobs that they don't actually have open, and then offer you a lower-responsibility job, hoping to slip that lower pay by you! And folks don't necessarily have the luxury of "just not taking the job" -- if you're on unemployment, and you turn down a job, you don't get your unemployment benefits back. However, all of this falls under "truth in advertising" laws, which our FTC must enforce, so all that remains is for us to tell them to enforce them.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell AT&T to cut all ties with the notorious One America News Network. AT&T owns about two-thirds of DirecTV, which will stop offering OAN this coming April, and while that's a big deal, OAN only exists in the first place thanks to AT&T money, and we have no indication that money train's going to stop rolling. Indeed, AT&T said they wanted a competitor to Fox News, but why should there be more than one right-wing propaganda outlet? Hell, why should there be one? OAN peddles 2020 election lies and COVID misinformation just like the other right-wing "news" channels, and our commitment to freedom of speech does not require us to enable right-wing propaganda to corrupt the minds and souls of good Americans. It doesn't require corporations to fund it, either.

Around the table: more thoughts on inflation, monopolies, and entitlement.

On the occasion of Stephen Breyer's retirement from our Supreme Court, Matt Stoller describes just how awful Justice Breyer has been on antitrust issues, which reminds us, if nothing else does, that we esteem Supreme Court Justices perhaps too highly for the harm they don't do. If President Biden (who criticized Justice Breyer's antitrust leanings as "presumptuous and elitist" while in the Senate mulling his nomination) nominates a strong anti-monopolist to replace him, I guess we'll see under what circumstances Manchinema will oppose a Democratic Supreme Court nominee. Not that Mr. Biden shouldn't do it anyway! Exposing those two to daylight again and again and again is far better in the long run than capitulating to them, even in a 50-50 Senate.

Robert Reich also says corporate power plays a huge role in inflation. Perhaps imprecisely, he says supply chain problems cause "most" of the recent price increases, but then says corporations don't have to pass those increases on to customers: "(i)f corporations were competing vigorously against each other, they’d swallow these cost increases in order to keep their prices as low as possible." Too many people throw up their hands and say things like they'll just pass on the increases to the consumer without asking "is that moral, or even practical in the long term?" Mr. Reich goes on to point to specific monopolists causing price hikes, and if you think you spot actual collusion in some of his examples, well, all I can say is Joe Biden appointed antitrust crusaders to key positions and then monopolies raised prices when they didn't really have to.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon blames Trumpism, anti-vax activism, and the crypto crash on "an overblown sense of entitlement" largely on the part of white American men, a sense of entitlement that "leads them to believe they are above having to live with the same social contract that binds the rest of us." And they say liberals can't talk about values! She also explains the real reason people cling to the Big Lie even though it's hardly rational: "(l)ike cryptocurrency or ivermectin, the Big Lie is viewed as a kind of cheat code, a way for Republicans to get their way without having to play by the same rules that constrain everyone else." That's a profound insight, one that builds upon another profound insight of hers, that right-wingers simply don't believe all the BS they spew. Being something of a literalist, I'm still getting my head around that.

Surprise, surprise, Glenn Youngkin begins his term as Virginia Governor pandering to the far-right, barring school mask mandates, workplace vaccine requirements, and critical race theory even though no one teaches that to elementary school kids. I guess today's "conservatives" really don't care about empowering local governments or businesses! This is yet another lesson not to trust a Republican who tries to come off as "moderate" and "reasonable," though really, we shouldn't have needed any more of those lessons after the George W. Bush ascension. I do wonder, though, how many Republican candidates for office in 2022 will bother trying to come off as moderate or reasonable. I mean, I would try to come off like that, if I were evil, but these folks might be bold thinkers.

After Neil Young asks his label and management to remove all his music from Spotify in protest of Joe Rogan's continued presence there, Spotify goes ahead and scrubs his music from their platform. And their spokeshack really spokeshacks it up, claiming they've "removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID since the start of the pandemic," without noting how many of those episodes actually contained COVID misinfo or noting how many of them have Joe Rogan's market share. Anyway, good for Neil Young! And if you really want to hear Neil Young without/before buying his records, you can always go to YouTube. I hear the new album's pretty outstanding. And the future ain't about making everything easy.

Finally, after President Biden called Fox News's Peter Doocy a "stupid son of a bitch" for asking whether he thought inflation was a "political liability" -- hey, I've called Mr. Doocy worse! -- Rep. Jim Banks (E-IN) actually asked "(h)ave we ever seen a President attack and malign the free press like Joe Biden has?" Ah, yeah, Sherlock, we just saw President Donald Trump attack and malign the press as the "enemy of the people," usually at the top of his lungs, for four fucking years. I haven't banished anyone to oblivion in a while, so how about we never speak of Jim Banks again after today?

Around the table: the real source of American rage, and other topics.

As Joe Manchin wields excuse after excuse for killing the Build Better Act, David Dayen reminds us that President Biden can write a lot of Executive Orders that would do a lot of good. (Indeed, The American Prospect has made a list!) I sure hope President Biden isn't afraid that right-wingers will call him a dictator, since a) our laws already give our President the authority to issue these orders, b) right-wingers will say anything, no matter how stupid, and c) uh, have they met their Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump?

When I read that rural America faces an eviction crisis because American Rescue Plan Act funding for folks facing eviction has, ah, had a hard time getting to the good Americans who need it, I remind myself that this is why rural Americans vote for Republicans so much -- because Democrats don't do anything good for them when they have the power. I'm sure the information gap between what rural folks think they can get and what they can get is real, but again, shouldn't our federal government make damn sure everyone knows what they need to know?

Ho hum, a Gizmodo/Markup investigation finds that "predictive policing algorithms" tend to ignore white neighborhoods while "predicting" more crime in Black/Brown neighborhoods, meaning that "residents in over-policed areas are confronted, detained, or rung up on bullshit charges with alarming frequency" and then "this data gets fed back into the software to generate more of the same abuse." If you're still thinking but that's where more crime is har har har, all you need ask is whether every conceivable criminal gets punished. Difficulty: if you've ever committed a crime, no matter how small, and not served time for it, then the answer is "no." You did your crime out of sight, you say? Why do you suppose law enforcement didn't see you?

Noami S. Baron at The Conversation comes up with an unexpected answer to the age-old question of " Why We Remember More by Reading -- Especially Print -- Than From Audio or Video" -- that people approach audio, video, and social media with more of "an entertainment mindset," and thus don't devote their full attention to it. That's illuminating -- and mind-boggling, to me at least, since I try to devote my full attention to a TV program or an album just as I do to a book, but again, that's probably just me. All the other reasons you do better reading in print than any other thing -- because you touch paper, you remember the "physical geography" of a page, you remember what you read based on how far into the book you were, because you're more likely "multitasking" when you're on social media -- still operate, of course. Plus, I'd argue, you can re-read something in print far more easily and effectively than you can "re-read" a song or video (which occur in time and usually without accompanying written text) or even read a news article online (which could change when you read it again).

When I hear that the January 6 attempted coup has made the House of Representatives "a deeply unpleasant place to work," I'm tempted to call that a no-shit-Sherlock moment. After all, some of them helped plan the January 6 attack, while roughly a third of them enabled it by voting against certifying the 2020 election that same day for no damn good reason. When folks give you the impression they want you to die, it's hard to break bread with them. Or even drink martinis with them at D.C. watering holes. (The Wall Street Journal article referenced at the link sits behind a paywall, so I don't know how much it bought into all that both-sides-are-to-blame rubbish. Then again, maybe I do.)

Finally, as the year draws to a close, Kevin Drum's analysis of "The Real Source of America’s Rising Rage" is worth revisiting. Spoiler alert: basically, the "real source" of "our national temper tantrum" is the rise and primacy of Fox News over the last two decades -- yeah, talk radio and social media have done some damage, but not the damage Fox News has done. I feel compelled to mention, again, that what it offers its viewers -- rage -- is a very potent drug; it gives its users the illusion of control over chaos. And it's a damn shame that these very same people would never regard immigration or critical race theory as "chaos" unless some slick snake-oil salesfolk told them so, over and over again.

Around the table: featuring a lot of right-wing whining and stupid plans.

Yes, Virginia, the Trump brain trust, such as it is, really did put their plans to overthrow our government into a PowerPoint presentation. Which begs the question: if Mark Meadows turned this document over to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attempted coup before he decided to stop cooperating, what far worse crap could he now be hiding? It's a question worth answering!

Right-wingers are wringing their hands over the fact that "young Democrats" don't want to date them or be their friends anymore, but what the fuck do they expect after the way they've acted for the last two decades? How many times should they be entitled to call people "traitor" and "weakling" without any consequences? I, for one, am glad that the youths have figured out that shame and shunning are real things civilized people do. And, last I looked, our First Amendment guaranteed freedom of association, which I guess right-wingers think is only for corporations.

Alex Pareene suggests that Elon Musk might be playing a long game by making his self-driving cars work so badly -- chiefly so that governments may further restrict the movements of folks who walk, "for their own safety," of course. Instead of actually punishing Tesla for developing bad technology, which would be a better way of insuring citizens' safety than walling off their sidewalks! Those of us who are trying to make our lives more walkable might take such things a bit personally. And folks who find themselves impressed at such "galaxy-brain thinking" should ask what good any plan does if its goal is "make one person richer." It's not a thing to take to the Pearly Gates, after all.

Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph now Fox News prettyheads want to call the burning of their Christmas tree outside a hate crime against Fox News! Which sure would take corporate "personhood" to a whole new level! Apparently that's about the only way to hold the accused arsonist on bail in New York City now; of course they blame TEH LIBRULZ!!!! for reforming bail laws, and whine about TEH CRIMEZ SURGEZ!!!! though not using actual facts, but seriously, it's not at all absurd to regard a guy who burns down a big Christmas tree as not much of a flight risk or a danger to others. Why, Fox News is whining so much I'm starting to suspect the whole thing was an inside job!

Uh oh: a publicist for Kanye West apparently threatened a Georgia poll-worker with jail if she didn't "come forward" with non-existent election fraud. Of course he didn't directly threaten Ms. Freeman; he just said "I cannot say what specifically will take place. I just know that it will disrupt your freedom and the freedom of one or more of your family members. You are a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up." And he imagines a court of law won't find that a threat? Would now be a good time to remind everyone that Kanye West's best riff comes from Phil Manzanera?

Finally, the president of California's medical board alleges that a group of anti-vaxxers, possibly associated with the notorious astroturf group America's Frontline Doctors, have stalked her, spied on her (by flying a drone over her house), and confronted her in a dark parking lot. If these allegations are true -- and local police seem to think they are -- I hope these individuals get jail time. After all, if we want to be a law-and-order country, we should go after the real enemies of law and order.

Around the table: from farmers triumphing in India to right-wingers embarrassing themselves in Florida.

P. Sainath at Counterpunch describes the massive victory India's long-beleaguered farmers have recently won -- and how Indian media barely covered it. If this happened in the U.S., you'd just assume our media simply weren't interested in non-white, non-right wing protestors, but in India, you'd have to chalk it up to a general avoidance of discussing anything that would upset the rich and powerful. Indian farmers managed to get their Prime Minister to agree to repeal three onerous agricultural laws, this after surviving first-we-ignore-you-then-we-ridicule-you-then-we-bust-out-the-water-cannons, and they deserve our admiration and our support.

James Somers at The New Yorker describes scientific advances in mind-reading. Right now they're not "reading thoughts" so much as inferring them from brain patterns, and color me skeptical that it'll ever be particularly good, because the the brain is a far more magnificent thing than even neurologists know, not to mention that people will plug mind-reading tech with their own prejudices just like they did with facial recognition technology. But if the technology does get good, I'm sure Congress will be there with laws that protect good Americans from having their privacy invaded! I kid, of course; we'll have to prod them to do that, and the big data lobby could be even bigger by then.

I'm always pleased to see someone make the pragmatic case against our use of drones in foreign lands -- the moral arguments don't persuade certain people, for whatever reason, and the pragmatic case gives us an additional weapon to shame them (and prompt more moral behavior from the undecided). I'm even more pleased that former Navy officer James Durso takes the case farther than I thought to do -- by taking us past the errant drone strike (and the subsequent lack of punishment for anyone) as ISIS recruiting tool, which is where we are now, to the day when the other side have their own drones, and start taking out American embassies and other "soft" targets. Lesson: accountability is always the best policy, no matter how painful it might be.

When I hear that "QNuts" are "Falling Out of Love With Kyle Rittenhouse" -- over an apparently legit beef Mr. Rittenhouse has with former lawyer/QAnon darling Lin Wood -- I am reminded that this is how rage addicts try to convince us (and themselves) that they're not really rage addicts. Although when I hear that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), herself a Q adherent, is siding with Mr. Rittenhouse against Mr. Wood, I don't just wonder if this is just more right-wing drama to distract the folks -- I also wonder if folks like Rep. Greene abandon folks like Mr. Wood because, well, they think of Lin Wood as a loser, and you know how their real Personal Lord and Savior, Donald Trump, feels about losers.

When I hear that Donald Trump actually said that the House January 6 panel trying to get his records "will result in permanent damage to the institution of the presidency," my first impulse is to say he's got some cojones saying that, after taking a massive dump all over the office for four years. But let's grapple with the point about "preserving the confidentiality of Presidential communications," shall we? The American people deserve to know exactly what their President did and said in the time leading up to the attempted coup he instigated. There! Done grappling.

Finally, Jim Swift at The Bulwark takes us through the "anatomy of a viral lie," in this case the utter absurdity that Nancy Pelosi was about to buy a $25 million mansion in Florida, which would, somehow, justify everything Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have done. Read the whole thing, and then keep in mind that when journalists started reporting on rumors and justifying it by telling themselves they weren't doing "serious" work, they opened up a box that'd make Pandora blush. As a famous philosopher once said, when a man lies, he murders some part of the world.

Around the table: in which we confront yet more right-wing whining.

"Are people lying more since the rise of social media and smartphones?" asks David Markowitz at The Conversation. You're tempted to say F YEAH aren't you? You know, because of all the stupid crap you read on Facebook and Twitter? But this article deals with more mundane lies -- the ones you tell your boss to get out of work, the ones you tell your friends when you just don't feel like going out to dinner -- and references a 2004 study that found that, actually, folks will more readily lie with any technology deployed over the phone, and not so much over email (at least partly, I suspect, because it feels more like "putting something in writing"). Fast-forward 17 years and a much larger study finds more or less the same, and Mr. Markowitz also found a relatively low rate of lying, generally, except from people who lie a lot. There's a lesson in there, somewhere.

When I hear that right-wingers had a whinefest about the "government propaganda" of Big Bird telling kids he got the vaccine and it's OK, I am compelled to say that it sure would help if our "liberal" media would treat dramas like these as "really, you're whining about that now?" You know, instead of they must speak for a large number of people, so let's endlessly pander to their dumb opinions and enable their weakness. (Not to pile on, but Sesame Street isn't really a "big government TV show" anymore, since HBO provides most of its funding now.)

In a peripherally-related note, Sen. Josh Hawley (E-MO) doubles down on his "masculinity" pablum because of course he does. I've already patiently negotiated his nonsense, so I think the best thing to do at this point would be to create a cartoon or comic book -- the bolder and sillier the art, the better -- showing him marching around without a shirt off (and occasionally raising his fist like he did at the January 6 rioters) yelling at people who he thinks are "injuring" masculinity. When they act like fools, we should make sure everyone sees them as fools.

I thought Elon Musk wasn't going to get the answer he wanted when he asked Twitter if he should pay more in taxes, but I was taken aback, for a moment, that the score was only 58-42 in favor of him paying more in taxes, since usually the tax-the-rich-more answer in polls clears two-thirds. But two caveats: 1) we should suspect polls that people voluntarily join more than we suspect those that pollsters have designed to actually reflect the population, and 2) I would not be surprised to learn that Twitter users have a higher proportion of get-rich-quick-wannabes who don't want to part with any of their "hard-earned money" than the general population.

Linda So and Jason Szep at Reuters write an admirable report exposing nine individuals who have threatened election officials within the last year -- and also exposing how little law enforcement has done about any of them. We learn that there are at least two schools of thought over whether "We're going to fucking kill you all" or "“You are all going to fucking hang. I’m going to make sure of it" enjoy our First Amendment protections, but that's not the most appalling thing about all of this. The most appalling thing about all of this is that law enforcement either doesn't care about bringing these irredeemable assholes to justice or secretly cheers them on -- I'm not sure how else to read a sentence like "(r)eporters connected with him in September on the phone number police called untraceable.")

Finally, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) gives a wholly predictable assessment of Republican successes in the 2021 elections, pointing to "bickering among (Democrats)" as the cause, and further opining that Americans "just want you to work together and get stuff done." That's a big gamble, right there, that folks haven't seen her as the one who didn't want to "work together and get stuff done," since she scuttled Medicare drug price negotiation by herself and she scuttled raising corporate tax rates and tax rates on the rich by herself. I would be quite offended if she got away with taking a big dump on the popular will in front of everybody and then claiming that the problem is all these politicians taking a big dump on the popular will.

Around the table: confronting social media culpability and Fox News culpability in our poisonous national discourse.

I'm old enough to remember a time when I would have found Nick Clegg's argument that you should blame Donald Trump and the actual insurrectionists, and not Facebook, for January 6 a lot more sympathetic, but in the old days, you actually had to work to make connections over the internet, and sites like Meetup most pointedly did not use algorithms for the express purpose of stirring up shit. Also, too, Facebook knew it was stirring up shit and did next to nothing about it. (As an aside, I would be amused to learn that Facebook didn't even do the due diligence Parler did before January 6.)

Before we congratulate Merck on that COVID pill, let us recall that the pill cost $17.74 per pill to produce (much of that from the taxpayer!) and now Merck charges our government a staggering $712 to use it. One might call that extortion, and no I don't think the urgency of the task (i.e., beating COVID) justifies handing out taxpayer money to help make a pill and then getting charged 40 times as much for said pill when it's done. When your right-wing nephew says "well, Merck did the work," point him to a) 40 times as much, b) the taxpayers helped fund it, and c) Merck bought the rights to the pill in May of 2020 and thus had less to do with its research and development than their price would suggest.

Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) also doesn't support Medicare drug price negotiation. His rubbish arguments defending his position are just as irrelevant as the cynical observation that WELL NEW JERSEY HAS A LOT OF DRUG COMPANIES HA HA HA SNORT -- he's supposed to do the will of his constituents, i.e., the living, breathing ones, and if New Jersey is like the rest of America, somewhere between 80% and 90% of his constituents want Medicare drug price negotiation. If you live in New Jersey, first off, lucky you! And second off, you may want to call Sen. Menendez and give him what for; here's his contact info.

Zeke Faux at Bloomberg describes the "wild search for the U.S. dollars supposedly backing the stablecoin at the center of the global cryptocurrency trade," and if you read the article and conclude "it's all a scam," I sure wouldn't blame you. Naturally, Tether's first CEO invented pop-up ads and its current lawyer claims all its critics are "jihadists." And dig the, ah, *surreality* of this sentence from paragraph 3: "But in the crypto world, where joke coins with pictures of dogs can be worth billions of dollars and scammers periodically make fortunes with preposterous-sounding schemes, Tether seemed like just another curiosity." "Curiosity" indeed.

Bernie Sanders appears to have had it up to here with Joe Manchin, and confronting Mr. Manchin's nattering about "entitlements" with "does Senator Manchin really believe that seniors are not entitled to digest their food, and that they’re not entitled to (care that could enable them to) hear and see properly?" is exactly how you are supposed to talk about this crap -- turn the word "entitlement" back on its users, like the depleted uranium weapon it is. Sadly, you won't see our "liberal" media do very much of that, so jealous are they of their "access" to people like Joe Manchin, when there are literally hundreds of millions of Americans who are just as good at making their views known as he is, and the enterprising media outlet could have "access" to any of them.

Finally, Fox News celebrates its 25th anniversary, and Melanie McFarland at Salon tabluates a good deal of the damage. You could really do a number on Fox News, more so than, say, Robert Greenwald did with OutFoxed(which I found oddly tame in 2004!), and more so, even, than Ms. McFarland does here, though she's laboring under a word limit. Anyway, the most urgent observation comes late: "How do we move forward from this? Every answer is insufficient and exhausting. Fox News management isn't interested in reining in its prime time hosts because they're the channel's main ratings magnets. De-programming experts have all sorts of suggestions on how to save the rabid Fox addicts in your life, but once again that places the burden on reasonable people to wade into a reservoir of hatred that's been steadily filling for two and a half decades." But only "reasonable people" can do the hard work of maintaining a civilization; we just have to contain the unreasonable people.

Around the table: from bad politicians and killer robots to health care and tax policy scammers.

Hard to believe, Harry, but the Build Back Better plan is actually quite popular in West Virginia, far more so than the bloviations of Sen. Manchin would have you believe. I had liberals tell me earlier this year that we should all go easy on Sens. Manchin and Sinema because they represent such right-wing states; I hope more liberals have had that myth exploded for them. A lot of folks who call themselves "conservative" really just want a government that gives them more for their taxpayer dollars than the back of its hand. A government that talks like they do -- i.e., plainly -- would also be nice.

Now that "killer robots" have actually taken human life, per a U.N. Security Council report, James Dawes at The Conversation says they could be "more destabilizing than nukes." And now would be a good time to note, as I've done before, that Philip K. Dick predicted this, as well, in the short story "Second Variety," where the killer robots got advanced enough to design more advanced killer robots! It would be a shame to succumb to such a phenomenon, just as folks all over the world are more anti-war than they've ever been.

Umair Haque dissects "What a Massive Ripoff American Life Really Is," and though I suspect the median salary is a better indicator of American life than the average salary, the absurdly high cost of utilities, rent, and health care are quite real, and the monopoly issues that underlie them (with one internet provider in your town, how will we ever get prices down?) are also quite real. Pedants and trolls will latch onto my first observation, of course; pedants will then proceed to a life of self-abuse as they never get their heads above water no matter how hard they work, and trolls will proceed to a life of ease brought about by their willingness to serve corporate power. I have hope for the former, but not the latter. And it's becoming much harder to tell the difference.

From the "It's Not Just Evil Politics, It's Also Big Money!" file: right-wing health care providers are making big bucks prescribing hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to rage-addled COVID patients. Alas, some folks who paid for such "health care" services never even received them, because a scam just isn't complete until the scammer isn't even working to maintain it. And now, as Merck appears to have developed a COVID treatment drug that might actually reduce your suffering if you get the dread disease, I'm sure America's Frontline Doctors and their nefarious ilk will twist your feelings about big pharma greed into feelings about big pharma results, all while lining their own pockets! George Washington Plunkitt would be proud.

Finally, corporate front groups are lying-ass liars about how much tax hikes on the rich and on corporations will "cost your family." Remember when right-wingers said the 2001 Bush tax cuts would save you "$1,800 annually "on average"? Then you also remember that the "average" between your piddling tax cut and Dick Cheney's tax cut sure didn't put $1,800 in your bank account. You may also remember when the Trump tax "reform" were going to put $4,000 in your bank account; how did that work out? The good news: more Americans see through this rubbish then they used to. The bad news: the ones who don't are now far more likely to shoot those of us who do.

Around the table: from hidden monopolies to stupid Governor tricks.

Another week, another excellent Matt Stoller article showing how monopolies create shortages. You won't necessarily know the names of the monopolies in question (Shimano and SRAM for bike parts, Thermo Fisher and VMR for plastic lab supplies, Newell Brands for Mason jar lids), but you will get the point. You'll also witness the folly of producing most of our plastic resin in Texas, like no other American states had a shale boom last decade. Seriously, when they talk "market efficiencies," they really mean "efficiency in redistributing income upward to executives," because letting one or two corporations control everything -- even in niche industries -- is damn inefficient, actually.

From ProPublica we learn that landlords use algorithms to rate potential tenants, and surprise, surprise, no federal agency regulates this activity, nor do landlords make it particularly easy to find out what your "score" says about you, despite the fact that the Fair Credit Reporting Act actually mandates that they give you that info. There is literally no reason any of this should be a secret, and that includes how these algorithms work, or, perhaps more precisely, "work." Certainly no one would want us to think the answer to that question might be "it works in whatever way delivers the most money to landlords." (The CFPB also has some good advice in the article.)

Oh, splendid, now Joe Manchin gets to write the climate plank of the Build Back Better Act, which not only means he'll make sure big polluters get their welfare handouts, but that he'll get to seriously injure the bill before he figures out what bullshit reason he'll use to torpedo it completely. Or he'll just tag-team Kyrsten Sinema and she'll torpedo it! The New York Times leads with the fact that Mr. Manchin himself made half a mil last year from "coal production," but making half a mil in dividends from coal stock isn't really "production" per se; how interesting that a clearly dying industry can make so much money for some people, but not for, say, actual coal workers.

Speaking of Ms. Sinema, Tim Murphy at Mother Jones not only runs down the absurdity of "moderate" Democratic opposition to Medicare drug price negotiation generally, but reminds us that Ms. Sinema ran for Senate on lowering drug prices. In case you're thinking AHA TWO DIFFERENTZ THINGZ!!!!!, letting Medicare negotiate lower drug prices will lower drug prices generally, and not just for the more than 60 million Americans on whose behalf Medicare would negotiate drug prices. Once big corporate employers see the deal Medicare gets, they're going to want to get that deal, too. That doesn't mean we should just tolerate the existence of private health insurance; it just means we use the world we're in to get the world we want.

At least President Biden has said he'll negotiate no deals with Republicans in exchange for their voting to raise the debt ceiling; he learned that much from Barack Obama, who famously refused to give in to Republicans over this same matter in 2013, though I thought he learned that lesson rather late himself. Speaking of learning lessons, Democrats ought to lift the debt limit on their own and stop complaining that "both parties increased the debt, so both parties should lift the debt limit." The message they should bring to the midterms is we governed, they whined, and I think lifting the debt limit on their own actually helps spread that message.

Finally, did Gov. Brian Kemp (E-GA) really say that you shouldn't mandate the COVID vaccine because they didn't mandate the AIDS vaccine and that worked out? Yes, he really did say that -- more than once! -- and the only true part of it is that, yes, no one mandated an AIDS vaccine because the AIDS vaccine doesn't exist. So, is he trying to prove he really "cares" about people by suggesting that he supports a nonexistent AIDS vaccine? How 1999 of him. Well, they say right-wingers have trouble catching up with the times.