Today In Sportsball

The FIFA World Cup kicks off in Qatar on November 20. The biggest sporting event in the world has a dark side: Qatar won the tournament by buying a large number of votes and the construction of the stadiums has killed 6,500 people, according to research by The Guardian.

Every day, coffins arrive at Kathmandu airport with deceased workers who sought refuge in one of the Gulf states. Journalist Danny Ghosen investigates why Nepalese people knowingly choose to work abroad under terrible conditions and why they also went into debt for that job. With all the consequences for the next of kin. Yet new workers report to the airport every day in search of a better life.

 vpro documentaries

People are dying for a chance to work a decent job.

Dirty Fuels

We have to keep moving away from dirty fuels, but that threatens the plutocrats who are looking for control by commoditizing everything, and then monopolizing it.

You can't sabotage the sun, you can't cut back on the production of wind, and you can't blow up the motion of the water.

If we want energy independence, and the healthier world, and the freedom all of that implies, then we have to stomp the rent-seekers out of existence (figuratively of course - if possible).

How do you expect to hold me hostage to something that you don't have?

The WaPo editors conveniently miss that point.

(pay wall)

Opinion
Undersea pipeline sabotage demands the West prepare for more attacks

Evidence continues to accumulate regarding underwater explosions that blew huge holes in two Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipelines on Sept. 27, and the circumstances all point to what a official NATO statement called “deliberate” sabotage. Sweden and Denmark have officially informed the U.N. Security Council that there were “at least two detonations” using “several hundred kilos” of explosives. This is the kind of capability usually wielded by a state actor, though NATO did not say officially what everyone suspects unofficially: The author of this strike against Europe’s stability and security was Russia. Now, the United States and its allies must meet a new challenge: threats to critical infrastructure, just as they are about to try to get through winter without Russian oil and gas.

Intelligence sources had foreseen this, and, indeed, Ukraine’s government warned of it. Getting the response right begins with understanding why Russian President Vladimir Putin might have chosen to strike where and when he did. In some ways, the pipelines — known as Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 — made attractive targets precisely because the short-term harm to Europe’s economy would be relatively limited. Neither carried much gas. Russia shut off the flow in Nord Stream 1, ostensibly for routine maintenance, more than a month ago, and the German government canceled Nord Stream 2’s planned opening in response to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Furthermore, the explosions took place in international waters in the Baltic Sea, meaning they cannot be construed as a direct attack on any NATO member, which could have triggered the alliance’s mutual-defense agreement. As for the timing, the attack came on the day a new undersea gas pipeline opened from one NATO member that borders on Russia, Norway, to another, Poland, which the latter had billed as a quantum leap for its energy security.

Put it all together and the attack looks very much like an attempt to take revenge on countries that have backed Ukraine — a signal to them that more expensive energy supply disruptions might be coming — while preserving plausible deniability.

The West has long been aware of Russia’s capacity to disrupt critical energy and communications infrastructure through cyberattacks and disinformation. In April, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, along with the FBI and the National Security Agency, issued a joint warning about the cyberthreat to critical infrastructure such as energy and utilities. And so far, Ukraine and its supporters have kept cyber-damage to a minimum. Sabotage to the gas pipelines shows that Russia might use more prosaic “kinetic” tools — high explosives — to achieve the same purposes. In fact, Norway has suspected the Russian navy damaged its undersea fiber-optic cables earlier this year.

NATO was wise not to assign blame without ironclad proof, while warning it would respond forcefully against known culprits. What must come next, however, is stepped-up air and naval surveillance of the global network of undersea pipelines and cables, more accumulation of energy reserves for the winter and assurance that existing pipeline repair services — they already exist in both the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea — can act rapidly if needed. In protecting critical infrastructure, resilience is an essential part of deterrence.

These Plutocrats

Somehow, rich people get the idea in their heads that they can do whatever they want and no matter the consequences for everybody else, they'll always be insulated to a point where the world of shit they create won't have a negative impact on them.

And there can be no better illustration of that than their apparent assumption that when things get too shitty on this planet, their money can either provide a safe and cozy little cocoon, or whisk them away to the next paradise.

The super-rich ‘preppers’ are planning to save themselves from the apocalypse

Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences

As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I don’t usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin what’s left of the internet, much less civilisation?

Still, sometimes a combination of morbid curiosity and cold hard cash is enough to get me on a stage in front of the tech elite, where I try to talk some sense into them about how their businesses are affecting our lives out here in the real world. That’s how I found myself accepting an invitation to address a group mysteriously described as “ultra-wealthy stakeholders”, out in the middle of the desert.

A limo was waiting for me at the airport. As the sun began to dip over the horizon, I realised I had been in the car for three hours. What sort of wealthy hedge-fund types would drive this far from the airport for a conference? Then I saw it. On a parallel path next to the highway, as if racing against us, a small jet was coming in for a landing on a private airfield. Of course.

The next morning, two men in matching Patagonia fleeces came for me in a golf cart and conveyed me through rocks and underbrush to a meeting hall. They left me to drink coffee and prepare in what I figured was serving as my green room. But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to me. They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world. At least two of them were billionaires. After a bit of small talk, I realised they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come to ask questions.

They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?

The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its ow

I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.

This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.

Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.

These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch. Will it be Jeff Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Mark Zuckerberg to his virtual metaverse? And these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fuelling most of this speculation to begin with.

What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.

Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let’s call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.

Never before have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else. Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.

Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalisation of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused.

Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.

By the time I boarded my return flight to New York, my mind was reeling with the implications of The Mindset. What were its main tenets? Who were its true believers? What, if anything, could we do to resist it? Before I had even landed, I posted an article about my strange encounter – to surprising effect.

Almost immediately, I began receiving inquiries from businesses catering to the billionaire prepper, all hoping I would make some introductions on their behalf to the five men I had written about. I heard from a real estate agent who specialises in disaster-proof listings, a company taking reservations for its third underground dwellings project, and a security firm offering various forms of “risk management”.

But the message that got my attention came from a former president of the American chamber of commerce in Latvia. JC Cole had witnessed the fall of the Soviet empire, as well as what it took to rebuild a working society almost from scratch. He had also served as landlord for the American and European Union embassies, and learned a whole lot about security systems and evacuation plans. “You certainly stirred up a bees’ nest,” he began his first email to me. “It’s quite accurate – the wealthy hiding in their bunkers will have a problem with their security teams… I believe you are correct with your advice to ‘treat those people really well, right now’, but also the concept may be expanded and I believe there is a better system that would give much better results.”

He felt certain that the “event” – a grey swan, or predictable catastrophe triggered by our enemies, Mother Nature, or just by accident –was inevitable. He had done a Swot analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats – and concluded that preparing for calamity required us to take the very same measures as trying to prevent one. “By coincidence,” he explained, “I am setting up a series of safe haven farms in the NYC area. These are designed to best handle an ‘event’ and also benefit society as semi-organic farms. Both within three hours’ drive from the city – close enough to get there when it happens.”

Here was a prepper with security clearance, field experience and food sustainability expertise. He believed the best way to cope with the impending disaster was to change the way we treat one another, the economy, and the planet right now – while also developing a network of secret, totally self-sufficient residential farm communities for millionaires, guarded by Navy Seals armed to the teeth.

JC is currently developing two farms as part of his safe haven project. Farm one, outside Princeton, is his show model and “works well as long as the thin blue line is working”. The second one, somewhere in the Poconos, has to remain a secret. “The fewer people who know the locations, the better,” he explained, along with a link to the Twilight Zone episode in which panicked neighbours break into a family’s bomb shelter during a nuclear scare. “The primary value of safe haven is operational security, nicknamed OpSec by the military. If/when the supply chain breaks, the people will have no food delivered. Covid-19 gave us the wake-up call as people started fighting over toilet paper. When it comes to a shortage of food it will be vicious. That is why those intelligent enough to invest have to be stealthy.”

JC invited me down to New Jersey to see the real thing. “Wear boots,” he said. “The ground is still wet.” Then he asked: “Do you shoot?”

The farm itself was serving as an equestrian centre and tactical training facility in addition to raising goats and chickens. JC showed me how to hold and shoot a Glock at a series of outdoor targets shaped like bad guys, while he grumbled about the way Senator Dianne Feinstein had limited the number of rounds one could legally fit in a magazine for the handgun. JC knew his stuff. I asked him about various combat scenarios. “The only way to protect your family is with a group,” he said. That was really the whole point of his project – to gather a team capable of sheltering in place for a year or more, while also defending itself from those who hadn’t prepared. JC was also hoping to train young farmers in sustainable agriculture, and to secure at least one doctor and dentist for each location.

On the way back to the main building, JC showed me the “layered security” protocols he had learned designing embassy properties: a fence, “no trespassing” signs, guard dogs, surveillance cameras … all meant to discourage violent confrontation. He paused for a minute as he stared down the drive. “Honestly, I am less concerned about gangs with guns than the woman at the end of the driveway holding a baby and asking for food.” He paused, and sighed, “I don’t want to be in that moral dilemma.”

That’s why JC’s real passion wasn’t just to build a few isolated, militarised retreat facilities for millionaires, but to prototype locally owned sustainable farms that can be modelled by others and ultimately help restore regional food security in America. The “just-in-time” delivery system preferred by agricultural conglomerates renders most of the nation vulnerable to a crisis as minor as a power outage or transportation shutdown. Meanwhile, the centralisation of the agricultural industry has left most farms utterly dependent on the same long supply chains as urban consumers. “Most egg farmers can’t even raise chickens,” JC explained as he showed me his henhouses. “They buy chicks. I’ve got roosters.”

JC is no hippy environmentalist but his business model is based in the same communitarian spirit I tried to convey to the billionaires: the way to keep the hungry hordes from storming the gates is by getting them food security now. So for $3m, investors not only get a maximum security compound in which to ride out the coming plague, solar storm, or electric grid collapse. They also get a stake in a potentially profitable network of local farm franchises that could reduce the probability of a catastrophic event in the first place. His business would do its best to ensure there are as few hungry children at the gate as possible when the time comes to lock down.

So far, JC Cole has been unable to convince anyone to invest in American Heritage Farms. That doesn’t mean no one is investing in such schemes. It’s just that the ones that attract more attention and cash don’t generally have these cooperative components. They’re more for people who want to go it alone. Most billionaire preppers don’t want to have to learn to get along with a community of farmers or, worse, spend their winnings funding a national food resilience programme. The mindset that requires safe havens is less concerned with preventing moral dilemmas than simply keeping them out of sight.

Many of those seriously seeking a safe haven simply hire one of several prepper construction companies to bury a prefab steel-lined bunker somewhere on one of their existing properties. Rising S Company in Texas builds and installs bunkers and tornado shelters for as little as $40,000 for an 8ft by 12ft emergency hideout all the way up to the $8.3m luxury series “Aristocrat”, complete with pool and bowling lane. The enterprise originally catered to families seeking temporary storm shelters, before it went into the long-term apocalypse business. The company logo, complete with three crucifixes, suggests their services are geared more toward Christian evangelist preppers in red-state America than billionaire tech bros playing out sci-fi scenarios.

There’s something much more whimsical about the facilities in which most of the billionaires – or, more accurately, aspiring billionaires – actually invest. A company called Vivos is selling luxury underground apartments in converted cold war munitions storage facilities, missile silos, and other fortified locations around the world. Like miniature Club Med resorts, they offer private suites for individuals or families, and larger common areas with pools, games, movies and dining. Ultra-elite shelters such as the Oppidum in the Czech Republic claim to cater to the billionaire class, and pay more attention to the long-term psychological health of residents. They provide imitation of natural light, such as a pool with a simulated sunlit garden area, a wine vault, and other amenities to make the wealthy feel at home.

On closer analysis, however, the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim. For one, the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle. For example, an indoor, sealed hydroponic garden is vulnerable to contamination. Vertical farms with moisture sensors and computer-controlled irrigation systems look great in business plans and on the rooftops of Bay Area startups; when a palette of topsoil or a row of crops goes wrong, it can simply be pulled and replaced. The hermetically sealed apocalypse “grow room” doesn’t allow for such do-overs.

Just the known unknowns are enough to dash any reasonable hope of survival. But this doesn’t seem to stop wealthy preppers from trying. The New York Times reported that real estate agents specialising in private islands were overwhelmed with inquiries during the Covid-19 pandemic. Prospective clients were even asking about whether there was enough land to do some agriculture in addition to installing a helicopter landing pad. But while a private island may be a good place to wait out a temporary plague, turning it into a self-sufficient, defensible ocean fortress is harder than it sounds. Small islands are utterly dependent on air and sea deliveries for basic staples. Solar panels and water filtration equipment need to be replaced and serviced at regular intervals. The billionaires who reside in such locales are more, not less, dependent on complex supply chains than those of us embedded in industrial civilisation.

Surely the billionaires who brought me out for advice on their exit strategies were aware of these limitations. Could it have all been some sort of game? Five men sitting around a poker table, each wagering his escape plan was best?

But if they were in it just for fun, they wouldn’t have called for me. They would have flown out the author of a zombie apocalypse comic book. If they wanted to test their bunker plans, they’d have hired a security expert from Blackwater or the Pentagon. They seemed to want something more. Their language went far beyond questions of disaster preparedness and verged on politics and philosophy: words such as individuality, sovereignty, governance and autonomy.

That’s because it wasn’t their actual bunker strategies I had been brought out to evaluate so much as the philosophy and mathematics they were using to justify their commitment to escape. They were working out what I’ve come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind –apocalypse or not?

Or was this really their intention all along? Maybe the apocalypse is less something they’re trying to escape than an excuse to realise The Mindset’s true goal: to rise above mere mortals and execute the ultimate exit strategy.

This is an edited extract from Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff, published by Scribe (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

A Confession

I confess a guilty pleasure - I'm kind of a Perry Mason freak.

Weirdly (I think), it started when I watched a BBC documentary about the rise of fundamentalist religious/conservative groups to prominence in the US (and the Middle East), and how the mobilization of those factions came to be used as a potent political weapon by a rather fanatical right wing in the GOP.

One the series highlights was the teachings of a guy named Leo Strauss at Univ of Chicago, who helped birth what would become the NeoCon movement, which grew up to be the Radical Libertarian thing that Nancy MacLean talks about in her book Democracy In Chains, as Republicans work at tearing down our traditions of democratic self-government in order to replace it all with plutocracy.

Anyway, the Perry Mason character is appealing because he's kind of an anti-hero. He's more or less always on the side of right, but he's willing to bend the rules and play a little in SmarmSpace to get at whatever truth there is be gotten at, and he's not above omitting a few details as he directs his associates in their tasks, and sometimes manipulates his opponents to serve his purposes.

Also - it's good to know what's motivating your opponent.

(from about 6:20 thru about 10:30)

There's also a sexual tension between Mason and his assistant, Della Street, which was hinted at pretty strongly but never addressed directly.

But then, more than 35 years later...

The Appeasement Caucus

More specifically, The Kremlin Caucus.

Or maybe just Putin's Puppets.

But I think it's more like The Plutocracy Gang.

These guys see the world in terms of USAmerica Inc, and Consortium Europa, and China House, etc.

Where we have countries, they want commercial enterprises.

Where we have sovereign territories and mutual defense treaties, they're pushing for organization charts and overlapping market segments and reciprocal sales agreements.

So when we hear them say something like "border integrity", they're just illustrating the need to chain a labor force to its place of origin while ensuring capital can free-flow wherever it needs to go to cut costs and boost share holder equity.

They're not against Russia's invasion of Ukraine any more than they're against Elon Musk's invasion of Twitter.

Not that the Press Poodles have figured any of this out yet. So today's Press Poodle Award goes to Paul Kane.

WaPo: (pay wall)

The list of anti-Ukraine Republican lawmakers is quickly growing

Two months ago, three voted against the first pro-Ukraine bill. This week, 57 opposed a request for weapons and humanitarian aid.

Once belittled by then-President Trump as a “third-rate grandstander,” Rep. Thomas Massie is used to tilting at political windmills.

In early March, the Kentucky Republican was one of just three lawmakers to oppose the first piece of legislation designed to show U.S. support for Ukraine in its war against an invading Russian army, a familiar lonely spot for the libertarian-leaning lawmaker frequently at odds with his party’s leaders.

But on Monday, Massie spoke to Trump for the first time in more than two years — and received the former president’s endorsement in the May 17 Kentucky primary. And on Tuesday, 56 Republicans joined Massie in opposing the latest push to send arms to the Ukrainian forces.

“It’s growing by the week,” he told reporters in an impromptu 20-minute conversation off the House floor Friday. He suggested the price tag so far was “insane” and that sanctions against Moscow only increase inflation. “More and more people are agreeing with that.”

Massie, 51, is the only member of the House to hold a perfect 16-for-16 record opposing legislation to support Ukraine and oppose Russia, according to House records and a Democratic analysis provided to The Washington Post.

It was easy to brush Massie aside in early March when he opposed a simple, nonbinding resolution declaring American support for Ukraine and demanding Russian President Vladimir Putin call a cease fire. Or in late April, when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) was the only other Republican to oppose a bill to protect religious freedoms in Ukraine.

Little by little, however, with each proposal, a few more Republicans would sign up: eight Republicans opposed suspending trade privileges for Russia in mid-March; 17 Republicans opposed a resolution supporting Moldova, whose leaders fear their Ukraine-bordering nation could be Putin’s next target; 19 opposed a similar resolution in support for Georgia.

Then, on April 27, 55 House Republicans opposed legislation to build secure telecommunications networks in Ukraine and neighboring nations. Finally, on Tuesday,, 57 Republicans opposed President Biden’s request for $40 billion in weapons and humanitarian aid, with some saying the legislation had been rushed to the floor without detailed consideration. All Democrats backed the president’s request.

Massie saw it as a defining moment.

“This is the real story. Not that there’s 57 Republicans who’ve woken up to the folly of what we’re doing in Ukraine, but that there are zero Democrats. Every single one of them is on the wrong side of this,” he said.

His views remain a minority, but his allies in this cause include some of the closest allies to Trump, who is strongly considering another run for president and has espoused his own fondness for Putin.

Greene, who frequently appears as a warm-up act for Trump rallies, has opposed 15 of the 16 measures related to Ukraine. Arizona GOP Reps. Andy Biggs and Paul A. Gosar — who supported efforts to try to block President Biden’s certification of victory in the 2020 campaign — have voted against 11 and 10 of the Ukraine-related bills, respectively.

These Republicans sum up their world view in blunt, nationalist terms. “Let me ask you,” Greene said during an interview Thursday. “Has Vladimir Putin stopped his war in Ukraine because of all these sanctions? No, not at all. It hasn’t done anything. So, you know what? I care about our country, United States of America and our people. That’s it.”

Greene, a freshman with no background in foreign policy, often uses fiery terms that do not fully grasp the geopolitical issue at hand. “Baby formula, baby formula, people cannot find baby formula, with such a shortage. But our Congress is going to send $40 billion to some other country,” she said.

But Massie — an engineer who graduated with several degrees from M.I.T. and became an inventor who still holds a number of patents — has devoted time and energy to honing his America First views during five terms in the House.

“I’m further, I think, than he is on the issue of NATO. He demanded that the partners pay their share. I would withdraw us from NATO,” Massie explained of his and Trump’s views toward the critical alliance. “It’s a Cold War relic. Our involvement should have ceased when the [Berlin] wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed.”

He would have preemptively surrendered portions of eastern Ukraine to Russia in a manner that would have “avoided tens of thousands of people dying,” because this is how he sees the war ending anyway.

“A fractured Ukraine, with the Eastern portion of it being a satellite or more government, more deferential to Putin, and the Western part of it more deferential to Europe or the United States,” Massie said.

These views are anathema to traditional Republican hawks as well as Democrats in line with Biden, who push for a vigorous foreign policy that works to unify allies, particularly in Europe.

“Both Democrats and Republicans have at different times in history had a more isolationist, nativist wing,” said Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. “Right now, it’s the Republicans who are highest on that. They’re playing a very isolationist card.”

“Honestly there is an isolationist wing within the party that’s traditionally been there,” said Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Smith takes a more optimistic outlook, focusing on how more than 70 percent of House Republicans supported the latest Ukraine aid package and that on other votes, Massie and Greene have had few allies.

“Pretty much everybody else understands that this isn’t just about Ukraine. It is about our security and peace and stability in the world. So thus far the Republican Party is still there,” Smith said.

McCaul has actually been pleasantly surprised that the anti-Ukraine faction has not grown larger, something he attributes to the success on the ground of Ukrainian troops and the atrocities committed by Putin’s troops.

“I was really worried, interestingly, earlier on about how this was going to trend,” McCaul said Friday.

He understands that this could turn into a long-term commitment and worries that later this year, when almost inevitably Biden will ask Congress for another war supplemental bill, support will drop among Republicans.

“I still think there’s very strong support, but it is something we’re keeping an eye on as we look at the next supplemental,” McCaul said. “What’s going to be the appetite for that?”

Smith does worry about the nativist wing’s influence with Trump if he runs for president in 2024. “If Trump is the leader of their party, that’s a huge problem,” he said.

Before Monday’s call, Massie said he last spoke to Trump on March 27, 2020, just off the floor of the House as the then-president screamed at him to allow the chamber to unanimously approve the more than $2 trillion Cares Act to combat the early days of the pandemic.

Massie objected to a simple unanimous consent — which would have allowed all but a few members to safely stay home and pass the massive bill without an actual vote. Instead, about 250 lawmakers showed up and gave their vocal support, a bipartisan victory that prompted Trump to call for Massie to be expelled from the GOP.

He went on to win reelection without Trump, and by Monday, Trump reached out to Massie.

“A glorious phone call,” Massie said.

They did not talk about foreign policy, or Massie’s votes to certify Biden’s victory. They did not discuss Massie’s March 2020 actions. They did talk about how Trump’s uncle taught at M.I.T. for several decades.

Afterward, Trump issued a public statement declaring Massie a “first-rate” defender of his policies, back in his good graces.

“A promotion from third rate to first rate,” Massie said.

Kleptocracy

About halfway through this clip the guy makes the point that going after the oligarchs won't deter Putin, or make him change policies, because they've been subordinated to the regime in Moscow, and they just don't have the power they once had.

But It's not just the influence on Putin and Russian politics that matters. There's way too much dark money being poured into electoral processes everywhere. These rich boogers are buying up Coin-Operated Politicians all over this planet. And that needs to be dealt with if we don't want to live under the thumb of a global plutocracy.

Today's Oy

A tweet from Congress Critter Madison Cawthorn:

At first blush, it's the easy shot to call him an idiot and blow it off.

But he's not an idiot. At least, he's not the kind of idiot who doesn't know that legislation doesn't just fall out of the sky all neatly wrapped for him to peruse.

He's already had opportunity to know what's in the thing. It's been rattling around in various forms, in various committees for a while now, so he's not in the dark on this shit. He's got staffers who wrangle that kinda thing for him and they know what's in it even if he insists on staying willfully ignorant of it.

So what's the deal?

Here's the deal: Cawthorn knows his constituents are waiting to be the fools who get fooled into believing everyone but them is the fool. And a lot of those fools are at least partly aware that they've been fooled and are still going along with it because they need to be "on the inside" as they and their buddy Mr Cawthorn make fools of all those fools.

Confused? Me too - and that, ladies and germs - that's pretty much the whole fuckin' point.

If I can get you addled and frustrated enough, you'll eventually throw up your hands and leave me to my devices to "solve the problem" for you.

Of course the "solution" will be flashy, and probably expensive, but largely with no real substance or efficacy. It's just a win for our side - which, to Cawthorn and the Plutocrats, means little more than putting your dollars in their pockets.

That's how we do things here

Reminder

Never forget how deeply the American Right hates this country's traditions

of democratic self-government.

Their project is to tear it all down

and replace it

with a global, stateless plutocracy.

Big History

They knew the history, and so they knew something like COVID was coming 15 years ago.

Bush didn't do enough - IMO because he was too busy fuckin' around with the Cheney/Rumsfeld project to conquer the oil world.

Obama took it more seriously, and managed to do more, but still not enough - IMO because of little public interest in it, and (largely) Republican fuckery, ie: "sequestration" as a means to hamstring progressive policies.

45* comes along and shit-cans the whole structure - on purpose - in order to destabilize the government and open the way to authoritarian plutocratic rule.

And now we're on our way to a million dead Americans, as our system of democratic self-governance is teetering on the brink.

The last 3 chapters plus the afterword go a long way towards explaining how stupidly we've been acting.

How Rich?

It would be good if I could figure out how to embed this, but I can't - and it's possible the people who came up with it are smart enough not to give me the chance.

Anyway, go look it over, and scroll all the way thru it so you get the full effect of just how fucked up our system of "meritocratic capitalism" has become.

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

I got ridiculously lucky and made a few million dollars in my career. If you take all that money and make a stack of 100-dollar bills, it would be about 10 feet tall.

If you take all of Jeff Bezos's money (let's be really conservative and say $150 billion), and you make a stack of 100-dollar bills, it would be over 100 miles tall.

100 MILES

So They Tell Us

Q: Why do Republicans argue, "This is not a democracy, it's a republic"?

A: It's a way of branding our government with the GOP label, which is both good conditioning, and good camouflage for that conditioning. It gets people used to thinking in terms of the first clause of that statement, so when our traditions of democratic self-governance have been torn down and carted away, we're already used to, "This is not a democracy", which can then be followed by, "and it never was."

A year ago, in The Atlantic: (pay wall)

Dependent on a minority of the population to hold national power, Republicans such as Senator Mike Lee of Utah have taken to reminding the public that “we’re not a democracy.” It is quaint that so many Republicans, embracing a president who routinely tramples constitutional norms, have suddenly found their voice in pointing out that, formally, the country is a republic. There is some truth to this insistence. But it is mostly disingenuous. The Constitution was meant to foster a complex form of majority rule, not enable minority rule.

The founding generation was deeply skeptical of what it called “pure” democracy and defended the American experiment as “wholly republican.” To take this as a rejection of democracy misses how the idea of government by the people, including both a democracy and a republic, was understood when the Constitution was drafted and ratified. It misses, too, how we understand the idea of democracy today.

When founding thinkers such as James Madison spoke of democracy, they were usually referring to direct democracy, what Madison frequently labeled “pure” democracy. Madison made the distinction between a republic and a direct democracy exquisitely clear in “Federalist No. 14”: “In a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, will be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.” Both a democracy and a republic were popular forms of government: Each drew its legitimacy from the people and depended on rule by the people. The crucial difference was that a republic relied on representation, while in a “pure” democracy, the people represented themselves.

At the time of the founding, a narrow vision of the people prevailed. Black people were largely excluded from the terms of citizenship, and slavery was a reality, even when frowned upon, that existed alongside an insistence on self-government. What this generation considered either a democracy or a republic is troublesome to us insofar as it largely granted only white men the full rights of citizens, albeit with some exceptions. America could not be considered a truly popular government until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which commanded equal citizenship for Black Americans. Yet this triumph was rooted in the founding generation’s insistence on what we would come to call democracy.

The history of democracy as grasped by the Founders, drawn largely from the ancient world, revealed that overbearing majorities could all too easily lend themselves to mob rule, dominating minorities and trampling individual rights. Democracy was also susceptible to demagogues—men of “factious tempers” and “sinister designs,” as Madison put it in “Federalist No. 10”—who relied on “vicious arts” to betray the interests of the people. Madison nevertheless sought to defend popular government—the rule of the many—rather than retreat to the rule of the few.

American constitutional design can best be understood as an effort to establish a sober form of democracy. It did so by embracing representation, the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the protection of individual rights—all concepts that were unknown in the ancient world where democracy had earned its poor reputation.

In “Federalist No. 10” and “Federalist No. 51,” the seminal papers, Madison argued that a large republic with a diversity of interests capped by the separation of powers and checks and balances would help provide the solution to the ills of popular government. In a large and diverse society, populist passions are likely to dissipate, as no single group can easily dominate. If such intemperate passions come from a minority of the population, the “republican principle,” by which Madison meant majority rule, will allow the defeat of “sinister views by regular vote.” More problematic are passionate groups that come together as a majority. The large republic with a diversity of interests makes this unlikely, particularly when its separation of powers works to filter and tame such passions by incentivizing the development of complex democratic majorities: “In the extended republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good.” Madison had previewed this argument at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 using the term democracy, arguing that a diversity of interests was “the only defense against the inconveniences of democracy consistent with the democratic form of government.”

Yet while dependent on the people, the Constitution did not embrace simple majoritarian democracy. The states, with unequal populations, got equal representation in the Senate. The Electoral College also gave the states weight as states in selecting the president. But the centrality of states, a concession to political reality, was balanced by the House of Representatives, where the principle of representation by population prevailed, and which would make up the overwhelming number of electoral votes when selecting a president.

But none of this justified minority rule, which was at odds with the “republican principle.” Madison’s design remained one of popular government precisely because it would require the building of political majorities over time. As Madison argued in “Federalist No. 63,” “The cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers.”

Alexander Hamilton, one of Madison’s co-authors of The Federalist Papers, echoed this argument. Hamilton made the case for popular government and even called it democracy: “A representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable.”The American experiment, as advanced by Hamilton and Madison, sought to redeem the cause of popular government against its checkered history. Given the success of the experiment by the standards of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, we would come to use the term democracy as a stand-in for representative democracy, as distinct from direct democracy.

Consider that President Abraham Lincoln, facing a civil war, which he termed the great test of popular government, used constitutional republic and democracy synonymously, eloquently casting the American experiment as government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And whatever the complexities of American constitutional design, Lincoln insisted, “the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible.” Indeed, Lincoln offered a definition of popular government that can guide our understanding of a democracy—or a republic—today: “A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks, and limitations, and always changing easily, with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.”

The greatest shortcoming of the American experiment was its limited vision of the people, which excluded Black people, women, and others from meaningful citizenship, diminishing popular government’s cause. According to Lincoln, extending meaningful citizenship so that “all should have an equal chance” was the basis on which the country could be “saved.” The expansion of we the people was behind the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments ratified in the wake of the Civil War. The Fourteenth recognized that all persons born in the U.S. were citizens of the country and entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizenship. The Fifteenth secured the vote for Black men. Subsequent amendments, the Nineteenth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Sixth, granted women the right to vote, prohibited poll taxes in national elections, and lowered the voting age to 18. Progress has been slow—and sometimes halted, as is evident from current efforts to limit voting rights—and the country has struggled to become the democratic republic first set in motion two centuries ago. At the same time, it has also sought to find the right republican constraints on the evolving body of citizens, so that majority rule—but not factious tempers—can prevail.

Perhaps the most significant stumbling block has been the states themselves. In the 1790 census, taken shortly after the Constitution was ratified, America’s largest state, Virginia, was roughly 13 times larger than its smallest state, Delaware. Today, California is roughly 78 times larger than Wyoming. This sort of disparity has deeply shaped the Senate, which gives a minority of the population a disproportionate influence on national policy choices. Similarly, in the Electoral College, small states get a disproportionate say on who becomes president. Each of California’s electoral votes is estimated to represent 700,000-plus people, while one of Wyoming’s speaks for just under 200,000 people.

Subsequent to 1988, the Republican presidential candidate has prevailed in the Electoral College in three out of seven elections, but won the popular vote only once (2004). If President Trump is reelected, it will almost certainly be because he once again prevailed in the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. If this were to occur, he would be the only two-term president to never win a plurality of the popular vote. In 2020, Trump is the first candidate in American history to campaign for the presidency without making any effort to win the popular vote, appealing only to the people who will deliver him an Electoral College win. If the polls are any indication, more Americans may vote for Vice President Biden than have ever voted for a presidential candidate, and he could still lose the presidency. In the past, losing the popular vote while winning the Electoral College was rare. Given current trends, minority rule could become routine. Many Republicans are actively embracing this position with the insistence that we are, after all, a republic, not a democracy.

They have also dispensed with the notion of building democratic majorities to govern, making no effort on health care, immigration, or a crucial second round of economic relief in the face of COVID-19. Instead, revealing contempt for the democratic norms they insisted on when President Barack Obama sought to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat, Republicans in the Senate have brazenly wielded their power to entrench a Republican majority on the Supreme Court by rushing to confirm Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The Senate Judiciary Committee vote to approve Barrett also illuminates the disparity in popular representation: The 12 Republican senators who voted to approve of Barrett’s nomination represented 9 million fewer people than the 10 Democratic senators who chose not to vote. Similarly, the 52 Republican senators who voted to confirm Barrett represented 17 million fewer people than the 48 senators who voted against her. And the Court Barrett is joining, made up of six Republican appointees (half of whom were appointed by a president who lost the popular vote) to three Democratic appointees, has been quite skeptical of voting rights—a severe blow to the “democracy” part of a democratic republic. In 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, the Court struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that allowed the federal government to preempt changes in voting regulations from states with a history of racial discrimination.

As Adam Serwer recently wrote in these pages, “Shelby County ushered in a new era of experimentation among Republican politicians in restricting the electorate, often along racial lines.” Republicans are eager to shrink the electorate. Ostensibly seeking to prevent voting fraud, which studies have continually shown is a nonexistent problem, Republicans support efforts to make voting more difficult—especially for minorities, who do not tend to vote Republican. The Republican governor of Texas, in the midst of a pandemic when more people are voting by mail, limited the number of drop-off locations for absentee ballots to one per county. Loving, with a population of 169, has one drop-off location; Harris, with a population of 4.7 million (majority nonwhite), also has one drop-off location. States controlled by Republicans, such as Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, have also closed polling places, making voters in predominantly minority communities stand in line for hours to cast their ballot.

Who counts as a full and equal citizen—as part of we the people—has shrunk in the Republican vision. Arguing against statehood for the District of Columbia, which has 200,000 more people than the state of Wyoming, Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas said Wyoming is entitled to representation because it is “a well-rounded working-class state.” It is also overwhelmingly white. In contrast, D.C. is 50 percent nonwhite.

High-minded claims that we are not a democracy surreptitiously fuse republic with minority rule rather than popular government. Enabling sustained minority rule at the national level is not a feature of our constitutional design, but a perversion of it. Routine minority rule is neither desirable nor sustainable, and makes it difficult to characterize the country as either a democracy or a republic. We should see this as a constitutional failure demanding constitutional reform.

I Gotcher Conspiracy Right here

Hey, "conservatives", do you really wanna do that conspiracy thing? Here's one.

What if you make a political move that takes cops off the streets, and do it thru the unions, which kinda short-circuits the lefties' pushback?

Put this together with - oh, I dunno - that horseshit going on down there in Texas where they've legalized Vigilantism, and whaddya got?

The Guardian:

Police departments face a shortage as unions enable officers to refuse vaccines

Representatives say the mandates violate the officers’ rights while city leaders are trying to keep the public safe

Sgt Randy Huserik and all other officers with the Seattle police department who have been vaccinated against Covid-19 are prepared to report at 7am Tuesday morning to any of the city’s five precincts rather than their usual assignments. Some detectives could even be responding to 911 calls instead of following up on their case load, he said.

That’s because the city is implementing a vaccine mandate for officers on 18 October and preparing to fire hundreds of officers who refuse to get the vaccine, which could leave the department significantly understaffed.

“We will have additional bodies available to handle 911 calls but obviously there is going to be a backlash on that for all the officers assigned as detectives who then won’t be working on their caseload, which will then back up as additional cases come in,” said Huserik, who has been with the department for 28 years and works in public affairs.

The standoff between the city and officers is just one conflict among many across the United States, with city leaders stating that they are trying to keep the public safe and some officers and their union representatives saying that the mandates violate their rights. In Chicago, the issue has even led to the mayor and the local police union trading legal actions.

While the penalties for officers who decline to get the vaccine differ from city to city, there is a common resistance among police unions to various restrictions.

And policing experts warn that even if officers’ resistance to the vaccination is misguided, issuing mandates could further deplete departments that are already understaffed and thus hurt public safety.

“I think you should encourage them, but I don’t think you can make anybody do anything and think that relationship is going to be amicable and trustworthy down the line,” said David Thomas, a professor of forensic studies at Florida Gulf Coast University.

The resistance to the vaccines comes despite the fact Covid-19 has caused 473 deaths among law enforcement officers in the United States, making it the largest cause of death for the group in 2020 and 2021, according to Officer Down Memorial Page, which tracks the deaths.

“You would think that is enough to encourage everybody to get vaccinated,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which advises police departments across the country. “It’s just mind-boggling to think that the creation of [police] unions was to protect officers’ rights and what could be more significant than the right to live a good life?”

Brian Higgins, a former police chief and adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, attributes the resistance in part to the fact that police “are a little more skeptical” and “are not used to being told what to do”, he said.

And there it is - the cops "are not used to being told what to do."

Well then, you need to get used to it, fellas.

You are not the law.

You are not above the law.

You will comply with the fucking law.

From A Different Angle

It's easy to see how a growing affinity between Millennial youngsters and (eg) Boomer Progressives could be seen as a real threat to a "conservative" scheme aimed at installing a plutocracy.

So what's a good little fascist to do?

Divide-n-Conquer.

So how do I drive a wedge between two very important factions in order to keep them from joining forces and kicking my autocratic ass to the political curb?

The Young Turks take a crack at Cancel Culture as a kind of False Flag ploy - another example of how we can be manipulated by people who turn everything upside down and inside out.

About That AT&T Thing

Sorry not sorry, AT&T, but for this, you deserve nothing but a big fat

FUCK YOU.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Trump’s favorite channel, One America News, was never ‘news’ at all

The whitewashing and denialism of the Jan. 6 insurrection started at One America News on that very same day.

As President Donald Trump tried to overturn the legitimate results of the presidential election — inciting a deadly riot along the way — the cable channel’s brass were sending an all-too-clear message to their team about how to cover this horrifying event.

“Please DO NOT say ‘Trump Supporters Storm Capitol. . . .’ Simply call them demonstrators or protestors. . . . DO NOT CALL IT A RIOT!!!” came the impassioned email directive from a news director to the staff.

The next day, OAN’s top boss, founder Robert Herring Sr., ordered producers to get in line behind the president, as he floated the conspiracy theory that it wasn’t Trump supporters breaking those windows and storming those barricades — that it was the leftist movement antifa instead. exposé

“We want to report all the things Antifa did yesterday. I don’t think it was Trump people but let’s investigate,” the 80-year-old chief executive wrote in an email. There was simply nothing to support this far-fetched theory: The FBI has found no evidence of antifa involvement, and almost all of the hundreds of suspects charged have been well-documented Trump supporters; some are members of white-supremacy or other far-right extremist groups.

When Reuters, the global news agency, published its two-part investigation last week of OAN, the most startling finding was that AT&T indirectly provided 90 percent of the channel’s revenue, after letting it be known that it was eager to host a new conservative cable network.

Yes, the world’s largest communications company played a major role in creating and sustaining the far-right channel that spins wacky ideas, promotes fraudulent covid-19 cures and, in its fervor, makes the pro-Trump market leader, Fox News, look almost reasonable. (AT&T has challenged aspects of Reuters’ reporting and said that the company, through its offshoot, DirecTV, provides “viewpoints across the political spectrum.”)

But just as noteworthy as AT&T’s involvement was the way Reuters’s John Shiffman pulled back the curtain on how the San Diego-based network operates, relying in part on court documents.

What they showed is that OAN is dedicated not to the “news,” which is part of its name, but to propaganda, directed from the top.

“If there was any story involving Trump, we had to only focus on either the positive information or basically create positive information,” Marissa Gonzales, an former OAN producer who resigned last year, told Reuters. “It was never, never the full truth.”

That’s what was going on in the background. It adds valuable — if appalling — perspective to what we already knew about OAN.

We knew that Trump appreciates the blind loyalty, promoting the channel more than 100 times on his Twitter feed, often as he complained about Fox News’s failure to back him fully and at all times. We knew that Herring was far from shy about his partiality, tweeting in early January: “If anyone thinks we will throw the best President America has had, in my 79 years, under the bus, you are wrong.”

And we knew that OAN let two of its on-air personalities raise more than $600,000 to help fund a private “audit” of the presidential vote in Arizona. One of them even worked part-time for the Trump recount effort’s legal team.

It’s no wonder the voting machine company Dominion is suing OAN for defamation, for spreading and endorsing false reports that it helped steal the 2020 election from Trump. Dominion’s suit describes the problem succinctly: “OAN helped create and cultivate an alternative reality where up is down (and) pigs have wings.”

But OAN maintains that this all falls under protected free speech or opinion, including a series of pseudo-documentaries about unproven election fraud that MyPillow chief executive and Trump loyalist Mike Lindell paid to put on the air. A federal judge over the summer suggested the courts may not accept that defense, as he allowed a number of Dominion’s related defamation suits, including one against Lindell, to go forward.

Trump’s relentless misinformation campaign, aided by his loyal media allies, has clearly gotten through to millions of Americans. Although there is no basis in fact, no evidence to support it, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found in April that about half of Republicans believe the siege was either a nonviolent protest or caused by left-wing forces “trying to make Trump look bad.” A majority of Republicans believe Trump’s lie that widespread voter fraud robbed him of a second presidential term.

OAN’s television reach may not be vast: Most Americans won’t encounter it when they turn on their TV. But its website’s offerings very well may show up in their social media feeds. Typical of these was a three-paragraph article Friday, featuring Trump’s official statement slamming the “Unselect Committee of Partisan Democrats,” under this headline: “Report: President Trump Fights Democrat-Led ‘Probes’ Into Jan. 6 Protest.”

In terms of spreading misinformation and helping Trump deny the devastating realities of the Jan6 insurrection, OAN is punching way above its weight.

It's time - past time - for some good old-fashioned Teddy Roosevelt-style Trust-Bustin'

The AT&T Empire

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