Today's Crazy Brits

Our cousins across the pond are often just as screwy as we are.

It has to be good that they're showing signs of coming out of their own version of this weird 21st century political delirium, as Boris Johnson has submitted his resignation to parliament.

Jonathan Pie

The Atlantic - David Frum, asking a very pertinent question: (pay wall)

Why Won’t Republicans Act Like Britain’s Tories?

Boris Johnson’s party ditched its dysfunctional leader, yet the GOP remains in thrall to the much more dangerous Donald Trump.

The head of government is caught in a series of scandals. The scandals are not necessarily so important in themselves. Many of them involve purely personal misconduct. But if exposed, they would shock public opinion and threaten the leader’s hold on power. So he lies and lies and lies again. He mobilizes his cabinet and staff to lie for him. And when the truth does finally catch up with him, he tries to brazen things out. The people voted for him. He has a mandate. He won’t go willingly—and he threatens his colleagues that if they try to force him out, he will pull down his administration and his party with him.

The British media are very fond of comparisons between outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson and ex-President Donald Trump. But the political convulsion that toppled Johnson looks a lot more like the uproar that led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the late ’90s than anything in Trump’s record.

Johnson ignored ethics rules and even the law of the land. He disregarded the British value of shared sacrifice in times of hardship by attending parties prohibited by anti-COVID health orders. He was routinely unreliable and untruthful. But Johnson did not attack the constitutional structure of his country.

Johnson will leave office for much the same reason, and in much the same way, as his predecessors Theresa May, David Cameron, and Tony Blair left it: because he lost the confidence of his party. The Conservatives won an 80-seat majority in the general election of December 2019. Johnson claimed that majority as his own personal accomplishment. His resignation in July 2022 confirms the norm of British democracy: Any mandate conferred by the voters belongs to the majority party in Parliament, not to the party leader.

Britain faces many troubles post-Johnson: the accumulating economic harm wrought by the decision to quit the European Union; the threat of Scottish withdrawal from the United Kingdom; the challenge of maintaining peace and an open border between EU-member Ireland in the south and non-EU Ulster in the north. It faces those problems with its system of government in essentially the same working order as it was before Johnson gained the prime ministership.

This outlook is very different for the United States post-Trump. Like Johnson, Trump used every available legal means to hold power as long as he could. Unlike Johnson, Trump then turned to illegal means. He forbade his administration to cooperate in the transition to its elected successor. He pressured state governments to violate their own laws and void their election, replacing their democratically chosen presidential electors with stooges selected by state Republican parties.

When all else failed, Trump fomented a violent attack on the Capitol to interrupt the last formality of the presidential election. Trump hoped that he could intimidate his vice president into violating the law to overturn the election. And if the vice president failed to comply, Trump seemed willing either to put the vice president to flight or even to allow his supporters to kill him—presumably so that some replacement could overturn the election certification in the vice president’s place.

That was terrible, but what has happened since is, if possible, worse. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s attempted putsch, many leaders in Trump’s party voiced condemnation—though even then, most refused to hold him to account by the constitutional means available: impeachment and removal. In the months since January 6, 2021, Republican leaders have declined to enforce any accountability. Instead they have gradually submitted to his demand that their party protect him from the law and pretend to believe his excuses for his plot to seize the presidency by violence: that there was something defective about the election he lost by 8 million votes—even as his party in fact gained seats in the House and Senate.

Few Republican leaders actually believe Trump’s crazy claims. Many are making behind-the-scenes efforts to sabotage his renomination in 2024. But they won’t stand up and be counted—and if he beats them in party primaries, they have declared in advance that they will submit to his leadership and try their best to return him to the presidency he tried to steal after the 2020 election.

That’s a crisis of democracy.

The British face nothing like it. As severe as their national problems are, their institutions proved more than robust in the face of Johnson’s transgressions. Johnson, for his part, never fundamentally tested the British constitutional system: All he wanted from office was a good time and an easy job.

On this side of the Atlantic, things look much darker. The United States had mechanisms to deal with Trump’s attempted coup. He could have been removed from office that very night by the mechanism of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. He could have been convicted and disqualified from ever holding office again by conviction in an impeachment trial.

Unlike Johnson’s party, Trump’s party protected him to the end from accountability for his crimes against the Constitution. With rare exceptions, his party protects him still. The only president in U.S. history to attempt a violent seizure of power remains the front-runner for his party’s nomination in 2024.

The British today can expect a return to the normal problems of governance, albeit aggravated by the self-harm of Brexit but otherwise with their parliamentary democracy intact. For Americans post-Trump, democracy itself remains the question on every election ballot.

These Modern Times

The GOP is the Party Of The Memory Hole.

They talk about Lincoln, but only because he was the first Republican, and is now their only hope to fool black folks into supporting the GOP.

Once in a while, we hear a Republican mention Reagan in softly glowing terms, but even The Gipper has faded a little.

They never mention Poppy Bush - "Read my lips no new taxes".

They won't invite W to their conventions, for fear that somebody might remember the fucked-up-edness of the Iraq invasion.

And they sure as hell don't talk about Goldwater anymore - not since he clashed head on with the new power wing.

WaPo - Sep 16,1981: (pay wall)

Goldwater Lashes Religious Pressure

Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), long the symbol of the conservative movement, said yesterday he will fight "every step of the way" against religious groups that seek to pressure public officials.

In a breakfast interview with a group of reporters and in a speech on the Senate floor, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee said, "I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that, if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C or D....I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate."

Goldwater clashed sharply a few weeks ago with anti-abortion groups and the Moral Majority, when they criticized President Reagan's choice of Arizona Circuit Judge Sandra Day O'Connor for the Supreme Court. He told reporters yesterday morning he had been looking for a public forum in which to broaden his attack. After rehearsing the speech at breakfast, he decided to deliver it on the Senate floor.

"I don't like the New Right," Goldwater said. "What they're talking about is not conservatism."

In the formal speech, the Arizonan asked Americans to "look at the carnage in Iran, the bloodshed in Northern Ireland, or the bombs bursting in Lebanon," all of which he said stemmed from "injecting religious issues into the affairs of state."

"By maintaining the separation of church and state," Goldwater said, "the United States has avoided the intolerance which has so divided the rest of the world with religious wars."

Citing such groups as the Moral Majority and "pro-life" organizations, Goldwater called "the religious factions that are growing throughout our land...a divisive element that could tear apart the very spirit of our representative system, if they gain sufficient strength."

He said, "Far too much of the time of members of Congress and officials of the Executive Branch is used up dealing with special-interest groups on issues like abortion, school busing, ERA, prayer in the schools and pornography."

Goldwater said he shared "many of the values emphasized by these organizations," but would "fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of 'conservatism.' "

Asked about the bill to encourage chastity among teen-agers that was sponsored by one of the "New Right" senators, Jeremiah Denton (R-Ala.), Goldwater asked, "How the hell are you going to regulate that? They've been trying ever since the apple. It's just like abortion. You can make them unconstitutional but they're still going to go out and have one."

A Recovering Republican

I know I shouldn't feel alone in my personal political evolution - I can't be so special as to be the only one who's figured out that "conservative" does not mean what most of these boneheaded Republicans claim it means.

Anyway, here's a fellow traveler - James Killen:

Gelding

Trump continues to lose his oomph.

Rachel Maddow

Savage Inequality

Back when I was a complete Libertarian Asshole - not a Progressive Just-Partly-An-Asshole like I am now - I hated unions.

I was absolutely sure they'd outlived their usefulness, and that they were doing far more harm than good. And I was more right than wrong at the time.

That was then and this is now.

Here's Ari Melber being brilliant.

Changing Times

Axios:

All the old vices — from sex to gambling to drugs — are quickly becoming legal, as both society and the criminal justice system rethink their values.

The big picture:

This amounts to an under-the-radar shift in how society treats what have long been thought of as victimless crimes — behaviors that might not harm anyone who isn't participating, but that are considered to offend social morals.

What's happening:

• When the NFL season began last month, fans in more than two dozen states and the District of Columbia were legally allowed to place bets on games. Five more states are projected to allow it by the end of the NFL season according to the American Gaming Association.
• The Manhattan district attorney's office announced earlier this year that it would stop prosecuting sex work and unlicensed massage, joining a number of other jurisdictions that have moved to partially decriminalize sex work.
• Last November, after the passage of a ballot initiative, Oregon became the first state to decriminalize possession of small amounts of all illicit drugs, while four more states — Arizona, New Jersey, South Dakota and Montana — joined 11 others that have legalized the recreational use of cannabis.

Background:

• The definition of "vice" is always shifting because society's morality is always shifting.
• Generally, part of what makes a vice a vice is that a lot of society considers it questionable, but a lot of society also participates in it.

By the numbers:

• An estimated 45.2 million people — more than 12% of the country — plan to wager on the NFL this season, up from 32% the year before, according to the AGA.
• In a 2019 Pew survey, 18% of U.S. adults reported they had used cannabis over the past year — a drug that is still illegal under federal law.
• A 2020 poll by Data for Progress found 52% of respondents at least somewhat support decriminalizing the buying and selling of sex between consenting adults, compared to just 24% in a similar 1978 poll.

Between the lines:

• Legalizing or at least decriminalizing activities that millions of Americans engage in — and millions more tacitly tolerate — can reduce arrests and prosecutions that disproportionately affect people of color, while also freeing up police and courts to focus on crimes that harm more people.
• If regulated and taxed, it can also divert substantial revenue to government coffers. Legal gambling generates nearly $700 million in tax money at the state level, while legal marijuana has generated nearly $8 billion in tax revenue since states first began allowing recreational use.
• Bringing an activity out of the black market can also starve criminal organizations of revenue and help protect individuals who will engage in it — a key argument for decriminalizing sex work.

The other side:

• Opponents question whether vices are truly "victimless crimes" and raise concerns about the unintended consequences of allowing activities that, if taken to the extreme, can produce both individual and social harm.
• A 2020 study found recreational cannabis legalization in Washington state in 2012 was followed by an uptick in the likelihood that teens would use marijuana, though other research has found no clear connection.
• Between 3% and 6% of U.S. adults are considered to have a gambling problem, and one study found the rate doubles among people who live within 10 miles of a gaming establishment.
• Experts also have long worried that legalizing sports betting can lead to more opportunities for fixing games, eroding the integrity of the sport.
• Sex work presents the biggest questions of all. Some experts doubt that selling sex can ever be truly consensual and fear that decriminalization inadvertently puts sex workers at greater risk from clients.

What to watch:

... whether legalization and decriminalization are followed by additional support for the social and personal consequences of vices.

Even advocates for Oregon's drug decriminalization worry far too little funding has been allocated to treatment and recovery.

The bottom line:

50 years after President Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs, American attitudes toward and laws about activities that have long been classified as vices are changing — and with it, the assumption that it's the government's role to police public morality.

About That Labor Thing

Man does not live by bread alone - he needs peanut butter and mashed up bananas and spicy brown mustard.

NYT: (pay wall)

Workers Are Gaining Leverage Over Employers Right Before Our Eyes

“Employers are becoming much more cognizant that yes, it’s about money, but also about quality of life.”

The relationship between American businesses and their employees is undergoing a profound shift: For the first time in a generation, workers are gaining the upper hand.

The change is broader than the pandemic-related signing bonuses at fast-food places. Up and down the wage scale, companies are becoming more willing to pay a little more, to train workers, to take chances on people without traditional qualifications, and to show greater flexibility in where and how people work.

The erosion of employer power began during the low-unemployment years leading up to the pandemic and, given demographic trends, could persist for years.

March had a record number of open positions, according to federal data that goes back to 2000, and workers were voluntarily leaving their jobs at a rate that matches its historical high. Burning Glass Technologies, a firm that analyzes millions of job listings a day, found that the share of postings that say “no experience necessary” is up two-thirds over 2019 levels, while the share of those promising a starting bonus has doubled.

People are demanding more money to take a new job. The “reservation wage,” as economists call the minimum compensation workers would require, was 19 percent higher for those without a college degree in March than in November 2019, a jump of nearly $10,000 a year, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Employers are feeling it: A survey of human resources executives from large companies conducted in April by the Conference Board, a research group, found that 49 percent of organizations with a mostly blue-collar work force found it hard to retain workers, up from 30 percent before the pandemic.

“Companies are going to have to work harder to attract and retain talent,” said Karen Fichuk, who as chief executive of the giant staffing company Randstad North America closely tracks supply and demand for labor. “We think it’s a bit of a historic moment for the American labor force.”

This recalibration between worker and employer partly reflects a strange moment in the economy. It’s reopening, but many would-be workers are not ready to return to the job.

Yet in key respects, the shift builds on changes already underway in the tight labor market preceding the pandemic, when the unemployment rate was 4 percent or lower for two straight years.

That follows decades in which union power declined, unemployment was frequently high and employers made an art out of shifting work toward contract and gig arrangements that favored their interests over those of their employees. It would take years of change to undo those cumulative effects.

But the demographic picture is not becoming any more favorable for employers eager to fill positions. Population growth for Americans between ages 20 and 64 turned negative last year for the first time in the nation’s history. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the potential labor force will grow a mere 0.3 to 0.4 percent annually for the remainder of the 2020s; the size of the work force rose an average of 0.8 percent a year from 2000 to 2020.

An important question for the overall economy is whether employers will be able to create conditions attractive enough to coax back in some of the millions of working-age adults not currently part of the labor force. Depending on your view of the causes, the end of expanded pandemic-era jobless benefits might have an effect too. Some businesses may need to raise prices or retool how they operate; others may be forced to close entirely.

Higher wages are part of the story. The jobs report issued on Friday showed that average hourly earnings for nonmanagerial workers were 1.3 percent higher in May than two months earlier. Other than in a brief period of statistical distortions early in the pandemic, that is the strongest two-month gain since 1983.

But wages alone aren’t enough, and firms seem to be finding it in their own best interest to seek out workers across all strata of society, to the benefit of people who have missed out on opportunity in the last few decades.

“I’ve been doing this a long time and have never felt more excited and more optimistic about the level of creative investment on this issue,” said Bertina Ceccarelli, chief executive of NPower, a nonprofit aimed at helping military veterans and disadvantaged young adults start tech industry careers. “It’s an explosive moment right now.”

In effect, an entire generation of managers that came of age in an era of abundant workers is being forced to learn how to operate amid labor scarcity. That means different things for different companies and workers — and often involves strategies more elaborate than simply paying a signing bonus or a higher hourly wage.

At the high end of the labor market, that can mean workers are more emboldened to leave a job if employers are insufficiently flexible on issues like working from home.

It also means companies thinking more expansively about who is qualified for a job in the first place. That is evident, for example, in the way Alex Lorick, a former South Florida nightclub bouncer, was able to become a mainframe technician at I.B.M.

Mr. Lorick often worked a shift called “devil’s nine to five” — 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. — made all the more brutal when it was interspersed with day shifts. The hours were tough, but the pay was better than in his previous jobs, one at a retirement home and another serving food at a dog track. Yet it was a far cry from the type of work he had dreamed about in high school, when he liked computers and imagined making video games for a living.

As a young adult, he took online classes in web development and programming languages, but encountered a Catch-22 many job seekers know well: Nobody wanted to hire a tech worker without experience, which meant he couldn’t get enough experience to be hired. College wasn’t for him. Hence the devil’s nine to five.

Until late last year, that is. After months on unemployment during the pandemic, he heard from I.B.M., where he had once applied and been rejected for a tech job. It invited him to apply to an apprenticeship program that would pay him to be trained as a mainframe technician. Now 24, he completed his training this month and is beginning hands-on work in what he hopes is the start of a long career.

“This is a way more stable paycheck, and more consistent hours,” Mr. Lorick said. “But the most important thing is that I feel like I’m on a path that makes sense and where I have the opportunity to grow.”

Before Adquena Faine began an I.B.M. apprenticeship to become a cloud storage engineer, she was driving for ride-hailing services to support herself and her daughter, dealing with the erratic income and sore back that came with it.

“I really hate driving now,” she said. “I could feel the car vibrating even when I wasn’t in the car.”

She had attended but not completed college, and served in the Air Force, but the information technology industry was new to her.

“They were confident they could teach me what I needed to know,” she said. “It was intense, but I didn’t want to let myself down or my baby girl down.”

The hiring of Ms. Faine and Mr. Lorick was part of a deliberate effort by I.B.M. to rethink how it hires and what counts as a qualification for a given job.

The apprenticeship program began in 2017, and thousands of people have moved through that and similar programs. Executives concluded that the qualifications for many jobs were unnecessarily demanding. Postings might require applicants to have a bachelor’s degree, for example, in jobs that a six-month training course would adequately prepare a person for.

“By creating your own dumb barriers, you’re actually making your job in the search for talent harder,” said Obed Louissaint, I.B.M.’s senior vice president for transformation and culture. In working with managers across the company on training initiatives like the one under which Mr. Lorick was hired, “it’s about making managers more accountable for mentoring, developing and building talent versus buying talent.”

“I think something fundamental is changing, and it’s been happening for a while, but now it’s accelerating,” Mr. Louissaint said.

Efforts like the one at I.B.M. are, to some degree, a rediscovery in the value of investing in workers.

Ed Note: There is nothing more maddening than to hear some jackass spouting off about what a novel idea it is to place real value on the people who actually make everything work.

And don't get me started on the demeaning language of "Human Resources" - like I'm nothing but a load of bauxite - you dig me out of the ground, you smelt me down, you stamp a few million beer cans out of me and throw what left on the shit pile when you're done?

Moving on:

“I do think companies need to relearn some things,” said Byron Auguste, chief executive of Opportunity at Work, an organization devoted to encouraging job opportunities for people from all backgrounds. “A lot of companies, after the recessions in 2001 and 2008, dismantled their onboarding and training infrastructure and said that’s a cost we can’t afford.

“But it turns out, you actually do need to develop your own workers and can’t just depend on hiring.”

Any job involves much more than a paycheck. Some good jobs don’t pay much, and some bad jobs pay a lot. Ultimately, every position is a bundle of things: a salary, yes, but also a benefits package; a work environment that may or may not be pleasant; opportunities to advance (or not); flexible hours (or not).

Statistics agencies collect pretty good data on the aspects of jobs that are quantifiable, especially salary and benefits, and not such great data on other dimensions of what makes a job good or bad. But it is clear, as the labor market tightens, that people routinely favor those less quantifiable advantages.

We look for a job to pay the mortgage, but the work has to be more than just a way to support our habits and hobbies.

And here again, none of the good things that are beginning to happen are going to go on happening if Dems lose elections. And right now, with Republicans pushing 300-400 bills at the state level that fuck people out of their votes, plus Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema insisting on "bi-partisanship", we could be looking at everything crashing in on top of us here pretty soon.

Republicans are pushing for a system that fucks Democrats out of everything that put them in the majority - everything that a majority of Americans want to see enacted - and Joe Manchin thinks he can talk the GOP into supporting something that thwarts their own efforts.

Money Meets Mouth

QAmom - from YouTube guy DurtySean:

Take the fact that we all had to stay put during the pandemic - with not enough to occupy ourselves - plus the election cycle, plus the decades-long push towards plutocracy - you put it all together and you get some pretty weird shit goin' on here in USAmerica Inc.

Seems like a pretty good idea to make those bets though.

Isn't It Amazing

And just like that - "conservative evangelicals" stopped telling us we should all pray for the president.

The Generation Gap

When you say "socialism" to a millennial, they don't associate that word with the USSR and the Cold War and all the bad shit boomers grew up with.

"Socialism", to a millennial, means Canada and Switzerland and Healthcare and College Opportunities and Affordable Housing and Social Security and a Living Wage and Equality.

Big difference.

EVOLUTION

It's not just a good idea

it's the law

Deeper Into The Woods

"We ain't outa the woods yet" is pretty much the hallmark of understatement for 2020.

I think we may be only about halfway to the darkest shittiest parts of the woods right now, and without some pretty great leadership and extremely adept maneuvering, no amount of bread crumbs will get us safely out of this mess.

Observing Joe Biden these last few weeks, I've been thinking about how his usual "happy warrior" demeanor just isn't there in the same way it's always been. I've found myself wondering if it's because he's lost a step or two, but then I figured (and had partially confirmed) that as the presumptive nominee, he's been getting security briefings.

We all imagine how fucked up things are - can you imagine what it must be like to get your worst fears confirmed, but then hear there's a shit load more that's even worse than your worse fucking fears?

I can only guess, of course, but it seems obvious to me that Joe's got the weight of the whole world on him right now.

So anyway, here we are, not quite two thirds of the way through 2020, and we've got a pandemic killing one of us every 55 seconds, we have a battalion of Daddy State monsters loose in the corridors of power, we've got Murder Hornets, Derechos and now Fire Tornadoes.

But the really bad news is...

...Wade Davis, Rolling Stone:

Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. For the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity, informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come together, focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same fears and uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet unrealized, promises of medical science.

In a single season, civilization has been brought low by a microscopic parasite 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt. COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also the cultural foundations of our lives, the toolbox of community and connectivity that is for the human what claws and teeth represent to the tiger.

Our interventions to date have largely focused on mitigating the rate of spread, flattening the curve of morbidity. There is no treatment at hand, and no certainty of a vaccine on the near horizon. The fastest vaccine ever developed was for mumps. It took four years. COVID-19 killed 100,000 Americans in four months. There is some evidence that natural infection may not imply immunity, leaving some to question how effective a vaccine will be, even assuming one can be found. And it must be safe. If the global population is to be immunized, lethal complications in just one person in a thousand would imply the death of millions.

Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. In the 14th Century, the Black Death killed close to half of Europe’s population. A scarcity of labor led to increased wages. Rising expectations culminated in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, an inflection point that marked the beginning of the end of the feudal order that had dominated medieval Europe for a thousand years.

The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes.

COVID’s historic significance lies not in what it implies for our daily lives. Change, after all, is the one constant when it comes to culture. All peoples in all places at all times are always dancing with new possibilities for life. As companies eliminate or downsize central offices, employees work from home, restaurants close, shopping malls shutter, streaming brings entertainment and sporting events into the home, and airline travel becomes ever more problematic and miserable, people will adapt, as we’ve always done. Fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species. As history confirms, it allows us to come to terms with any degree of social, moral, or environmental degradation.

To be sure, financial uncertainty will cast a long shadow. Hovering over the global economy for some time will be the sober realization that all the money in the hands of all the nations on Earth will never be enough to offset the losses sustained when an entire world ceases to function, with workers and businesses everywhere facing a choice between economic and biological survival.

Unsettling as these transitions and circumstances will be, short of a complete economic collapse, none stands out as a turning point in history. But what surely does is the absolutely devastating impact that the pandemic has had on the reputation and international standing of the United States of America.

In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

For the first time, the international community felt compelled to send disaster relief to Washington. For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.” As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.

Davis goes on to lay out just how fucked he thinks we are.

And while I can't say he's wrong to think what he thinks, I will say that we've been down before.

The one thing 45* has been right about - the only thing, and he's warped and perverted it almost totally beyond recognition - but the one thing is that we just go on. We fuck up. We fall on our face. We get back up. And we keep going.

Of course, it'd be nice if we could recognize the need for some fundamental change once in a while, and it'd be really nice if we could see the need and make the changes before all the shit hits the fuckin' fan.

Anyway, we have to make some real adjustments. Trump just pretends he's some fuckin' cat that jumped up on the table and landed with all four paws in 4 different bowls of steaming hot soup, and then tries to make like he meant to do exactly that, and what are you guys laughing at - you're the idiots, not me - oooh look, a mouse.

And that's kinda what we've allowed fuckups like Trump to pull. We have to try harder not to let them off the hook this time. If we want government to be held to account, then we have to dig in and insist that some of these big fish get fried.

Overheard

Q:
You're willing to turn your back on friends because of their politics?

A:
I'm willing to turn my back on them because of the morality of their politics - huge difference.

We can disagree on lots of issues and still be friends - racism isn't one of them.

- abuse of power isn't one of them.

- corruption isn't one of them.

The Great Divide

"The republic cannot endure half Fox News and half free." --driftglass

Adam Przeworski, a political scientist who has studied struggling democracies in Eastern Europe and Latin America, has argued that to survive, democratic institutions “must give all the relevant political forces a chance to win from time to time in the competition of interests and values.” But, he adds, they also have to do something else, of equal importance: “They must make even losing under democracy more attractive than a future under non-democratic outcomes.” That conservatives—despite currently holding the White House, the Senate, and many state governments—are losing faith in their ability to win elections in the future bodes ill for the smooth functioning of American democracy. That they believe these electoral losses would lead to their destruction is even more worrying.

We should be careful about overstating the dangers. It is not 1860 again in the United States—it is not even 1850. But numerous examples from American history—most notably the antebellum South—offer a cautionary tale about how quickly a robust democracy can weaken when a large section of the population becomes convinced that it cannot continue to win elections, and also that it cannot afford to lose them.

the collapse of the mainstream Republican Party in the face of Trumpism is at once a product of highly particular circumstances and a disturbing echo of other events. In his recent study of the emergence of democracy in Western Europe, the political scientist Daniel Ziblatt zeroes in on a decisive factor distinguishing the states that achieved democratic stability from those that fell prey to authoritarian impulses: The key variable was not the strength or character of the political left, or of the forces pushing for greater democratization, so much as the viability of the center-right. A strong center-right party could wall off more extreme right-wing movements, shutting out the radicals who attacked the political system itself.

Dancing at the edge of Both-Sides:

The left is by no means immune to authoritarian impulses; some of the worst excesses of the 20th century were carried out by totalitarian left-wing regimes. But right-wing parties are typically composed of people who have enjoyed power and status within a society. They might include disproportionate numbers of leaders—business magnates, military officers, judges, governors—upon whose loyalty and support the government depends. If groups that traditionally have enjoyed privileged positions see a future for themselves in a more democratic society, Ziblatt finds, they will accede to it. But if “conservative forces believe that electoral politics will permanently exclude them from government, they are more likely to reject democracy outright.”

I contend there's no such thing as a "left-wing totalitarian" - lefties really don't do that. If it's a totalitarian regime, then it's only pretending to be "lefty". Stalin was not a Communist - he called himself that as a disguise. He walked and talked and acted like a Tsarist, and that's what he was.

Yes, "the left" generally insists on consistency regarding people's rights and some kind of doctrine of fairness, but centralized consolidated government power is a principle - indeed, the main tenet and overarching goal - of Plutocratic Daddy State Wingnuts (like Stalin, and Putin, and Erdogan, and Trump).

Ziblatt points to Germany in the 1930s, the most catastrophic collapse of a democracy in the 20th century, as evidence that the fate of democracy lies in the hands of conservatives. Where the center-right flourishes, it can defend the interests of its adherents, starving more radical movements of support. In Germany, where center-right parties faltered, “not their strength, but rather their weakness” became the driving force behind democracy’s collapse.

Of course, the most catastrophic collapse of a democracy in the 19th century took place right here in the United States, sparked by the anxieties of white voters who feared the decline of their own power within a diversifying nation.

It always backfires for the majority (or at least for a plurality), but it gets pushed through by the minority if their propaganda works, and if their voter suppression efforts are sufficient.

And remember, it really only takes a few hundred thousand votes nationwide. Trump "won" in 2016 by less than 200,000 votes, micro-targeted in a few dozen precincts.

The GOP’s efforts to cling to power by coercion instead of persuasion have illuminated the perils of defining a political party in a pluralistic democracy around a common heritage, rather than around values or ideals. Consider Trump’s push to slow the pace of immigration, which has backfired spectacularly, turning public opinion against his restrictionist stance. Before Trump announced his presidential bid, in 2015, less than a quarter of Americans thought legal immigration should be increased; today, more than a third feel that way. Whatever the merits of Trump’s particular immigration proposals, he has made them less likely to be enacted.

Here's where the author's hypothesis is both bolstered, and starts to fail.

For a populist, Trump is remarkably unpopular. But no one should take comfort from that fact. The more he radicalizes his opponents against his agenda, the more he gives his own supporters to fear. The excesses of the left bind his supporters more tightly to him, even as the excesses of the right make it harder for the Republican Party to command majority support, validating the fear that the party is passing into eclipse, in a vicious cycle.

No goddammit - "the excesses of the left" ARE NOT THE SAME AS THOSE COMING FROM THE RIGHT.

For the most part, the guy gets it right - it may seem like a Both Sides thing, but what we're looking at is a problem growing mostly - if not exclusively - from the right.

SkyNet Rising

We need constant reminding that we have to address the questions of "Can We Do This" versus "Should We Do This".

There's always a power dynamic at work, so even though "new stuff" is almost always originally intended to "make the world a better place", there are always people looking to devise ways of weaponizing it, and turning it to their own purposes in order to serve their own political agendas.

Media Assignment: Real Genius, 1985 - Val Kilmer, Gabriel Jarret, Jon Gries, William Atherton.

MIT Technology Review:

Once it was fashionable to fret about the prospect of super-intelligent machines taking over the world. The past year showed that AI may cause all sorts of hazards long before that happens.

The latest AI methods excel at perceptual tasks such as classifying images and transcribing speech, but the hype and excitement over these skills have disguised how far we really are from building machines as clever as we are. Six controversies from 2018 stand out as warnings that even the smartest AI algorithms can misbehave, or that carelessly applying them can have dire consequences.

1. Self-crashing cars

After a fatal accident involving one of Uber’s self-driving cars in March, investigators found that the company’s technology had failed catastrophically, in a way that could easily have been prevented.

Carmakers like Ford and General Motors, newcomers like Uber, and a horde of startups are hurrying to commercialize a technology that, despite its immaturity, has already seen billions of dollars in investment. Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, has made the most progress; it rolled out the first fully autonomous taxi service in Arizona last year. But even Waymo’s technology is limited, and autonomous cars cannot drive everywhere in all conditions.

What to watch for in 2019: Regulators in the US and elsewhere have so far taken a hands-off approach for fear of stifling innovation. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has even signaled that existing safety rules may be relaxed. But pedestrians and human drivers haven’t signed up to be guinea pigs. Another serious accident in 2019 might shift the regulators’ attitudes.

2. Political manipulation bots

In March, news broke that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting company, had exploited Facebook’s data sharing practices to influence the 2016 US presidential election. The resulting uproar showed how the algorithms that decide what news and information to surface on social media can be gamed to amplify misinformation, undermine healthy debate, and isolate citizens with different views from one another.

During a congressional hearing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised that AI itself could be trained to spot and block malicious content, even though it is still far from being able to understand the meaning of text, images, or video.

What to watch for in 2019: Zuckerberg’s promise will be tested in elections held in two of Africa’s biggest countries: South Africa and Nigeria. The long run-up to the 2020 US election has also begun, and it could inspire new kinds of misinformation technology powered by AI, including malicious chatbots.

3. Algorithms for peace

Last year, an AI peace movement took shape when Google employees learned that their employer was supplying technology to the US Air Force for classifying drone imagery. The workers feared this could be a fateful step towards supplying technology for automating deadly drone strikes. In response, the company abandoned Project Maven, as it was called, and created an AI code of ethics.

Academics and industry heavyweights have backed a campaign to ban the use of autonomous weapons. Military use of AI is only gaining momentum, however, and other companies, like Microsoft and Amazon, have shown no reservations about helping out.

What to watch out for in 2019: Although Pentagon spending on AI projects is increasing, activists hope a preemptive treaty banning autonomous weaponswill emerge from a series of UN meetings slated for this year.

4. A surveillance face-off

AI’s superhuman ability to identify faces has led countries to deploy surveillance technology at a remarkable rate. Face recognition also lets you unlock your phone and automatically tags photos for you on social media.

Civil liberties groups warn of a dystopian future. The technology is a formidable way to invade people’s privacy, and biases in training data make it likely to automate discrimination.

In many countries—China especially—face recognition is being widely used for policing and government surveillance. Amazon is selling the technologyto US immigration and law enforcement agencies.

What to watch out for in 2019: Face recognition will spread to vehicles and webcams, and it will be used to track your emotions as well as your identity. But we may also see some preliminary regulation of it this year, too.

5. Fake it till you break it

A proliferation of “deepfake” videos last year showed how easy it is becoming make fake clips using AI. This means fake celebrity porn, lots of weird movie mashups, and, potentially, virulent political smear campaigns.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs), which involve two dueling neural networks, can conjure extraordinarily realistic but completely made-up images and video. Nvidia recently showed how GANs can generate photorealistic faces of whatever race, gender, and age you want.

What to watch for in 2019: As deepfakes improve, people will probably start being duped by them this year. DARPA will test new methods for detecting deepfakes. But since this also relies on AI, it’ll be a game of cat and mouse.

6. Algorithmic discrimination

Bias was discovered in numerous commercial tools last year. Vision algorithms trained on unbalanced data sets failed to recognize women or people of color; hiring programs fed historic data were proven to perpetuate discrimination that already exists.

Tied to the issue of bias—and harder to fix—is the lack of diversity across the AI field itself. Women occupy, at most, 30% of industry jobs and fewer than 25% of teaching roles at top universities. There are comparatively few black and Latin researchers as well.

What to expect in 2019: We’ll see methods for detecting and mitigating bias and algorithms that can produced unbiased results from biased data. The International Conference on Machine Learning, a major AI conference, will be held in Ethiopia in 2020 because African scientists researching problems of bias could have trouble getting visas to travel to other regions. Other events could also move.
The Long Term Hopeful part is that better people than this current crop of Daddy State assholes have been trying to conquer the world for more than 40,000 years, and the world remains undefeated.

The Short Term Worrisome part is that it's always a painful and bloody process convincing them of their folly.

Applied Science

Here's a video about The Dzhanibekov Effect or Tennis Racket Theorem - how spinning objects behave.

As long as there's something like gravity to govern the object's behavior, it's harder to observe the effect, and we don't see it as any kind of big problem because we have relatively stable conditions, and the objects generally rotate on either of the two axes that are most prevalent. Remove gravity, and the thing flip-flops regularly and frequently enough for us to see it plainly in real time.

Imagine a politician or a political party - and further imagine that the governing force is the basic morality of an individual.

Now think of a democratic self-government where you have a process of checks and balances built in, but you systematically remove pieces of that process over time.

That 3rd thing - the 3rd axis that we don't spend much time or energy noticing - becomes a more dominant factor.

There are some vexing questions rattling around in my head right now.

eg:
How did "the party of Lincoln" become the party that fights to reinstate so many of the things Lincoln (and other Republican presidents) fought to abolish?

How did "the party of fiscal responsibility" become the party that dramatically increases our Revenue Deficit and the National Debt every time they're in power?

How does "the party of freedom and patriotism" become the party that builds concentration camps?

What is the political (ie: human) equivalent of that 3rd axis, other than morality, ethics and a sense of honor?

I don't know. And that bugs the fuck outa me.

I also don't know that it hasn't always been this way - and that really bugs the fuck outa me.

The Scariest Thing

Kate Marvel, Scientific American:

Cahokia was larger than London, centrally planned, the Manhattan of its day. Most people there would have come from somewhere else. There were defensive foundations, playing fields, and a magnificent temple. There would have been sacred ceremonies and salacious gossip. It must have been a very exciting place to live.

And then, relatively abruptly, it ceased to exist. We know of the city only because of the physical traces left behind. Few stories of Cahokia have survived; it disappeared from oral tradition, as if whatever happened to it is best forgotten. The archaeological record shows traces of the desperation and bloodshed that almost always accompany great upheavals: skeletons with bound hands, pits full of strangled young women.

- and -

I am often asked what frightens me most about climate change, whether I lie awake at night thinking about ocean hypoxia or arctic permafrost or other feedback processes that could turn a bad thing into a catastrophe. I am scared of the physical changes that await us on a warming planet, but the most important feedback process is the least well understood. The scariest thing about climate change is what it will make us do to each other.

The New Republic:

National crises make governments vulnerable to autocracy—a rather obvious assessment, perhaps, but one rarely seen in debates about climate change. Take the Maldives, an atoll nation in the Indian Ocean. Rising seawater is projected to consume most, if not all, of the country this century. In 2008, the Maldives chose its first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed. Almost immediately, he made climate change preparations central to his administration. He announced plansto move 360,000 Maldivian citizens to new homelands in Sri Lanka, India, or Australia, and he promised to make the Maldives the world’s first carbon-neutral country. Nasheed also demonstrated a flair for the dramatic, staging an underwater Cabinet meeting that turned him into a viral climate celebrity. “What we need to do is nothing short of decarbonizing the entire global economy,” he said. “If man can walk on the moon, we can unite to defeat our common carbon enemy.”

In 2012, the military deposed Nasheed, forcing him to flee the country at gunpoint after mass protests over economic stagnation and spikes in commodity prices. His eventual successor, Abdulla Yameen, has since suspended parts of the constitution, giving himself sweeping powers to arrest and detain opponents, including two of the country’s five Supreme Court justices and even his own half-brother. Meanwhile, Yameen has tossed out Nasheed’s climate adaptation plans and rejected renewable energy programs, proposing instead to build new islands and economic free zones attractive to a global elite. “We do not need cabinet meetings underwater,” his environment minister told The Guardian. “We do not need to go anywhere. We need development.”

If any lesson can be drawn from the power struggle in the Maldives, it is that people who feel threatened by an outside force, be it foreign invaders or rising tides, often seek reassurance. That reassurance may come in the form of a strongman leader, someone who tells them all will be well, the economy will soar, the sea walls hold. People must only surrender their elections, or their due process, until the crisis is resolved. This is perhaps the most overlooked threat of climate change: Major shifts in the global climate could give rise to a new generation of authoritarian rulers, not just in poorer countries or those with weak democratic institutions, but in wealthy industrialized nations, too.

Our social structures have never been very good at keeping pace with either technology or the kind of disruption that Climate Change is bringing - has brought.

And we've got a triple whammy going

• Automation and globalized trade that drives economic disruption
• Climate Change that drives political disruption
• Oligarchs & Plutocrats who think they control things well enough to keep themselves above it all

So my default is still in effect: Hopeful but not optimistic, even though more of us are starting to get woke.

On Herding Cats

So here we are at the beginning of another election cycle.

Not crazy about Warren? Cool.
Think Beto just don't cut? Fine.
Sick to death of all the Biden memes? OK.
Bernie's 2 years past his freshness date? Awesome.

I'm not asking you to keep it all under your hat. I'm not telling you to sit down and shut up.

You should stand up and you should speak up.

But don't lose your shit just because I like somebody who you're convinced is a DINO, and the new Darling Of The Wall Street Crowd, and nothing more or less than the embodiment of the Evil Duopoly and blah blah blah.

Get the fuck over yourself.

Everybody running for the Dem nomination is a better choice than the Flaming Racist Daddy State Asshole currently steering the entire world directly into the sun.

EVERY FUCKING ONE OF 'EM