A good start, although grossly belated and susceptible to eternal additional delay

The news broke the other day that the House Select Committee on Trump’s January 6 MAGA riot (he owns it, no matter what spin you put on it, its purpose was to extra-legally keep him in power based on a lie, Trump organized it, publicized it, incited it, walked down to the Capitol with his private army…) is finally casting a wide net to learn how many people were involved in the planning and execution of this premeditated attack on constitutional government in the United States.

Me, personally, I’d have convened this Select Committee on February 1, after the GOP came together as a bloc to disappear and defend the January 6 MAGA riot. The long delay in getting a serious investigation started is deadly to the case, at least to the diehard 39%, since most Americans of all political persuasions view the events of nine months ago as irrelevant ancient history.

The clock is also ticking on that razor thin Congressional majority. The replacement for anti-filibuster reform senator Diane Feinstein (D-Ca), 88, for example, will be appointed by Gavin Newsom’s replacement as California governor, if anything happens to her, as the GOP exploits the odd Recall Law in that state to once again replace a Democratic governor, this one elected with a more than 60% majority. Any of the forty-six assorted clowns running to replace him will get to be governor if recall gets 51% of the votes and they get more votes than the others.

Still, this step toward accountability and truth by the January 6 Select Committee qualifies as good news. The list of people whose records are sought is exhaustive, as it should be. Here’s a sliver of the hundreds of Trump-related people whose phone and online information from the days leading up to, and including, January 6 have been requested:

It’s fairly clear that many of these people had knowledge of, or were directly involved, in perpetrating or trying to stop (as Jared and Ivanka both claimed they were doing on January 6th) the MAGA riot at the Capitol. It’s also fairly clear that many of these people will fight to the death in court, as Trump and his ilk ALWAYS do, to delay the release of this politically poisonous information for as long as possible. Their legal fees will be paid by obscenely wealthy Nazis who will arrange to make these fees tax deductible donations to apolitical non-profit corporations.

Congressional subpoenas are no longer viewed, on the right (since Barr had Trump assert the blanket preemptive privilege that the Bagpiper pulled out of his ample, crusty ass), as legal commands to appear, backed by the ability to enforce them by sending the Sergeant-At-Arms to arrest you for contempt, but as partisan political tools deployed simply to harass and embarrass political enemies. The ability to drag out legal proceedings for years to block legitimate investigations into areas of vital public concern demonstrates the urgent need for former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner’s Interbranch Dispute Resolution Court. Two weeks, issue fully argued and decided — obey the fucking subpoena. Until we have this court, we’re as fucked as a nation that no longer has an enforceable Voting Rights Act that can guarantee the constitutional right to vote to all citizens.

As Democrats deliberate and try to do the right thing in a political system under sustained attack by literal fascists (first a polite request, then, two weeks later, a subpoena, then a long court battle) Trumpists are busy all day, every day, stirring the shit pot, passing new voter restriction laws, laws restricting the teaching of historical events that would make White Christian children feel bad, promulgating new anti-vaccine and anti-masking rules and blaming Biden for the chaos in Afghanistan and the massive surge in hospitalizations and deaths from the Trump variant.

One of the fiercest defenders of Trump’s “landslide victory” over Joe Biden has recently called for Kamala Harris to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment to remove the mentally incompetent Biden from his illegitimate office. Madison Cawthorn is the name of this freshman Congressman and sophomore piece of shit. See, it’s all just partisanship, showmanship, brinksmanship! GO TEAM!

The Roger Stone-Donald Trump controversy explained | Roger Stone | The Guardian
Seig Heil, baby!

Strongmen by Ruth Ben-Ghiat (2)

Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s detailed discussion of modern autocrats jumps back and forth in history, from strongman to strongman, throwing an illuminating light on the gross consistency of the strongman playbook. She lays bare the always intimate symbiosis between the strongman and the wealthy elites he courts during his rise and rewards for keeping him in power. If you are a member of a wealthy elite, and your strongman doggedly protects your privilege, what else do you really need from government? On the other hand, for the average citizen, the thrill of committing violent mayhem against local and foreign “enemies”, with the blessing of Dear Leader, is about all you get, outside of stirring propaganda, confirmation of your hatreds and autocratic rule. Every strongman requires obscenely privileged wealthy backers and squads of angry men, standing back and standing by, to intimidate and bloody all enemies.

At random from this great book, when Italian rogue, whoremaster, construction, media and advertising magnate Silvio Berlusconi took power in Italy in 1994, after running as the candidate of the first corporately created political party, Forza Italia (a one stop corporate influence shop that had clubs all over Italy, ran his marketing campaign, auditioned candidates, lobbied government, etc.), he refused to divest himself of control of his huge business holdings. He appointed his daughter, Marina, to run the holding company that controlled his major businesses. In this way, as far as he was concerned, he’d solved the entire question of conflict of interest and government ethics, he simply made a bold political, not technically illegal, move nobody could stop him from making. This was when he first became Prime Minister in 1994. More recent examples of this same thing, by strongmen and would-be strongmen, immediately leap to mind.

Accordingly, Ben-Ghiat wastes no time making a connection that needs no mention, instead moving on to talk about the way the strongman’s rogue nature draws people to him. He thrills them by proclaiming strict law and order for enemies, and complete impunity for himself and his cronies.

Strongmen often demonstrate their power and virility by flaunting their ability to have unlimited sex with a parade of women. Ben-Ghiat describes the practices of Muammar Gaddafi and his bunga bunga rooms. Berlusconi credited Gaddafi for the term, which to strongmen means unlimited sex, with or without consent. Berlusconi loved the term bunga-bunga and used it to describe his own sex parties [1]. Gaddafi’s bunga bunga room was more of a rape room, for good looking teenaged girls picked out of crowds by a special team always on the look out for young beauties. Berlusconi consorted with a more professional class of women, he was very wealthy, didn’t mind paying for sex, and had a reputation as a rascal to uphold. Other recent strongmen have the professionals they pay for sex sign binding non-disclosure agreements in exchange for hush money.

This embrace of hyper-sexuality and entitlement to sexual gratification is part of the patriarchal “macho” cult of personality myth of the virile strongman, you know, you can walk right up and grab ’em by the pussy, really, seriously. Transgressing the law, and the norms of polite society, is intoxicating to mobs, and a sexual thrill to men who envy the leader’s power to command sex. Ben-Ghiat doesn’t go into detail about Mussolini’s sex life, aside from noting that he was at it for a good part of every day (in ten minute intervals, apparently) and that the cheering crowd was an unfailing aphrodisiac for the priapic womanizer El Duce. Ben-Ghiat includes this sexual predation as part of the strongman’s universal drives: to accumulate bodies, territory and wealth. Again, brings many things from not long ago to mind.

Ben-Ghiat notes that strongmen can tolerate women in power, but only if they are subservient to the strongman. She describes the misogyny that Angela Merkel faced whenever she met with a strongman. Berlusconi made her wait, standing in front of his deak, while he took a long phone call. He referred to her as a “unfuckable lard ass” (the Department of Justice is currently defending an American former president for delivering a more delicate version of the same line, directed at a female journalist he also called a liar, at a press conference, part of his “official duties”). Trump refused to shake Merkel’s hand. Putin made her wait for hours and then, knowing her fear of dogs, unleashed his dogs near her. The German Chancellor said of Putin “I know why he has to do this, to prove he is a man. He’s afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this.”

This terror of their own weakness is the driving secret of every strongman. Ben-Ghiat asks “who would the strongman be without the crowds that form the raw material of his propaganda? His secret is that he needs them far more than they need him.” The pageantry that is the hallmark of every strongman regime “plays to his bottomless need for control and adoration. Of course, having it all is never enough for men who live in a secret state of dread at losing everything. Even as the strongman proclaims his infallibility he is pursued by the demon of fear. He’s wary of the people he represses… of individuals who can prosecute him, of elites who can turn on him and of enemies who wish to remove him from the face of the earth.”

Only a strongman understands his fellow strongmen on this level, which is why they tend to validate each other publicly. It is all love between macho strongmen. The love of the crowd reassures them. We all recall the “lovefest” of January 6 when some of the best people, in one of the largest crowds in history, got a little carried away kissing and hugging the police in their overwhelming adoration of our recent strongman. We could all feel the love.

Wait a second, you say mass media magnate Berlusconi fought to stay in power to avoid prosecution? Berlusconi, as Prime Minister, had the power to get Italian Public Television hosts fired for saying things he didn’t like, though he owned the three most popular television stations in Italy, featuring scantily clothed women, he had no direct control of these public TV hosts. Exploiting corporate conflict aversion he was able to remove critical voices from the mass media, effectively silencing public critics. He managed to remain unaccountable for many arguable crimes, bold risks, committed before and after taking office, though his top minister was later imprisoned for Mafia ties and a few others faced legal consequences, just not Silvio. Other strongmen have not done as well as the Italian forerunner of Donald J. Trump. Some ended badly, Saddam, Mussolini, Gaddafi, Hitler.

Every strongman must successfully exploit the mass media of his day to gain power and control public opinion. Radio was a boon to Mussolini and Hitler (as it was to FDR here), TV to more modern strongmen. “Social media” is today’s coin of the realm for strongmen. Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia (gruesomely murdering and dismembering a prominent critic with complete impunity) employs a gigantic army of internet trolls (“the flies”) spreading every message useful to his glorious, reformist rule and drowning out anything critical (MBS also doesn’t hesitate to imprison or butcher critics and rivals, clearly).

In regard to the internet age, a sobering realization dawns when thinking of our once and future Unitary Executive, Donald J. Trump. He could never have become president, in spite of his genius, in spite of being a self-made millionaire at age eight and all the rest, without the unregulated, powerfully influential battlegrounds of Twitter and Facebook. Before the ubiquity of internet echo chambers, before TV (which gave us JFK), the technological breakthrough for early modern stongmen was mass produced affordable radios. Mussolini and Hitler were pioneers in live radio broadcasts of their live mass rallies. It was amazing the effect leaders could have on millions listening at home, by delivering a direct message to each individual citizen in a compellingly personal way. “Social media” is the most directly “personal” form of mass messaging yet. Look, the leader spells just as badly as you do, LOL!

Dr. Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Public Enlightenment, saw at once that Hitler in the studio, trying to do radio, was a complete dud. Wooden and not the faintest bit charismatic in front of a studio microphone, Hitler’s rally-stirring genius only blossomed when the human geiger counter began to work a crowd into a frenzy. Goebbels only aired live Hitler performances, where his beloved idol really shined. The Fuhrer’s mesmerizing live performance was helped by body language training from a top German actor, he also worked with a skilled hypnotist, studying techniques to hone his native talents, constantly tweaking his Hitler brand, which Goebbels lovingly produced. Talk about reality TV.

Ben-Ghiat notes that for many it is intoxicating to commit criminal acts with impunity. “The special psychological climate that strongmen create among their people, the thrill of transgression mixed with the comfort of submitting to his power, endows life with energy, purpose and drama.” This criminal culture filers down from the top. “Making government a refuge for criminals who don’t have to learn to be lawless hastens the contagion effect. So does granting amnesties and pardons, which indebt individuals to the leader and make blackmailers, war criminals and murderers available for service.”

African strongman Mobutu hired the public relations/lobbying/political consulting firm of Paul Manafort and self-proclaimed rat-fucker Roger Stone to launder his corrupt, bloody reputation for the rest of the world.. Manafort’s job, immediately prior to volunteering to work for free as Trump’s campaign manager, was grooming Russian oligarch-backed strongman Viktor Yanukovich [2] to become strongman president of Ukraine. After Yanukovich was elected a massive anti-corruption movement ousted him from power, he fled Ukraine (to Russia) and was replaced as president by the young Jewish lawyer, comedian, TV star and anti-corruption candidate Volodymyr “I need you to do me a favor, though” Zelensky. Manafort was never prosecuted for his direct, secret dealings with the Russian secret service in connection with their help in Trump’s 2016 election campaign, but was convicted of other felonies, for which he was later pardoned by the president he’d loyally served, and refused to incriminate. As was Stone, Flynn, Bannon and a rogue’s gallery of other icons of transgression and polished criminals including Michael Milken. Y’all know the drill.

In relation to the strongman’s need for experienced criminals and dirty-tricksters, Ben-Ghiat cites Hannah Arendt for the proposition that “murderers were most likely to survive in Nazi death camps, not least because the SS appointed criminals to be be capos in charge of disciplining their fellow prisoners. Criminals proved to be some of the Nazis best torturers since they were highly imaginative when it came to pain.” Pinochet was a big believer in torture, with the official backing of the US government that made his rise to power possible.

Strongman states are chaotic, violent and destructive, yet they claim economic growth superior to what is available under democracy. Some categories of people prosper under a regime that helps cronies and financial elites concentrate capital and privatize public goods. Non-cronies and ordinary citizens better just get on line for the rallies and cheer loud as hell for the strongman.

Ben-Ghiat turns to Arendt again:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and ficion, i.e. the reality of experience, and the distinction between true and false, i.e. the standards of thought, no longer exist.”

Every strongman harnesses the power of mass media to influence and intimidate, dismantle the public’s ability to think critically, and create the ideal subjects of strongman rule. All the strongman needs, beyond that and massive financial backing, are a few people with public gravitas who can harness the law, as Bill Barr did for Trump, to advance the strongman’s needs. Ben-Ghiat describes Barr’s March 2020 attempt to get Congress to declare a state of emergency (Covid-19) to allow him to detain, indefinitely and without trial, members of the Left who he accused of “a systematic shredding of laws and undermining the rule of law.” [3] Barr told cops that he was engaged in an “unrelenting, never-ending fight against criminal predators in our society.” He sure was, but only certain ones.

From a bruising, norm-busting presidential campaign, to Trump’s Bannon-composed America-first “American Carnage” State of the Union, which Dubya called “weird shit”, to the January 6 MAGA riot Trump organized, incited and defended after losing the election he claims to have won in a landslide, Trump and his allies followed the strongman playbook step by step. Create an inhuman enemy bent on destroying society, an existential threat, offer yourself as the only savior, keep your war chest full of dark money, control the mass media to convince masses that black is white, up is actually down, use violence and the threat of violence to intimidate the thoughtful, who tend to hesitate and deliberate rather than taking the bold, violent action the strongman is always ready to inspire, et, viola, you are on your way to creating a strongman state.

Ben-Ghiat points out that for strongmen politics is always personal. She notes that all strongmen are also “personalists” holding no real ideals beyond what is best for them personally. “Thirsty for profit and holding a propriety view of office, personalist rulers exploit their nation’s natural and human resources for economic gain.” Bolsonaro warned indigenous communities that they must adapt to his exploitation of their Amazon rain forest habitat or disappear. “Trump’s authoritarian bargain with elites — profits for them, political support for him — motivates his administration’s enthusiastic embrace of climate change denial.” She notes that as of May 2020 he’d rolled back a hundred environmental regulations, greatly increasing profits for his most highly polluting donors.

Strongmen, like all perpetuators of unfair systems, require maximum opacity for their most controversial operations to flourish. Here’s Ruth Ben-Ghiat, ending with a nice snapshot of corporate media’s famous “conflict aversion”, and its tacit support for the status quo, no matter how grotesque:

“To counter authoritarianism we must prioritize accountability and transparency in government. At the heart of strongman rule is the claim that he and his agents are above the law, above judgement and not beholden to the truth. Accountability also matters as a measure of open societies because the old yardstick, elections, is less reliable. New authoritarian states often simulate democracy. The nominal democracies governed by personalist rulers often act like autocracies. In Trump’s America, as in Berlusconi’s Italy, the legal and the illegal, fact and fiction, celebrity and politics, blend together until nothing means anything anymore and everything is a confidence game. The corrosive effects of the shift away from standards of accountability and truth were evident in the reaction of CBS news journalist Nora O’Donnell to Trump’s January’s 2020 State of the Union speech. Although the speech contained numerous false statements about economic growth during his presidency, O’Donnell hailed it as ‘a triumph by the Reality TV president, a master showman at his best’.”

Everyone of these motherfuckers, in their day, a master showman at his best.

[1]

A century later, the term bunga bunga became popular again as part of a joke on the internet.[7][n 1] This joke was then narrated by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at his dinner parties (in a version which featured, as prisoners, former ministers from the centre-left opposition party led by Romano Prodi).[8]

This expression was then frequently quoted by the Italian and international press during the 2011 investigation surrounding Silvio Berlusconi’s child exploitation acquiring a quite different meaning as “an orgy involving a powerful leader”; it was allegedly taught to Silvio Berlusconi by Muammar al-Gaddafi,[9] who was also the unwitting originator of the phrase Zenga Zenga.

In Italy, the term “has become an instant, supposedly hilarious, household expression”.[10]

Recent explanations disagree on its meaning, or perhaps illustrate the range of its reference. It “is said to be a sort of underwater orgy where nude young women allegedly encircled the nude host and/or his friends in his swimming pool”,[11] “an African-style ritual” performed for male spectators by “20 naked young women”,[12] or erotic entertainment of a rich host involving pole dancing and competitive striptease by skimpy-costumed “women in nurses’ outfits and police uniforms”,[13] the prize being prostitution for the host.[14]

source

[2]

Ukraine was by no means the roughest place Manafort ever worked. His roster of clients going back to the 1980s has included Congolese and Filipino dictators, along with a guerilla leader in Angola. But even this range of experience did not make the Party of Regions an easy customer for Manafort. The reputation of its leaders had been stained with blood since at least 2000, when some of Yanukovych’s political patrons were implicated in the murder of Georgy Gongadze, an investigative journalist who was abducted and beheaded that year.

source

[3]

Yet while the world is consumed by this pandemic and when he thought no one was watching, Attorney General William Barr proposed granting himself immense, permanent powers extending far past the needs posed by this threat.

For example, the proposal grants Barr personally the power to ask any chief judge to hold a citizen, “whenever the district court is fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation.” What qualifies as such disobedience or emergency is left, once again, to Barr. So Barr would be able to hold any American—man, woman or child—indefinitely at his own discretion, whether related to COVID-19 or not, without trial.

The proposal also prevents people with COVID-19 from even applying for asylum. The most vulnerable populations around the world, including children with credible fear for their lives whom we are required under the Refugee Convention to protect, would be needlessly turned away.

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Strongmen by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

I will be updating this book report soon to include some of the fascinating details historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat lays out in her playbook for dictators. In the meantime I highly recommend this insightful book to anyone interested in the historical parallels to the autocratic challenge we face today in the USA! USA!!!!

The author, in going back and forth in time between Mussolini, Pinochet, Putin, Saddam, Berlusconi, Bolsonaro, Franco, Hitler and company, presents the unaltered playbook that every one of these “strongmen” uses. It is uncanny how every one of them use exactly the same reality- bending techniques.

The Strongman playbook she lays out is remarkably consistent over the century it has been in use. Every one of these Law and Order Strongmen employs criminals and ambitious sociopaths to subvert the rule of law, intimidate and silence critics and favor and shield those who enable the dictator’s unchallengeable rule. Loyalty and personal use to the Strongman become the sole benchmarks for personalist rulers, like our most recent former president, when hiring henchmen.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat ends her book describing the essential weakness of the Strongman and the path citizens of conscience must take when facing the rise of a Strongman:

The Trump variant

Let’s call the US Delta variant of Covid-19 what it is: the Trump variant.

For the many months the Orange Polyp was downplaying the pandemic hoax and scheming with his allies to fix the election in every way they could imagine, he kept touting the vaccine his scientists were creating in record time. Once we have the vaccine, he promised, this long nightmare will quickly be over. To everyone’s shock, it turned out he was lying.

After record voter turnout decisively ousted the Orange Polyp from office there was a new burning issue for his faithful 39% to rally behind, demonstrated for them again when their leader’s landslide victory was stolen from them by a cabal of Communist Nazis, criminal Blacks and traitorous GOP leaders, all funded by Jew pedophile cannibals – you can’t trust anything the illegitimate government does!

After losing the presidential election in 2020, by a decisive margin, while his party made gains in the House and held most of their ground in the Senate, his rage led him to badmouth the vaccine (which he took secretly, like the entire FOX staff, like forceful anti-vaccine governor Greg Abbott). No longer the Trump miracle that his Operation Warp Speed had produced, taking the Biden Vaccine was strictly a matter of personal freedom.

In conservative regions of the country that take their personal freedom goddamned seriously, the high Covid infection and death numbers, the overwhelmed ICUs, are directly related to low vaccine rates and the reckless anti-science mandates of their GOP state leaders. Note, when discussing personal freedom from government coercion, how many of these right wing Trumpist governors are preventing the personal freedom of those who accept the science and want people to take every precaution against the newly resurgent Trump variant. Inconsistency is never a problem to people who cling to their anger.

Of course, there is a sort of rationale for choosing not to take the vaccine, as there always is when masses surrender logic to the will of demagogues. It’s kind of thin, given the real, ongoing risk of infection and death, and the vaccine’s success in protecting people from death by Covid, but it is a rationale. Government mandates are tyranny, pure and simple. Being forced by the government to wear a mask in public, after all, is just like being made to wear a yellow Jewish star on your coat back in Nazi times. Needle Nazis want to inject you with an unproven drug that will make you one of them. Getting jabbed with the unproven Fauci Ouchi or wearing a mask are both matters of purely personal choice that nobody has a right to judge anybody about. Just because 99% of the hospitalizations for Covid are unvaccinated folks doesn’t prove shit — you can’t just trust that this unproven vaccine works simply because Biden and Fauci claim it does!

Lately the chorus against anti-vax shaming from the 60% who are now vaccinated, and angry that the Trump variant is surging out of control, has grown. You can’t persuade people that what they’re doing is stupid, selfish and reckless, these pundits tell us, by using words like “stupid,” “selfish” and “reckless”. You see what the Left is doing by judgmentally blaming those unvaccinated people who are infecting their children and dying for being dumber than piles of shit? It doesn’t work, pundits remind us urgently.

A gentle reminder: proof itself doesn’t work, for people ready to believe alternative facts. In an election Trump’s party did very well in, particularly after the four disastrous years of his incompetent, corrupt and often criminal administration, somehow only the presidential ballot was rigged, corrupt, fraudulent. It doesn’t faze anyone at the Polyp’s mass spreader events that there is not a shred of proof of this wild assertion. See, to MAGA nation it’s obvious the fucking Blacks and the Jews who control them were determined to get rid of the greatest White Christian ever to rule the modern USA come hell or high water, and with their unlimited power and vast Jew money they had the ability, and the criminal viciousness to do it. Close to 40% of our fellow Americans see it this way, the vast majority of Republicans accept this alarmingly counter-factual alternative fact.

Of course, it can be seen differently. Until the former and future president is indicted and tried, for, at minimum, obstruction of justice (check out the impressively consistent pattern and practice which demonstrates his unflagging intent) and interference in the election (roll the tape of him badgering the Georgia Secretary of State to find him a measly 11,780 votes), it is well to remember that this Delta variant surge is the fucking Trump variant.

Capitalism’s mania for “improvements”

Progress, in capitalism, means steady market growth and constant product improvements, whether people want to be marketed to or have the useful products they rely on redesigned or not. Most people of a certain age are familiar with the term “planned obsolescence”. For those who are not:

a policy of producing consumer goods that rapidly become obsolete and so require replacing, achieved by frequent changes in design, termination of the supply of spare parts, and the use of nondurable materials.

The plan is to make ever greater profits by forcing people to keep buying new things to replace consumer goods designed to become obsolete, outmoded, uncool, unfashionable, useless for their customary purpose. Corporations steadily produce groundbreaking new consumer items, branded, unveiled and advertised with fabulous fanfare, that have to be replaced frequently with updated models. For good measure we have designed a new, improved power cord that won’t fit your current device or older devices, we don’t sell the old power cord anymore, just upgrade your phone and toss all the old ones. This is a trillion dollar business model that has produced countless innovative billionaires (as well as, sadly, a mountain of deadly products left to poison the earth).

Everyone today knows the short term version of the drill as simply “updates” or “upgrades”. In computer and phone-related retail, for the short-term game, all you need to do is force people to constantly update their devices and all sorts of wonderful things can be achieved. My podcast player keeps upgrading its ability to deliver ads that cannot be defeated. The ads of savagely competitive Jeff Fucking Bezos are the best, his undefeatable ads play at top volume OVER the podcast you are trying to listen to. When the ad is done you simply rewind to catch the five to fifteen seconds that were drowned out by the sound of an ear shattering jackhammer being muted, finally, by the noise canceling headphones fucking Bezos is hamfistedly trying to sell to everyone.

Rooms full of Andys [1], creative engineering types on the spectrum, are kept busy constantly tweaking the devices and applications we are constantly using. The “updates” do not always improve the product, often disabling familiar, essential features, but… fuck it, just buy a new device if your old one is giving you crap. Life is change. Capitalism certainly is — as long as the change keeps the extractive engines humming full throttle and new customers are cultivated in every corner of the world.

Here’s a mildly sickening example of forced updates nobody but the seller would ever want. I used to run an animation workshop for elementary school kids, I’d bring a small digital camera, a camera stand, a few small lights and a Macbook laptop computer into the room. Within ten minutes the workshop was humming. While kids choreographed and shot their animations, another team would be swapping out the camera’s SD card, uploading the new frames to the computer, opening the program iMovie and starting to make the day’s single frame animation. Music would be added from a program called Garageband, which allowed kids to improvise and easily remove any mistakes they made. The beauty of the macBook, running Operating System 10.6.8, or earlier, was the seamless integration of its various creative programs. Kids could create music in Garageband, easily drag into iMovie from Garageband. They could overdub multiple tracks of narration on top of the music, frames could be tweaked in an onboard graphics program, dragged into iMovie.

Once I stupidly updated the macBook. The new operating system updated and reconfigured all the programs. Suddenly Garageband became more automated, based on customer feedback, or the quirky whims of a room full of Andys, I suppose, and it became impossible to quickly correct mistakes on the fly. When an 8 year-old sound engineer tried to fix a mistake the old command gave a new result– auto-quantize– make your track adhere more strictly to the metronome. The kids never used the metronome. It was very frustrating how hard it became to fix mistakes that in the previous version were so simple to fix that second and third graders mastered it instantly and quickly taught others to do it.

Yes, an engineer at Apple told me on the phone, not everybody liked the newly disabled programs, he didn’t like it himself, and, of course, they were driven by corporate greed (why give things for free when you can claw them back and sell them?) but once the update was done there was no way to revert back to the previous version of the program. Best bet, he told me, was to buy a used MacBook running 10.6.8 or earlier and never update it. They eventually disabled enough features of iMovie that it became impossible to do single frame animation in iMovie, you had to buy a “professional” program from Apple to do what once came included in your computer.

I am tapping away on WordPress, which “improved” their writing editor in ways that made it more cumbersome than it was before. They touted this brilliant new “blocks” system, which replaced a perfectly useful one, even as they made the “theme” I am using obsolete. The tech term for this is “not supported”. You can use it, but nobody at WordPress can do much except urge you to switch to a supported theme. It’s true you could lose all of your content, which can no longer be backed up easily (we eliminated the RSS feed which used to allow you to cut and paste all content into a form you could save) but your experience will be enhanced, as the rooms full of WordPress Andys designed it to be.

The other day I was able to type on WordPress without straining my eyes. I’d see the words like this:

On the updated viewer, the best one can do is this:

If that’s hard on your old eyes, dude, just get stronger glasses, man. What the fuck do you want us to do, bro? Many people think this is a cool new improvement, (asshole…) OK, we just made that up, everybody hates it, but — you know what? Fuck them all and, with respect, sir, fuck you. We are the vanguard of the new world, innovative masters of the digital universe, and you are a carping dinosaur. Why not just simply go extinct if you don’t like the way we do things now?

Well, anyway, it is hard on my old eyes tapping away here. I devised a workaround, that I will use for all future posts. I will henceforth write in a word processing program, OpenOffice, wonderful, free and open-sourced, then select all, copy, paste into this fucking editor which I can then squint at like the bitter old fuck I am.

And make no mistake, when it comes to predatory fucking capitalism, a massive machine that never apologizes for any crime and is always quick to justify any “externality” (when people are killed in the name of profit, like in Bhopal, India, for example, that’s an “externality” the corporation has to account for, a small portion of the profits will go toward a secret settlement with the families of the dead, assuming they have excellent lawyers that can hold us to account) — I am an extremely bitter old fuck.

[1]

I had a friend named Andy, bright, witty, socially maladroit and occasionally locked up in a laughing academy until his wilder moods could be stabilized, who made a nice living writing computer code. He was responsible for how websites acted, where the buttons were to make things work and so forth. I’d observed many times how idiosyncratic Andy was, he always radically adjusted your desk chair when he sat in it, immediately retuned your guitar (breaking a string once in a while) and so forth. I later realized he was probably somewhere on the Asperger’s spectrum. What was intuitive and useful to him was by no means universal, is what I’m trying to say.

The Wall of Perceptions

A massive danger we now see all around us comes from people convinced that their perceptions, whatever the limitations of their view, whatever anybody else might have to say about these perceptions, are accurate reflections of the world. Opinion, shaped by what we know and endlessly confirmed by the reliable Confirmation Bias (they agree with me, I must be right!) is magnified and hardened by the agreement of others. The particular silo of opinion we spend most of our time in will shape our perception of the world. The anonymous “friend” groups of the internet, we learn, are incredibly powerful in shaping perceptions and opinions. The lonelier and more disconnected the individual, the more they will be influenced by a community online who claims to see things just like they do.

Our perceptions are shaped by a number of things, limited by our point of view, our knowledge and our access to useful evidence. The level and quality of information we take in is as crucial in forming our perceptions as our ability to gather and sort through reliable information. Our general feeling of well-being or ill health, our mood, our level of fear, the people we trust, the ones we hate, all shape our perceptions. How angry or upset we are at a given moment is a huge factor in how we see things (anger and fear will distort perceptions like nobody’s business) and the secret of Trumpism’s otherwise irrational appeal (keep ’em mad as hell at the ENEMY).

Here’s a recent example, from my own life, of how perceptions, and the emotions that color them, can distort your view of what is real. A few months back we arranged a reunion with old friends we hadn’t seen since before the pandemic, a gathering I was greatly looking forward to. A few days before the weekend we all agreed to take the COVID-19 test to ensure that none of us could be contagious to the others, possibly transmit a breakthrough infection. We’d all been vaccinated, so this test was part of an “abundance of caution,” as the saying goes, during the new super-infectious Delta variant surge. Sekhnet and I were tested side by side and were told we’d have a text when the results were in.

The day before the weekend, Sekhnet woke up to a text informing her that her test came back negative. I, on the other hand, got a missed call from the outfit that had done the test. They left me a message: “Hello, I’m calling from New York City Health and Hospitals, we need to speak to you in regards to your recent test and will call you back again soon. Thank you.” I tried calling the number, but it was not a working number. I groaned, snarled, agonized and belly-ached, waiting for the call back, cursing that bane of American existence, “health care” bureaucracy, dreading the bad news the eventual conversation would certainly impart. Meantime, I was helpless.

If it wasn’t bad news, why hadn’t I received the same good news text Sekhnet had, which did they “need to speak to me” regarding my test results? This obvious question was one I could not solve for — it had to be had news, I became convinced. If it had been good news, I’d also have gotten a text, no? At one point I put my phone on charge and went to the bathroom to micturate (as they say in certain prep schools). During the short time it took to empty my bladder I had the promised call back. This time they left no message.

“HIPPA,” offered Sekhnet, at one point, trying to explain why they’d left me no medical information on my phone. As to the simple text informing her of the wonderful, personal, result of her medical test, a text seemingly in clear violation of HIPPA, she had no immediate explanation.

My perception that I must have tested positive became unshakable, and it was driven by anxiety that I would now have to miss the gathering with well-loved old friends I’d been looking forward to. Sekhnet and I had been tested six feet apart, virtually simultaneously. It made no sense that the same outfit would send a good news text to one of us and not the other, if we’d both tested negative. Sekhnet offered theories, maybe they’d gone to different labs, somehow. My mind kept returning to “it makes no fucking sense!”

True, it made no fucking sense. Aggravating though the seven hours was before I was able to confirm that my test too had come back negative, in the end it still made no fucking sense. The wall of perception that kept me convinced it had to be bad news (until I was able to confirm otherwise) was built from a logical assumption. What I hadn’t stopped to consider is how often, in our modern, digital, corporatized society, things simply make no fucking sense.

I had a friend named Andy, bright, witty, socially maladroit and occasionally locked up in a laughing academy until his wilder moods could be stabilized, who made a nice living writing computer code. He was responsible for how websites acted, where the buttons were to make things work and so forth. I’d observed many times how idiosyncratic Andy was, he always radically adjusted your desk chair when he sat in it, immediately retuned your guitar (breaking a string once in a while) and so forth. I later realized he was probably somewhere on the Asperger’s spectrum. What was intuitive and useful to him was by no means universal, is what I’m trying to say.

Anytime I encounter a weird glitch on a website, like a frustrating “help” cul du sac you cannot exit from when seeking further information, I immediately picture a room full of Andys, coders with engineering smarts who do not necessarily think and act like the average person. Feature, bug? Who gives a fuck? The money is in constantly tweaking the code, the algorithms, the arrangement of the menus, the efficiency or complexity of the help features. In fact, just today, a room full of fucking Andys at WordPress changed the settings on the editor, so that the text, as you write, can no longer be blown up to an easily readable font, for old eyes like mine. Everyone, obviously, prefers their text at a steady 10 pt, extending the full width of your screen, without the former ability to work on it with less eye strain in a viewer that let you blow the words up to any size you’d like.

There was some kind of human/machine fuck up at the testing place when Sekhnet got her promised text and I got a call from a nonworking number, then another that left no message, no way to get in touch with anyone. I spent hours, convinced the news I didn’t yet have had to be bad (even the “None Detected” I was eventually able to see online was not reassuring, since Sekhnet had gotten a straight forward “negative” by text), finding nobody on the phone, after each long wait, who could confirm the seemingly simple, now obvious, answer that “None detected” is another way of saying “Negative”.

When, at the end of a long, frustrating day, I finally got somebody from the NYC Covid-testing hotline who could instantly confirm that “none detected” did not mean “test inconclusive” but “negative”, my mind was finally put to rest, having at last the clear answer I’d been denied by various Andys all day long. My doctor friend shook her head at my unnecessary day of aggravation (and the hell poor Sekhnet had been put through), since everybody with any sense should intuitively know that “none detected” means “negative”, something very obvious in hindsight, once you learn they are the same, after numerous help hotline folks did not know that for a fact.

True, obvious once you know, but from my point of view, the illogic of one person getting a promised text and the other endlessly waiting for a second callback that never came, was something I couldn’t simply accept as human error. It made no sense and it was going to directly and immediately effect my life for the worse. I had to verify that “none detected” (which I learned on-line after an hour or so of uncertainty) meant negative. If it is so intuitive, why was nobody in the city health bureaucracy I finally got to speak to able to clarify that for me?

There could have been a note to that effect online (“none detected” is the same as “negative”), where they gave you the test result, true, but none of the Andys involved with the website were told to put a note there. So, fearful that I might have to miss the social weekend I’d been looking forward to for weeks, I called various help lines, and waited, with sinking heart, on endless muzak blasting phone queues because of the huge volume of worried callers who were being helped by representatives who themselves could not confirm the seemingly simple, now obvious, fact that None Detected means Negative.

Knowing that these two terms are identical, having had them confirmed, and shrugged at by a doctor friend who couldn’t understand how I could not know the terms mean the same thing, I can now advise anyone in the unnecessary anguish I was in. Before I knew this undeniable fact? I was trapped behind the wall of my perceptions.

The conversation is tiring, but necessary

There are actual facts on the ground, things like massive surges in COVID infections in states whose leaders preach absolute liberty to infect whoever you want (Florida’s Deathsantis has just muscled his way past NY for worst Covid-19 infection rate in US history), and the heat-related 100 year killer storms that have become common. Certain powerful parties (like Koch-funded “think tanks”) work overtime to promote “experts” to “refute” facts that are bad for business, or bad for maintaining minority power in the face of “majoritarian tyranny.” The threats they deny, a deadly pandemic, deadly climate change, do not cease to exist, though they become immensely harder to find solutions for when tens of millions, naturally, prefer denial. How do we talk sense across this abyss of entrenched, hotly clutched opinion?

The conversation is exhausting, particularly after four years of an American president’s childish insistence that showing a tape of what just happened, or of what he just said, is an unfair, distorted, treasonous lie by the Enemy of the People. The Culture War is doing the terrible work of every other war, creating a zero-sum world with implacable, inhuman enemies on both sides. Hard for me not to smirk when I read that the secretly vaccinated governor of Texas (rivaling Deathsantis of Florida for eye-popping COVID numbers) tests positive for a virus he is actively preventing the public from protecting itself from. In the name of Freedom and the Second Amendment, no less. Facts actually matter, though, as does cause and effect, to at least 65% of us. How about this one, did you hear about this?

Take the heat wave this summer in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, which resulted in an estimated hundreds of heat-related deaths, ruined crops and wildfire outbreaks. The town of Lytton, British Columbia, broke the temperature record for Canada three days in a row. On the fourth day Lytton was all but destroyed by wildfire. These events were so extreme that they were very difficult to imagine, even for climate scientists like us, just two months ago.

source

I’d heard about the record heat in Canada, not as much about the hundreds of heat-related deaths, and had never heard of the connection between the record heat and the wildfire that destroyed the town that set the record for consecutive hotter than hell days.

You can read the piece linked above and learn that scientists now have a method to attribute the heat-related disasters to human burning of fossil fuels and other heat increasing activities.

Or, turn on your favorite talking head and watch this entire liberal scam to destroy America be exposed for the godless Commie plot that it is. It will be debunked once and for all by an expert Climate Skeptical preacher with an online degree in divinity who will hip an audience of millions to the flimflam of these wild-eyed Climate Alarmists. Who you going to believe, someone who’s screaming with her hair on fire or someone cool, talking very calmly and reasonably?

The following is from a nightly email news letter I get from an outfit called Crooked Media. Their snappy come on is: Subscribe to What A Day to get more pithy analysis of the world we live in and how long that world can possibly continue to exist. The newsletter is informative and refreshingly blunt and snarky. From a discussion about booster shots for vaccinated Americans:

The Israel experience suggests we might be poised for boosters, even if Republicans hadn’t encouraged vaccine rejection. But the coming booster season underscores the ugly division they created: On one side, the overwhelming majority of Americans follow public-health guidance and are willing to sacrifice for one another; on the other it’s OK to mass-infect children with a novel virus to hurt political enemies. The stakes of keeping that minority out of power couldn’t be higher.

“On one side, the overwhelming majority of Americans follow public-health guidance and are willing to sacrifice for one another; on the other it’s OK to mass-infect children with a novel virus to hurt political enemies. The stakes of keeping that minority out of power couldn’t be higher.”

Could the stakes for our experiment in democracy be higher? I can’t imagine how. I guess that terrifying, all-powerful cabal of Satanist pedophile cannibal Christ-haters could actually exist, and be in control of our country, and millions of innocent young children could really be at risk of abduction, rape and having their blood drained so that vampire Democrats can slurp down its youth-enhancing properties.

On the other hand, surveys show not every earthling believes in these kind of destructive fairy tales (these screen shots are from NowThis News):

This strikes me as encouraging news in the accepting the evidence of our eyes, ears and brains department. In passing, we note that of the G20 nations, six, or 30%, are currently being run by autocrats, including the murderous “reformer” crown prince of the medieval monarchy of our close allies, the Saudis, a gigantic royal family that sits atop an underground ocean of petroleum.

The conversation with people who want simple answers that do not inconvenience them, that confirm their darkest suspicions about guys like George Soros (and the rest of us Jews, for that matter), that give them a feeling of superiority in a world at a very perilous moment, is fucking exhausting. A bridge to the interests of these folks must be built, exhausting as that project is in the face of everything else we are up against.

I guess an important thing to keep in mind is not to start the conversation by talking about how ignorant and deadly science denial is in our modern age. A slick-talking Jew will never convince an antisemite that Jews would not drink your baby’s blood in a heartbeat, given the chance, but there is a way to have this discussion. And have it we must, or watch our beautiful world be destroyed by pure greed, arrogance and a sadistic lynch mob’s pleasure in the suffering of the powerless.

Culture? You’re soaking in it.

When I was a kid there was a long running TV commercial for a dishwashing liquid whose maker claimed it was so great at softening and moisturizing a woman’s skin that Marge, the manicurist, would soak her customer’s hands in it (on the sly, of course). Marge would quickly work how beautifully this wonderful dishwashing product worked to soften skin into every chat. When the customer asked Marge where she could try this amazing product Marge hit ’em with the punchline “you’re soaking in it!” The startled customer would start to pull her hand back, but Marge would gently but firmly put the hand back in the dishwashing liquid and everybody smiled and remembered the product was so good that you could literally soak in it to soften and moisturize your hands.

“You’re soaking in it” serves as an excellent (if mildly strained) metaphor for how dimly we see culture and most other things that surround us, seemingly immutable things that appear to be inevitable. The way things are, and have “always been”, is a powerful reinforcement of just about anything.

There is a compelling reason the US government doesn’t provide health care to all citizens as a right of citizenship. It’s complicated. Same for the reason that millions of underemployed Americans can’t presently go through a government sponsored training program to become skilled home health aides, with a guaranteed decent income, benefits and a pension. Both have to do with what we’re all soaking in, how the “free market” profit motive drives American health care, the lucrative middle man corporations who rake in billions selling these services, skimming a percentage off the top, usually underpaying the unskilled workers who often provide tender, intimate care to homebound older Americans in their last days. There are laws in place, and overlapping regulations, customs, cultural beliefs, etc. that keep things like affordable health care as a right and the right to decent pay for doing a tough, shitty, very important job out of the public discussion most of the time.

If you watch commercial TV you are going to see television commercials. Duh. Nothing is for free, and our constitution acknowledges, in its copyright clause, that all creativity is motivated by a desire for profit. You want something for free? Pay the premium to not see ads or shut up about the constant commercials. It is unthinkable that anyone in a free society would do anything for free, except perhaps favors for friends and family members. In God we trust, YOU pay cash, brah.

Some men see things as they are and ask, “”Why?”” I dream things that never were and ask, “”Why not?””

We can either, in the great old phrase (made famous by Robert Kennedy, who tweaked a line from George Bernard Shaw), talk about things exactly as they are, limited by existing law and culture, or imagine better things that don’t presently exist and change culture and laws to make them real Maybe our worst failures, as humanists who believe in basic human equality and a right to dignity, are failures of imagination.

To me, one of the features of Hilary’s 2016 campaign that doomed her to win the popular vote by only 3,000,000, and come up 78,000 short in the Electoral College (how about that vestige of slavery and rule by the wealthy for a “why?”) was her assertion that changing institutions takes time, sometimes generations, and that steady, incremental progress is the best we can realistically hope for, that radical change is unwise and uncalled for, no matter how pressing the need might seem, and so on.

The status quo, she implied, while not perfect, was pretty good for most people. Her opponent, the malignant Orange Polyp, spoke directly to the grievances of millions of disgruntled Americans when he said he knew how rotten to the core and corrupt American politics was and that he alone could fix it. He’d drain the swamp, build the wall, repeal Obamacare and replace it with something much better, and cheaper, that would cover everything.

This is a simplistic little post on an obscure blahg by a know-it-all who works for free, but there is hopefully a kernel of a thought in it for somebody. The best, and the worst, are things we imagine in the absence of actual experience. Few things we dread turn out to be as terrible as we fear, not everything we look forward to turns out to be as great as we dream it will be. Still, it’s a useful exercise, I think, in looking for solutions, to suspend disbelief based on the reality of a seemingly unalterable legal/social/cultural arrangement that we are all soaking in and that nobody can change. For generating possible solutions to complicated, miserable, often deadly problems, why not imagine something better and ask “Why not?”