One More General for the ‘Self Licking Ice Cream Cone’

Before he became lionized as the “only adult in the room” capable of standing up to President Trump, General James Mattis was quite like any other brass scoping out a lucrative second career in the defense industry. And as with other military giants parlaying their four stars into a cushy boardroom chair or executive suite, he pushed and defended a sub-par product while on both sides of the revolving door. Unfortunately for everyone involved, that contract turned out to be an expensive fraud and a potential health hazard to the troops.

According to a recent report by the Project on Government Oversight, 25 generals, nine admirals, 43 lieutenant generals, and 23 vice admirals retired to become lobbyists, board members, executives, or consultants for the defense industry between 2008 and 2018. They are part of a much larger group of 380 high-ranking government officials and congressional staff who shifted into the industry in that time.

To get a sense of the demand, according to POGO, which had to compile all of this information through Freedom of Information requests, there were 625 instances in 2018 alone in which the top 20 defense contractors (think Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin) hired senior DoD officials for high-paying jobs—90 percent of which could be described as “influence peddling.”

Back to Mattis. In 2012, while he was head of Central Command, the Marine General pressed the Army to procure and deploy blood testing equipment from a Silicon Valley company called Theranos. He communicated that he was having success with this effort directly to Theranos’s chief executive officer. Even though an Army health unit tried to terminate the contract due to its not meeting requirements, according to POGO, Mattis kept the pressure up. Luckily, it was never used on the battlefield.

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise but upon retirement in 2013, Mattis asked a DoD counsel about the ethics guiding future employment with Theranos. They advised against it. So Mattis went to serve on its board instead for a $100,000 salary. Two years after Mattis quit to serve as Trump’s Pentagon chief in 2016, the two Theranos executives he worked with were indicted for “massive” fraud, perpetuating a “multi-million dollar scheme to defraud investors, doctors and patients,” and misrepresenting their product entirely. It was a fake.

But assuming this was Mattis’s only foray into the private sector would be naive. When he was tapped for defense secretary—just three years after he left the military—he was worth upwards of $10 million. In addition to his retirement pay, which was close to $15,000 a month at the time, he received $242,000 as a board member, plus as much as $1.2 million in stock options in General Dynamics, the Pentagon’s fourth largest contractor. He also disclosed payments from other corporate boards, speech honorariums—including $20,000 from defense heavyweight Northrop Grumman—and a whopping $410,000 from Stanford University’s public policy think tank the Hoover Institution for serving as a “distinguished visiting fellow.”

Never for a moment think that Mattis won’t land softly after he leaves Washington—if he leaves at all. Given his past record, he will likely follow a very long line, as illustrated by POGO’s explosive report, of DoD officials who have used their positions while inside the government to represent the biggest recipients of federal funding on the outside. They then join ex-congressional staffers and lawmakers on powerful committees who grease the skids on Capitol Hill. And then they go to work for the very companies they’ve helped, fleshing out a small army of executives, lobbyists, and board members with direct access to the power brokers with the purse strings back on the inside.

Welcome to the Swamp.

by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, The American Conservative |  Read more:

Image: U.S. Customs and Border Patrol/Wikimedia Commons/Department of State

[ed. Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone: a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself (Wikipedia).]

Hostile Waters

Hostile Waters (Seattle Times)

Part 1: Orcas thrive in a land to the north. Why are Puget Sound's dying?

Part 2: The orca and the orca catcher: How a generation of killer whales was taken from Puget Sound.

Part 3: FAQ: A primer on the critically endangered southern resident killer whales.

[ed. Heartbreaking.]

Off-Roading, Chopped Joshua Trees, Overflowing Toilets: Our National Parks During a Shutdown

I’m running this piece because the destruction of national parks during the shutdown is strong evidence of the decay in social capital. While history shows again and again that old farts bemoan the decline in morays of the young, it’s still disturbing to see large groups of people take advantage of a lack of supervision at national parks to trash them. If they can’t show some consideration in a context like this, how can we expect citizens to pull together when the Jackpot comes?

I remember watching the 2011 Steven Soderberg movie Contagion and finding it to be far too optimistic about how the public would react to a pandemic. Contagion has the US being put under quarantine for six months to prevent the spread of a deadly, high communicable disease. There’s no consideration whatsoever about how people are supposed to support themselves, as in pay their mortgage/rent, electricity and other bills, or how the many that need prescription drugs are supposed to get them (as in how are they to be produced and distributed if everyone but emergency workers are to stay at home). In other words, it was completely unrealistic about the ongoing human effort needed to provision society and clean up its garbage.

While the movie did show some signs of social breakdown, like looting, it also portrayed the government as effective in maintaining a great deal of order, like closing state borders. But it also depicted people lining up to get food rations and only some scuffles breaking out.

The US simply does not have remotely enough social cohesiveness to handle a six month quarantine and then a relaxation of it, including rationing of the vaccine as limited supplies were distributed. This country is full of guns. You’d see too many people doing as they saw fit in a time of breakdown. And that’s before questioning whether our government, which has significant outsourced activities, would have the managerial ability and operational capacity to respond effectively to a crisis of this order.

If Brexit crashes out at the end of March or after an extension, we’ll get a picture of how well governments cope with national emergencies after decades of neoliberalism and demonization of public service.

By Annelise McGough. Originally published at Grist

Ever wanted to cut down an iconic Joshua tree in order to create space for some off-roading? No? Well, we thank you. But during the government shutdown, some fine folks did just that.

National parks are filling with garbage, and not just the kind that comes in trash bags. Since the government shut down 20 days ago, Joshua Tree, which is about the size of Delaware and located two hours east of Los Angeles, has been forced to reduce its number of rangers from 100 to only eight. The lack of staff is making it difficult to keep up with the mayhem that is illegal off-roading and road creation, damage of federal property, overflowing garbage and toilets, out-of-bounds camping, and the chopping down of literal Joshua trees.

by Yves Smith/Annelise McGough, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: NPS via National Parks Traveler

Sidewalk Flowers

How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives  ~ Annie Dillard

JonArno Lawson and Sydney Smith, Sidewalk Flowers

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[ed. See also: A Velocity of Being: Illustrated Letters to Children about Why We Read and In Defense of Boredom: 200 Years of Ideas on the Virtues of Not-Doing and Attention, Multitasking, and the Habit of Mind That Sets Geniuses Apart (Brain Pickings).]

The Weight I Carry

I weigh 460 pounds.

Those are the hardest words I’ve ever had to write. Nobody knows that number—not my wife, not my doctor, not my closest friends. It feels like confessing a crime. The average American male weighs about 195 pounds; I’m two of those guys, with a 10-year-old left over. I’m the biggest human being most people who know me have ever met, or ever will.

The government definition of obesity is a body mass index of 30 or more. My BMI is 60.7. My shirts are size XXXXXXL, which the big-and-tall stores shorten to 6X. I’m 6 foot 1, or 73 inches tall. My waist is 60 inches around. I’m nearly a sphere.

Those are the numbers. This is how it feels.

I’m on the subway in New York City, standing in the aisle, clinging to the pole. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, and don’t visit New York much, so I don’t have a feel for how subway cars move. I’m praying this one doesn’t lurch around a corner or slam to a stop, because I’m terrified of falling. Part of it is embarrassment. When a fat guy falls, it’s hard to get up. But what really scares me is the chance that I might land on somebody. I glance at the people wedged around me. None of them could take my weight. It would be an avalanche. Some of them stare at me, and I figure they’re thinking the same thing. An old woman is sitting three feet away. One slip and I’d crush her. I grip the pole harder.

My palms start to sweat, and all of a sudden I flash back to elementary school in Georgia, standing in the aisle on the school bus. The driver hollers at me to find a seat. He can’t take us home until everybody sits down. I’m the only one standing. Every time I spot an open space, somebody slides to the edge of the seat and covers it up. Nobody wants the fat boy mashed in next to them. I freeze, helpless. The driver glares at me in the rearview mirror. An older kid sitting in front of me—a redhead, freckles, I’ll never forget his face—has a cast on his right arm. He reaches back and starts clubbing me with it, below the waist, out of the driver’s line of sight. He catches me in the groin and it hurts, but not as much as the shame when the other kids laugh and the bus driver gets up and storms toward me—

and the train stops and jolts me back into now.

I peel my hands from the pole and get off. I climb the stairs to the street and step to the side to catch my breath. I’m wheezing like a 30-year smoker. My legs wobble from the climb. I’m meeting a friend near Central Park, at a place called the Brooklyn Diner. I’m 15 minutes early, on purpose, because I have to find a safe place to sit.

The night before, I had Googled Brooklyn Diner interior to get an idea of the layout. Now I scan the space like a gangster, looking for danger spots. The booths are too small—I can’t squeeze in. The barstools are bolted to the floor—they’re too close to the bar, and my ass would hang off the back. I check the tables, gauging the chairs. These look solid—the chair seems okay; yep, it’ll hold me up. For the first time in an hour, I take an untroubled breath.

My friend shows up on time. By then, I’ve scouted out the menu. Eggs, bacon, toast, coffee. A few bites and the shame fades. At least for a little while.

By any reasonable standard, I have won life’s lottery. I grew up with two loving parents in a peaceful house. I’ve spent my whole career doing work that thrills me—writing for newspapers and magazines. I married the best woman I’ve ever known, Alix Felsing, and I love her more now than when my heart first tumbled for her. We’re blessed with strong families and a deep bench of friends. Our lives are full of music and laughter. I wouldn’t swap with anyone.

Except on those mornings when I wake up and take a long, naked look in the mirror.

My body is a car wreck. Skin tags—long, mole-like growths caused by chafing—dangle under my arms and down in my crotch. I have breasts where my chest ought to be. My belly is strafed with more stretch marks than a mother of five. My stomach hangs below my waist, giving me what the Urban Dictionary calls a “front butt”—as if some twisted Dr. Frankenstein grafted an extra rear end on the wrong side. Varicose veins bulge from my thighs. My calves and shins are rust-colored and shiny from a condition called chronic venous insufficiency. Here’s what it means: The veins in my legs aren’t strong enough to push all the blood back up toward my heart, so it pools in my capillaries and forces little dots of iron up under my skin. The veins are failing because of the pressure caused by 460 pounds pushing downward with every step I take. My body is crumbling under its own gravity.

Some days, when I see that disaster staring back, I get so mad that I pound my gut with my fists, as if I could beat the fat out of me. Other times, the sight sinks me into a blue fog that can ruin an hour or a morning or a day. But most of the time what I feel is sadness over how much life I’ve wasted. When I was a kid, I never climbed a tree or learned to swim. When I was in my 20s, I never took a girl home from a bar. Now I’m 50, and I’ve never hiked a mountain or ridden a skateboard or done a cartwheel. I’ve missed out on so many adventures, so many good times, because I was too fat to try. Sometimes, when I could’ve tried anyway, I didn’t have the courage. I’ve done a lot of things I’m proud of. But I’ve never believed I could do anything truly great, because I’ve failed so many times at the one crucial challenge in my life.

What the hell is wrong with me?

What the hell is wrong with us? As I write this, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 79 million American adults—40 percent of women, and 35 percent of men—qualify as obese. The obesity rate among American children is 17 percent and climbing. Our collective waistline laps over every boundary: age, race, gender, politics, culture. In our fractured country, we all agree on one thing: second helpings.

As every fat person knows, there’s no such thing as a cheap buffet—you always pay later, one way or another. Fat America comes with a devastating bill. According to government estimates, Americans pay $147 billion a year in medical costs related to obesity. That’s roughly equal to the entire budget for the U.S. Army. But the money is just part of the cost. Every fat person, and every fat person’s family, pays with anger and heartache and pain. For every one of us who can’t shed the weight, there are spouses and parents and kids and friends who grieve. We carve lines in their faces. We sentence them to long years alone.

I know this from experience. I also feel it like a burning knife right now. Because my sister, Brenda Williams, died seven days ago, on Christmas Eve. (...)

Brenda was 63 and weighed well north of 200 pounds. Her feet swelled so much that she could hardly wear shoes. Her thighs cramped so bad, with so little warning, that she was afraid to drive. For years, she dealt with sores on her legs caused by the swelling. They leaked fluid and wouldn’t heal. In late December, one of the sores got infected. Brenda was tough, so by the time she admitted she was sick, she was in deep trouble. Ed took her to the emergency room in Jesup, Georgia, as Alix and I were heading to Tennessee to spend Christmas with Alix’s folks. My brother called at two in the morning on Christmas Eve and said that things were getting worse. We tried to sleep for a couple of hours, got up, and got on the road. The infection turned out to be MRSA. It spread so goddamn fast. We were somewhere outside Asheville when my brother sent a text: She’s gone.

The funeral was on my mom’s 82nd birthday. She cried tears from the bottom of the ocean. She lived next door to Brenda and Ed for almost 20 years—we moved her there after she retired. She spent so many nights telling stories around Brenda and Ed’s dining-room table. Now she won’t go back in their house. All she can see is the empty space where Brenda used to be. The infection was the official cause of Brenda’s death, but her weight killed her, sure as poison.

What happens when someone close to you dies? People bring food. (...)

Guys like us don’t make it to 60.

Some of us rot away from diabetes or blow out an artery from high blood pressure, but a heart attack is what I worry about most. My doctor likes to say that in a third of the cases of heart disease, the first symptom is death. Right now, my heart tests out fine. But I can hear it thumping in my temples, 80-some beats a minute even when I’m resting, and I know I make it work too hard. Sometimes, when it’s quiet in the house, I close my eyes and listen to it strain, praying that it won’t just stop like a needle lifted off a record. Every day I wonder if this is the day I might keel over in my office chair or at the bookstore or (God help me) at the wheel of my car. At 460 pounds, I’m lucky to have made it this far. It’s like holding 20 at the blackjack table and waving at the dealer for another card. Without a miracle, I’m bound to bust.

by Tommy Tomlinson, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Courtesy Tommy Tomlinson

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Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Opté Digital Skin Care

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[ed. Wow, wonder what that's going to cost? (probably $20, but cartridges: $299!). See also: Procter and Gamble’s Opte wand is like a real-life beauty filter for your skin (The Verge)]

Max Beckmann, The Prodigal Son

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Stevie Nicks, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Anders Petersen, Café Lehmitz
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404 Page Not Found

The first time I can remember logging on to the net was around 1998, when I was five years old. My father was with me; I remember him working his magic, getting the modem to hum its infamous atonal tune. The purpose of this journey was to see if the internet had any answers to my persistent questions about how railroad crossings worked. We opened a search engine, probably AltaVista, and quickly found a Geocities webpage devoted to railroad crossings from around the world. I still remember the site’s black textured background, its grainy, white serif typeface, and the blinking gifs of railroad crossings positioned on either side of a slightly off-center text header.

I’m a digital native, older than most. Because my father worked for the federal government, our household was an early adopter of the internet. As I grew up, so did it. When I was a child, for example, the internet was still indexable; you generally found websites through directories and webrings. Favorites meant something, because finding what you were looking for often took quite a bit of time. When search engines became the norm, around the time I was in elementary school, this analog directory hunting was replaced with the ubiquitous Google search. Which is to say I witnessed it all, and as a particularly lonely child, I witnessed it rather closely: Neopets in elementary school, the birth of Myspace in middle school, the rise of Facebook in early high school, Instagram in late high school, the internet culture wars of infamy as a freshman in college, Donald Trump and Cambridge Analytica in graduate school.

Writing in 2008, the new media scholar Geert Lovink separated internet culture into three periods:

First, the scientific, precommercial, text-only period before the World Wide Web. Second, the euphoric, speculative period in which the Internet opened up for the general audience, culminating in the late 1990s dotcom mania. Third, the post-dot-com crash/post-9/11 period, which is now coming to a close with the Web 2.0 mini-bubble.

For those my age, this tripartite history of the net begins at number two, with the anarchic, sprawling, ’90s net, followed by the post-9/11, pre-iPhone variety (including the blogosphere and the fulcrum moment that was Myspace), and ending with today’s app-driven, hyper-conglomerate social media net.

Like many people my age and older, I miss the pre–social media internet. The new internet knows this, and it capitalizes on my nostalgia as it eats away at the old internet. It amounts to an unforeseen form of technological cannibalism.

Admittedly, the phenomenon of the self-eating internet may not be obvious when we think about it in the abstract; we need to break it down into its constituent operations. For example, I open my Instagram account to post on my Instagram Story feed that I’m writing this essay about internet nostalgia. There I can attach kitschy gifs to my story like fancy stickers—I look at my options, and the offerings remind me of various moments from my online past. There’s an image of sparkles that takes me back to the flash-based dress-up games I once played as a tween. There’s another gif with glitzy text that reads “Don’t hate me cuz I’m beautiful,” recalling the emotional trials of my Myspace days. And there is yet another gif that features a computer that bears a suspicious resemblance to the “My Computer” icon from Windows 95. These gifs come from Giphy, which has been integrated with Instagram for years. They’re lo-res, imperfect, and entirely decontextualized. These disembodied ghosts—ancient in computer years—blink back at me because tech companies know that, based on my age, I like them. And I do like them. I miss where they came from—it’s a place I’ve found is no longer there.

The Hell of Beautiful Interfaces

The internet is perhaps the most potent and active delivery system in history for the thesis “capitalism will obliterate everything you know and love”—online it happens in real time. Considering the average website is less than ten years old, that old warning from your parents that says to “be careful what you post online because it’ll be there forever” is like the story your dad told you about chocolate milk coming from brown cows, a well-meant farce. On the contrary, librarians and archivists have implored us for years to be wary of the impermanence of digital media; when a website, especially one that invites mass participation, goes offline or executes a huge dump of its data and resources, it’s as if a smallish Library of Alexandria has been burned to the ground. Except unlike the burning of such a library, when a website folds, the ensuing commentary from tech blogs asks only why the company folded, or why a startup wasn’t profitable. Ignored is the scope and species of the lost material, or what it might have meant to the scant few who are left to salvage the digital wreck.

The reason the tech literati don’t wring their hands more is obvious: the artifacts of internet life are personal—that is, not professionally or historically notable—and therefore worthless. The persistent erasure of what are essentially frozen experiences, snapshots of our lives, nakedly demonstrates how tech monopolies value the human commonality and user experience so loftily promoted in their branding—they don’t. And this is especially true in an era where involuntary data mining, as opposed to voluntary participation, is king.

Of course, these same writers have devoted several books to the history and culture of what Lovink identifies as the “scientific period” of the web, the one populated exclusively by elite scientists, researchers, and geeks, and given over to the BBS days of early computing, before graphical user interfaces and web browsers made the net accessible to the lowly amateur. And countless hagiographies and histories have been written about the technology of the internet and its “inventors” hailing from the FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google). But the users of those technologies and services can only be found in the data point or the footnote, transformed into an anonymous bleating mass a world below the visionaries who built the platforms that now alchemize our consumer preferences into chunks of fool’s gold. Meanwhile, the genuine experiences of users are ignored, despite the fact that the internet has always been deeply and irrevocably personal.

by Kate Wagner, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Nichole Shinn
[ed. See also: Tumblr.]

The Dark Forest

Why We Should Really Stop Trying to Contact Aliens

Experts are more and more convinced there’s probably intelligent life out there. Our first impulse, being friendly Earth types, is to reach out and say hi — from 1977’s Voyager to SETI@home, we can’t wait to meet the neighbors. Some scientists, like Stephen Hawking, caution that this may be a lethal mistake, and others say, “Naw, not to worry.” Yet here we are, scanning the night skies, visions of Close Encounters in our heads. A recent work of science fiction, though, contains a stunningly convincing argument that we should shut. The. Hell. Up. Hiding wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. The Fermi paradox, its author asserts, suggests that everyone else already is.

The book is The Dark Forest, the second volume in the unforgettable Three-Body trilogy by Chinese writer Cixin Liu. Cixin’s writing is beyond smart — it’s brilliant — and it's science fiction of the best kind, with mind-boggling ideas and perceptions, and characters you care about. His concept of the dark forest, though presented in a work of fiction, is chilling, and very real.

The Axioms of Social Cosmology

In The Dark Forest, a character suggests the creation of an area of study called “cosmic sociology.” She describes it as a means of understanding the interactions of distant civilizations who know each other only as dots of light, light years away. It's based on two simple, inarguable axioms that would be true of every civilization, regardless of the life forms it contains or where it is in the universe:

• Survival is the primary need of civilization. This is the most basic desire of any life form, right?
• Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant. There’s potentially competition for resources, including minerals, water, life-capable planets, etc.

To complete the picture, the character says, one needs to understand two other important concepts:

• chains of suspicion
• technological explosion

Chains of Suspicion

When one civilization becomes aware of another, the most critical thing is to ascertain whether or not the newly found civilization is operating from benevolence — and thus won’t attack and destroy you — or malice. Too much further communication could take you from limited exposure in which the other civilization simply knows you exist, to the strongest: They know where to find you. And so each civilization is left to guess the other’s intent, and the stakes couldn't be higher.

You can’t assume the other civilization is benevolent, and they can't assume that about you, either. Nor can you be sure the other correctly comprehends your assessment of their benevolence or maliciousness. As one character tells another in the book:

Next, even if you know that I think you’re benevolent, and I also know that you think I’m benevolent, I don’t know what you think about what I think about what you’re thinking about me. It's convoluted, isn't it? 

Does the other civilization see your opinion of them as a reason to relax, or to conquer you and take your resources? How can you possibly know what to make of each other with a certainty that satisfies your desire for survival? Inevitably, neither civilization can afford to trust the other, There’s just no way to discern another’s true intention from so very far away.

Technological Explosion

You do know that a civilization that contacts you is capable technologically of at least that much. But this is all you have to go on in your assessment of the threat level or their ability to defend themselves against an attack from you. You might think that a civilization that considers itself advanced could relax, secure in its military superiority at the moment of first contact. But contact with you could be just the impetus needed for the other civilization to shoot ahead technologically — progress is non-linear, as shown by our own tech explosion in just 300 years against the millions of years we’ve been around. By the time an invading force traverses the vast expanse of space — likely over the course of years, if not centuries — who can know what awaits them? No civilization can be confident of its power relative to the other.

The person listening to this in The Dark Forest responds, “So I have to keep quiet.” After a pause, he asks, “Do you think that will work?”

Nope. “To sum up,” says the first speaker, “letting you know I exist, and letting you to continue to exist, are both dangerous to me and violate the first axiom.” So, he continues, “If neither communication nor silence will work once you learn of my existence, you’re left with just one option.” Attack.

As if what’s already been argued isn’t scary enough, he reminds his listener, “Extrapolate that option out to billions and billions of stars and hundred of millions of civilization’s and there’s your picture. The real universe is just that black.”

Welcome to the Woods

Cixin’s dark forest metaphor goes like this:

The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds another life — another hunter, angel, or a demon, a delicate infant to tottering old man, a fairy or demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them.

And here’s us with our desire for contact:

But in this dark forest, there’s a stupid child called humanity, who has built a bonfire and is standing before it shouting, “Here I am! Here I am!”

So the answer to the Fermi paradox may simply be this: Civilizations aware of the dark forest concept are wisely hiding.

by Robby Berman, The Big Think |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. A rebuttal, but perhaps in the end largely irrelevant re: global climate change, nuclear and biological weapons, gene editing, AI, politicians, and other existential threats - see also: The Great Filter (or, it is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself).]  

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[ed. There must be something wrong with the battery]

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Forgotten France Rises Up

December 15, place de l’Opéra, Paris. Three yellow vests read out an address ‘to the French people and the president of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron’ saying: ‘This movement belongs to no one and to everyone. It gives voice to a people who for 40 years have been dispossessed of everything that enabled them to believe in their future and their greatness.’

The anger provoked by a fuel tax produced, within a month, a wider diagnosis of what ails society and democracy. Mass movements that bring together people with minimal organisation encourage rapid politicisation, which explains why ‘the people’ have discovered that they are ‘dispossessed of their future’ a year after electing as president a man who boasts he swept aside the two parties that alternated in power for 40 years.

Macron has come unstuck. As did previous wunderkinder just as young, smiling and modern: Laurent Fabius, Tony Blair, Matteo Renzi. The liberal bourgeoisie are hugely disappointed. His French presidential election win in 2017 — whether it was a miracle or a divine surprise — had given them hope that France had become a haven of tranquillity in a troubled West. When Macron was crowned (to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy), The Economist, that standard-bearer for the views of the international ruling class, put him on its front cover, grinning as he walked on water.

But the sea has swallowed up Macron, too sure of his own instincts and too contemptuous of other people’s economic plight. Social distress is generally only a backdrop to an election campaign, used to explain the choice of those who vote the wrong way. But when old angers build and new ones are stirred up without consideration for those enduring them, then, as the new interior minister Christophe Castaner put it, the ‘monster’ can spring out of its box. And then, anything becomes possible.

France’s amnesia about the history of the left explains why there have been so few comparisons between the yellow vest movement and the strikes of 1936, during the Popular Front, which prompted similar elite surprise at the workers’ living conditions and their demand to be treated with dignity. Philosopher and campaigner Simone Weil wrote: ‘All those who are strangers to this life of slavery are incapable of understanding what has proved decisive in this situation. In this movement it is not about this or that particular demand, however important ... After always having submitted, endured everything, accepted everything in silence for months and years, it is about daring to straighten up, to stand up. To take your turn to speak’.

The tables had turned

Prime Minister Léon Blum, speaking about the subsequent Matignon agreements of 1936, which granted paid holidays, a 40-hour week and better wages, reported an exchange between the employers’ negotiators in which one said to another, when he saw the level of some salaries, ‘How is this possible? How did we let this happen?’ Was Macron similarly enlightened by hearing yellow vests describe their daily life? Tense, pale, his eyes riveted to the teleprompter, he did admit in his address to the nation that ‘the effort demanded of them was too great’ and ‘not fair’. The tables had turned and he was now the one learning a lesson.

How did we let this happen? Thanks to the yellow vests, everyone is more aware of the government’s injustices: €5 a month less in 2017 for housing benefit while the progressive rates of tax on capital were abolished; the wealth tax eliminated; pensioners’ purchasing power declining. The costliest measure was the replacement of the tax credit for competitiveness and employment (CICE, a corporate tax credit scheme for businesses) with a reduction in employers’ social security contributions, which mean that this year the Treasury will effectively pay a double bonus to Bernard Arnault, the richest man in Europe, owner of Carrefour, LVMH, Le Parisien and Les Echos. This policy will cost almost €40bn in 2019, 1.8% of GDP and more than 100 times the saving from housing benefit cuts. In the short, angry video, viewed 6.2m times, that helped launch the yellow vest movement, Jacline Mouraud, 51, a composer and hypnotherapist from Brittany, asked Macron three times, ‘What are you doing with the cash?’ Now we know.

A hefty fuel price rise and a stricter roadworthiness test for cars were enough to bring everything to the surface. Such as banks that grow fat on every loan, yet in the name of cost-saving ‘rationalise’, meaning close, their branches, as they do the accounts of customers who write a cheque that bounces to get through to the end of the month. A government that raids pensions, already too low, as if they were a treasure chest. Single mothers who have trouble getting child support from their former partners, equally poor. Couples who want to split up but are forced to stay together because they cannot afford two rents. The Internet, computers and smartphones which are now necessities that have to be paid for, not for leisure purposes but because service rationalisations by the post office, tax authorities and railways, and the disappearance of public phones, make it impossible to live without them. And everywhere there are maternity unit closures and shuttered shops while Amazon opens new warehouses. This universe of anomie, imposed technology, form filling, productivity tracking and loneliness can be seen in other countries too. It has arisen under very different political regimes and predates Macron’s election, but he seems in love with this new world and has made its accomplishment his social project — another reason why he is hated.

But not universally so. People who are doing well — graduates, the middle class, those in big cities — share Macron’s optimistic outlook. As long as the country is calm, or in despair, which amounts to the same thing, the world and the future are theirs. 

by Sergie Halimi, Le Monde Diplomatique |  Read more:

Image: Lucas Barioulet · AFP · Getty

Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me

The Silicon Valley gospel of “disruption” has descended into caricature, but, at its core, there are some sound tactics buried beneath the self-serving bullshit. A lot of our systems and institutions are corrupt, bloated, and infested with cream-skimming rentiers who add nothing and take so much.

Take taxis: there is nothing good about the idea that cab drivers and cab passengers meet each other by random chance, with the drivers aimlessly circling traffic-clogged roads while passengers brave the curb lane to frantically wave at them. Add to that the toxic practice of licensing cabs by creating “taxi medallions” that allow businesspeople (like erstwhile Trump bagman Michael Cohen) to corner the market on these licenses and lease them to drivers, creaming off the bulk of the profits in the process, leaving drivers with barely enough to survive.

So enter Uber, an app that allows drivers and passengers to find each other extremely efficiently, that gives drivers realtime intelligence about places where fares are going begging, and which bankrupts the rent-seeking medallion speculators almost overnight.

Of course, Uber also eliminates safety checks for drivers (and allows them to illegally discriminate against people with disabilities, people of color, and other marginalized groups); it used predatory pricing (where each ride is subsidized by deep-pocketed, market-cornering execs) to crush potential competitors, and games the regulatory and tax system.

Uber (and its Peter-Thiel-backed rival Lyft) are not good companies. They’re not forces for good. But the system they killed? Also not good.

In 2016, the City of Austin played a game of high-stakes chicken with Uber and Lyft. Austin cab drivers have to get fingerprinted as part of a criminal records check, and Austin wanted Uber and Lyft drivers to go through the same process.

Uber and Lyft violently objected to this. They said it would add a needless barrier to entry that would depress the supply of drivers, and privately, they confessed their fear that giving in to any regulation, anywhere, would open the door to regulation everywhere. They wanted to establish a reputation for being such dirty fighters that no city would even try to put rules on them.

(Notably, Uber and Lyft did not make any arguments about criminal background checks perpetuating America’s racially unjust “justice system” in which people of color are systematically overpoliced and then railroaded into guilty pleas.)

Austin wasn’t intimidated. They enacted the rule, and Uber and Lyft simply exited the city, leaving Austin without any rideshare at all. All the drivers and passengers who’d come to rely on Lyft and Uber were out of luck.

But the drivers were undaunted. They formed a co-operative and in months, they had cloned the Uber app and launched a new business called Ride Austin, which is exactly like Uber: literally the same drivers, driving the same cars, and charging the same prices. But it’s also completely different from Uber: the drivers own this company through a worker-owned co-op. They take home 25% more per ride than they made when they were driving for Uber. Uber and Lyft drivers commute into Austin from as far away as San Antonio just to drive for Ride. That’s how much better driving for a worker co-op is. [Edit: RideAustin reached out to us to correct this information. RideAustin is not a driver co-op, and was not founded by drivers. Also, RideAustin did not launch “months” after Uber and Lyft pulled out of Austin, as the article states. RideAustin was founded within a week after the big guys left, and began rides less than a month later (first ride was on June 16, 2016). More information can be found at their site, RideAustin.com.]

I remember when the term “platform cooperativism” was first bandied about to describe this kind of thing. I was at a small, invitational tech conference where nerds, investors, activists, lawyers, SF writers and other technologically oriented types were gathered. I was on a panel about these platform co-ops and I said that I thought Uber would be really easy to replace with a co-op: the riders and the drivers valued the service, not the logo on the app, and plenty of people were happy about the convenience of Uber but unhappy about the creepy, rapacious nature of the company behind it.

An investor in the audience stood up to tell me how full of shit I was: I had no idea just how complicated Uber’s app and infrastructure were, and there was no way a bunch of grubby drivers would ever be able to match its expert coding and administration.

He was so wrong.

But there’s another, better argument against this kind of platform cooperativism: “discovery costs.” I first hailed a Ride car at South By Southwest, not long after Lyft and Uber had exited the city, and everyone going to the festival had been repeatedly warned that they would have to download the Ride app to get around the city (Austin’s taxi fleet hasn’t been up to the SXSW crowds for more than a decade, and never less so than now, having been crippled by Uber and Lyft).

So I was prepared. When I land in another city, the first app I try when I need to get around is Lyft, then Uber (Uber was a godsend in Shanghai, where we were repeatedly cheated by regular cab drivers, but where the Uber app kept everything aboveboard). Some or all of these cities might have co-op rideshares, but there’s no easy way to know about it, and without passengers, there’s no incentive for the drivers to drive for the co-ops, so even when you do try to hail a co-op, there won’t be any drivers available.

Lyft and Uber have moved back into Austin, and their drivers get fingerprinted. I just got my speaker-info package from SXSW for the 2019 festival, and the advice to download Ride before touching down is no longer the top of the checklist. I imagine that most of the attendees at SXSW will be getting around with Uber and Lyft, and 25% of the money they spend will go to those companies’ shareholders, not to the drivers.

But imagine a disruptive app that disrupted the disrupters.

Imagine if I could install a version of Ride (call it Meta-Uber) that knew about all the driver co-ops in the world. When I landed, I’d page a car with Uber or Lyft, but once a driver accepted the hail, my Meta-Uber app would signal the driver’s phone and ask, “Do you have a driver co-op app on your phone?” If the driver and I both had the co-op app, our apps would cancel the Uber reservation and re-book the trip with Meta-Uber.

That way, we could piggyback on the installed base of Uber and Lyft cars, the billions they’ve poured into getting rideshare services legalized in cities around the world, the marketing billions they’ve spent making us all accustomed to the idea of rideshare services.

This Meta-Uber service would allow for a graceful transition from the shareholder-owned rideshares to worker co-ops. When you needed a car, you’d get one, without having to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of no drivers because there are no passengers because there are no drivers. One fare at a time, we could cannibalize Lyft and Uber into the poorhouse.

The billions they’ve spent to establish “first-mover advantages” wouldn’t be unscalable stone walls around their business: they’d be immovable stone weights around their necks. Lyft and Uber would have multi-billion-dollar capital overhangs that their investors would expect to recoup, while the co-ops that nimbly leapt over Uber and Lyft would not have any such burden.

Could we do this?

Yes. Technically, this isn’t all that challenging. Create a service where drivers and passengers’ devices all register unique, per-ride codes, have the Meta-Uber check to see if the driver’s device has just posted a unique code that matches yours, and then use the built-in ride-cancelation tool that’s already incorporated into Uber and Lyft to tear down the old reservation and re-create it with Meta-Uber.

What about legal impediments, though?

That’s where the trouble starts. Tech law is a minefield of overly broad, superannuated rules that have been systematically distorted by companies that used “disruption” to batter their way into old industries, but now use these laws to shield themselves from any pressure from upstarts to seek to disrupt them.

by Cory Doctorow, Locus |  Read more:

Image: Paula Mariel Salischiker

Thin Ice

"We’re coming into campaign season for 2020, the last presidential campaign, in my estimation, that can elect a candidate who can make a real difference in the trajectory of the nation, and indeed the species. Those alive today will see what comes as we read the start of the last chapter of the final book most of us will be characters in.

Welcome to the New Year, all. It could be a bumpy ride."

~ Thomas Neuburger

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Image: Gifak.net

The Real Crisis

... is that Trump has no idea what he’s doing.

Donald Trump campaigned on the absurd lie that the United States could construct a large concrete wall across the entire US-Mexico border and coerce the Mexican government into paying for its construction. The government is currently shut down because Trump refuses to admit that his absurd lie was, in fact, an absurd lie.

Since he won’t own up to it, lie has begun to pile upon lie like a sitcom farce, to the point where Trump on Tuesday night delivered an address on the subject of an entirely fake “crisis” at the southern border. The crisis, supposedly, is the reason that we not only need a wall but need it so badly that it’s worth shutting down the government to get one.

It’s an absurd situation only heightened by the larger absurdity that the fundamentals of Trump-era America are good. Unemployment is low and the economy is growing. Unauthorized immigration is low. Funds are flowing to further enhance border security, and a halfway competent president would be able to secure more without much muss or fuss. But Donald Trump doesn’t do anything without muss or fuss. So he’s now mired in a historically low approval rating, and we as a country are mired in the overlapping fake security crisis at the border and the very real crisis of a shutdown of much of the federal government.

And the realest crisis of all is the fact that in Donald Trump, we have a president who has no idea what he’s doing.

Trump’s wall of nonsense

Whether or not it’s a good idea, at the end of the day, a president who wanted to get Congress to appropriate some extra money to build some extra steel fencing would be able to get that done.

Not everyone in Congress would agree that it’s a good idea, but the federal budget is full of line items that not everyone likes. But if something is important to the White House, they find a way to get it done by making concessions on other fronts.

There are, however, two huge problems for Trump with that approach.

One is that immigration hawks themselves do not believe that the marginal value of additional fence-building is high, largely because the United States already has a lot of border fences, which means the most valuable fencing is already in place. Consequently, immigration restrictionists in Congress and in the White House have been unwilling to strike a deal that offers Democrats anything of value — hence the need to try to extort the money from Democrats with the shutdown.

The other is that the key premise of Trump’s campaign was that all the wonky kvetching about the impossibility of his absurd border wall was just excuse-making by feckless politicians. That was the central political premise of his campaign — that he, Trump, would get tough in a unique way. To admit that actually, his critics were right all along and the smartest thing to do is simply to continue what the Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations were already doing would be politically devastating.

So Trump is asking Democrats to help him out of a political jam that he created by lying, and in exchange, he’s offering them nothing. Not surprisingly, they are not taking the deal. (...)

Catastrophe keeps us together

What we witnessed Tuesday night was not a president addressing the nation about a crisis, but a president flailing.

Simply put, he can’t even begin to put together a coherent argument for why this funding dispute about fence construction justifies a government shutdown. At the end of the day, there is literally nothing more banal in American political history than the president having a proposal he can’t get the opposition party to agree to. If every policy standoff ended in a government shutdown, we couldn’t have a country at all.

by Matthew Yglesias, Vox | Read more:
Image: misplaced

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