Tax and Spend Republicans

[ed. As Joe Biden assumes the Office of the Presidency in a couple days he's already revealed plans for a $1.9 trillion economic recovery plan (the details of which can be viewed here). Included in that budget are provisions for an immediate $1400 stimulus check to help ease the burden of the pandemic's disastrous effect on the economy. Some are asking why $1400 instead of the $2000 that was promised? Well, for one thing, Democrats weren't clear to begin with and are simply adding $1400 to the $600 that Congress approved in the Covid-relief bill last month. This I think is a mistake. If you promise a $2000 check, you should deliver a $2000 check (not some "oh, well you know this is what we really meant... blah, blah, blah). But secondarily it also shows how conditioned Democrats are to being cowed by that tired, old Republican bogeyman of being "tax and spend" liberals. So, to help nip that nonsense in the bud, please refer to the following, provided by Politifact. It's pretty obvious. Republicans are the tax and spend party (cutting taxes for corporations and the rich, spending like crazy); Democrats clean up their messes.]

***

A viral post portrays Democrats, not Republicans, as the party of fiscal responsibility, with numbers about the deficit under recent presidents to make the case.

Alex Cole, a political news editor at the website Newsitics, published the tweet July 23. Within a few hours, several Facebook users posted screenshots of the tweet, which claims that Republican presidents have been more responsible for contributing to the deficit over the past four decades.

Those posts racked up several hundred likes and shares. We also found a screenshot on Reddit, where it has been upvoted more than 53,000 times.

"Morons: ‘Democrats cause deficits,’" the original tweet reads. (...)

At PolitiFact, we’ve reported extensively on how Republicans and Democrats often try to pin the federal deficit on each other — muddying the facts in the process. So we wanted to see if this Facebook post is true.

We reached out to Newsitics, the media outlet that Cole founded and works for, to see what evidence he used to compose the tweet and didn’t hear back. Our review shows the numbers basically check out, but they don’t tell the full story.

What even is the deficit?

Some people confuse the federal deficit with the debt — but they’re two separate concepts.

The Department of the Treasury explains it like this: The deficit is the difference between the money that the government makes and the money it spends. If the government spends more than it collects in revenues, then it’s running a deficit.

The federal debt is the running total of the accumulated deficits.

Following the money

Now let’s take a closer look at each president’s impact on the federal deficit.

To check the numbers in Cole’s tweet, we went to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which has an interactive database for these kinds of figures. Here’s what we found for each claim:

"(President Ronald) Reagan took the deficit from 70 billion to 175 billion." This is more or less accurate. The federal deficit went from about $78.9 billion at the beginning of Reagan’s presidency to $152.6 billion at the end of it. At points between 1983 and 1986, the deficit was actually more than $175 billion.

"(George H.W.) Bush 41 took it to 300 billion." Close, but not exactly. The number was around $255 billion at the end of Bush’s term. The deficit spiked at around $290.3 billion the year before he left office.

"(Bill) Clinton got it to zero." This is true. During his presidency, Clinton managed to zero out the deficit and end his term with a $128.2 billion surplus.

"(George W.) Bush 43 took it from 0 to 1.2 trillion." This is in the ballpark. Ignoring the fact that he actually started his presidency with a surplus, Bush left office in 2009 with a federal deficit of roughly $1.41 trillion.

"(Barack) Obama halved it to 600 billion." This is essentially accurate. Obama left the presidency with a deficit of approximately $584.6 billion, which is more than halving $1.41 trillion. The deficit was even lower in 2015 at around $441.9 billion.

We had to look for more recent data to back up Cole’s allegation that "Trump’s got it back to a trillion."

A Treasury Department statement from June put the federal deficit at about $747.1 billion so far this fiscal year. But the agency also reported that Washington is on track to post a $1.1 trillion deficit by the end of September, which backs up Cole’s claim.

by Daniel Funke, PolitiFact |  Read more:
Image: Facebook

[ed. See also: U.S. deficits and the debt in 5 charts: A 2018 midterm report (PolitiFact); These U.S. Presidents Had the Largest Budget Deficits (Investopedia); Corporate Democrats Want Tax Breaks for the Rich — Not $2,000 Survival Checks (Jacobin); and Biden has a $1.9 trillion economic recovery plan—and a path to achieve it (Quartz).]

Masami Teraoka, Catfish Envy, 1993 
via:

Among the Insurrectionists

By the end of President Donald Trump’s crusade against American democracy—after a relentless deployment of propaganda, demagoguery, intimidation, and fearmongering aimed at persuading as many Americans as possible to repudiate their country’s foundational principles—a single word sufficed to nudge his most fanatical supporters into open insurrection. Thousands of them had assembled on the Mall, in Washington, D.C., on the morning of January 6th, to hear Trump address them from a stage outside the White House. From where I stood, at the foot of the Washington Monument, you had to strain to see his image on a jumbotron that had been set up on Constitution Avenue. His voice, however, projected clearly through powerful speakers as he rehashed the debunked allegations of massive fraud which he’d been propagating for months. Then he summarized the supposed crimes, simply, as “bullshit.”

“Bullshit! Bullshit!” the crowd chanted. It was a peculiar mixture of emotion that had become familiar at pro-Trump rallies since he lost the election: half mutinous rage, half gleeful excitement at being licensed to act on it. The profanity signalled a final jettisoning of whatever residual deference to political norms had survived the past four years. In front of me, a middle-aged man wearing a Trump flag as a cape told a young man standing beside him, “There’s gonna be a war.” His tone was resigned, as if he were at last embracing a truth that he had long resisted. “I’m ready to fight,” he said. The young man nodded. He had a thin mustache and hugged a life-size mannequin with duct tape over its eyes, “traitor” scrawled on its chest, and a noose around its neck.

“We want to be so nice,” Trump said. “We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. We’re going to have to fight much harder. And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us.”

About a mile and a half away, at the east end of the Mall, Vice-President Pence and both houses of Congress had convened to certify the Electoral College votes that had made Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the next President and Vice-President of the United States. In December, a hundred and forty Republican representatives—two-thirds of the caucus—had said that they would formally object to the certification of several swing states. Fourteen Republican senators, led by Josh Hawley, of Missouri, and Ted Cruz, of Texas, had joined the effort. The lawmakers lacked the authority to overturn the election, but Trump and his allies had concocted a fantastical alternative: Pence, as the presiding officer of the Senate, could single-handedly nullify votes from states that Biden had won. Pence, though, had advised Congress that the Constitution constrained him from taking such action.

“After this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you,” Trump told the crowd. The people around me exchanged looks of astonishment and delight. “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them—because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength.”

“No weakness!” a woman cried.

Before Trump had even finished his speech, approximately eight thousand people started moving up the Mall. “We’re storming the Capitol!” some yelled.

There was an eerie sense of inexorability, the throngs of Trump supporters advancing up the long lawn as if pulled by a current. Everyone seemed to understand what was about to happen. The past nine weeks had been steadily building toward this moment. On November 7th, mere hours after Biden’s win was projected, I attended a protest at the Pennsylvania state capitol, in Harrisburg. Hundreds of Trump supporters, including heavily armed militia members, vowed to revolt. When I asked a man with an assault rifle—a “combat-skills instructor” for a militia called the Pennsylvania Three Percent—how likely he considered the prospect of civil conflict, he told me, “It’s coming.” Since then, Trump and his allies had done everything they could to spread and intensify this bitter aggrievement. On December 5th, Trump acknowledged, “I’ve probably worked harder in the last three weeks than I ever have in my life.” (He was not talking about managing the pandemic, which since the election has claimed a hundred and fifty thousand American lives.) Militant pro-Trump outfits like the Proud Boys—a national organization dedicated to “reinstating a spirit of Western chauvinism” in America—had been openly gearing up for major violence. In early January, on Parler, an unfiltered social-media site favored by conservatives, Joe Biggs, a top Proud Boys leader, had written, “Every law makers who breaks their own stupid Fucking laws should be dragged out of office and hung.”

On the Mall, a makeshift wooden gallows, with stairs and a rope, had been constructed near a statue of Ulysses S. Grant. Some of the marchers nearby carried Confederate flags. Up ahead, the dull thud of stun grenades could be heard, accompanied by bright flashes. “They need help!” a man shouted. “It’s us versus the cops!” Someone let out a rebel yell. Scattered groups wavered, debating whether to join the confrontation. “We lost the Senate—we need to make a stand now,” a bookish-looking woman in a down coat and glasses appealed to the person next to her. The previous day, a runoff in Georgia had flipped two Republican Senate seats to the Democrats, giving them majority control.

Hundreds of Trump supporters had forced their way past barricades to the Capitol steps. In anticipation of Biden’s Inauguration, bleachers had been erected there, and the sides of the scaffolding were wrapped in ripstop tarpaulin. Officers in riot gear blocked an open flap in the fabric; the mob pressed against them, screaming insults.

“You are traitors to the country!” a man barked at the police through a megaphone plastered with stickers from “InfoWars,” the incendiary Web program hosted by the right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones. Behind the man stood Biggs, the Proud Boys leader. He wore a radio clipped onto the breast pocket of his plaid flannel shirt. Not far away, I spotted a “straight pride” flag.

There wasn’t nearly enough law enforcement to fend off the mob, which pelted the officers with cans and bottles. One man angrily invoked the pandemic lockdown: “Why can’t I work? Where’s my ‘pursuit of happiness’?” Many people were equipped with flak jackets, helmets, gas masks, and tactical apparel. Guns were prohibited for the protest, but a man in a cowboy hat, posing for a photograph, lifted his jacket to reveal a revolver tucked into his waistband. Other Trump supporters had Tasers, baseball bats, and truncheons. I saw one man holding a coiled noose.

“Hang Mike Pence!” people yelled.

Soon the mob swarmed past the officers, into the understructure of the bleachers, and scrambled through its metal braces, up the building’s granite steps. Toward the top was a temporary security wall with three doors, one of which was instantly breached. Dozens of police stood behind the wall, using shields, nightsticks, and pepper spray to stop people from crossing the threshold. Other officers took up positions on planks above, firing a steady barrage of nonlethal munitions into the solid mass of bodies. As rounds tinked off metal, and caustic chemicals filled the space as if it were a fumigation tent, some of the insurrectionists panicked: “We need to retreat and assault another point!” But most remained resolute. “Hold the line!” they exhorted. “Storm!” Martial bagpipes blared through portable speakers.

“Shoot the politicians!” somebody yelled.

“Fight for Trump!”

A jet of pepper spray incapacitated me for about twenty minutes. When I regained my vision, the mob was streaming freely through all three doors. I followed an overweight man in a Roman-era costume—sandals, cape, armguards, dagger—away from the bleachers and onto an open terrace on the Capitol’s main level. People clambered through a shattered window. Video later showed that a Proud Boy had smashed it with a riot shield. A dozen police stood in a hallway softly lit by ornate chandeliers, mutely watching the rioters—many of them wearing Trump gear or carrying Trump flags—flood into the building. Their cries resonated through colonnaded rooms: “Where’s the traitors?” “Bring them out!” “Get these fucking cocksucking Commies out!”

The attack on the Capitol was a predictable apotheosis of a months-long ferment. Throughout the pandemic, right-wing protesters had been gathering at statehouses, demanding entry. In April, an armed mob had filled the Michigan state capitol, chanting “Treason!” and “Let us in!” In December, conservatives had broken the glass doors of the Oregon state capitol, overrunning officers and spraying them with chemical agents. The occupation of restricted government sanctums was an affirmation of dominance so emotionally satisfying that it was an end in itself—proof to elected officials, to Biden voters, and also to the occupiers themselves that they were still in charge. After one of the Trump supporters breached the U.S. Capitol, he insisted through a megaphone, “We will not be denied.” There was an unmistakable subtext as the mob, almost entirely white, shouted, “Whose house? Our house!” One man carried a Confederate flag through the building. A Black member of the Capitol Police later told BuzzFeed News that, during the assault, he was called a racial slur fifteen times.

I followed a group that broke off to advance on five policemen guarding a side corridor. “Stand down,” a man in a maga hat commanded. “You’re outnumbered. There’s a fucking million of us out there, and we are listening to Trump—your boss.”

“We can take you out,” a man beside him warned.

The officers backpedalled the length of the corridor, until we arrived at a marble staircase. Then they moved aside. “We love you guys—take it easy!” a rioter yelled as he bounded up the steps, which led to the Capitol’s central rotunda.

Beneath the soaring dome, surrounded by statues of former Presidents and by large oil paintings depicting such historical scenes as the embarkation of the Pilgrims and the presentation of the Declaration of Independence, a number of young men chanted, “America first!” The phrase was popularized in 1940 by Nazi sympathizers lobbying to keep the U.S. out of the Second World War; in 2016, Trump resurrected it to describe his isolationist foreign and immigration policies. Some of the chanters, however, waved or wore royal-blue flags inscribed with “AF,” in white letters. This is the logo for the program “America First,” which is hosted by Nicholas Fuentes, a twenty-two-year-old Holocaust denier, who promotes a brand of white Christian nationalism that views politics as a means of preserving demographic supremacy. Though America Firsters revile most mainstream Republicans for lacking sufficient commitment to this priority—especially neoconservatives, whom they accuse of being subservient to Satan and Jews—the group’s loyalty to Trump is, according to Fuentes, “unconditional.”

The America Firsters and other invaders fanned out in search of lawmakers, breaking into offices and revelling in their own astounding impunity. “Nancy, I’m ho-ome! ” a man taunted, mimicking Jack Nicholson’s character in “The Shining.” Someone else yelled, “1776—it’s now or never.” Around this time, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country. . . . USA demands the truth!” Twenty minutes later, Ashli Babbitt, a thirty-five-year-old woman from California, was fatally shot while climbing through a barricaded door that led to the Speaker’s lobby in the House chamber, where representatives were sheltering. The congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, later said that she’d had a “close encounter” with rioters during which she thought she “was going to die.” Earlier that morning, another representative, Lauren Boebert—a newly elected Republican, from Colorado, who has praised QAnon and promised to wear her Glock in the Capitol—had tweeted, “Today is 1776.”

When Babbitt was shot, I was on the opposite side of the Capitol, where people were growing frustrated by the empty halls and offices.

“Where the fuck are they?”

“Where the fuck is Nancy?”

No one seemed quite sure how to proceed. “While we’re here, we might as well set up a government,” somebody suggested.

Then a man with a large “AF ” flag—college-age, cheeks spotted with acne—pushed through a series of tall double doors, the last of which gave onto the Senate chamber.

“Praise God!”

by Luke Mogelson, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Balazs Gardi for The New Yorker

Ranked-Choice Voting in Elections. Here's How It Works

New York City voted on Tuesday to change the way it determines election winners. With approval from more than 73% of voters, the Big Apple joins Maine and countries including Australia and New Zealand in adopting what’s known as ranked-choice voting.

This popular electoral system allows voters to rank candidates by preference, meaning they can submit ballots that list not only their first-choice candidate for a position, but also their second, third and so on.

Ranked-choice voting advocates, including Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who has championed it as a key policy initiative, say it could help prevent evermore polarized election campaigns, increase the number of women and minority candidates running for office, and reduce negative campaigning. Critics say that the new system could make elections much more complicated for voters and be abused by parties trying to game the system.

In addition to Maine, which has adopted the system statewide, several states are experimenting with ranked-choice voting. Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, and Wyoming plan to use ranked-choice for voters in the 2020 Democratic primaries, and Nevada plans to use it for early voters in their 2020 Democratic caucuses, according to FairVote, a nonpartisan group that advocates for election reform.

“We are really settling on ranked-choice voting as the most promising reform to democratize and depolarize our politics,” says Larry Diamond, the former director of Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. “I think it’s not only here to stay but that it’s gaining support across the country.”

Here’s what to know about ranked-choice voting.

What is ranked-choice voting?

Ranked-choice voting is an electoral system that allows people to vote for multiple candidates, in order of preference. Instead of just choosing who you want to win, you fill out the ballot saying who is your first choice, second choice, or third choice (or more as needed) for each position.

The candidate with the majority (more than 50%) of first-choice votes wins outright. If no candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes, then it triggers a new counting process. The candidate who did the worst is eliminated, and that candidate’s voters’ ballots are redistributed to their second-choice pick. In other words, if you ranked a losing candidate as your first choice, and the candidate is eliminated, then your vote still counts: it just moves to your second-choice candidate. That process continues until there is a candidate who has the majority of votes.

In comparison, the U.S. federal government and most American states and cities currently use what’s known as the plurality system: the candidate with the highest number of votes wins—period. It doesn’t matter whether that candidate earned the majority of the vote.

In a ranked-choice voting system, it works differently. The winning candidate almost always ends up with a majority of votes—even if some portion of the electorate selected him or her as a second or third choice.

Ranked-choice voting works in a variety of contexts. New York City will join Maine in using instant-runoff voting.

How ranked-choice voting could affect U.S. elections

If ranked-choice voting was adopted nationwide, it would fundamentally change how U.S. elections work.

Take the last presidential election, for example. In 2016, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton received less than 50% of the total vote in 12 states, with the remainder going to third-party candidates. Under the current system, in each of those states, the candidate with the most votes was declared victorious. If the U.S. had a ranked-choice voting system, voters would have been asked to choose a second choice, third choice or more. (If Green Party candidate Jill Stein was a voter’s first choice, for instance, she would have been given the option of choosing a different candidate—Clinton, Trump, etc.—as her second choice.)

Ranked-choice voting advocates argue that the plurality system doesn’t always reflect the true will of the people. It can lead to vote-splitting among candidates with similar positions, resulting in a candidate who is less popular overall being elected, experts say. That’s called the “Nader” effect or the “spoiler” effect. (...)

Because it helps eliminate vote-splitting, a ranked-choice voting system can have the effect of encouraging more third-party and centrist candidates, advocates say. Michael Bloomberg, a centrist, third-party candidate, considered running in the 2016 presidential election but decided not to upon concluding that he might split the Democratic vote with Clinton, increasing the chances of Trump’s victory. (Trump, of course, still won the election, though he lost the popular vote to Clinton.) Again, the 2016 election offers a good hypothetical example. If a ranked-choice voting system had been in place in Michigan, then Clinton, not Trump, may have won that state. Because neither candidate received a majority of the Michigan vote, ranked-choice voting would have come into play. And if we can assume that most Stein voters would have chosen Clinton as their second choice, the former Secretary of State would have won, according to Saari. Trump won Michigan by 10,700; Stein received more than 51,000 votes. (...)

What are the benefits of ranked-choice voting?

Ranked-choice voting can lead to less negative campaigning, says Richard DeLeon, who researches ranked-choice voting at San Francisco State University. Less divisive political environments can also have the effect of helping female, minority, centrist candidates, and third-party candidates.

“A lot of research shows that when you, as a candidate, go negative, you hurt public perceptions of yourself, but you do more damage to your opponent, and in plurality elections, this tradeoff can pay off,” says Diamond, the Stanford researcher. But since candidates are forced to rely on second and third-place votes in ranked-choice elections, negative campaigning can open the way for a third candidate to gain support. “It becomes much more costly to go negative since you risk losing your ability to pick up second-preference votes, and it actually does more harm than good,” Diamond adds.

A 2018 study showed that this created a slight percentage increase in female candidates running. This may be because women can be “deterred from running for office if they have to campaign negatively to win,” explains Sarah John, an author of the study and former director of research at FairVote. “Over time we expect candidates to learn how to run an effective ranked-choice voting election campaign, which will less often include ‘going negative.”

The study also showed that women overall and minority women are more likely to win in ranked-choice voting systems. This is, in part, because of an unconscious ticket “balancing” that many voters tend to practice. “When voters are asked to vote for or rank a whole field of candidates under proportional or ranked systems, they often tend to include female or minority candidates in the mix for balance,” explains John.

According to experts, ranked-choice systems also tend to favor centrist candidates, since the system allows voters to express preference for one-sided, partisan candidates of their choice, as well as moderate candidates, who have broader appeal. Partisan candidates have a narrower appeal, so they are less likely to be the second and third-choice for voters than a centrist candidate would be. This can also motivate partisan candidates to avoid taking extremes as well as give third-party, centrist candidates more incentive to run.

by Anna Purna Kambhampaty, Time |  Read more:

Image: Gabriela Bhaskar—The New York Times/Redux

[ed. Positives and negatives. If the process favors more "centrists" (middle of the road, wishy washy types) then I consider that a definite downside.]  

How AWS and Other Cloud Providers Became the Internet’s Most Powerful Moderators

When Amazon Web Services decided to stop hosting the alt-right social network Parler last week following the insurrection at the Capitol, it looked like the site was doomed to go offline.

Migrating an app successfully between cloud providers, and ensuring it works on the other side as expected, is hard enough. But moving the vast amounts of data associated with a social network (likely hundreds of terabytes of information) would be agonizingly slow, taking far longer than the 24-hour warning Amazon gave Parler.

Unfortunately for Parler, virtually every other vendor was ditching them as well. With cloud providers rejecting them and no physical servers of its own, Parler has nowhere to go and now says it may never return.

The swift shutdown of Parler illustrates a wonder of the modern internet. It’s simple to get a website or service online without ever physically seeing or touching a server. Developers can choose from an array of hosts, from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, click a few buttons, and be online in a few minutes. These companies manage vast data centers full of servers, renting them out by the hour, so you don’t need to think about setting up your own gear. They have centralized much of the web, which gives them unprecedented power to police it.

This is a relatively new phenomenon. Until just over a decade ago, getting anything online at scale was a complicated, expensive process. It required procuring expensive physical servers from a company like Dell or HP, putting them in a data center somewhere, and configuring them yourself to get them up and running. Smaller companies might contract with a “colocation” provider like Rackspace to rent a spot for their servers in its data center, but the arrangement was expensive and slow, taking days or weeks to get the contracts signed, servers delivered, set up, and online.

Those enormous data centers are still there; they’re just operated by the largest companies at an enormous scale. Rather than renting an entire server sitting in a rack somewhere, virtualization technology allows companies like Amazon to rent out hundreds of tiny slices of a single server’s performance to lots of people, which is what makes it such a profitable business.

Because of the complexity and expertise involved, nobody wants to buy an actual server because then you’re stuck maintaining it, replacing it every few years, and making sure it’s in a safe place — doing so would be far too expensive for most services. (...)

Larger companies and governments do still operate their own data centers for various reasons, from data privacy to local laws that disallow using cloud services, but the vast majority of the world now rents servers from one or more cloud providers.

Most of the largest services, like Apple’s iCloud, use multiple cloud platforms to avoid putting their eggs in one basket in case of outages. The average company can’t afford this because it’s hilariously expensive to pay multiple cloud platforms—and it requires ensuring that your app is built to work correctly when spread across all of them.

Snap, for example, revealed in 2017 that it had a contract with Google Cloud for $2 billion over five years for its service, in addition to a contract with Amazon Web Services for $1 billion. It’s unlikely Parler has that kind of money, let alone custom contracts with any of these companies.

When Amazon booted Parler from its cloud platform, there was little the company could have done to stay online, which shows the power of deplatforming hate. A decade ago, when the norm would have been owning actual servers and space in a data center, the company likely could have stayed online in a similar fashion to how torrent website The Pirate Bay famously dodged almost every global takedown it’s faced over the last 20 years.

But, gone are the days when it was common for smaller companies to own servers. It’s simply not realistic anymore. Getting things online fast and cheap has been an incredible change to how the internet is cobbled together, but it has also centralized the majority of the web around giant platforms like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — which means that the internet is at the mercy of their whims as well, for better or worse.

by Owen Williams, One Zero |  Read more:

Image: Thiago Prudêncio/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

[Ed. See also: Beyond Platforms: Private Censorship, Parler, and the Stack (EFF); How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler (Glenn Greenwald).]

Paywalls

[ed. Everybody hates paywalls (see here, here, here, here and here), and some are more impenetrable (and irritating) than others (like the Washington Post, thanks J. Bezos). There are some workarounds and it's probably worthwhile to revisit them from time to time. Here are a couple I've found on the Chrome extensions page:]

Cookie Remover: removes cookies (and paywall) from the current page.

Outline: Read and annotate without distractions (cut and paste url for a paywall/ad-free experience).

Also, just opening a link in incognito mode (Chrome users) can sometimes work

Orlando Agudelo-Botero, Democracia, 2017

via: Uncivil Liberty (Lapham's Quarterly)

Violence in the Capitol, Dangers in the Aftermath

In the days and weeks after the 9/11 attack, Americans were largely united in emotional horror at what had been done to their country as well as in their willingness to endorse repression and violence in response. As a result, there was little room to raise concerns about the possible excesses or dangers of the American reaction, let alone to dissent from what political leaders were proposing in the name of vengeance and security. The psychological trauma from the carnage and the wreckage at the country’s most cherished symbols swamped rational faculties and thus rendered futile any attempts to urge restraint or caution.

Nonetheless, a few tried. Scorn and sometimes worse were universally heaped upon them.

On September 14 — while bodies were still buried under burning rubble in downtown Manhattan — Congresswoman Barbara Lee cast a lone vote against the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF). “Some of us must urge the use of restraint,” she said seventy-two hours after the attack, adding: “our country is in a state of mourning” and thus “some of us must say: let’s step back for a moment, let’s pause just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.”

For simply urging caution and casting a single “no” vote against war, Lee’s Congressional office was deluged with threats of violence. Armed security was deployed to protect her, largely as a result of media attackssuggesting that she was anti-American and sympathetic to terrorists. Yet twenty years later — with U.S. troops still fighting in Afghanistan under that same AUMF, with Iraq destroyed, ISIS spawned, and U.S. civil liberties and privacy rights permanently crippled — her solitary admonitions look far more like courage, prescience and wisdom than sedition or a desire to downplay the threat of Al Qaeda.

Others also raised similar questions and issued similar warnings. On the left, people like Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky, and on the right people such as Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan — in different ways and at different times — urged U.S. politicians and Americans generally to resist unleashing an orgy of domestic assaults on civil liberties, foreign invasions, and an endless war posture. They warned that such a cycle, once initiated, would be very difficult to control, even more difficult to reverse, and virtually guaranteed to provoke even greater violence. (...)

In retrospect, it is hard to deny that those who defied, or at least questioned, the potent 2001 emotional consensus by urging deliberation in lieu of reactionary rage were vindicated by subsequent events: the two-decade expansion of the war in Afghanistan to multiple countries, the enactment of the Patriot Act, the secret implementation of mass surveillance systems, the trillions of dollars of taxpayer wealth transferred to weapons manufacturers, and the paramilitarization of the domestic security state. At the very least, basic rationality requires an acknowledgement that when political passions and rage-driven emotions find their most intense expression, calls for reflection and caution can only be valuable even if ultimately rejected. (...)

There are other, more important historical lessons to draw not only from the 9/11 attack but subsequent terrorism on U.S. soil. One is the importance of resisting the coercive framework that demands everyone choose one of two extremes: that the incident is either (a) insignificant or even justifiable, or (b) is an earth-shattering, radically transformative event that demands radical, transformative state responses.

This reductive, binary framework is anti-intellectual and dangerous. One can condemn a particular act while resisting the attempt to inflate the dangers it poses. One can acknowledge the very real existence of a threat while also warning of the harms, often far greater, from proposed solutions. One can reject maximalist, inflammatory rhetoric about an attack (a War of Civilizations, an attempted coup, an insurrection, sedition) without being fairly accused of indifference toward or sympathy for the attackers.

Indeed, the primary focus of the first decade of my journalism was the U.S. War on Terror — in particular, the relentless erosions of civil liberties and the endless militarization of American society in the name of waging it. To make the case that those trends should be opposed, I frequently argued that the threat posed by Islamic radicalism to U.S. citizens was being deliberately exaggerated, inflated and melodramatized. (...)

It is stunning to watch now as every War on Terror rhetorical tactic to justify civil liberties erosions is now being invoked in the name of combatting Trumpism, including the aggressive exploitation of the emotions triggered by yesterday’s events at the Capitol to accelerate their implementation and demonize dissent over the quickly formed consensus. The same framework used to assault civil liberties in the name of foreign terrorism is now being seamlessly applied — often by those who spent the last two decades objecting to it — to the threat posed by “domestic white supremacist terrorists,” the term preferred by liberal elites, especially after yesterday, for Trump supporters generally. In so many ways, yesterday was the liberals’ 9/11, as even the most sensible commentators among them are resorting to the most unhinged rhetoric available.

by Glenn Greenwald, Substack |  Read more:

Image: Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

Edward Burtynsky, Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, China, 2005
via:

Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes

Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth, as of this week, about $220 million.

The password will let him unlock a small hard drive, known as an IronKey, which contains the private keys to a digital wallet that holds 7,002 Bitcoin. While the price of Bitcoin dropped sharply on Monday, it is still up more than 50 percent from just a month ago, when it passed its previous all-time high of around $20,000.

The problem is that Mr. Thomas years ago lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever. He has since tried eight of his most commonly used password formulations — to no avail.

“I would just lay in bed and think about it,” Mr. Thomas said. “Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again.”

Bitcoin, which has been on an extraordinary and volatile eight-month run, has made a lot of its holders very rich in a short time, even as the coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the world economy.

But the cryptocurrency’s unusual nature has also meant that many people are locked out of their Bitcoin fortunes as a result of lost or forgotten keys. They have been forced to watch, helpless, as the price has risen and fallen sharply, unable to cash in on their digital wealth.

Of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent — currently worth around $140 billion — appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets, according to the cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis. Wallet Recovery Services, a business that helps find lost digital keys, said it had gotten 70 requests a day from people who wanted help recovering their riches, three times the number of a month ago.

Bitcoin owners who are locked out of their wallets speak of endless days and nights of frustration as they have tried to get access to their fortunes. Many have owned the coins since Bitcoin’s early days a decade ago, when no one had confidence that the tokens would be worth anything.

“Through the years I would say I have spent hundreds of hours trying to get back into these wallets,” said Brad Yasar, an entrepreneur in Los Angeles who has a few desktop computers that contain thousands of Bitcoin he created, or mined, during the early days of the technology. While those Bitcoin are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he lost his passwords many years ago and has put the hard drives containing them in vacuum-sealed bags, out of sight.

“I don’t want to be reminded every day that what I have now is a fraction of what I could have that I lost,” he said.

The dilemma is a stark reminder of Bitcoin’s unusual technological underpinnings, which set it apart from normal money and give it some of its most vaunted — and riskiest — qualities. With traditional bank accounts and online wallets, banks like Wells Fargo and other financial companies like PayPal can provide people the passwords to their accounts or reset lost passwords.

But Bitcoin has no company to provide or store passwords. The virtual currency’s creator, a shadowy figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto, has said Bitcoin’s central idea was to allow anyone in the world to open a digital bank account and hold the money in a way that no government could prevent or regulate.

This is made possible by the structure of Bitcoin, which is governed by a network of computers that agreed to follow software containing all the rules for the cryptocurrency. The software includes a complex algorithm that makes it possible to create an address, and associated private key, which is known only by the person who created the wallet. (...)

But the structure of this system did not account for just how bad people can be at remembering and securing their passwords.

by Nathaniel Popper, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via

Geert Oliver
via:

Lucien Lorelle, “Les Baigneuses, collage Hommage à Picasso (Nus surréalistes)”, 1933.
via:

Bernie Sanders Wants to Go Big

Shortly before the 2016 election, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the Republican nominee for vice president and the speaker of the House, told a group of college Republicans why he thought Democrats winning control of the Senate would be a policy nightmare.

“Do you know who becomes chair of the Senate Budget Committee?” Mr. Ryan asked. “A guy named Bernie Sanders. You ever heard of him?”

Republicans have long feared the prospect of Mr. Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist from Vermont, taking the helm of the powerful committee given his embrace of bigger government and more federal spending with borrowed money. With Democrats reclaiming the Senate, that fear is about to become a reality. Mr. Sanders, the most progressive member of the chamber, will have a central role in shaping and steering the Democrats’ tax and spending plans through a Congress that they control with the slimmest of margins.

Mr. Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and twice ran unsuccessfully for the party’s presidential nomination, said he would move quickly in his new role to push through a robust and deficit-financed economic stimulus package soon after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes office.

“I believe that the crisis is of enormous severity and we’ve got to move as rapidly as we can,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview.

“Underline the word aggressive,” he said. “Start out there.”

Despite Democrats’ narrow control of the Senate, Mr. Sanders is expected to exert heavy influence over taxes, health care, climate change and several other domestic issues. That is because his role as budget chairman will give him control over a little-known but incredibly powerful congressional tool that allows certain types of legislation to win Senate approval with just a simple majority.

That tool — a budget mechanism called reconciliation — allows Congress to move some legislation without gaining 60 votes. It has become the vehicle for several major legislative efforts this century, including tax cuts under President Trump and President George W. Bush, and the final version of President Barack Obama’s signature health care bill.

The reconciliation process begins with lawmakers adopting a budget resolution, originating in the House and Senate Budget Committees, which can include directions to congressional committees on how much to increase federal spending or taxes.

The nature of the process effectively gives Mr. Sanders a leading role in deciding how expansive — and expensive — Mr. Biden’s ambitions for new taxes and spending will be.

Mr. Sanders said in the interview that he wanted an initial, emergency stimulus package to be “big.” He thinks it must include an additional $1,400 in direct payments for adults and children, on top of the $600 that Congress just passed, along with money for states and cities to fund coronavirus vaccine distribution, testing and contact tracing. He also wants to create an emergency universal health care program, so that anyone can get medical treatment during the pandemic, whether they currently have insurance or not.

Mr. Sanders said he had been speaking with Mr. Biden about the scale and timing of stimulus legislation. He said that he did not intend to try to force his long-held priorities, such as “Medicare for all,” into a relief bill. However, he does intend to test the legal bounds of how reconciliation can be used so that Democrats can pass policies that go beyond traditional budget items and address “structural problems in American society.”

by Alan Rappeport and Jim Tankersley, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Elizabeth Frantz for The New York Times
[ed. Go Bernie, go!]

You Can’t Have an Open-Carry Democracy

Last Wednesday evening, as soldiers went room to room clearing the United States Capitol of seditionists, I was on the phone with Michigan State Sen. Dayna Polehanki, who recalled the April 2020 day when men with long guns showed up at the statehouse in Lansing to pressure lawmakers to repeal a COVID-19 emergency law. Like last week’s siege, that incursion was egged on by Donald Trump, who tweeted in support, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” Some observers even thought the president’s tweet constituted insurrection—the offense for which he is now being impeached.

The intimidation in Michigan worked: Lawmakers did repeal the law, and though Polehanki did not vote with the majority, she told me the threat was clear: “When I can’t speak freely and press my vote button because someone is standing over me with a rifle, you’re infringing on my First Amendment rights.” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel agreed that the protesters had crossed the line from simply carrying weapons to brandishing them—making a threat. (Later, it turned out that several men present were plotting to kidnap the governor.)

On Monday, the Michigan State Capitol Commission decided to prohibit open carry inside the statehouse, citing the attack on Congress. It was an acknowledgment that—beneath the conspiracy theories, the presidential cult of personality, and the craven Republican Party—the big challenge to returning to any kind of political sense of “normal” is guns. (...)

For a decade, we’ve been slowly adjusting to the new role of guns in public life. We’ve redesigned schools, installed metal detectors at every theater and arena, and endured horrific massacres at events including a Brooklyn block party, a California garlic festival, an El Paso, Texas, Walmart, and a Dayton, Ohio, nightlife district. And that was just over eight days in 2019. While the pandemic has brought some respite from headline-grabbing massacres such as school shootings, the toll of gun violence in 2020 was even worse than the year before. Shootings almost doubled in New York City. Murders in both Chicago and New York rose by 50 percent. This trend was consistent across most U.S. cities.

And while America’s trigger-happy policing is not new, police departments justify the warrior-cop equipment on display at this summer’s protests by citing the heavily armed populace. Indeed, police are more likely to kill and to be killed in parts of America where more people own guns.

So in a way, confronting the role of guns in political life—from Washington to Lansing to beleaguered county commissions—is long overdue. After Michigan, the issue flared again this summer as militia groups confronted Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon; Austin, Texas; and Kenosha, Wisconsin. Several people were killed.

When the rioters entered Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s suite in the Capitol last week, staffers hiding in her conference room had turned off the lights and barricaded the door—techniques, she told 60 Minutes, they learned from active shooter drills in high school. (...)

... sooner rather than later, we’re going to have to deal with the oxymoron of open-carry democracy. How do we permit a populace armed to the teeth to safely march, to rally, to watch its government in action, to confront and engage with politicians at will? When does the mere presence of a gun become a threat?

by Henry Grabar, Slate |  Read more:

Image: Seth Herald/Getty Images

[ed. See also: Chekhov's gun: 'If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.']

Emergency Room Notebook, 1977

You never hear sirens in the emergency room — the drivers turn them off on Webster Street. I see the red backup lights of ACE or United Ambulance out of the corner of my eye. Usually we are expecting them, alerted by the MED NET radio, just like on TV. “City One: This is ACE, Code Two. Forty-two-year-old male, head injury, BP 190 over 110. Conscious. ETA three minutes.” “City One … 76542 Clear.”

If it is Code Three, where life is in critical danger, the doctor and nurses wait outside, chatting in anticipation. Inside, in room 6, the trauma room, is the Code Blue team. EKG, X-ray technicians, respiratory therapists, cardiac nurses. In most Code Blues, though, the EMT drivers or firemen are too busy to call in. Piedmont Fire Department never does, and they have the worst. Rich massive coronaries, matronly phenobarbital suicides, children in swimming pools.

All day long the heavy hearselike Cadillacs of Care Ambulance back up just to the left of emergency parking. All day long, just outside my window, their gurneys sail past to cobalt, radiation therapy. The ambulances are gray, the drivers wear gray, the blankets are gray, the patients are yellow-gray except where the doctors have marked their skulls or throats with a dazzling red Magic Marker X.

They asked me to work over there. No thanks. I hate lingering good-byes. Why do I still make tasteless jokes about death? I take it very seriously now. Study it. Not directly, just sniffing around. I see death as a person … sometimes many people, saying hello. Blind Mrs. Diane Adderly, Mr. Gionotti, Madame Y, my grandma.

Madame Y is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She looks dead, actually, her skin translucent blue-white, her exquisitely boned Oriental face serene and ageless. She wears black slacks and boots, mandarin-collared jackets cut and trimmed in Asia? France? The Vatican, maybe — they have the weight of a bishop’s cassock — or an X-ray robe. The piping has been done by hand in rich fuchsias, magentas, oranges.

Her Bentley drives up at nine, driven by a flippant Filipino who chain-smokes Shermans in the parking lot. Her two sons, tall, in suits made in Hong Kong, escort her from the car to the entrance of radiation therapy. It is a long walk from there, down a corridor. She is the only person who walks it alone. At the entrance she turns to her sons, smiles, and bows. They bow back to her and watch until she has reached the end of the hall. When she disappears they go for coffee and talk on the telephone.

An hour and a half later everyone reappears at once. She, with two flushed spots of mauve on her cheekbones, her sons, the Bentley with the Filipino, and they all glide away. Glisten and sheen of the silver car, her black hair, her silk jacket. The entire ritual as silent and flowing as blood.

She is dead now. Not sure when it happened, on one of my days off. She always seemed dead anyway, but nicely so, like an illustration or advertisement.

I like my job in Emergency. Blood, bones, tendons seem like affirmations to me. I am awed by the human body, by its endurance. Thank God — because it’ll be hours before X-ray or Demerol. Maybe I’m morbid. I am fascinated by two fingers in a baggie, a glittering switchblade all the way out of a lean pimp’s back. I like the fact that, in Emergency, everything is reparable, or not.

Code Blues. Well, everybody loves Code Blues. That’s when somebody dies — their heart stops beating, they stop breathing — but the Emergency team can, and often does, bring them back to life. Even if the patient is a tired eighty-year-old you can’t help but get caught up in the drama of resuscitation, if only for a while. Many lives, young fruitful ones, are saved.

The pace and excitement of ten or fifteen people, performers … it’s like opening night at the theater. The patients, if they are conscious, take part too, if just by looking interested in all the goings-on. They never look afraid.

If the family is with the patient it is my job to get information from them, to keep them informed about what’s going on. Reassure them, mostly.

While the staff members think in terms of good or bad codes — how well everyone did what they were supposed to do, whether the patient responded or not — I think in terms of good or bad deaths.

Bad deaths are ones with the manager of a hotel as next of kin, or the cleaning woman who found the stroke victim two weeks later, dying of dehydration. Really bad deaths are when there are several children and in-laws I have called in from somewhere inconvenient and none of them seem to know each other or the dying parent at all. There is nothing to say. They keep talking about making arrangements, about having to make arrangements, about who will make arrangements.

Gypsies are good deaths. I think so … the nurses don’t and security guards don’t. There are always dozens of them, demanding to be with the dying person, to kiss them and hug them, unplugging and screwing up the TVs and monitors and assorted apparatus. The best thing about Gypsy deaths is they never make their kids keep quiet. The adults wail and cry and sob but all the children continue to run around, playing and laughing, without being told they should be sad or respectful.

Good deaths seem to be coincidentally good Codes — the patient responds miraculously to all this life-giving treatment and then just quietly passes away.

Mr. Gionotti’s death was good … The family respected the staff’s request that they stay outside, but one by many one they went in and made their presence known to Mr. Gionotti and came out to reassure the others that everything was being done. There were a lot of them, sitting, standing, touching, smoking, laughing sometimes. I felt I was present at a celebration, a family reunion.

One thing I do know about death. The “better” the person, the more loving and happy and caring, the less of a gap that person’s death makes.

When Mr. Gionotti died, well, he was dead, and Mrs. Gionotti wept, they all did, but they all went weeping off together, and with him, really.

I saw blind Mr. Adderly on the 51 bus the other night. His wife, Diane Adderly, came in DOA a few months ago. He had found her body at the foot of the stairs, with his cane. Ratshit Nurse McCoy kept telling him to stop crying.

“It simply won’t help the situation, Mr. Adderly.”

“Nothing will help. It’s all I can do. Let me alone.”

When he heard McCoy had left, to make arrangements, he told me that he had never cried before. It scared him, because of his eyes.

I put her wedding band on his little finger. Over a thousand dollars in grimy cash had been in her bra, and I put it in his wallet. I told him that the denominations were fifties, twenties, and hundreds and he would need to find somebody to sort it all out.

When I saw him later on a bus he must have remembered my walk or smell. I didn’t see him at all — just climbed on the bus and slumped into the nearest seat. He even got up from the front seat near the driver to sit by me.

“Hello, Lucia,” he said.

He was very funny, describing his new, messy roommate at the Hilltop House for the Blind. I couldn’t imagine how he could know his roommate was messy, but then I could and told him my Marx Brothers idea of two blind roommates — shaving cream on the spaghetti, slipping on spilled stuffaroni, etc. We laughed and were silent, holding hands … from Pleasant Valley to Alcatraz Avenue. He cried, softly. My tears were for my own loneliness, my own blindness.

The first night I worked in Emergency, an ACE ambulance brought in a Jane Doe. Staff was short that night so the ambulance drivers and I undressed her, pulled the shredded panty hose off of varicose veins, toenails curling like parrots’. We unstuck her papers, not from her gray flesh-colored bra but from her clammy breasts. A picture of a young man in a marine uniform: George 1944. Three wet coupons for Purina cat chow and a blurred red, white, and blue Medicare card. Her name was Jane. Jane Daugherty. We tried the phone book. No Jane, no George.

If their purses haven’t already been stolen old women never seem to have anything in them but bottom dentures, a 51 bus schedule, and an address book with no last names.

The drivers and I worked together with pieces of information, calling the California Hotel for Annie, underlined, the Five-Spot cleaners. Sometimes we just have to wait until a relative calls, looking for them. Emergency phones ring all day long. “Have you seen a — ?” Old people. I get mixed up about old people. It seems a shame to do a total hip replacement or a coronary bypass on some ninety-five-year-old who whispers, “Please let me go.”

It doesn’t seem old people should fall down so much, take so many baths. But maybe it’s important for them to walk alone, stand on their own two feet. Sometimes it seems they fall on purpose, like the woman who ate all those Ex-Lax — to get away from the nursing home.

There is a great deal of flirty banter among the nurses and the ambulance crews. “So long — seizure later.” It used to shock me, all the jokes while they’re in the middle of a tracheotomy or shaving a patient for monitors. An eighty-year-old woman, fractured pelvis, sobbing, “Hold my hand! Please hold my hand!” Ambulance drivers rattling on about the Oakland Stompers.

“Hold her bloody hand, man!” He looked at me like I was crazy. I don’t hold many hands anymore and I joke a lot, too, if not around patients. There is a great deal of tension and pressure. It’s draining — being involved in life-and-death situations all the time.

Even more draining, and the real cause of tension and cynicism, is that so many of the patients we get in Emergency are not only not emergencies, there is nothing the matter with them at all. It gets so you yearn for a good cut-and-dried stabbing or a gunshot wound. All day long, all night long, people come in because they don’t have much appetite, have irregular BMs, stiff necks, red or green urine (which invariably means they had beets or spinach for lunch).

Can you hear all those sirens in the background, in the middle of the night? More than one of them is going to pick up some old guy who ran out of Gallo port.

by Lucia Berlin, A Manual For Cleaning Women |

“Good news! He’ll be gone in a week!”

via: Paul Noth

Via Getty

People Thought This Rioter's Name Was "Via Getty" (Buzz Feed)
via: (not Getty)
[ed. Hilarious. The internet is on the case. See also: The Capitol rioters put themselves all over social media. Now they’re getting arrested (Vox/Recode).]

Mobile Homes As Chic Affordable Housing

The following is a lightly-edited extract from a podcast conversation I had with Andres Duany, a principal founder of the New Urbanist movement. In it, Duany proposes the mobile home as an intelligent response to the affordable housing crisis—bucking the dogma and the orthodoxies of our horrified New Urbanist colleagues. The full interview can be heard here (no paywall).

Kunstler: I know for a couple of years now you’ve been studying the mobile home industry, mainly as a way of figuring out how to deliver affordable dwellings to people. This has raised a lot of ire among our fellow New Urbanists, who can’t process the idea. What did you learn from all this?

Duany: It’s not ire. They think I’ve lost my mind. It’s like pity. Okay, first of all where does it come from? (And it took me a long time to arrive at this.) Most people don’t understand how much subsidized affordable housing Liz [Plater-Zyberk] and I have built, because we never show it. We’ve done so much affordable housing for agricultural laborers, for black communities. It’s nice-looking—actually we’ve gotten some prizes. Why don’t we show it? I never show it because you might ask me how much it costs. And it actually costs twice as much as regular market housing. With government subsidies everything blows up in expense. Now, I know very well that there will not be money for subsidies any longer, but there are ways to deliver housing that costs much less to build without a subsidy. (...)

So, I backed into the mobile home industry and I realized that they had solved the problem technically. They know how to build it. And, by the way, it’s not like the 1960s mobile homes, the ones that are collapsing. These are much, much better. The codes have improved tremendously. But they still look horrible.

So, what we have is a cultural problem, not a technical problem. Whenever you see new mobile homes, they’re not new parks, they’re old ones being refurbished, switching out the units. You can’t get new ones permitted. But what happens is nobody wants them [anywhere near them] because they’re so distinctly for “losers.” Now, parenthetically, they’re not “losers.” They’re actually people who don’t make enough money to get any other kind of house, and very often they have jobs and everything else. Many are down on their luck, but they’re not dysfunctional people on the whole. They’re paying every month for the charges and for the unit and maintaining them. Don’t think they’re “losers.” They’re just people on a low burn-rate.

But the mobile home industry has cultural problem. The reason is that the mobile home tries desperately to look like conventional housing, with the little pitched roofs, the clapboards, the little shutters. When you compare them to conventional houses, they’re always less good. If you compare them to the 1950s houses by Philip Johnson in Connecticut, the great houses by the chic architects of the ‘50s for the Houston oil people, which are flat-roofed boxes with sliding glass doors—they’re ultra-chic, particularly these days when everybody loves mid-century modern. So, instead of making my mobile homes look like “shotgun” houses, we redesign them to look like mid-century modern.

Suddenly they’re so much better! You know how the [shipping] container houses are so popular? Well, those are actually miserable inside. They’re only eight feet wide and so forth. So, you pick up the aesthetic of the container house in mid-century modern, and suddenly you have a winner—and it’s $90 a square foot! It’s not $50 anymore, but that’s still $100, $200, $300 less than stick-built housing. We’re hacking the industry’s technical abilities, and over-laying on it a very advanced aesthetic. It’s no longer the dwellings of losers but the dwellings of winners.

Kunstler: Part of your idea was a way to provide housing in the big corporate parking lots of companies like Google and Apple, that don’t pay their tech workers enough to live otherwise in these high-priced places, right?

Duany: The kids at Google are earning, minimum, 150,000, okay? God knows maybe more than that. And they’re still commuting an hour and sharing a ranch house somewhere. The traffic jams are unbelievable. So, we said, “why not use the parking lots?” The tiny houses that we design meet the standards of the Department of Motor Vehicles. We followed that code, so they’re legal to park in parking lots. You put them there instead of the car, and the kids don’t have to commute. And they’re very, very chic. They’ve got leather chairs, they’re finished with Japanese interiors, full baths, queen-sized beds. They’re definitely not for losers. They’re cool. They’re not…a ranch house somewhere! We tried so hard and spent a lot of extra money so that they would not be associated with losers. They’d be associated with people who have a choice. This housing is for people with master’s degrees, okay? I say that not to be cruel to everybody else but just to get the damn things permitted, approved by the neighborhood.

by James Howard Kunstler, The American Conservative | Read more:
Image via:
[ed. Imagine repurposing ghost malls with their miles of parking spaces (and infrastructure already in place) for affordable housing, or to help with homelessness. Makes too much sense. See also: Transforming trailers (CNU).] 

The FTC Should Do Its Job

A Simple Thing Biden Can Do to Reset America

“An Extremely Online Riot”

The riot inside Congress last week is going to be with us for a long time, in terms of reaction and policy response. While we can lay responsibility on Donald Trump’s doorstep for inciting the violent behavior, he himself did not participate in the riot itself, nor did he pay for people to come to D.C. to be a part of it. Trump can channel the anger of large numbers of alienated people, but the anger and paranoia exists independently of him, even though he uses this rage for his own purposes. And even when Trump is gone, these angry people will remain in our society.

So who are they? Some are opportunists who flew private jets to D.C. to break windows, others are far-right racists flying Confederate flags, and a few are just normal Republican activists and officeholders choosing to indulge an anti-democratic violent fantasy. But many in what CNN’s Brian Stelter called an Extremely Online riot are middle or lower middle class people who found their way to radicalism through social media. The one who has been profiled in depth is Ashli Babbitt, a woman who died from a gunshot wound as she tried to climb into the Speaker’s lobby. In tracing her life, I think there are some lessons about what we can do to stop the polarization and radicalization of our society. (...)

So here’s the profile of a rioter, a working class person who went overseas eight times in military service, including two combat zones, who then tried her hand at a small business where financial predators and monopolists lurked. She then fell in with conspiratorial social media, and turned into a violent rioter who, like most of the rioters, thought she was defending America by overturning an election.

It’s easy to mock this kind of thinking, to see rioters as losers or racists. And no doubt there’s a strain of deep-seated racial animus that is with us and always will be, but I think ascribing all of it to such an explanation is too simple. Racist or no, Babbitt really was at one point a patriotic American, serving in the military for over half her adult life. More broadly, she’s far from alone in expressing rage at the status quo. There have protests against the existing social order for almost a decade, starting with the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and then Black Lives Matter in 2014 and accelerating into protests and riots earlier this year. I’ve written about the relationship between unrest and corporate power in the context of those protests, a sense of alienation that normal political channels, that politics itself is not a realistic path for addressing social problems. (...)

There are two paths in a representative democracy if we have a large group who lives in a cult-like artificial world of misinformation, and many more who rightly or wrongly don’t trust any political institution. We can try to strip these people of representation and political power; that is the guiding idea behind removing Trump, as well as a whole host of conservatives, off of Silicon Valley platforms that have become essential to modern society. Removing these people is a choice to not have a society, to pretend that we can put these people into a closet somewhere and ignore them.

The alternative is less dramatic. We can take on the legal framework behind social media so these products aren’t addictive and radicalizing. As I’ve written, there are legal immunities and policy choices that allow Facebook to profit in especially toxic ways through compiling detailed user profiles and targeting them with ads. If we change how social media companies make money, we can change how these services operate to make them socially beneficial instead of engines of radicalization.

More broadly, we can try to rebuild our institutions so everyone has a stake in society again, and end the systemic cheating in our commerce that strips people of community. Just saying ‘trust our institutions’ won’t work, at least not until we make those institutions trustworthy. (...)

The Problem Lies in Policy

If we recognize that a major short-term cause in creating this paranoid cult is social media models based on addiction, monopolization and surveillance, and a long-term cause is systemic cheating in our economy and culture, we can break down our problems in manageable chunks. These problems originate from laws and regulations guiding commerce.

And that’s why I think the solution lies in part at the agency set up to regulate commerce - the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is a potentially economy-reshaping institution. It has broad jurisdiction over privacy, consumer protection, and antitrust laws, meaning it can reorient how virtually every corporation in the country functions. It can write rules against ‘unfair methods of competition,’ which can include prohibiting anything from discriminatory pricing in industrial gas markets to addictive or deceptive user interfaces to certain kinds of targeted ads. As a small example, the commission took action earlier this year against corporations engaging in ‘merchant cash advances,’ precisely the predatory lending that trapped Babbitt.

by Matt Stoller, BIG |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

A Message to the Country

[ed. Very powerful. Thank you, Mr. Schwarzenegger.]