Against Active Shooter Drills

We have a $2.7 billion industry devoted to causing the traumatization of children.

They refer to it as ‘active shooter drill training.’

I was initially motivated to write this when I saw a claim that the bipartisan gun deal allocated $5 billion in additional funding for causing childhood trauma. That turned out not to be the case (summaries of the deal from NPR, from CNN and from WaPo don’t mention it and it seems too big to have been overlooked if it was real), but these shooter drills are still traumatizing our children on a regular basis, which seems worth pointing out as another prime example of both our civilization losing its mind and also the existence of extremely low-hanging fruit.

As in, we could simply not traumatize our kids all the time for no reason. Crazy, I know.

For those who don’t know, an ‘active shooter drill’ is where they take young children who are forced by law to be at a given location each day, and periodically teach have them practice hiding and being shot at by a mass shooter.

If your response to that idea is ‘what, what, that sounds horrible and terrifying and we should absolutely positively not do that’ then you seem like a normal human to me.

If your response to that idea is ‘yes this will help protect our children’ then I do not understand you.

Yet these drills are required. Since school is also required, this is something the state is forcing on children. Children are being forced to report periodically for trauma. (...)

This Washington Post article has a variety of reactions to drills. Some of them are about how shameful it is that we have people shooting up schools in the first place, but mostly it’s about how these drills primary effect is clearly to traumatize students.

Yet this has ballooned into an industry, due to our demand to do something:

I do not need a study to say that this ‘may’ do more harm than good, and neither do you. (...)

One particular thing that was sometimes done was to have pretend gunmen roaming the halls firing blanks. I think we mostly realized not to do that.

There are also additional reasons to think drills are even worse than this.

• Drills teach children that they live in a world where deadly school shootings are are something they should expect to happen in their lives, which they aren’t. This functions to put the idea of shooting up a school closer to top of mind and to normalize it as a choice. It lets disturbed kids at risk of doing this see what it would look like, and maybe discover they like it, or that other kids deserve it.

• I propose that traumatized kids, kids who despise their schools for damn good reason, or those who are constantly among others with trauma, are going to more often choose to do crazy horrible things like shoot up the school.

• Drills show potential shooters exactly how everyone will react. This alone plausibly allows them to plan the most effective response measures in ways that more than nullify any benefits from the drill.

• Drills teach children exactly how much the system and the adults around them care about them. They’ll respond accordingly.

• Drills, preparing for drills, dealing with the aftermath of drills and all the resulting focus on such matters takes a lot of time away from learning, to the extent that was a thing school was trying to do.

What to do about this?

On a civilization level, we should stop doing this. At minimum we should do less traumatic versions of it, ideally stop causing trauma for no reason.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, Don't Worry About the Vase |  Read more:

Images: Twitter/X

[ed. Absolutely. We're normalizing the abnormal. See also: Something Was Wrong (DWV). And if that's not enough to make kids more stressed, depressed and neurotic we have the new concept of 'Gentle Parenting', which just sounds like the old concept of helicoptering.]

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Quentin Monge

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Fentanyl Super Labs in Canada Pose New Threat for U.S.

At a rural property an hour outside Vancouver in October, Canadian police found 2.5 million doses of fentanyl and 528 gallons of chemicals in a shipping container and a storage unit. Six months earlier, they raided a home in a cookie-cutter Vancouver subdivision packed with barrels of fentanyl-making chemicals, glassware and lab equipment.

Thousands of miles away outside Toronto, police in August found what is believed to be the largest fentanyl lab so far in Canada – hidden at a property 30 miles from the U.S. border crossing at Niagara Falls, N.Y.

U.S. authorities say they have little indication that Canadian-made fentanyl is being smuggled south in significant quantities. But at a time when record numbers of people are dying from overdoses in the United States, the spread of clandestine fentanyl labs in Canada has the potential to undermine U.S. enforcement efforts and worsen the opioid epidemic in both nations.

Investigators in Canada say the labs are producing fentanyl for domestic users and for export to Australia, New Zealand and, they assume, the United States.

“It’d be hard to believe it’s not occurring,” said Philip Heard, commander of the organized crime unit for police in Vancouver, a city hard-hit by fentanyl overdose deaths. “Most police leaders I’ve spoken to believe our production outstrips what our domestic demand is.”

The Canadian labs are a curveball for U.S. authorities whose efforts to combat fentanyl are focused on the southern border with Mexico. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has installed about $800 million worth of powerful scanning and detection equipment at land border crossings since 2019. Nearly all that technology has been deployed along the U.S. southern border, where CBP confiscated nearly 27,000 pounds of fentanyl during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the most ever.

Republican lawmakers in recent months have called for U.S. military strikes in Mexico targeting fentanyl traffickers and drug labs. The spread of fentanyl production to Canada suggests traffickers there are poised to benefit if Mexican suppliers get squeezed. The lightly-patrolled U.S.-Canada border spans more than 5,500 miles – the longest international boundary between two nations in the world – and has few physical barriers.

One candidate seeking the GOP presidential nomination, Vivek Ramaswamy, has proposed building a wall along the U.S. northern border, citing the threat of fentanyl smuggling from Canada. But the appearance of the Canadian labs has generated little reaction in Washington, where the U.S.-Mexico border remains the focus of the fentanyl debate.

The powerful, intensely addictive drug and other synthetic opioids claim more than 70,000 lives a year in the United States. A similar proportion of Canadians are dying of overdoses – about 7,000 annually. The two countries remain the only nations where fentanyl poses such a lethal threat.

CBP seized just two pounds of fentanyl along the northern border during the 2023 fiscal year, the agency’s latest statistics show.

“We are not seeing any sort of southbound flow of fentanyl into the United States from Canada,” said Robert Hammer, the top Homeland Security Investigations agent in Seattle, who said he consulted with his fellow agents in Buffalo and Detroit.

“That’s not to say it’s not happening, and not to say it may not happen in the future,” Hammer cautioned.

Hammer said he remains skeptical Canadian-made fentanyl will displace the pills flooding into the United States from Mexico. “We are down to 45 cents a pill on the wholesale side here in Seattle,” he said. “You have to be pretty damn competitive to beat 45 cents a pill to compete with the Mexican cartels that have entrenched themselves with the distribution network they have set up here in the Pacific Northwest.”

Still, authorities in the United States and Canada are investigating the robust trade links between the countries, routes that provide ample opportunities for smuggling. In October, the Treasury Department issued sanctions against a Vancouver company that purports to sell beverage industry supplies, alleging it was a distributor of illicit precursor chemicals and equipment and sought to obtain from China nearly 3,000 liters of chemicals used to make fentanyl, heroin and meth. The company’s owner has denied the allegations.

Drug experts have long warned that a crackdown along the U.S.-Mexico border could prompt criminal groups to seek alternative sources or begin producing fentanyl in the United States. Most of the labs encountered in the United States are what police agencies refer to as “pill press” operations, where traffickers make tablets out of fentanyl powder smuggled from Mexico.

The super labs that police are finding in Canada differ because they are synthesizing the drug – not merely pressing pills – using precursor chemicals sourced primarily from China. (...)

Derek Westwick, who runs the Royal Canadian Mounted Police unit in British Columbia responsible for stopping precursor chemicals and finding drug labs, said his team has busted 10 operations in Western Canada – in isolated rural areas and dense urban neighborhoods. “The only common thread is they’re always rental properties,” Westwick said, explaining that leased properties are generally protected from seizure by law enforcement.

Police say the fentanyl labs have spread eastward from British Columbia – into Alberta and now Toronto.

In the Toronto area in 2020, what started as a large-scale investigation into meth labs uncovered a large-scale fentanyl pill pressing operation. Investigators seized nearly 124,000 counterfeit pain pills and 70 kilograms of fentanyl powder.

By August, police concluded a separate investigation known as Project Odeon, which was sparked by an overdose death two years earlier in Hamilton, just outside Toronto. Investigators discovered a dismantled fentanyl lab and an active one at a rural Hamilton home. They seized 3.5 tons of chemical byproduct from fentanyl production, 800 gallons of chemicals used to make the opioid and more than 25 kilograms of finished fentanyl.

Ontario Police Detective Inspector Lee Fulford said the lab had the capacity to churn out 20 to 30 kilograms of fentanyl weekly. “It’s alarming that much fentanyl would be hitting the streets of Toronto,” said Fulford, of the Organized Crime Enforcement Bureau.

Authorities charged 12 people, including a Toronto physician. Hamilton police officials said they identified a U.S. company that had sold three pieces of lab equipment, although they did not name the company.

by David Ovalle and Nick Miroff, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Vancouver Police Department

[ed. Supply vs. Demand. $.45/pill? Lots to unpack here (eg. why not name the company?), and another wall? Across Canada. Really?]

Off His Royal Tits

Penguins​ are super-parents. When the female provides dinner she doesn’t just reach for the pesto but launches herself into the treacherous, icy depths, returning with a stomach full of half-digested fish to be spewed down the gullet of her needy chick, His Fluffy Eminence, who is then installed in a creche so protective it makes the average nursery look like the workhouse in Oliver Twist. Yet, even for penguins, rejection comes: after the winter huddling and the pre-fledge commutes, the deep dives and the exhausting feeds, the mother will waddle off across the tundra, never to be seen by her children again. Abandonment, we understand, is not the deranging catastrophe that wrecks the child’s system of trust, but the crowning achievement of good parenting.

Humans tend to take the whole waddling away thing quite badly. ‘When a child feels abandoned,’ D.W. Winnicott writes in The Child, the Family and the Outside World, he

becomes unable to play, and unable to be affectionate or to accept affection. Along with this, as is well known, there can be compulsive erotic activities. The stealing of deprived children who are recovering can be said to be part of the search for the transitional object, which had been lost through the death or fading of the internalised version of the mother.

We can’t be sure of the effect of the lost mother on the king penguin, but we can be in no doubt that it matters greatly to England’s royal family. In his essay ‘The Place of the Monarchy’, Winnicott helps us gain traction on the problem: ‘It is in the personal inner psychic reality that the thing is destroyed,’ he writes. And later:

Whereas a monarchy can be founded on a thousand years of history, it could be destroyed in a day. It could be destroyed by false theory or by irresponsible journalism. It could be laughed out of existence by those who only see a fairy story or who see a ballet or a play when really they are looking at an aspect of life itself.

Prince Harry’s mother died when he was twelve years old, and his search for the transitional object has been messed up ever since. In Tom Bradby’s interview with him for ITV, after Harry describes the crash in Paris he immediately speaks of not wanting the same thing to happen to his wife. ‘Shooting, shooting, shooting,’ is the way this ex-soldier describes the actions of the paparazzi that night. He has always believed that Diana was murdered by careless journalists pursuing her for personal profit, and he wants to get rid of these death-eaters before they get anywhere near his wife and children. Journalism for him is a profession opposed to truth. This seems so obvious to him that it acts as a gateway drug to everything else he believes. The art of biography appears to the prince to be a pane of clear glass through which the truth will finally be revealed to the reader. So here it comes: The Corrections by Harry Windsor, a postmodern social novel in which the author will confront the twisted evils that harass civilisation and be a living antidote to the poison spread by the Daily Mail. It’s an impressive scheme of outrage. Harry’s truth is a cartoon strip of saucy entertainments and shouty jeremiads masquerading as a critique of the establishment, and it simply couldn’t be more riveting. His truth – ‘my truth’ – is much better written than the Mail, though guddling in the same sad bogs on the same dark heaths of human experience. Really funny, though. We find him losing his virginity to a horsey woman round the back of a pub. We find him staying up half the night at Eton smoking smuggled-in weed. One time, he takes acid and is so off his royal tits he thinks he’s having a chat with a toilet seat. Another time, his cock nearly drops off at the South Pole when it gets frostbitten. He gets decked by his brother and falls onto a dog bowl, but doesn’t punch him back. Truth is everywhere. Truth is relentless. Truth is a noisy neighbour who just swallowed four disco biscuits and dragged his sound system into the garden for a bit of a social. What’s not to like?

In a world of royal enchantment, competitive PR, national myth-making and pure lies, the truth – if played loud enough – can seem like a human right eclipsing all others, and Harry has worked himself up to the point where truth is life and life is truth. (He’s been in California for a while. He’ll get over it when the tax bill arrives.) The mantra comes towards you waving glow sticks. Harry will allow no contradiction and no variance – ‘Recollections may vary,’ the late queen said – and only when his wider family shows that it ‘deeply appreciates’ the truth of what he’s gone through will ‘reconciliation’ be possible. Harry says, in his Montecito meets TikTok kind of way, that ‘forgiveness is 100 per cent a possibility,’ and that he’s ‘open’ to helping the royal family understand its own unconscious bias. It must be quite annoying, if you’re them. You don’t have to be Baudrillard to feel that Harry’s idea of the truth is simplistic, and that he’s become a bit of a fundamentalist: anything that isn’t ‘my truth’ is automatically part of the big lie. Harry has set out to convince the world that his family are professional liars, with one or two saving graces, such as heavenly anointment. And he’s not wrong.

Diana died in the full glare of the cameras, and Harry and his brother were forced to mourn her in that same light, an experience believed, in the popular mind, to be something that would bind them together for ever. It actually served to cast them out of each other’s sphere as they searched separately for their mother. Their father, a cultured, adult man in a permanent foetal crouch, couldn’t comfort them or share their feelings or join them in trying to alter the future.

Pa and I mostly coexisted. He had trouble communicating, trouble listening, trouble being intimate face to face. On occasion, after a long multi-course dinner, I’d walk upstairs and find a letter on my pillow. The letter would say how proud he was of me for something I’d done or accomplished. I’d smile, place it under my pillow, but also wonder why he hadn’t said this moments ago, while seated directly across from me ... Pa confessed around this time that he’d been ‘persecuted’ as a boy ... I remember him murmuring ominously: I nearly didn’t survive. How had he? Head down, clutching his teddy bear, which he still owned years later. Teddy went everywhere with Pa.

In this fierce toboggan ride of a book, Harry never says that his mother is dead, only that she has ‘disappeared’. Photographs, images, pieces in the press, the proofs of his and his family’s specialness, are what obsess him and drive him into a spiral of confusion as he fights for control of his life. I would say, right off, that when a mother dies so publicly and so violently, the fight is likely to be with the sibling. Nobody actually shares their parent – that’s just an illusion – and even the healthiest of brothers are parrying with wooden swords. Each child wants to go back, fighting off all monsters, all observers and opportunists, all lovers and all brothers, to be alone with her again.

There has never been a book like this, with its parcelling out of epic, one-sided truths. Most royal biographies, even the lively ones – his mother’s, his father’s, poor old Crawfie’s – were made airless by vapid writing, spurious genuflections before royal protocol, cringing vanity masquerading as public service. Harry does much less of that. He goes in for a Las Vegas-style treatment of the royal problem, with multiple sets, many costumes and guest appearances by everybody from Carl Jung to Elton John. There are overshared war experiences, bouts of snotty complaining, daddy issues, mummy issues, brother issues, bedroom-size issues, whose-palace-is-it-anyway issues, arguments about tiaras, Kate Middleton issues and todger-nearly-dropping-off-in-Harley-Street issues. Harry notarises his pees, his poos, his sweat and his bonks. He reveals the duff present his auntie Margaret gave him for Christmas (‘I was conversant with the general contours of her sad life’). He calls his brother bald. He has trouble showing affection without its being excessive (he hugs his therapist after one session, FedEx-ing the transference before session three) and barely introduces a person into the narrative before shortening their name and making them a ‘legend’. So, we have Chels, Cress, Euge and other colourfully abbreviated lives. Harry wants to love. He wants purpose. He’s nobody’s ‘spare’. He can never quite say it out loud, and neither could his aunt Margaret, but he’s pissed about being number two, and he takes all the unfairness and makes of it a Molotov cocktail. Take that, Camilla! Take that, courtiers and royal correspondents! Take that, Pa, from your ‘darling boy’! You can’t help agreeing with him half the time; the other half is spent worrying how he’ll ever make it through his life, as he mistakes his need to end his pain with the need for a global reset.

by Andrew O’Hagan, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Good Morning America

[ed. Missed this earlier this year, but with Harry's court case against the Mail recently resolved thought it would still be of some interest. Terrific review.]

Effective Obfuscation

As Sam Bankman-Fried rose and fell, people outside of Silicon Valley began to hear about “effective altruism” (EA) for the first time. Then rifts emerged within OpenAI with the ouster and then reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman, and the newer phrase “effective accelerationism” (often abbreviated to “e/acc” on Twitter) began to enter the mainstream.

Both ideologies ostensibly center on improving the fate of humanity, offering anyone who adopts the label an easy way to brand themselves as a deep-thinking do-gooder. At the most surface level, both sound reasonable. Who wouldn’t want to be effective in their altruism, after all? And surely it’s just a simple fact that technological development would accelerate given that newer advances build off the old, right?

But scratching the surface of both reveal their true form: a twisted morass of Silicon Valley techno-utopianism, inflated egos, and greed.

Same as it always was.

Effective altruism

The one-sentence description of effective altruism sounds like a universal goal rather than an obscure pseudo-philosophy. After all, most people are altruistic to some extent, and no one wants to be ineffective in their altruism. From the group’s website: “Effective altruism is a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.” Pretty benign stuff, right?

Dig a little deeper, and the rationalism and utilitarianism emerges. Unsatisfied with the generally subjective attempts to evaluate the potential positive impact of putting one’s financial support towards — say — reducing malaria in Africa versus ending factory farming versus helping the local school district hire more teachers, effective altruists try to reduce these enormously complex goals into “impartial”, quantitative equations.

In order to establish such a rubric in which to confine the messy, squishy, human problems they have claimed to want to solve, they had to establish a philosophy. And effective altruists dove into the philosophy side of things with both feet. Countless hours have been spent around coffee tables in Bay Area housing co-ops, debating the morality of prioritizing local causes above ones that are more geographically distant, or where to prioritize the rights of animals alongside the rights of human beings. Thousands of posts and far more comments have been typed on sites like LessWrong, where individuals earnestly fling around jargon about “Bayesian mindset” and “quality adjusted life years”.

The problem with removing the messy, squishy, human part of decisionmaking is you can end up with an ideology like effective altruism: one that allows a person to justify almost any course of action in the supposed pursuit of maximizing their effectiveness.

Take, for example, the widely held belief among EAs that it is more effective for a person to take an extremely high-paying job than to work for a non-profit, because the impact of donating lots of money is far higher than the impact of one individual’s work. (The hypothetical person described in this belief, I will note, tends to be a student at an elite university rather than an average person on the street — a detail I think is illuminating about effective altruism’s demographic makeup.) This is a useful way to justify working for a company that many others might view as ethically dubious: say, a defense contractor developing weapons, a technology firm building surveillance tools, or a company known to use child labor. It’s also an easy way to justify life’s luxuries: if every hour of my time is so precious that I must maximize the amount of it spent earning so I may later give, then it’s only logical to hire help to do my housework, or order takeout every night, or hire a car service instead of using public transit.

The philosophy has also justified other not-so-altruistic things: one of effective altruism’s ideological originators, William MacAskill, has urged people not to boycott sweatshops (“there is no question that sweatshops benefit those in poor countries“, he says). Taken to the extreme, someone could feasibly justify committing massive fraud or other types of wrongdoing in order to obtain billions of dollars that they could, maybe someday, donate to worthy causes. You know, hypothetically.

Other issues arise when it comes to the task of evaluating who should be prioritized when it comes to aid. A prominent contributor to the effective altruist ideology, Peter Singer, wrote an essay in 1971 arguing that a person should feel equally obligated to save a child halfway around the world as they do a child right next to them. Since then, EAs have taken this even further: why prioritize a child next to you when you could help ease the suffering of a better child somewhere else? Why help a child next to you today when you could instead help hypothetical children born one hundred years from now? Or help artificial sentient beings one thousand years from now?

The focus on future artificial sentience has become particularly prominent in recent times, with “effective altruists” emerging as one synonym for so-called “AI safety” advocates, or “AI doomers”. Despite their contemporary prominence in AI debates, these tend not to be the thoughtful researchers who have spent years advocating for responsible and ethical development of machine learning systems, and trying to ground discussions about the future of AI in what is probable and plausible. Instead, these are people who believe that artificial general intelligence — that is, a truly sentient, hyperintelligent artificial being — is inevitable, and that one of the most important tasks is to slowly develop AI such that this inevitable superintelligence is beneficial to humans and not an existential threat.

This brings us to the competing ideology:

Effective accelerationism

While effective altruists view artificial intelligence as an existential risk that could threaten humanity, and often push for a slower timeline in developing it (though they push for developing it nonetheless), there is a group with a different outlook: the effective accelerationists.

This ideology has been embraced by some powerful figures in the tech industry, including Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen, who published a manifesto in October in which he worshipped the “techno-capital machine” as a force destined to bring about an “upward spiral” if not constrained by those who concern themselves with such concepts as ethics, safety, or sustainability.

Those who seek to place guardrails around technological development are no better than murderers, he argues, for putting themselves in the way of development that might produce lifesaving AI.

This is the core belief of effective accelerationism: that the only ethical choice is to put the pedal to the metal on technological progress, pushing forward at all costs, because the hypothetical upside far outweighs the risks identified by those they brush aside as “doomers” or “decels” (decelerationists).

Despite their differences on AI, effective altruism and effective accelerationism share much in common (in addition to the similar names). Just like effective altruism, effective accelerationism can be used to justify nearly any course of action an adherent wants to take.

by Molly White, Citation Needed |  Read more:

Image: Christina Animashaun, Vox: How effective altruism went from a niche movement to a billion-dollar force
[ed. See also: The religion of techno-optimism (Disconnect - excerpt below); also, It’s Time to Dismantle the Technopoly (New Yorker); and, The Year Millennials Aged Out of the Internet (NYT).]

"The expectation of ultimate salvation through technology, whatever the immediate human and social costs, has become the unspoken orthodoxy, reinforced by a market-induced enthusiasm for novelty and sanctioned by a millenarian yearning for new beginnings. This popular faith, subliminally indulged and intensified by corporate, government, and media pitchmen, inspires an awed deference to the practitioners and their promises of deliverance while diverting attention from more urgent concerns. Thus, unrestrained technological development is allowed to proceed apace, without serious scrutiny or oversight — without reason. Pleas for some rationality, for reflection about pace and purpose, for sober assessment of costs and benefits — for evidence even of economic value, much less larger social gains — are dismissed as irrational. From within the faith, any and all criticism appears irrelevant, and irreverent."   ~ David Noble, The Religion of Technology.

I just want to remind you, Noble was writing this in 1997, yet it still feels like a current and deeply relevant commentary. As usual when reading about the history of tech criticism, it shows how the problems we face with the tech industry today are not new at all, but as the power and wealth of its corporate leaders has expanded in recent decades, the threat they pose has grown immensely. 

Meanwhile in the Moscow metro...

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Tokyo, 2023 (jade)
via: here, here, here, here 

Fresco fragment from Nemausus
Roman, 2nd century AD

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Perfect Day

Oh No, Kellyanne Conway Just Described My Perfect Day (The Mary Sue)

Since the Colorado Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Donald Trump’s name could not appear on the state’s Republican primary ballot, conservative media has been pitching a fit over the decision. That includes Trump’s always terrible former senior counselor-turned-Fox News personality, Kellyanne Conway. (...)

“I just think the Democrats wake up every morning, Emily, and they look at the calendar, the iPhone says January 6, 2021—the date never changes,”... “And then they get in an electric vehicle and go get an abortion. I just described the Democratic Party in seven seconds. That’s it. That’s what I see. But it’s always January 6.”

Image: Barbie

[ed. Crazy little Kellyanne. Still incoherent as ever, but now a Fox News "personality".]

Bad Reviews, Bad Behavior

[ed. Big flame-out in book world. See also: Scandal Rocks Publishing as Debut Author Is Linked To Fake Goodreads Accounts That Review Bombed Peers (The Mary Sue). The Guardian also has a report on the alleged 'review-bombing'. The author's book is described as a Greek mythology-in-space romantasy. What? Apparently, there's quite a sizeable readership for this type of genre/niche. Who knew?]

Jeff Bezos Rowing Boat

Bobby Fingers (Irish artist/comedian)

via: YouTube
[ed. One of the funniest and most absorbing things I've seen all year.]

Don't Touch My Fries

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[ed. Always loved this.... captures everything in one short meme. I think it's real. It is real, right? (Update: Nope. A spoof by the Sanders campaign). Dang. Sure seemed plausible.]

Terry Allen

I'm a high straight in Plainview

 Side bet in Idalou

 And a fresh deck in New Deal

 Yeah, some call me high hand

 And some call me low hand

 But, I'm holding what I am, the wheel 

[Chorus]

 'Cause I'm panhandlin'

 Man handlin'

 Post holin'

 High rollin'

 Dust Bowlin' Daddy

 And I ain't got no blood veins

 I just got them four lanes

 Of hard Amarillo Highway 

[Verse 2]

 Yeah I don't wear no Stetson

 But I'm willin' to bet, son

 That I'm a big a Texan as you are

 There's a girl in her barefeet

 'Sleep on the back seat

 An that trunk is full of Pearl and Lone Star 

[Chorus]

 [Verse 3]

 So gonna hop outta bed

 Pop a pill in my head

 Yeah, bust the Hub for the Golden Spread

 Under blue skies

 Gonna stuff my hide

 Behind some power glide

 And get some southern fried back in my eyes 

[Chorus]

 [Outro]

 And close I'll ever get to Heaven

 Is makin' speed up ol' 87

 Of that hard-ass Amarillo Highway

[ed. "... don't wear no Stetson, but I'm willing to bet, son". Don't write 'em like that anymore.]

Hyperloop Bites the Dust

Elon Musk‘s high-profile transportation startup, Hyperloop One, is shuttering its airless tubes.

The company is laying off employees, selling remaining assets (which include a test track and machinery), and closing its offices, Bloomberg reports. After hiring more than 200 people in 2022, remaining workers — who are tasked with supervising the asset sale — were told their employment ends Dec. 31. All of Hyperlooop One’s intellectual property will be handed over to majority stakeholder, Dubai-based DP World.

The billionaire estimated in a 2013 proposal that a pod would be able to whisk passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just 35 minutes and “feel a lot like being on an airplane.” After its founding in 2014, the buzzy startup raised around $450 million in venture capital funds and other investments, and even constructed a test track near Las Vegas to develop its technology.

For a moment, things looked promising for the Musk-owned company that vowed to end traffic once and for all. Originally founded as Hyperloop Technologies, the business changed its name to Hyperloop One in 2016, and then rebranded to Virgin Hyperloop One after Richard Branson invested in the company and joined its board of directors. After an exodus of top execs, Virgin dropped its name from Hyperloop One after opting to focus on cargo rather than passengers.

A former SpaceX subsidiary, the Boring Company, spun out as a separate business in 2018, did build a few short tunnels, including a mile-long prototype tube near SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. However, other proposed loops never materialized. A route from East Hollywood to Dodger Stadium, with a set completion date of 2020, remains a pipe dream, and elsewhere, slated projects in Chicago and Washington, D.C. were quietly shelved.

News of Hyperloop One’s shuttering follows the recent revelation that two million Tesla vehicles were recalled following a two-year investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The agency found that the car models featuring the self-driving feature — including models Y, S, 3, and X produced between Oct. 5, 2012, and Dec. 7, 2023 — contain a high-risk software flaw that likely contributed to an increase in wrecks and crashes.

by Charisma Madarang, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia (Alexander-93)

[ed. Crazy from the get go. Musk isn't crazy, but it shows how someone with a Great Man complex and billions to spend goes about building his legacy (and indulging his impulses). See also: Twitter was so many things...Elon Musk killed Twitter (The Verge); and, The Hyperloop was always a scam; and, The media's failure on Elon Musk; and, Elon Musk built his own reality. Now it's consuming him. (Disconnect).]

Only Medicare is Medicare

President George W. Bush and Republicans (and a handful of on-the-take Democrats) in Congress created the Medicare Advantage scam in 2003 as a way of routing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of for-profit insurance companies. (...)

Real Medicare pays bills when they’re presented. Medicare Advantage insurance companies, on the other hand, get a fixed dollar amount every year for each of the people enrolled in their programs, regardless of how much they spent on each customer.

As a result, Medicare Advantage programs make the greatest profits for their CEOs and shareholders when they actively refuse to pay for care, something that happens frequently. It’s a safe bet that nearly 100 percent of the people who sign up for Advantage programs don’t know this and don’t have any idea how badly screwed they could be if they get seriously ill.

Not only that, when people do figure out they’ve been duped and try to get back on real Medicare, the same insurance companies often punish them by refusing to write Medigap plans (that fill in the 20% hole in real Medicare). They can’t do that when you first sign up when you turn 65, but if you “leave” real Medicare for privatized Medicare Advantage, it can be damn hard to get back on it. (...)

With real Medicare and a Medigap plan, you talk with your physician or hospital and decide on your treatment, they bill Medicare, and you never see or hear about the bill. There is nobody between you and your physician or hospital and Medicare only goes after the payment they’ve made if they sniff out a fraud.

With Medicare Advantage, on the other hand, your insurance company gets a lump-sum payment from Medicare every year and keeps the difference between what they get and what they pay out. They then insert themselves between you and your doctor or hospital to avoid paying for whatever they can.

Whatever you decide on regarding treatment, many Advantage insurance companies will regularly second-guess and do everything they can to intimidate you into paying yourself out-of-pocket. Often, they simply refuse payment and wait for you to file a complaint against them; for people seriously ill the cumbersome “appeals” process is often more than they can handle.

As a result, hospitals and doctor groups across the nation are beginning to refuse to take Medicare Advantage patients. California-based Scripps Health, for example, cares for around 30,000 people on Medicare Advantage and recently notified all of them that Scripps will no longer offer medical services to them unless they pay out-of-pocket or revert back to real Medicare.

They made this decision because over $75 million worth of services and procedures their physicians had recommended to their patients were turned down by Medicare Advantage insurance companies. In many cases, Scripps had already provided the care and is now stuck with the bills that the Advantage companies refuse to pay.

Scripps CEO Chris Van Gorder told MedPage Today:

“We are a patient care organization and not a patient denial organization and, in many ways, the model of managed care has always been about denying or delaying care – at least economically. That is why denials, [prior] authorizations and administrative processes have become a very big issue for physicians and hospitals...”

Similarly, the Mayo Clinic has warned its customers in Florida and Arizona that they won’t accept Medicare Advantage any more, either. Increasing numbers of physician groups and hospitals are simply over being ripped off by Advantage insurance companies.

by Thom Hartman, Alternet |  Read more:

Image: Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP); Our Payments Their Profits (pdf)
[ed. As this article notes, we're currently in an open enrollment period for Medicare, and MA scammers are carpet-bombing America with advertisements, relying on confusion and deceptively low initial or monthly payments to entice people to essentially screw themselves (60 million of them). See also: As Scandals Mount, So Do Calls to Abolish Private Medicare Advantage Plans (CD);  How Medicare Advantage Plans Dodged Auditors and Overcharged Taxpayers by Millions (Kaiser Health News); and if that's not enough: Seniors’ Medicare Benefits Are Being Privatized Without Consent (The Lever). Our American health care system. Hardly a system at all, just a free for all rip-off spree - left to right, top to bottom. Three words: Medicare For All.]

The Only War is Culture War

What the Ivy League hearings on anti-Semitism reveal about the American elite.

As tensions escalated over the summer between the US and its rivals, Russia and China, the American media was ablaze with talk, not of nuclear apocalypse, but about the movies Oppenheimer and Barbie, the two blockbusters archly referred to as “Barbenheimer” – as if the creator of the atomic bomb and the child’s doll had anything in common. Now, more than two months after Hamas butchered and raped hundreds of Israeli civilians and took dozens more into a living hell as hostages, and as Israel continues to raze Gaza, turning it into a charnel house, slaughtering thousands of Palestinian civilians while killing, injuring or detaining thousands more in the West Bank, the US media has, for the past week, been consumed with the subject of America’s Ivy League universities. No one is talking about Israel, the Palestinians, or the war between them.

In an America where just about every solid social or political meaning has melted with a late-capitalist liquescence that would have taken even Karl Marx’s breath away, an event is rarely interpreted in its actual context. Like the protagonist of the satirical 1920s Soviet play, The Suicide, whose declared intention of taking his own life is immediately followed by numerous groups requesting that he kindly kill himself on their behalf, singular events are seized upon simultaneously by competing groups as proof of one or another’s assumptions.

So when, on 5 December, the presidents of three elite universities – University of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard – two of them, Penn and Harvard, rarefied Ivies, were summoned to appear at a congressional hearing convened to address the anti-Semitism that seems to have surged on college campuses since the start of war in Israel/Palestine, the result was chaos. Asked by Representative Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican who has expediently converted herself into a Trump stalwart, and is now the fourth-most powerful figure in Congress, if pro-Palestinian students “calling for the genocide of Jews violate[s] Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment”, Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, replied: “It can be, depending on the context.” Elizabeth Magill, Penn’s president, answered, “If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.” Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT: “That would be investigated as harassment if pervasive and severe.”

The college presidents’ clownishly ambiguous and infirm replies were predictably met with howls of execration. For conservatives, this was an instance where, at last, as a headline in the Wall Street Journal put it, “The Ivy League mask falls”, and the so-called woke project of replacing the academic discipline of the humanities with the enforcement of “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI), as the progressive war cry goes, was revealed as the destruction of civilised standards and values that, in conservative eyes, it is. For liberals, the hearing was a cynical stunt. As a New York Times headline stated, “As fury erupts over campus anti-Semitism, conservatives seize the moment”, with the article concluding that, among other things, Stefanik was taking sweet revenge on Harvard, her alma mater, because it removed her from the board of its Institute of Politics for supporting Trump’s false claims of a stolen election in 2020.

Social media has the effect of reducing language to mere words, empty of context and intention. That is what happened at the hearing. The formative circumstances here, which made the presidents’ replies logical and rational, if not immediately morally coherent, were evidence of the revolution in mores that has occurred since Trump’s election in 2016.

Trump’s catering to the racial and cultural prejudices of his white working-class base, accompanied by bouts of authoritarian blustering, created an equally illiberal response on the part of American progressives, who are to the left of increasingly silent American liberals. The former US president’s appeals to prejudice fostered, on the left, a general policing of social attitudes, particularly around “harmful” speech. Such policing found its fullest expression at the nation’s universities, where many offices devoted to the enforcement of DEI guidelines sprang up. Nowhere, however, were the new DEI guardians more empowered than at private American universities that, unlike America’s publicly funded colleges, are not bound by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

Over several years, one professor after another, mostly at private institutions of higher learning, was accused of saying something that a student or students claimed caused them mental and emotional harm. Such complaints often resulted in a DEI officer – working in a university’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action – filing a formal charge of “discriminatory harassment” and beginning a formal investigation. For language to be considered discriminatory harassment, it must, to quote the Supreme Court’s legal definition of the term, be “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it can be said to deprive the victim… of access to the educational opportunities or benefits provided by the school”. By shrewdly referring to the universities’ “rules on bullying and harassment”, Stefanik abruptly focused the presidents’ attention on the technical language of academic enforcement, and they directed their answers precisely to that language. Kornbluth, the MIT president, quoted virtually verbatim the legal definition of discriminatory harassment.

In the event a university does find a professor guilty of discriminatory harassment and takes punitive action, the professor can threaten to cross over to the parallel universe of actual American law, where they could then sue on various grounds of discrimination themselves. As a result, private American higher education institutions have been quietly paying significant sums of money out in negotiated settlements for years. In many instances, DEI investigators are the bane of university lawyers.

Considering the issues of legal jeopardy and conservative accusations of a war on free speech, those three university presidents were no doubt grateful for the opportunity to demonstrate that they do not suppress free speech on their campuses. Here was the proof they had not: even the most disturbing pro-Palestinian slogans were protected so long as those uttering them did not cross over into actionable conduct. But in creating a vacuum of legal terminology, a moral emptiness in which, after all, DEI often thrives, the presidents robotically missed the opportunity to speak clearly and definitively about the actual issue of campus anti-Semitism. It was muddled language for muddled times, and the muddled and muddling right-wing Republicans are having themselves a feast. (...)

The whole thing was like the Marx Brothers meeting the psychiatric experiment The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, the account in which three patients think they’re Christ: Stefanik, every bit the polished Ivy Leaguer, trimmed her political sails right past the real issues at stake, and as the polished Ivy League presidents – far too polished to ever publicly countenance an anti-Semitic sentiment – looked right past what Stefanik was actually saying to their own public relations. Currently the outcome is unfolding along the lines of the new social justice algorithm. As I write, Magill, the white president has resigned; Gay, the black president, has so far survived efforts to remove her; and Kornbluth, the Jewish president, has emerged unscathed from charges that she was enabling anti-Semitism.

Only the media, it seems, is obsessed with the incident, especially with Harvard, since much of the elite media is composed of Ivy League graduates – especially Harvard. Not much attention, if any at all, has been paid to the countless pro-Palestinian demonstrations at smaller state schools. And who, after all, but someone who self-flatteringly treasures Harvard as the perfect symbol of status and achievement could think that Stefanik was animated by revenge for being shunned by Harvard rather than by cold political calculation? The rest of the country – for whom Harvard is, if they have any sense of the place at all, either an expensive finishing school dedicated to the high-minded production of high-functioning sociopaths or a perpetual rash on the ageing skin of American meritocracy – really couldn’t care less about what happens there.

The true significance of the congressional hearing lies beyond the ships-passing-in-the-night myopias of either the three presidents or their inquisitor. It lies in the perpetual scrimmage among America’s social groups for status and power, of which the woke revolution is the latest iteration.

by Lee Siegel, New Statesman |  Read more:

Image: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
[ed. No kidding. How did none of them just simply say "It's complicated but using the term genocide is inflamatory and not at all helpful. Of course we're against that in any form". But no. How much do these people get paid, anyway?]

Ohno Bakufu, Crucian Carp, Surinaka River

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Architecture as Entertainment

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Images: X/TikTok

[ed. I can't even process how awful it must be to have something like this plunked down in the middle of your city. Even Las Vegas. A Giant eyeball? Wow. See also: Sphere Eats the Soul (Baffler), and the new Mukaab in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.]