Author: Aaron Weber

You can’t make this stuff up: Trump’s EPA is bringing back asbestos. In a gigantic coincidence, one of the world’s largest suppliers is Russian mining company Uralasbest, which recently began to use Trump’s face on its packaging:

Other Mainstream Republican Ideas

“The America we know and love is vanishing… Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people. And they’re changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don’t like.”

 Laura Ingraham, speaking for Fox News.

So, how shall we engage respectfully with these ideas? How shall we treat the statement “brown people made me sad” as a valid expression or idea with which polite society ought to engage?

(How does she manage to square it with her adoption of a Guatemalan daughter? Easy. She regards her as “one of the good ones.”)

Anyway, after this latest “gaffe” it might be time to re-evaluate her “accidental” Nazi salute to a supersize president on video.

Long reads
Modularity is “kind of a characteristic of modernity,” but modularity in our supply chains can lead to moral compartmentalization and moral blindness. How does that impact our interactions with the opaque systems around us, and the way those systems impact the people at the other end of those black boxes? 

Supply chains are phenomenally complex, even for low-tech goods. A company may have a handle on the factories that manufacture finished products, but what about their suppliers? What about the suppliers’ suppliers? And what about the raw materials?
“It’s a staggering kind of undertaking,” said Bonnani. “If you’re a small apparel company, then you still might have 50,000 suppliers in your supply chain. You’ll have a personal relationship with about 200 to 500 agents or intermediaries.

Part four of a series on Cobb County, GA and its absurdly corrupt and counterproductive planning process:

The $400 million in public funds put toward the [Atlanta Braves baseball] stadium were not up for a vote, and there was hardly any opportunity for public comment. The deal also came with some unconsidered costs—not the least which was the bill for the stadium’s extensive parking… resulting in the creation of an $11 million dollar walking bridge over Interstate 285… The original agreement also overlooked the cost of police presence, saddling the county, rather than the team, with this mysteriously unforeseen expense.

(To close the shortfall, they’re closing libraries in poor neighborhoods. Surprise!)

That Grey Poupon that Evian that TED Talk
But seriously check out the Onora O’Neill TED talk on trust. Even if you hate TED talks, even if you don’t want to know about the theory or philosophy of trust and trustworthiness, listen to this one for the accent and vocabulary. Trust me. (Plus her official title is The Right Honourable Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve,CH, CBE, FRS, FBA, FMedSci. You can’t beat that legion of honors.)

Cultivating horror
The long-horned tick has arrived in the US and is spreading rapidly. 
A cop tased an 11-year-old. Tasing children as young as seven is allowed by police policy.

Cultivating joy
This mini horse running on a beach.
Animals interrupting nature photographers.
Cat feet fit perfectly.
Tiny kitten & giant dog.
Wholesome cowboy cartoon.

Remember, as long as you can take solace from thinking things can’t get any worse, they can definitely get worse.

Theory
A treatise on Urgent Earnestness. It’s the new defensive cynicism? It’s a … thing, anyway. Maybe.

In case you don’t automatically read every post there, check out the most recent one at Gin & Tacos, about the Museum of Communism in Prague. (I think he’s oversimplifying and exaggerating to make the point, but it’s an interesting point).

Oh, under communism lots of people were imprisoned? People
didn’t feel free? Government was corrupt and unresponsive? Wow interesting tell me more. Through that lens even the line of argument that capitalism is awesome for consumption looks a little wobbly; “Most people couldn’t get the things they wanted or needed” sounds an awful lot like “Most people can’t afford the things they want or need” and the difference is semantic. I guess if the reason people end up under-provided for is the most important thing to you, that argument is
worth having. In practice it isn’t.

A mind-controlling parasite found in cat feces may give people the courage they need to become entrepreneurs, researchers reported. https://t.co/ZL5WgbxzW4

NBC News (@NBCNews) July 25, 2018

Yep, this little guy is definitely a mind control vector.
As is this one, which appears to be growing right out of the ground.

Cultivating joy
Dog hides under other dog
Dog steals camera
Hedgehogs: not cats, but also very cute, and therefore possible mind-control vectors.

Buckminster Fuller in 1970, complaining about “this nonsense of earning a living,” seems to have been prescient. Or perhaps he was just rehashing Keynes from way back in ’28. Anyway, anthropologist David Graeber’s 2013 article on bullshit jobs, a piece I mentioned a few months back, is now a book that’s getting quite a lot of press.

The Economist has an interview with him discussing the yoke of managerial feudalism. The New York Times, which can’t bear to spell out s-h-i-t in the article copy, distinguishes itself by using the word “bullshit” only in the article URL of the online edition. And of course Bloomberg tries to out-hip its media rivals by using the word LOLOLOLOL as a complete sentence.

The New Yorker has a take which is somewhat different from the others, and worth noting:

It leads to a realization that Graeber circles but never articulates, which is that bullshit employment has come to serve in places like the U.S. and Britain as a disguised, half-baked version of the dole—one attuned specially to a large, credentialled middle class. Under a different social model, a young woman unable to find a spot in the workforce might have collected a government check. Now, instead, she can acquire a bullshit job at, say, a health-care company, spend half of every morning compiling useless reports, and use the rest of her desk time to play computer solitaire or shop for camping equipment online. It’s not, perhaps, a life well-lived. But it’s not the terror of penury, either.

Anyway. Six months into unemployment, I’m still looking for work. Even in a low-unemployment economy, employers are incredibly demanding and stingy. Just yesterday I spotted a junior marketing communications job that requires at least an MS, and ideally a PhD, in biochemistry. 

I suppose it makes sense. If it’s a bullshit job, then it doesn’t actually need to be done, so there’s no need to hire people based on their ability to do the work. Instead, they hire based on shiny credentials that make their bosses look impressive. “Check out the PhD in the cube over there! We’ve got highly-credentialed research scientists doing direct mail!”

LOLOLOLOL.

Politics
Look up who makes money from ICE in your state. Give ’em a call. Let ’em know you think they should stop.

Sarah Kendzior has a podcast.

A journalist was arrested for his reporting about ICE abuses. Criminal charges were dropped but because he’s an immigrant he’s now in ICE custody.

A college professor was tasked with making a parade float in addition to his regular duties. Someone didn’t like the float and now he’s out of a job.

Cuteness
This very cute dog.
This very brightly colored bird and its very black-and-white partner and their subtly tinted offspring.
Adding robot legs to help your plant move around in search of sun and water seems fun, but also potentially a sign of the apocalypse.

Yes, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. And yet… 

Stop saying “This is not who we are.” It’s pretty clear that it is.

Ed Burmila (@gin_and_tacos) June 19, 2018

I think we’re witnessing, with the Trump era, how many Americans explicitly understand citizenship and deservingness to be a function of whiteness.

b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) June 17, 2018

See also Cass Sunstein on how it’s happening here.

See also the Australian refugee crisis and its abuse and warehousing of detainees in Nauru.

2016: “Come on, you’re talking like Trump’s going to put people in concentration camps”

2018: “First of all, I think it’s offensive that you refer to them as ‘concentration camps'”

Jesse Hawken (@jessehawken) June 20, 2018

And this shit hasn’t stopped either:

Direct action
Are you a LinkedIn user? Are you connected with any of the people on this list? Perhaps you should speak with them about their life choices. 

Interesting
The town of Liberal, Kansas has undergone pretty dramatic demographic shifts over the past 30 years, and that’s resulted in the formation of a new regional accent in which Anglo and Latinx people alike speak with some Spanish inflections.

Definitely not a wolf

I WOULD LIKE TO ONCE AGAIN APOLOGIZE FOR WHAT WAS A SUBSTANTIAL MISUNDERSTANDING ON MY PART ABOUT WHAT YOU ALL MEANT BY ACQUIRING THE PERFECT BEACH BODY

I WILL PUT THAT DEAD GUY BACK WHERE I FOUND HIM

A LOT OF EGG ON MY FACE HERE

NOT A WOLF (@SICKOFWOLVES) June 11, 2018

Cultivating joy
This dog is so cute (especially the second picture).

The stunningly beautiful landscape isn’t quite hostile, although there are some predatory fish to avoid, but there isn’t really much fighting and there aren’t any guns. It’s mostly indifferent. There’s not even much plot. You’re just scavenging and scrambling and keeping a constant eye on how much air, food, and water you have left.

That’s the game. That’s all there is.

The job market

As most of you know by now, I’m looking for a full-time job. It’s an unpleasant process, and even good headline unemployment figures aren’t that encouraging when you’re part of the unemployed percentage of the population.

And even more discouraging, the folks who actually have jobs don’t seem to be much happier. Think of the poor archivists whose job it is to tape torn papers back together because nobody can persuade the president to stop tearing documents up as he reads (or doesn’t read) them. We only found out about the gig because two of them got fired for no reason, but they’re pretty sure someone else is still doing it. 

The boss likes to break things for no reason, and so some schlimazel has to tape it back together. That’s the job. That’s all there is. 

Short-form commentary

Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” This seems increasingly true.

Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) May 31, 2018

Cultivating joy
A rather elaborate noodle-slurping race between a human and a large dog.
Shibas at the beach.
Golden + Spiralizer.

[[Insert introductory paragraph here to create illusion that I’m not just aggregating other people’s content]]

Performative worklike activities

But the point is that in a modern economy, actually making stuff work is only part of the job. The other part of the job is performing that making-stuff-workiness to customers and executives. If your goal is to hire engineers to write code to protect your accounts from hackers, first you have to hire different engineers to build maps that shoot lasers, and show the laser maps to executives, to convince the executives to give you money to hire the real engineers to do the real work.
…
It suggests something about the future of work, doesn’t it? Eventually, robots will do a lot of the real work of, like, producing goods and performing services and writing computer programs to spot hackers. And humans will do the overlay of performative meta-work; we’ll put on little plays to convince each other to use a particular robot’s goods or services. For all the high technology of the laser maps, they respond to a particularly human need: The robots would be perfectly happy just to get on with protecting the servers from hackers, or improving the settlement processes, but the humans need a little razzle-dazzle

Workplace protest
Here’s Ed Burmila on Roseanne, explaining why we keep trying to pretend that Trump and his fans are just misunderstood:

Barr may have wanted to use a fictional version of herself to prove that white people who love Donald Trump—people like her, in short—are not racists who traffic in ludicrous conspiracy theories and detest anyone who isn’t like them. She failed because that is exactly what she is. ABC, in abetting this mess, found that even Hollywood magic can’t make sympathetic characters out of such people, although I suspect it will keep trying. The alternative is confronting the fact that the beliefs of a substantial number of Americans are malevolent and dangerous, not mere differences of opinion that can be resolved in 20 minutes, with a hug.

But let’s have a word about what kinds of speech merit getting canned. At what point do we fire people for speech that’s protected under the 1st amendment? If we endorse firing Roseanne, must we also endorse the punishment of Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players who kneel in protest during the national anthem?

If we agree with Matt Yglesias’ argument that Kaep is really a victim of  right-wing “no-platforming” must we also endorse neo-racialists like Charles Murray and Ben Shapiro who keep getting shouted down when they visit college campuses?

If we’re going to address only the fact that people are saying or doing things that got them fired or shouted at, we should have similar opinions about Roseanne Barr and Colin Kaepernick.  But we don’t, most of us. Most of us will tell you that it’s a fair and just outcome for one of those two people to get fired, and that the other person shouldn’t have lost their job over what they did.

Why is that? Perhaps it’s because of our political alignments: The left lines up behind a left-leaning celebrity, the right lines up behind a right-leaning celebrity. We signal our political affiliation in our choice of which controversial celebrity we defend, just like we signal our regional affiliation by following a sports team.

And maybe the difference is that Kaepernick is asking for a reduction in police brutality, and Roseanne Barr is reanimating Lee Atwater’s rotting corpse and giving it a Twitter account. And maybe, if you support one and endorse the firing of the other, then you’re making a distinction on the content of their speech and the character it reveals.

Not that it changes anything: Even if other players can take a knee in protest and have protection from the player’s union, Kaep’s never going to be a QB again, and Roseanne’s always going to have a spot on the lecture circuit where she’ll blame her racism on economic anxiety and liberal condescension. The NFL owners might back down on the kneeling ban, but they’ll always be the bosses and the players will always be men destroying their bodies and minds in exchange for a chance at a few years of fame and a fraction of the bosses’ wealth.

Internet oddities
My favorite new subreddit is /r/NatureIsFuckingLit. See, nature is lit, fam. It’s legit. Things like this cool storm front or a bird’s incredible mating dance or a snake being swallowed tail-first by a frog.

(WW1 1915)
ENGLISH GENERAL: Plan?
ENGLISH LIEUTENANT: Well, the trenches can be used to-
ENGLISH MAJOR: to symbolise man’s emptiness, yes…

The English Major (@Audenary) December 8, 2015

Authenticity is dead
Lab-made replica wine is actually pretty good and synthetic diamonds indistinguishable from mined diamonds are finally becoming available through the major diamond cartels. 

Cultivating joy
Boss cat dismisses Roomba
Dance-off with corgi
Dog adopts kittens
Ladybug covered in morning dew

If you really want to cultivate joy in a more systematic way there’s always this quick summary of the Yale class on being happy. (Yes, NextDraft scooped me on this and the wine story, but they’re both worth a link anyway).