About suffering they were never wrong

We’re in the midst of a constitutional crisis. A manifestly unqualifed, poorly-vetted, corrupt justice is about to be installed on the Supreme Court. The foxes are trying to hedge their bets from inside the henhouse.

Even in ultra-liberal Massachusetts, 35% of Republican voters cast ballots for a man credited with triggering a yearslong wave of anti-gay violence in Uganda. In a shocking echo of Hungarian fascism, Texas has ordered school districts to stop funding education for migrant children. Government cruelty to immigrant citizens is now extending to Vietnamese-Americans. The government officials marketing this sort of cruelty have a longstanding process of making money from it even when the policy is overturned.

Anyhow, in a corner, some untidy spot, where the dogs go on with their doggy life… the economy has somewhere to get to and sails calmly on. We still have to work.

Good economic news!
A while ago Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was criticized for saying “unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs.” The fact-checkers said, well, actually “everyone” is an exaggeration, and the number of multiple-job-holders isn’t that significant. Her correct and important point – that the unemployment numbers don’t reflect the very serious problems of wage stagnation and overall misery – was (of course) ignored in a rush to pile on to her slight inaccuracy. (For some reason this level of scrutiny isn’t applied to certain male officials with white or orange skin).

I’m one of the people the fact-checkers say is statistically insignificant: When I took my third job, I rose to about 30 hours a week, so the state cut off my unemployment benefits and now counts me as one of the gainfully employed. I’m good economic news! I’m also getting a great lesson in precarity: I don’t know from week to week how much I will bring home, much less my annual earnings, although I’m pretty certain they’ll be substantially lower than last year. If my household were actually on the brink, as so many American households are, it would be really, really bad.

This week, I got another job. I’m not yet at the level of Kevin Gates, boasting “GET IT GET FLY I GOT SIX JOBS I DON’T GET TIRED” but for those of you keeping track at home, I’ve got four jobs now: Essay coach, two consulting gigs, and now poll worker.
kevin-gates
Like all the others, being a poll worker is seasonal, temporary, and contingent. In this case, it’s roughly minimum wage, and there are just a handful of available workdays each year: Primary election, early voting, and general election. The primary this past Tuesday was my first day on the job. It was hot and the chairs were uncomfortable and I have a newfound distaste for people who write in no-hope candidates as a protest, because I had to count them at the end of the night, but it was mostly a great experience and I made about $165. Good economic news!

This month one of my other jobs is ending. Sort of.

See, the organization has a policy to prevent exploitative perma-temp arrangements, so I can’t be a temp anymore. Instead, I’ll be a consultant. Of course, they also have policies to prevent exploitative miscategorization of employees as consultants. A consultant has multiple customers and advertises for multiple customers, so I needed to update my LinkedIn to reflect that. Merely looking for a full-time job and doing some freelance work doesn’t make me overtly consultative enough. Moreover, a consultant doesn’t have a dedicated desk and doesn’t use dedicated company resources. So I have to take my name and the photo of my wife out of the shared cubicle (five people, four desks). Consulting!

Mistakes were made on all sides
A plainclothes cop left his unmarked vehicle running while picking up a to-go order at a pizzeria. Two teens jumped in for a joyride and were unsurprisingly caught. And beaten. And cuffed. And then beaten some more. Also attacked by dogs.

And then the recording of the interrogation was released:

Welcome to White Town motherfuckers…. I’m not hampered by the fucking truth ’cause I don’t give a fuck! People like you belong in jail. I’ll charge you with whatever — I’ll stick a fucking kilo of coke in your pocket and put you away for 15 years.

The officer in question was given a 60-day paid suspension.

(Note that the “Rin Tin Tin Myth” makes police dogs seem noble and friendly. Arrests with dogs are brutal.)

(Must be nice to have a union. I would be fired immediately from any of my several jobs for doing any of the things that cop did, starting with leaving a company vehicle unattended with the keys in the ignition).

Cultivating joy
Don’t look behind you, there’s a bird trying to keep up. (I can’t remember if I posted this before but it’s still funny to me).
A short story read by a former student of mine. Another story of hers will be in The Best American Short Stories of 2018, edited by Roxane Gay.
Some birds teach each other how to do stuff.

Trouble With a Capital T

We got trouble with a capital T that… yeah. The Washington Post reports that “the Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown.”

See, once it turned out that Obama had a birth certificate, nobody could trust birth certificates anymore. Because obviously Obama wasn’t American. You know, you have to be American to be a citizen. I can’t exactly define what that means, but I know it when I see it.

I mean, you better not have a Bank of America bank account if you’re not One Of Us.

And yes, I am specifically referring to the horrifically exploitative pre-code film Freaks:

freaks-movie-still
Like looking in a mirror
In Hungary, there’s a tax on doing anything nice for immigrants.

There’s a new sexism scandal at a Tokyo medical school.

Chinese parents are furious as their expensive school district admits kids from poor regions. Solution: A “poor door” so the children of migrants don’t wind up in the classrooms of property-owners.

Big ideas
Francis Fukuyama tries to explain why history stubbornly refuses to end. His original prediction has become, at this point, a punchline more than an idea.

For example, StrongTowns has a great article this week on what they’re calling the “irrelevance of thingies,” by which they mean that the Internet of Things type hype is largely just hype. They contend that cities actually matter even more than they used to:

It’s been more than two decades since Frances Cairncross published his book The Death of Distance that prophesied that the advance of computing and communication technologies would eliminate the importance of “being there” and erase the need to live in expensive, congested cities. (It goes down, along with Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and Kevin Hassett’s Dow 36,000 as one of the demonstrably least accurate book titles of that decade.)

Cultivating joy
Cat is terrible dinner guest.
Cat is rude to marine life.
Swarm of very wrinkly little puppies.

Individual 1 For President

Someone must have set ’em up
Now they’ll be workin in the cold grey rock
Now they’ll be workin in the hot mill steam
Now they’ll be working in the concrete
In the sirens and the silences now
All the great set-up hearts
All at once start to beat…

individual-1-bumper-sticker
Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres…

Legacy
Adam Serwer notes the very American precedents for the Trump kleptocracy… and also reports that these two paragraphs have inspired a great deal of hate mail:

Many commentators have described that kind of authoritarianism as foreign to the United States. But it isn’t. It has its inspiration and precursor in the racial kleptocracy of the Jim Crow South, in which states were essentially criminal enterprises that existed to expropriate black wealth, exploit black labor, disenfranchise black voters, and shield acts of racist terrorism and violence from prosecution.
Remnants of this society are still with us, from mass incarceration, to discrimination against black jurors, to stand-your-ground laws. But alongside it, America retains a system in which the wealthy remain largely immune to [punishment for] financial crimes. Weak laws and regulations make the prosecution of financial crimes difficult, and prosecutors are often loath to pursue individuals who might be able to fill their campaign coffers come election time. Whether the president is Barack Obama or Donald Trump, the rich can afford a different kind of justice than everyone else.

Big ideas
What is the fate of capitalism? Well, that depends on what you mean by “capitalism” doesn’t it?

Seattle fears becoming San Francisco, split between wealth and shitting in the streets.

Article suggestions from our friend Kevin: Slavery inspired Taylorism, the root of modern management theory; Do robots already rule the world?

Cultivating joy
Big cats carrying big kittens
Cats are liquid. Pro and con.

Double Standards

Ben Shapiro, a debate-team champion who peaked in high school, has challenged congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez to a debate. One generally debates another candidate, not some jabroni, especially one known for bad-faith rhetorical tricks like the Gish Gallop. But hey, the Times sure is determined to cover this controversy.

The NYTimes and others are criticizing Alexandria @Ocasio2018 for not debating Ben Shapiro, but they’ve let Andrew Cuomo refuse to debate @CynthiaNixon for months without a single op-ed. I’m sure there’s a solid reason other than sexist double standards.

Abolish ICE and all borders (@markaprovost) August 10, 2018

There is a striking contrast between the scoldy, condescending tone of coverage of @Ocasio2018’s budget hand-waving and the decade of credulous-verging-on-worshipful coverage of the same from Paul Ryan.

Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 11, 2018

NPR, that bastion of liberal bias, interviewed two different people on both sides of an important issue. On one side, an activist who wants cops to stop murdering black people. On the other, a white nationalist! Gosh, there really are two sides to every issue and they all deserve a lot of consideration!

And in addition
“Silent Sam,” the confederate monument erected in 1913 as part of a white supremacy movement at the University of North Carolina, has been taken down. The university administration is very concerned that someone could have been hurt during this rude, rude act of vandalism. (In contrast, the Classics department issued a statement almost a year ago, noting that the statue should have been long gone by now).

See also
Meanwhile, cities are freaking out about rideshare and app-based dockless bikes and e-scooters. There are risks! There are externalities!

… if you’re worried about a technology that occupies a lot of public space, undermines public transit, and sometimes injures pedestrians, I’ve got some bad news for you about normal cars.

Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 11, 2018

Wholesome, yet slimy
Another look into the travails of the American snail-farmer.

The future
What happens when you can’t drive and can’t easily get yourself into a taxi or rideshare vehicle? Do you suddenly realize that building your entire geography around cars was a bad idea?

Careers
A word about the hiring process and what it reveals about how it is to work at your organization:

Conway’s law states that “Organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”

Prince states “I guess I should’ve known by the way you parked your car sideways/That it wouldn’t last”

In other words, how you do one thing is how you do everything.

Cultivating joy
A thread about chubby pets rated on a scale from “A Fine Boi” to “O LAWD HE COMIN” 

Stranger than Fiction


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.

Hindsight 2020

If you thought Pizzagate was absurd, just wait til you hear about QAnon. It’s everywhere. It’s nonsense. The short summary is that people think that almost everyone except Trump is a pedophile. They seem to be divided on whether Mueller is in league with the pedos, or actually working with Trump to use the Russia investigation as a cover to prove that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are actually trafficking child sex slaves in collaboration with Chrissy Teigen. I’m not linking to any of it, but Roseanne Barr is a serious believer in the meshugas.

hindsight-2020

Political correctness is out of control
Texas: High schools violate law, deny students opportunity to register to vote
New York: County clerk refuses wedding license to gay couple
Louisiana: Man asks police to show warrant, so they choke him to death.
Mississippi: People keep shooting the Emmett Till memorial.
Massachusetts: Police called on a Smith College student for eating lunch while black.
Virginia: Senate candidate Corey Stewart is a white nationalist. The New York Times won’t say it.
California: Sikh man beaten by racist attackers… while posting a campaign sign for a Republican.
National: Turns out leftists get fired for their opinions more than right-wingers.

… The “campus free speech” crisis is somewhat manufactured. Conservative student groups invite speakers famous for offensive and racially charged speech — all of the above speakers fit that bill — in a deliberate attempt to provoke the campus left. In other words, they’re trolling. When students react by protesting or disrupting the event, the conservatives use it as proof that there’s real intolerance for conservative ideas.

Much-delayed hatchet jobs
It’s been a while since I insulted David Brooks in this newsletter, so let’s reminisce about the time that America’s greatest diagnostician of moral decay left his wife for his much-younger assistant. And their wedding registry was public. And they asked for very, very, very expensive designer tableware.

Cultivating joy
Roughly 100 goats escaped from a goat-rental service and went to frolic in suburban yards. (Also, you can rent goats. Mostly for weed control, but also because they’re hilarious.)
These cats.
This dad.

Also:

Lemurs self-medicate by rubbing toxic millipedes over their bottoms https://t.co/UDmJzliy9n pic.twitter.com/eX1o2SMtiW

— New Scientist (@newscientist) August 2, 2018

A Mind-Controlling Parasite

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.
Finance
Where did all the money go? Duh, it went to offshore tax havens.
(TLDR: “Wealth inequality measures have been grossly understating
concentration because of tax evasion and tax avoidance in tax havens.”)

Longform
A Medium article about the latest bits of the Nixon tapes to surface. Turns out Nixon and Billy Graham were even more antisemitic than you thought. Surprise. 

A Motherboard article about a group of anarchists who distribute instruction kits for making your own epipens, HIV drugs, and more.

Brad DeLong posted a chapter or so that he’s cutting from a book he’s writing, addressing why China was not as wealthy and powerful in the 20th century as
it might have been. Long, digressive, unpolished, unedited, and kind of
fascinating anyway. If this is the part that’s left on the cutting room
floor, it should be quite a book.

Stranger than fiction

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.

Pop Psychology

I’m taking business courses right now, which sometimes seems to mean memorizing a lot of pop-psychology mnemonics for different personality and management models and theories. One of the models of behavior we have learned is called “Influence Without Authority” and it begins with treating your opponents as potential allies. This seems hopelessly naive sometimes but I’ve tried to apply it to my daily life anyway.

For example, the Somerville Ward 3 Democrats mailing list lit up this week about a project to turn a former function hall into apartments. Neighbors were concerned about parking and about the addition of rental units, because they felt that renters don’t stick around and create a stable community. I managed to gently guide the discussion toward the far less controversial topics of immigration policy and classism by pointing out that if our town wants to be welcoming to immigrants and people with modest means, it need to begin by making it possible for them to find a moderately priced apartment. It kind of worked, in that it led to a non-furious internet disagreement. Which, I guess, is a small miracle in its own way.

Links
Injustice: That prison is literally made of poison. Obviously they told nearby citizens about the danger of drinking local water, but not the prisoners.

Note also that in a sad echo of the three-fifths compromise, prisoners are counted in the census as residents of their prisons, but not permitted to vote, distorting representation, voting power, and funding distributions.

Sarcasm: A modest proposal on what else we could replace with Amazon services.

Policy: A brief history of public housing in Vienna. In stark contrast with American public housing, it doesn’t suck.

Iatrogenic medicine: Sasha Frere-Jones on the harms of benzodiazepenes.

Win/Fail via Twitter
Yak fail.
Dog win.
Dog fail.
Chart fail.

Be All That You Can Be

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.

This Is How We Do

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).