Tossing Some Links Overboard

No no doggie don't fetch

At the end of the ocean you reach the sky (photo ©2021 Weldon Berger)

Here’s a little review of G.A. Cohen’s “Why Not Socialism?” in Jacobin. Short summary: capitalism is an asshole.

McKinsey & Company, a non-fiction consultancy version of the law firm Wolfram & Hart from Buffy the Vampire Slayer spinoff Angel, and the former hive of Pete Buttigieg, was simultaneously advising the FDA and various pharmaceutical firms, including Purdue, fiefdom of the Sackler family and prime contributor to the opioid crisis.

In an email in 2014 to Purdue’s chief executive, a McKinsey consultant highlighted the firm’s work for the F.D.A. and stressed “who we know and what we know.”

We were just saying that capitalism is an asshole.

The TikTok video begins with a fish-eye view of a porch. Beyond it lies a sunny footpath, a yard planted with a sapling, a homogeneous subdivision. We are amid the suburban dream, and yet the view is foreboding: We are peering out from a hidden surveillance camera, and a stranger is approaching the house. We watch him execute a slow variation on the electric slide and deposit a package at the door. Then, in the manner of a servant capitulating to the whims of his liege, he curtsies toward the lens. He does this because, as the TikTok user explains by way of an automated robotic voice-over, “I asked my Amazon driver to do a dance before he delivers my package.”

Fuuuuuuuck.

The largest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon over the past decade. Some 60,000 people now belong to this secret army, many working under masked identities and in low profile, all part of a broad program called "signature reduction." The force, more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniforms and under civilian cover, in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name companies.

The Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity estimates the true rate of unemployment to be about six times greater than the official figures; helpful information when corresponding with people baffled by economic dissatisfaction amid an allegedly blazing economy.

Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $20,000 annually before taxes.

This story, by Judd Legum in his invaluable Popular Information newsletter, summarizes the most important points from a flood of articles about Facebook based on documents released late last year by a Facebook whistleblower.

Michael Hobbes wrote about “The Methods of Moral Panic Journalism“ in his Confirm My Choices newsletter, with some historical examples leading to the current plague of woke-ism panic.

“Mainstream economics is replete with ideas that ‘everyone knows’ to be true, but that are actually arrant nonsense.”

Bush Rejects Taliban Offer On Bin Laden
Sure wish we could have a do-over on that one.

Loving your job or becoming personally invested in it at all is not only inadvisable, she believes, but “inappropriate.”

“Three years ago, a small group of academics at a German university launched an unprecedented collaboration with the military – using novels to try to pinpoint the world’s next conflicts. Are they on to something?“

“The cameras only let smiling workers enter rooms or book meetings, ensuring that every employee is definitely, 100 percent happy all the time.“

“But the visit set a series of gears in motion. This Kafka-esque policing nightmare — a circumstance in which police identified a man to be surveilled based on a purely theoretical danger — would seem to cause the thing it predicted, in a deranged feat of self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“A series of crises expose deepening divides across America.”
This story is from last year. Shockingly, nothing has changed (because capitalism is an asshole).

“Life is a sequence of crushings.“

Comments are longed for.

(Contributors to this post include Francis of Delirium’s The Funhouse and Wading; and The Goon Sax’s Mirror II. Music recommendations are always welcome.)