Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Something seems odd about that, but i have been drinking.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Shocking, but not surprising

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

I really should read my own blog.

No one could have predicted…

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Nevertheless, she persisted.

… makes me wish i had hoarded more linguine

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn – Nancy Pelosi

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

We are aware of all internet traditions.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Let there be snark.

This is a big f—–g deal.

What fresh hell is this?

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

It’s not even safe to go out and pick up 2 days worth of poop anymore.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

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Free Markets Solve Everything

They’re Criming Right Out in the Open

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To add to Mistermix, it was not hard to predict what would happen with this. There are rules for you and me, and there are rules for everyone else:

They're Criming Right Out in the Open

And that’s precisely what they did. When Robinhood and others froze trades on Gamestop, what they did was lock EVERYONE who had purchased through them into their trade, and not allow them to make any action. So if you are a trader bought at certain price and wanted to sell at a certain price, you’re just fucked. You own that stock and Say you bought at 180, and wanted to sell at 100. Tough shit. You eat the loss as it rides to zero as the big money boys manipulate the price down. ** APPARENTLY THIS IS WRONG AND I AM UNINFORMED BOOB WHO HATES HEDGE FUNDS AND WALL STREET SO MUCH HE IS SOMETIMES HASTY, NEITHER OF WHICH SHOULD SURPRISE LONGTIME READERS.***

It’s class warfare Calvinball, and you know what? They’ll fucking get away with it. Because as George Carlin noted, it’s a big fucking club, and you ain’t in it. Robinhood is legit now stealing from the poor to give to the rich.

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I Only Play for Money, Honey

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Hey, if you’re a Republican PAC and you sent money to one of the traitors who voted not to certify the election, the list of companies that won’t give you a fucking dime is getting longer every minute.  Different companies are taking different approaches — some are just suspending all donations for a while, while others are targeting PACs that gave to traitors.  MasterCard, which isn’t on the list in the piece linked here, won’t be giving any money to those PACs either (Jud Leglum has an internal memo to that effect.)

To be clear, both American Express and MasterCard have stopped giving money, but they’re still processing payments.  It would be very damn interesting if they stopped processing transactions for WinRed, the Republican equivalent of ActBlue, until WinRed said they wouldn’t support these traitors.  I’m gonna guess that’s not coming, but who knows?

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Short (Ha!) Parler Explainer

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Last night Amazon announced that they would stop hosting Parler tonight.  This comes on the heels of Apple banning Parler from the App Store, and Google banning them from the Google Play Store.

The short answer of what this means for Parler is that they’ll probably be down for a few days until they find a new host, and there will never be a Parler app on a mobile device.   In other words, their status on the Internet — meaning how they will be treated by other tech companies and potential investors — has been demoted from something like Twitter or Facebook to a porn site.  I don’t mean that as a joke, and if you want to understand why, read on.

show full post on front page

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Every City Has One

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I’m sure Adam will have a much more complete post about the Nashville bombing as soon as facts are more clear.  In the meantime, I just want to note that the bomber sure picked an effective target.  His apparent intentional and careful targeting of what the Post is calling the AT&T “transmission building” led to a regional telecommunications blackout of pretty impressive proportions.  911, cell and Internet service were affected.  The Nashville airport closed for around four hours.

A few years ago I toured a similar facility in Rochester, and it’s an impressive building.  It is overbuilt — something like 4 stories tall, but built so heavily that it could have been ~15 (my memory isn’t 100% on that) — lots of brick and concrete.  It has redundant generators, steel roll down window shields in the lobby, and 24/7 security.  It has to be impressive, because, like the Nashville building, most of the Internet and telephone traffic for the region passed through it (at least at the time I toured it).

I’m not revealing any secrets when I say that every city has a similar building, they’re a pretty important failure point, and they’re generally downtown, facing busy city streets.  They probably should be better protected, but I guess we needed to spend our post-9/11 money on turning cops into stormtroopers and giving them armored vehicles instead of hardening these buildings.  Another factor must be the almost complete lack of regulation of telecoms once they branched out from land lines into cellular and Internet.

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Billionaires, Republicans, and the Assault on Society

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While we’re waiting for…oh, I dunno, something or other, an article I chanced upon today about wine and income inequality triggered a thought about what we are really up against in the ongoing fight for our country.

Eric Asimov, the New York Times wine critic, published this about a week ago:

Among the many ways the rich are different from you and me: Only they can afford grand cru Burgundy.

That wasn’t always the case. In the 1990s, middle-class wine lovers could still afford to experience that rite of passage — drinking a truly great wine, not simply to enjoy it, but to understand what qualities made it exceptional in the eyes of history.

It might have been a splurge, perhaps requiring a few sacrifices. But it was feasible, just as it was possible to buy first-growth Bordeaux, or the top wines of Barolo, Brunello di Montalcino or Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon, to name a few other standard-bearers.

Billionaires, Republicans, and the Assault on Society

Not any more. The TL:DR is that prices for top wines–not just Burgandies, but all the iconic names/regions–have diverged from most other bottles:

In 1980, the price of a first-growth Bordeaux was roughly four times the price of a fifth-growth Bordeaux, he said in a phone interview, referring to an 1855 classification that ranked top Médoc producers in five tiers, or growths. Nowadays, he said, as prices have risen for all these top wines, the ratio between first- and fifth-growth price is more like 10 to 1.

The driver: demand from the top 1 percent, or one tenth of 1 percent:

In another example from Bordeaux, Professor Ashenfelter, along with two researchers from the University of Bordeaux, presented a paper in 2018 showing that as income inequality has increased since 1980, the price of first-growth Bordeaux has paralleled the rise in top incomes.

Asimov, no raving radical he, is nonetheless perfectly able to connect the dots:

Though the problem matters to wine lovers, the rising inaccessibility of fancy wines is just a microscopic example of how income inequality and the concentration of wealth in fewer hands have affected daily life.

The macroscopic story, as I see it, is the rich-to-ultrarich war on the idea  and the real life of society. They lead lives that are carefully demarcated in both experiences and physical spaces that are theirs, and very much not ours. They drink stuff we don’t–can’t, anymore, even as special treats, because they’ve bought it all. When they fall ill, they enjoy boutique health care, and have thus less and less stake (they think) in public health. And so on.

That’s what income inequality does, what it’s supposed to do: bifurcate the world into two, one that a small group enjoys in seemingly secure isolation, and the one everyone else lives in. Worse, the ethos evoked to defend such wealth and such distinctions is an atomized one, of meritocratic, individual success. That’s not a social vision; it denies the value of collective action; it is bloody lonely.

And, of course, it drives our politics. All the signalling–the bigotry, the divide-and-conquer hate, the religious dog whistling and so on–may in fact matter to some in the Republican political class, but the driver is making sure nothing impedes the progress of generational fortunes.

This is all obvious to most here, I think–but it reminds me that progressive income taxes and confiscatory inheritance duties are existential–not just for them, but for the survival of American democracy, and maybe America itself.

Probably won’t do much to bring down the price of Petrus (lots of Chinese and Russian and whoever gazillionaires to suck up the available supply, even if we got a handle on our gilded class). But that’s what it will take, I think, to get a sustainable politics back, and (when the virus looses its hold) the kind of social and cultural world we might like to inhabit.

Enough such windy stuff.

As I said to Mr. Gorbachev: Open Up This Thread!

(ETA to add the link to the Asimov article.)

Image: Willem Kalf, Wineglass and a Bowl of Fruit, 1663

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Kodak Non-Moment

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On July 28, to much fanfare, the Development Finance Corporation (DFC), a government entity formed from USAID in 2018, announced a commitment to loan $765 million to Kodak to have them start manufacturing base chemicals used for pharmaceuticals.  Gross incompetent Peter Navarro was deeply involved, blathering some nonsense that I won’t bother to repeat.

Today’s Kodak is just a shell of the former company.  It employs a mere 1,300 people (when it had up to 100K employees years ago).  Over the years as their film business burned out, they sold off every profitable division, leaving one large, old industrial complex in the center of Rochester, Kodak Park.  Imagine everything that the word “park” conjures up, and invert it — Kodak Park is dirty, old and polluted.  The story around Rochester is that when it rained near Kodak Park, the raindrops would burn the paint off of parked cars.

Still, Kodak owns a plant that can manufacture chemicals.  So, I guess it is a candidate to make pharma chemicals, and perhaps some startup costs and time could be saved by using their existing infrastructure.

But, there’s more than just a chemical cloud over Kodak Park and this deal.  In June, while negotiations were happening, Kodak’s grossly overcompensated CEO, Jim Continenza, bought 46,737 shared of stock as part of his compensation plan.  So, when the stock went from ~$2 to $30 on the day of the announcement, one might wonder if someone grabbed the invisible hand and forced it to shove $1.3 million into Continenza’s pockets.

Shockingly, even the Trump Administration’s SEC is investigating, and now the whole deal is up in the air.  I’ll wager it will never happen, because the “deal” signed on July 28 was a couple vague paragraphs that aren’t even a letter of intent.

This is of a piece with getting GM to manufacture ventilators.  It’s as if someone who had been in a coma since the 70’s suddenly awoke and was asked to name two big US companies:  “GM and Kodak.  Now get me a Tab and a Hostess Fruit Pie – it’s almost time for Bonanza!”

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So About That Third Party Spoilers Thing… The Libertarian Presidential Candidate And A Possibly Rabid Bat Edition

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What effect might his have on Ms. Jorgenson’s views on the US healthcare system? Well let’s just say kvetching was involved!

There is, as of 11:10 PM EDT, no word on the condition of the bat and whether it has contracted anything serious or life threatening from coming into contact with Ms. Jorgenson.

Open thread!

Obligatory:

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