Since the legal FBI search—not a raid—was revealed to have taken place at the Trump property in Mar-a-Lago, my phone has rung off the hook; what do you think, what did they get, who ratted him out? Since the punditry’s heart-pumping nonreporting began, leaning on former members of Trump’s inner...
Nature
This is the sixth set of notes for a reading group on Marx’s Capital, and includes a Volume I refresher for further reading of Volume II. There are links to earlier posts and texts that may be useful. Marx is probably too taken with a kind of scientism by proposing...
I was born in the 1950s when it was not illegal for black people in the south to vote—it was suicide. Pseudo-laws, tests, intimidation, hoods, ropes, and guns were the anti-democracy tactics of the day. Southern state officials could not legitimately ban black people from voting, so the strategy was...
Some historical terms should not be used lightly. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used the term Apartheid to describe the Israel/Palestine reality, this shocked some people. I hate the word Apartheid as it brings back to too many precise historical racial connotations with respect to South Africa. The term segregation holds similar memories...
If there are epitaphs for the US involvement in Afghanistan, it will resemble the problem of a modern military against a historically unconquerable country built on tribal differences. The winner will be Pakistan and the loser the people of Afghanistan. In a remarkable and previously unreported incident in early December, top...
There is a capitalist propaganda battle at work, with the Wall Street Journal claiming that “ Biden has sent a signal around the world that nobody’s intellectual property is safe in America.”. The National Review now claims that “Profit Margins Save Lives”. “The administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service...
President Joe Biden seems to be doing the right thing. Progressive's fight to #FreeTheVaccine may be realized. This could mitigate COVID-19 worldwide. #FreeTheVaccine may be realized x x YouTube Video See full episodes here. Most Progressives were receiving messages through the grapevine that was disturbing earlier this week. Many activists believed that...
A new book suggests now the necessity of reexamining the historical materialist project of Walter Benjamin recognizing those moments of historical contact as acts of recognizing the constructed historical object. “Historicism tends to be hermeneutic because it values cautious, rigorous, and contextualized interpretation of information; or relativist, because it rejects notions of universal, fundamental...
Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that...
According to new findings from the University of California San Diego and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, primarily in summer, unprecedented quantities of heat from the Pacific are pouring into the Arctic Ocean through the Bering Strait. This likely explains the rapid decimation of sea ice in the region. The decline has...
Like Martin Luther objecting to Pope Leo X selling indulgences to raise money for a variety of excesses, the environmental costs of carbon markets far exceed the benefits. Austerity would have denied us Renaissance art which is less at risk in an age of non-fungible tokens. Today the consequences for the planet...
Tennessee is at it again. State Rep. Jerry Sexton is trying for the third time to get the legislature to say that: BE IT RESOLVED BY THE SENATE OF THE ONE HUNDRED TWELFTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF TENNESSEE, THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES CONCURRING, that we hereby designate the...
Not about authoritarian horseshoes or even close hand grenades. The “environmental” claims of RWNjs or even wise use advocates is also about corporate land use, private property NIMBYism/sovereignty, and constraining minority populations via immigration. Even the New Zealand terrorist’s manifesto proclaimed a ecofascist threat was largely about fearing indigenous people because of...
Twitter is dragging Jonathan Turley because of attributing a Rousseau quote to the Reign of Terror, but more likely because they mistook him for Jeffrey Toobin. That’s the nature of conservative culture war, making class warfare a struggle more transcendent and less applicable in times of right-wing insurrection. x Since philosopher Jean...
The Atlanta spree killings are unfortunately a story with structural similarity to events elsewhere. How do we know that Robert Long wasn’t on his way to Mar-a-Lago when the cops performed a PIT maneuver on him after he killed eight people. Darn hypotheticals of the culture wars. Mar-a-Lago as spa resort...
It is patently clear that Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) has lost the fealty, loyalty, or any semblance of respect from his underlings and enemies. As Mr. Cuomo becomes more defiant in his denials of sexual harassment, the Democratic party both locally and nationwide is getting bored with the drama and wants...
“The universe has been to them.” (Resident Alien) Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what...
The sparse number of actual carbon capture and sequestration projects plus weak carbon markets amplify the problems of the climate crisis yet to be revisited, post-Trump. Two heartland examples in North Dakota and Texas show how there are several interlocking problems addressing the climate crisis that must be included in future environmental policy. More specifically...
Trump never truly understood why Paul Manafort chose Mike Pence as his Vice President. Trump thought that Pence’s commitment to theocracy would serve Trump’s con of the evangelicals and guarantee loyalty rather than the opposite. Trump got “betrayed” by Pence because he knew Trump would never really be able to deliver a...
Recovering memory and historical revisionism in sex work might be the sad product of many repressive regimes. What becomes worse is the complicity of academic institutions in white-washing crimes against humanity. Harvard is no stranger to items like Alan (buddy of Jeff Epstein) Dershowitz’s attempt to move the statutory rape...
For much of the world’s history, we have been ruled by violence and its descendants. Kings won their thrones by having better fighters than their opponents. Transfers of power meant inheriting that throne or by violently seizing it. On those rare occasions where power changed hands non-violently from one living...
Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that...
Let real wages (of $15+/hour) grow faster than labor productivity for some years, undoing the wage repression of the last decades. We have been misled by neoliberal economics for now many decades, it’s time to turn many things around in what is becoming a second-rated US economy, recently crippled by the...
“In all things of nature, there is something of the marvelous.” ~ Aristotle It is a fact that the biggest threat to our species is not climate change, though it will likely end much of what we experience today, but rather our war on bio-diversity. Bio-diversity is under attack from...
No one wants to hear about GameStop(gate) even if it’s not really a scandal or a flaw in capitalism. Slavoj “we must end capitalism but won't” Žižek on GameStop is like imposing a libidinal economy on Sudetenland when you take it over. Was the appeasement good for you too? There’s a market...
As Climate Crisis returns to the new US administration agenda, negative emissions technologies (NETs) may find their implementation hindered by neoliberal financialization. An earlier ACM story showed how Steve Keen’s critique of Nordhaus’s use of discounting climate change demonstrates that orthodox economics is incapable of accelerating innovation especially in...
The best explanation of short selling (as it applies to GameStop) that I've read pic.twitter.com/o9ZL5HqsKf — John M. Cunningham (@jmcunning) January 28, 2021 1/2Short selling means borrowing shares and immediately selling them. When the price goes down, they buy them back for cents and return them to the lender. This...
The historian George Santayana wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” Understanding this phrase is not so much in the words as in the context. Santayana was a historian but he was also a pragmatist. He believed the role of history was in solving current...
The historian George Santayana wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” Understanding this phrase is not so much in the words as in the context. Santayana was a historian but he was also a pragmatist. He believed the role of history was in solving current...
We were warned, now a new study has determined that the Earth’s plants' ability to sequester carbon emissions through photosynthesis will be halved by the 2030s or 2040s from what it is today at ten percent. That kind of loss will turn the natural world into a heat and carbon source, bringing...
We were warned, now a new study has determined that the Earth’s plants’ ability to sequester carbon emissions through photosynthesis will be halved by the 2030s or 2040s from what it is today at ten percent. That kind of loss will turn the natural world into a heat and carbon source, bringing...
There is a Wall Street Journal report that Trump’s pressure on a top federal prosecutor in Atlanta to resign was part of a broader push by President Trump to overturn the state’s election results. x Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA): “This is a very narrow article of impeachment … it is focused on...
Staring at the Andrew Jackson portrait in the Oval Office must have had a stochastic effect. Like Nixon talking to portraits, Trump decided he’d go out with a bang. As his hero, Trump perhaps read about the second inaugural on 4 March 1829. Trump would never hold such an “open house” rather...
During her second appearance on the leader of the genre in daytime talk, The View (1/5/21), following her maternity leave, Meghan McCain was told in no uncertain terms by one of the other four co-hosts, Joy Behar, that she was not missed. Although McCain was apparently appalled by the rebuke,...
This post in the Anticapitalist Chat supports a group reading of Karl Marx’s Capital Vol 1. #GoodMorningMarx #WeeklyMarx Reproduction and accumulation Capital is “self-valorising value”. But for capital to continue to generate new value and create surplus-value, this surplus-value must itself by reinvested back into production – that is, surplus-value must be...
Just because he wanted a spectacle that could have resulted in mass casualties and even death doesn’t change the event. Race has little to do with it, yet. Motive still needs further investigation, despite the mass of CTs and disinformation. It seems more likely that the bomber did not die...