#Thom Hartmann Report

[garudabluffs]

When Speech Becomes Sedition

"When speech becomes sedition, And truth’s locked away, They twist the world, reshape our vision, To make the light fade gray."

The song that was inspired by this article is here.

READ MORE https://hartmannreport.com/p/when-speech-becomes-sedition-tales-d28

70 Comments

VIDEO 11/01/2024 https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house

READ MORE https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-recession-racket-musk-trump-and-2bd/comments

40 Comments

[lenbryant]

Great take from Thomas Hartmann. Scrub past the ads.

[thatstormygeek]

The simple reality is that the future of American democracy is as much on the line in this case as it was in 1866. That was completely lost in yesterday’s arguments: it should have been central to them. So, why did even the “liberal” wing of the Court go along with this charade? Was it because, like Mitt Romney said of his Republican Senate colleagues who failed to convict Trump in his second impeachment, they were afraid for their own safety?

[...]

This is how fascists and authoritarians have seized and held power for all the millennia we’ve had what we call civilization: by inducing terror. Just ask Ruby Freeman or Paul Pelosi. Or read Shakespeare or the Bible. Or talk with Alexi Navalny’s wife. Did they never learn in American History class that there was a time, spanning about a generation, when democracy had been replaced by strongman oligarchy in the South and Trump is merely echoing the values and postures of that time? That the 14th Amendment was written to prevent or rescue us from exactly today’s situation?

[arlengrossman]

America Can’t Let the 9/11 War Lies Go Down the Memory Hole

By Thom Hartmann/ HartmannReport.com/ September 11, 2023 Today is 9/11, the event that first brought America together and then was cynically exploited by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to have a war against Iraq, following their illegal invasion of Afghanistan just a bit more than a year earlier. Yet the media today (so far, anyway) is curiously silent about Bush and Cheney’s lies.  Given the…

[posttexasstressdisorder]

How Trump's billionaires are hijacking affordable housing

Thom Hartmann

October 24, 2024 8:52AM ET

Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump attends the 79th annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York City, U.S., October 17, 2024. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

America’s morbidly rich billionaires are at it again, this time screwing the average family’s ability to have decent, affordable housing in their never-ending quest for more, more, more. Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, and Denmark have had enough and done something about it: we should, too.

There are a few things that are essential to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that should never be purely left to the marketplace; these are the most important sectors where government intervention, regulation, and even subsidy are not just appropriate but essential. Housing is at the top of that list.

A few days ago I noted how, since the Reagan Revolution, the cost of housing has exploded in America, relative to working class income.

When my dad bought his home in the 1950s, for example, the median price of a single-family house was around 2.2 times the median American family income. Today the St. Louis Fed says the median house sells for $417,700 while the median American income is $40,480—a ratio of more than 10 to 1 between housing costs and annual income.

ALSO READ: He’s mentally ill:' NY laughs ahead of Trump's Madison Square Garden rally

In other words, housing is about five times more expensive (relative to income) than it was in the 1950s.

And now we’ve surged past a new tipping point, causing the homelessness that’s plagued America’s cities since George W. Bush’s deregulation-driven housing- and stock-market crash in 2008, exacerbated by Trump’s bungling America’s pandemic response.

And the principal cause of both that crash and today’s crisis of homelessness and housing affordability has one, single, primary cause: billionaires treating housing as an investment commodity.

A new report from Popular Democracy and the Institute for Policy Studies reveals how billionaire investors have become a major driver of the nationwide housing crisis. They summarize in their own words:

— Billionaire-backed private equity firms worm their way into different segments of the housing market to extract ever-increasing rents and value from multi-family rental, single-family homes, and mobile home park communities. — Global billionaires purchase billions in U.S. real estate to diversify their asset holdings, driving the creation of luxury housing that functions as “safety deposit boxes in the sky.” Estimates of hidden wealth are as high as $36 trillion globally, with billions parked in U.S. land and housing markets. — Wealthy investors are acquiring property and holding units vacant, so that in many communities the number of vacant units greatly exceeds the number of unhoused people. Nationwide there are 16 million vacant homes: that is, 28 vacant homes for every unhoused person. — Billionaire investors are buying up a large segment of the short-term rental market, preventing local residents from living in these homes, in order to cash in on tourism. These are not small owners with one unit, but corporate owners with multiple properties. — Billionaire investors and corporate landlords are targeting communities of color and low-income residents, in particular, with rent increases, high rates of eviction, and unhealthy living conditions. What’s more, billionaire-owned private equity firms are investing in subsidized housing, enjoying tax breaks and public benefits, while raising rents and evicting low-income tenants from housing they are only required to keep affordable, temporarily. (Emphasis theirs.)

It seems that everywhere you look in America you see the tragedy of the homelessness these billionaires are causing. Rarely, though, do you hear about the role of Wall Street and its billionaires in causing it.

The math, however, is irrefutable.

Thirty-two percent is the magic threshold, according to research funded by the real estate listing company Zillow. When neighborhoods hit rent rates in excess of 32 percent of neighborhood income, homelessness explodes. And we’re seeing it play out right in front of us in cities across America because a handful of Wall Street billionaires are making a killing.

As the Zillow study notes:

“Across the country, the rent burden already exceeds the 32 percent [of median income] threshold in 100 of the 386 markets included in this analysis….”

And wherever housing prices become more than three times annual income, homelessness stalks like the grim reaper. That Zillow-funded study laid it out:

“This research demonstrates that the homeless population climbs faster when rent affordability — the share of income people spend on rent — crosses certain thresholds. In many areas beyond those thresholds, even modest rent increases can push thousands more Americans into homelessness.”

This trend is massive.

As noted in a Wall Street Journal article titled “Meet Your New Landlord: Wall Street,” in just one suburb (Spring Hill) of Nashville:

“In all of Spring Hill, four firms … own nearly 700 houses … [which] amounts to about 5% of all the houses in town.”

This is the tiniest tip of the iceberg.

“On the first Tuesday of each month,” notes the Journal article about a similar phenomenon in Atlanta, investors “toted duffels stuffed with millions of dollars in cashier’s checks made out in various denominations so they wouldn’t have to interrupt their buying spree with trips to the bank…”

The same thing is happening in cities and suburbs all across America; agents for the billionaire investor goliaths use fine-tuned computer algorithms to sniff out houses they can turn into rental properties, making over-market and unbeatable cash bids often within minutes of a house hitting the market.

After stripping neighborhoods of homes young families can afford to buy, billionaires then begin raising rents to extract as much cash as they can from local working class communities.

In the Nashville suburb of Spring Hill, the vice-mayor, Bruce Hull, told the Journal you used to be able to rent “a three bedroom, two bath house for $1,000 a month.” Today, the Journal notes:

“The average rent for 148 single-family homes in Spring Hill owned by the big four [Wall Street billionaire investor] landlords was about $1,773 a month…”

As the Bank of International Settlements summarized in a 2014 retrospective study of the years since the Reagan/Gingrich changes in banking and finance:

“We describe a Pareto frontier along which different levels of risk-taking map into different levels of welfare for the two parties, pitting Main Street against Wall Street. … We also show that financial innovation, asymmetric compensation schemes, concentration in the banking system, and bailout expectations enable or encourage greater risk-taking and allocate greater surplus to Wall Street at the expense of Main Street.”

It’s a fancy way of saying that billionaire-owned big banks and hedge funds have made trillions on housing while you and your community are becoming destitute.

Ryan Dezember, in his book Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare, describes the story of a family trying to buy a home in Phoenix. Every time they entered a bid, they were outbid instantly, the price rising over and over, until finally the family’s father threw in the towel.

“Jacobs was bewildered,” writes Dezember. “Who was this aggressive bidder?”

Turns out it was Blackstone Group, now the world’s largest real estate investor run by a major Trump supporter. At the time they were buying $150 million worth of American houses every week, trying to spend over $10 billion. And that’s just a drop in the overall bucket.

As that new study from Popular Democracy and the Institute for Policy Studies found:

“[Billionaire Stephen Schwarzman’s] Blackstone is the largest corporate landlord in the world, with a vast and diversified real estate portfolio. It owns more than 300,000 residential units across the U.S., has $1 trillion in global assets, and nearly doubled its profits in 2021. ��Blackstone owns 149,000 multi-family apartment units; 63,000 single-family homes; 70 mobile home parks with 13,000 lots through their subsidiary Treehouse Communities; and student housing, through American Campus Communities (144,300 beds in 205 properties as of 2022). Blackstone recently acquired 95,000 units of subsidized housing.”

In 2018, corporations and the billionaires that own or run them bought 1 out of every 10 homes sold in America, according to Dezember, noting that:

“Between 2006 and 2016, when the homeownership rate fell to its lowest level in fifty years, the number of renters grew by about a quarter.”

And it’s gotten worse every year since then.

This all really took off around a decade ago following the Bush Crash, when Morgan Stanley published a 2011 report titled “The Rentership Society,” arguing that snapping up houses and renting them back to people who otherwise would have wanted to buy them could be the newest and hottest investment opportunity for Wall Street’s billionaires and their funds.

Turns out, Morgan Stanley was right. Warren Buffett, KKR, and The Carlyle Group have all jumped into residential real estate, along with hundreds of smaller investment groups, and the National Home Rental Council has emerged as the industry’s premiere lobbying group, working to block rent control legislation and other efforts to control the industry.

As John Husing, the owner of Economics and Politics Inc., told The Tennessean newspaper:

“What you have are neighborhoods that are essentially unregulated apartment houses. It could be disastrous for the city.”

As Zillow found:

“The areas that are most vulnerable to rising rents, unaffordability, and poverty hold 15 percent of the U.S. population — and 47 percent of people experiencing homelessness.”

The loss of affordable homes also locks otherwise middle class families out of the traditional way wealth is accumulated — through home ownership: over 61% of all American middle-income family wealth is their home’s equity.

And as families are priced out of ownership and forced to rent, they become more vulnerable to homelessness.

Housing is one of the primary essentials of life. Nobody in America should be without it, and for society to work, housing costs must track incomes in a way that makes housing both available and affordable.

Singapore, Denmark, New Zealand, and parts of Canada have all put limits on billionaire, corporate, and foreign investment in housing, recognizing families’ residences as essential to life rather than purely a commodity. Multiple other countries are having that debate or moving to take similar actions as you read these words.

America should, too.

ALSO READ: Not even ‘Fox and Friends’ can hide Trump’s dementia

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:

Have you heard that Comcast is planning to sell MSNBC? Is Rupert Murdoch planning to buy it? Will America’s media landscape soon resemble those of Hungary and Russia? Without the rightwing media juggernaut, Donald Trump probably wouldn’t be president next year and wouldn’t have won in 2016. That said, the progressive media landscape looks like it might be about to get a whole lot worse. Comcast, which owns NBC and its subsidiaries CNBC and MSNBC (among other media outlets) announced this week that they’ll be spinning off MSNBC (among others) next year. And the consequences are already showing up. It was reported this week that Rachel Maddow just took a substantial annual pay-cut because of the uncertain future of the network. In part, this probably reflects a belt-tightening at Comcast, but is also an indication of how legacy media — which now includes cable properties — are taking a hit from newer digital media, from social media to podcasts to web-based networks and programs.

[...]

While NPR goes to great lengths to avoid political bias in their news (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting even hired last month, “in response to right-wing criticism,” multiple editors specifically to spot and stamp out any progressive perspectives that may creep into their reporting), if they were crippled, it’s safe to assume the roughly 1,500 rightwing hate radio stations in the country stand more than ready and willing to pick up their radio audience. Rightwing billionaires brought us Fox “News,” Sinclair, two other web- and cable-based rightwing TV channels, nationwide networks of hate radio (now also in Spanish), tens of millions of dollars in subsidies to rightwing podcast hosts, and the destruction of about half the nation’s local newspapers. Not to mention an entire network of billionaire-funded hard-right phony “pink slime” newspapers that pop up around the country every election year.

There’s no equivalent politically-tilted media systems on the left; Democratic-leaning billionaires have stayed out of the media space ever since Romney’s company took down Air America.

The closest TV and radio counterparts we have are Free Speech TV (available on the web, Dish, Sling, Roku, AppleTV, and DirecTV) and the Progress Channel on SiriusXM (my daily program is carried on both).

In the print media space, Substack is growing (although they also carry hard-right content) and provides a solid community of progressive publications (like HartmannReport.com), but that’s a drop in a much larger ocean; even The Washington Post and The New York Times don’t come close to the strength of editorial bias found in the Murdoch family’s The New York Post or The Wall Street Journal. Publications like The New Republic, Mother Jones, The Nation, and The Guardian provide solid progressive content, but all have funding bases that are trivial compared to conservative publications supported by rightwing billionaire networks. Ditto for websites like Raw Story, Common Dreams, Alternet, LA Progressive, Democratic Underground, and Daily Kos.

Thom Hartmann wrote a excellent yet frightening piece about how progressive journalism and media has ossified.

[misfitwashere]

If You Don't Know Medicare Advantage Is a Scam, You're Not Paying Attention

We’re on the edge of the open enrollment period for Medicare, and the Advantage scammers will be carpet-bombing America with advertisements over the next few months. Don't be fooled about what it is—and who is profiting.

Thom Hartmann

Oct 07, 2023

Common Dreams

President George W. Bush and Republicans (and a handful of on-the-take Democrats) in Congress created the Medicare Advantage scam in 2003 as a way of routing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of for-profit insurance companies.

Those companies, and their executives, then recycle some of that profit back into politicians’ pockets via the Citizens United legalized bribery loophole created by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

Just the overcharges happening right now in that scam are costing Americans over $140 billion a year: more than the entire budget for the Medicare Part B or Part D programs. These ripoffs — that our federal government seems to have no interest in stopping — are draining the Medicare trust fund while ensnaring gullible seniors in private insurance programs where they’re often denied life-saving care.

Real Medicare pays bills when they’re presented. Medicare Advantage insurance companies, on the other hand, get a fixed dollar amount every year for each of the people enrolled in their programs, regardless of how much they spent on each customer.

As a result, Medicare Advantage programs make the greatest profits for their CEOs and shareholders when they actively refuse to pay for care, something that happens frequently. It’s a safe bet that nearly 100 percent of the people who sign up for Advantage programs don’t know this and don’t have any idea how badly screwed they could be if they get seriously ill.

Not only that, when people do figure out they’ve been duped and try to get back on real Medicare, the same insurance companies often punish them by refusing to write Medigap plans (that fill in the 20% hole in real Medicare). They can’t do that when you first sign up when you turn 65, but if you “leave” real Medicare for privatized Medicare Advantage, it can be damn hard to get back on it.

The doctors’ group Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) just published a shocking report on the extent of the Medicare Advantage ripoffs — both to individual customers and to Medicare itself — that every American should know about.

The report, titled Our Payments, Their Profits, opens with this shocking exposé:

“By our estimate, and based on 2022 spending, Medicare Advantage overcharges taxpayers by a minimum of 22% or $88 billion per year, and potentially by up to 35% or $140 billion. By comparison, Part B premiums in 2022 totaled approximately $131 billion, and overall federal spending on Part D drug benefits cost approximately $126 billion. Either of these — or other crucial aspects of Medicare and Medicaid — could be funded entirely by eliminating overcharges in the Medicare Advantage program. “Medicare Advantage, also known as MA or Medicare Part C, is a privately administered insurance program that uses a capitated payment structure, as opposed to the fee-for-service (FFS) structure of Traditional Medicare or TM. Instead of paying directly for the health care of beneficiaries, the federal government gives a lump sum of money to a third party (generally a commercial insurer) to ‘manage’ patient care.”

With real Medicare and a Medigap plan, you talk with your physician or hospital and decide on your treatment, they bill Medicare, and you never see or hear about the bill. There is nobody between you and your physician or hospital and Medicare only goes after the payment they’ve made if they sniff out a fraud.

With Medicare Advantage, on the other hand, your insurance company gets a lump-sum payment from Medicare every year and keeps the difference between what they get and what they pay out. They then insert themselves between you and your doctor or hospital to avoid paying for whatever they can.

Whatever you decide on regarding treatment, many Advantage insurance company will regularly second-guess and do everything they can to intimidate you into paying yourself out-of-pocket. Often, they simply refuse payment and wait for you to file a complaint against them; for people seriously ill the cumbersome “appeals” process is often more than they can handle.

As a result, hospitals and doctor groups across the nation are beginning to refuse to take Medicare Advantage patients. California-based Scripps Health, for example, cares for around 30,000 people on Medicare Advantage and recently notified all of them that Scripps will no longer offer medical services to them unless they pay out-of-pocket or revert back to real Medicare.

They made this decision because over $75 million worth of services and procedures their physicians had recommended to their patients were turned down by Medicare Advantage insurance companies. In many cases, Scripps had already provided the care and is now stuck with the bills that the Advantage companies refuse to pay.

Scripps CEO Chris Van Gorder told MedPage Today:

“We are a patient care organization and not a patient denial organization and, in many ways, the model of managed care has always been about denying or delaying care – at least economically. That is why denials, [prior] authorizations and administrative processes have become a very big issue for physicians and hospitals...”

Similarly, the Mayo Clinic has warned its customers in Florida and Arizona that they won’t accept Medicare Advantage any more, either. Increasing numbers of physician groups and hospitals are simply over being ripped off by Advantage insurance companies.

Not only is the Medicare Advantage scam a screw job for healthcare providers and people who are on the programs and are unfortunate enough to get sick, it’s also preventing Americans from getting expanded benefits from real Medicare.

As the PNHP report notes, for real Medicare to provide comprehensive vision, dental, and hearing benefits to all Medicare recipients would cost the system around $84 billion a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Instead, though, the Medicare system is burdened with at least that amount of money in over-payments to Medicare Advantage providers — over-payments that have no health benefit whatsoever and merely inflate the companies’ profits.

A hundred billion dollars in excess profits can be put to a lot of uses, and the health insurance industry is quite good at it. The former CEO of UnitedHealth, “Dollar” Bill McGuire, for example, made off with over $1.5 billion dollars for his efforts.

And, because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision, some of these companies allocate millions every year (a mere drop in the bucket) to pay off loyal members of Congress and to dangle high-paying future jobs to high-level employees of CMS who have the power to keep the gravy train going and thwart prosecutions.

As PNHP noted:

“Medicare Advantage is just another example of the endless greed of the insurance industry poisoning American health care, siphoning money from vulnerable patients while delaying and denying necessary and often life-saving treatment. While there is obvious reason to fix these issues in MA and to expand Traditional Medicare for the sake of all beneficiaries, the deep structural problems with our health care system will only be fixed when we achieve improved Medicare for All.”

We’re on the edge of the open enrollment period for Medicare, and the Advantage scammers will be carpet-bombing America with advertisements over the next few months. Representatives Pocan, Khanna, and Schakowsky have introduced the “Save Medicare Act” that would ban Advantage companies from using the word Medicare in their advertising.

They made a video about it that’s well worth sharing with friends and family:

As Schakowsky, Khanna, and Pocan note, “Only Medicare is Medicare.” Don’t be fooled by the Medicare Advantage scam.

And now that you know, pass it on and save somebody else’s health!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[Daily Don]

* * * *

The Jacksonville, Florida murders of three Black customers in Dollar General Store.

          On Saturday, a gunman attempted to enter Florida’s oldest historically Black university—Edward Waters University. When he was turned away from the EWU campus, he went to a Dollar General Store in Jacksonville, Florida, and killed three Black customers. He carefully choreographed the murders to ensure that we would know they were hate crimes directed against the Black population in Florida—a state that has been engaged in a culture war against its Black citizens at the urging of Ron DeSantis.

          There is much to unpack in this latest hate crime in Florida. Juliette Kayyem provides the details and analysis in The Atlantic, The Jacksonville Killer Wanted Everyone to Know His Message of Hate. Her article is behind a paywall, but if you have access to The Atlantic, Kayyem’s article is a compelling and disturbing read. She writes, in part,

Much is already known about the gunman who killed three Black customers at a Dollar General shop in Jacksonville, Florida, yesterday. He was in possession of an AR-15-style weapon and a handgun; he left manifestos about his hatred toward African Americans; he was wearing a tactical-style uniform as if going to war. [The gunman’s] actions yesterday were not just a hate crime. They were a performance for all the world to see. This is the age of mass shooting as production. And we misunderstand what is happening if we see this as a play with only one act at a time. [The shooting] occurred on the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the civil-rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Whether the killer knew this doesn’t really matter. African Americans do.

          It does not matter whether we can draw a straight line between the killings and DeSantis’s hostility toward Black Floridians, it is enough that he signed a bill allowing permitless carry of handguns and several bills prohibiting the teaching of Black history. DeSantis has created an atmosphere of fear and hate that inevitably encourages deranged people like the Jacksonville killer to act on their delusions. DeSantis’s animosity toward Black Americans is objectively immoral. But it is also singularly disqualifying in his bid for the presidency.

          We must do something to stop the carnage and hate. There are many different approaches to stopping gun violence—and we must pursue them all. Thom Hartmann published an essay over the weekend that gave me hope that some solutions are not far from hand. See The Hartmann Report, Well-Regulated Smart Guns Are Here. As Hartmann explains, several technology solutions are fully operational and ready for deployment. Solutions include fingerprint technology to unlock guns and serial imprints on bullets inscribed by the firing pin upon discharge. None of these solutions would stop killers like the Jacksonville neo-Nazi, but they would undoubtedly stop other gun deaths. We must start somewhere.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[totallyhussein-blog]

Rishinomics or Reaganomics. What is next for Britain?

GROWING numbers of workers are being pulled into the red as the rising cost of essentials outpaces wage increases, Citizens Advice has warned.

The charity said the proportion of people in full-time employment it sees with “negative budgets” – having more money going out on essential costs than coming in – has risen from around 27 per cent in early 2019 to nearly 39 per cent by this year.

It added the self-employed have been particularly hard hit, with 58 per cent of those it has helped with debt having had a negative budget, compared with 39 per cent in 2019. Citizens Advice director of policy Matthew Upton said: “Most people expect that if you work hard, you should have enough money to get by."

“Yet our front-line advisers are seeing more and more people in work who can’t make ends meet. This is even after they’ve had specialist advice and done what they can to cut costs and maximise their income."

Following America's 1980's example

As USA Today reported back in 2013, Margaret Thatcher's first official visit to the United States was in 1967 when, as a young member of Parliament, she toured the country as part of a State Department exchange program. Thatcher first met Ronald Reagan one-on-one in April 1975 at the House of Commons in London. Reagan, then the governor of California, wrote a thank-you note to Thatcher, then the Conservative Party's opposition leader in Parliament.

The Ronald Reagan library identifies Thatcher as Reagan's most prolific correspondent among heads of state and notes that they exchanged hundreds of letters, messages and telephone calls. Both worked to dismantle government bureaucracies and deregulate key industries. At one meeting, Reagan and Thatcher had a sharp discussion about U.S. barriers to the denationalization of British Airways.

There's nothing "normal" about having a middle class, wrote Thom Hartmann in the Salon back in 2014. "Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it's a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation's middle class."

"When we had heavily regulated and taxed capitalism in the post-war era, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid working people what would be, in today's dollars, about $50 an hour with benefits. Reagan began deregulating and cutting taxes on capitalism in 1981, and today, with more classical "raw capitalism," what we call "Reaganomics," or "supply side economics," our nation's largest employer is WalMart and they pay around $10 an hour."

But as Peter Lunenfeld also wrote back in 2014; "economists are waking up to the fact that when young Americans enter the workforce burdened with over a trillion dollars in cumulative debt, they become risk averse, unwilling to move, less able to make major purchases, and slower to become homeowners. Not coincidentally, they don’t feel safe enough to register any major protests against the society that’s done this to them."

[garudabluffs]

"...a plug in for a documentary I watched last night -- it's called "Where to Invade Next", compiled by Michael Moore. He tours some European countries and one N. African one (Tunisia) to see if there's any good ideas/practices he can bring back to the U.S. While he doesn't go into religion, there's bits on education, justice (in terms of prisons and drugs), and labor practices. I was left with the impression that your country's woes are due to a philosophy of selfishness - as expressed by one Icelandic woman, "it's all about me, rather than we". If I wished to simplify the woes of the U.S., I'd boil it down to that also. There are some of your citizens who recognize the value in others, but for the large part I'd say that your Egos are way too big. This is why, as Moore discovers, the male bankers were all prosecuted -- yes, that's correct, bankers were prosecuted -- after the '08 collapse of the financial system -- and the women replaced them, because women place we over me. Anyways, some good lessons for America in this documentary." - 1 of 15 Comments

Is SCOTUS About to Put Religion Over Civil Society?

So here we are in 2023 and the real beliefs and plans of the Founding generation — slaveholders and abolitionists alike — have dissolved into a blur of BS, Qanon, and fundamentalist religion 02/01/2023

"The Court may force the state to prioritize religion above normal business and governmental concerns, in other words."

"[Or]the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whose members, a Massachusetts court has ruled, are legally entitled to sport their unique headwear (a colander) in official government ID photos.

Or Rastafarians, who may argue that marijuana is their sacramental herb and they should be allowed to work under its influence.

After all, the IRS has acknowledged all of these groups as legitimate religions by granting them tax-exempt status. While that may deprive the government and some communities of income and property taxes, it generally doesn’t hurt anybody."

READ MORE https://hartmannreport.com/p/is-scotus-about-to-put-religion-over

[marktaylor-canfield]

Nobody's Reporting This! 134 Reporters Killed In Gaza: Thom Hartmann & M...

[scottguy]

This is the newspaper that is SO concerned with 'balance' that they routinely ignore massively unethical behavior by Republicans in their headlines yet over scrutinize ridiculous things like Joe Biden's age. (As if Trump isn't already senile, unstable , and demented.)

But, when it comes to marginalized groups, the NY Times is fine with bias and shoddy reporting. Where are "both sides" in this debate? What, you couldn't find a SINGLE trans person or advocate for a question or comment? That's not trying very hard obviously.

THIS is why I no longer read or subscribe to the New York Times.

Corporate media is useless!

Corporate media will consistently defend the screwed up status quo in the United States.

Follow progressive media such as:

Media Matters

Democracy Now

Mother Jones

Truthout

Vox

The Huffington Post

Salon

Thom Hartmann

The Best of the Left (aggregates & edits together from various progressive sources by topic)

Common Dreams

Raw Story

Move On.org

The Guardian

That's just a partial list.

Corporate Media sold us all out twenty years ago now. The editors of corporate media now care far more about profit than accurately informing their audience.

[daimonclub]

Black Friday Day

Black Friday day new quote idea Black Friday day falls every year on the first Friday after Thanksgiving, the day of Thanksgiving, a typical holiday in the United States and celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. In 2022, Black Friday falls on November 25, the day in which all stores offer commercial bargains and discounts, not only on clothing and gift ideas, but also on many products for the home and kitchen. Since 1952, the day after Thanksgiving has traditionally been seen in the United States, together with Cyber Monday, as the start of the Christmas shopping season and related sales, even though the term "Black Friday" has only been widely used in the past decade. Black Friday is a scam. You should be mad they overcharge you 364 days a year. Unknown You may have heard of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There's another day you might want to know about: Giving Tuesday. The idea is pretty straightforward. On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, shoppers take a break from their gift-buying and donate what they can to charity. Bill Gates What do Black Friday shoppers and the Thanksgiving turkey have in common? They know what it’s like to be jammed into a small place and stuffed. Humoropedia Make sure the clothes you buy on Black Friday take into account how fat you got on Thanksgiving. Unknown We live in a consumer culture, and Black Friday is like the July 4th of that culture. It might be good not to live in this culture, but it terms of what we can do to make people safer at big sales, it seems more useful to try to avoid dangerous crowd conditions. John Seabrook Let’s spend Thanksgiving spilling food on our clothes, and Black Friday buying new ones. Unknown Black Friday sale. My house. You and I. All clothes will be 100% off. Kappit As reported in the Forbes "Entrepreneurs" column on December 3, 2013: "Cyber Monday, the online counterpart to Black Friday, has been gaining unprecedented popularity -to the point where Cyber Sales are continuing on throughout the week." Peter Greenberg, Travel Editor for CBS News, further advises: "If you want a real deal on Black Friday, stay away from the mall. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are all part of Cyber Week. Sorry shoppers on Black Friday will block and tackle better than your football team on Thanksgiving. Unknown I thought Black Friday was when everyone puts on blackface and steals children from Wal-Mart. Stephen Colbert Black Friday: Because only in America, people trample others for sales exactly one day after being thankful for what they already have. Unknown The National Retail Federation releases figures on the sales for each Thanksgiving weekend. The Federation's definition of “Black Friday weekend” includes Thursday, Friday, Saturday and projected spending for Sunday. The survey estimates number of shoppers, not number of people. The length of the shopping season is not the same across all years: the date for Black Friday varies between November 23 and 29, while Christmas Eve is fixed at December 24. 2012 had the longest shopping season since 2007.

Black Friday Day 2020 My version of Black Friday is deleting all the people in my phone who sent me a "mass Thanksgiving text." Blake Griffin For those of us in the financial world, Black Friday has a strong negative connotation, referring to a stock market catastrophe. Mark Skousen Black Friday, in reality, is a symptom of the plight that 30 years of Reaganomics has brought to working people in America. Right along with the frenzied rise of shoppers willing to fight each other at retail outlets across America, we've been steadily, for the last 30 years, watching the destruction of organized labor ... of decent pay and wages and conditions for working people... We have Black Friday today because the wealthy elite have strangled their workers for 32 years, ever since Ronald Reagan's election. Thom Hartmann Here’s hoping Black Friday doesn’t turn into Black and Blue Sunday. SomeECards Happy Thanksgiving to someone I’d have no problem stomping to death on Black Friday. Unknown Black Friday is an informal name for the day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States (the fourth Thursday of November), which has been regarded as the beginning of the country's Christmas shopping season since 1952. It is a busy shopping day and is a holiday in some states. Many people have a day off work or choose to take a day from their amount of yearly leave on Black Friday. Some people use this occasion also to make trips to see family members or friends who live in other areas or to go on vacation. Others use it to start shopping for the Christmas season. Shopping for Christmas presents is also popular on Black Friday. Many stores have special offers, high discounts and lower their prices on many goods, such as toys, clothes, food and electronic gadgets and devices. Black Friday is not a federal holiday, but is a public holiday in some states. It is not only the day after Thanksgiving Day but also the Friday before Cyber Monday. Many people take a day of their annual leave on the day after Thanksgiving Day. Many organizations also close for the Thanksgiving weekend. Public transit systems may run on their normal schedule or may have changes. Some stores extend their opening hours on Black Friday. There can also be congestion on roads to popular shopping destinations. Black Friday is one of the busiest shopping days in the USA. The states which have official public holidays for state government employees on "The Day After Thanksgiving" include Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. There are two popular theories as to why the day after Thanksgiving Day is called Black Friday. One theory suggests that the term originated in Philadelphia, where it was used to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic that would occur on the day after Thanksgiving. This usage dates to at least 1961. The wheels of vehicles in heavy traffic on the day left many black markings on the road surface, leading to the term Black Friday. The other theory is that the term Black Friday More than twenty years later, as the phrase became more widespread, a popular explanation became that this day represented the point in the year when retailers begin to turn a profit and therefore it is related to an old way of recording business accounts. As a matter of fact losses were recorded in red ink and profits in black ink. Many businesses, particularly small businesses, started making profits prior to Christmas. Many hoped to start showing a profit, marked in black ink, on the day after Thanksgiving Day.

Black Friday Day crowd and shoppers In the United Kingdom, on the contrary the term "Black Friday" originated within the Police and NHS to refer to the Friday before Christmas. It is the day when emergency services activate contingency plans to cope with the increase in workload due to many people going out drinking on the last Friday before Christmas. Contingencies can include setting up mobile field hospitals near City Centre nightspots. The term has then been adopted outside those services to refer to the evening and night of the Friday immediately before Christmas, and would now be considered a mainstream term and not simply as jargon of the emergency services. The year 2014 marked the introduction of this event in Bolivia, Colombia, Denmark, Italy, Finland, France, Ireland, Lebanon, Nigeria, South Africa and Sweden. In order to organize well your shopping you should research the Thanksgiving and Black Friday deals in advance, because you have to consider that the shops are very crowded in these days. Make an itinerary and a shopping plan: be sure to check when each store opens. This may determine the order of the stores that you visit. Best Buy, which typically draws a crowd that waits for the doors to open, will be open at 5 p.m. Thursday. You could also make a night or weekend out of it, or you can also create a map of your itinerary, planning where to park and so on. Don't forget about Santa: Santa will usually be available to take photos and meet children in the center atrium of most of the common hyper stores from this day, and every day until Dec. 24. Photo packages are also available for purchase. Bring your family: The adventure of Black Friday does not need to be rushed or stressful, and above all you must pay great attention and be careful, in fact despite frequent attempts to control the crowds of shoppers, minor injuries are common among the crowds, usually as a result of being pushed or thrown to the ground in small stampedes, while most injuries remain minor, serious injuries and even deliberate violence have taken place on some Black Fridays. In 2008, a crowd of approximately 2,000 shoppers in Valley Stream, New York, waited outside for the 5:00am opening of the local Walmart. As opening time approached, the crowd grew anxious and when the doors were opened the crowd pushed forward, breaking the door down, a 34-year-old employee was trampled to death. The shoppers did not appear concerned with the victim's fate, expressing refusal to halt their stampede when other employees attempted to intervene and help the injured employee, complaining that they had been waiting in the cold and were not willing to wait any longer.

Black Friday Day 2020 by English Culture Shoppers had begun assembling as early as 9:00 PM the evening before. Even when police arrived and attempted to render aid to the injured man, shoppers continued to pour in, shoving and pushing the officers as they made their way into the store. Several other people incurred minor injuries, including a pregnant woman who had to be taken to the hospital. The incident may be the first case of a death occurring during Black Friday sales; according to the National Retail Federation, "We are not aware of any other circumstances where a retail employee has died working on the day after Thanksgiving." Most major retailers open very early (and more recently during overnight hours) and offer promotional sales. Black Friday is not an official holiday, but California and some other states observe "The Day After Thanksgiving" as a holiday for state government employees, sometimes in lieu of another federal holiday such as Columbus Day. Many non-retail employees and schools have both Thanksgiving and the following Friday off, which, along with the following regular weekend, makes it a four-day weekend, thereby increasing the number of potential shoppers. It has routinely been the busiest shopping day of the year since 2005, although news reports, which at that time were inaccurate, have described it as the busiest shopping day of the year for a much longer period of time. Similar stories resurface year upon year at this time, portraying hysteria and shortage of stock, creating a state of positive feedback. Black Friday is a shopping day for a combination of reasons. As the first day after the last major holiday before Christmas, it marks the unofficial beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Additionally, many employers give their employees the day off as part of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. In order to take advantage of this, virtually all retailers in the country, big and small, offer various sales including limited amounts of doorbuster/doorcrasher/doorsmasher items to entice traffic. Recent years have seen retailers extend beyond normal hours in order to maintain an edge or to simply keep up with the competition. Such hours may include opening as early as 12:00 am or remaining open overnight on Thanksgiving Day and beginning sale prices at midnight. In 2010, Toys 'R' Us began their Black Friday sales at 10:00 pm on Thanksgiving Day and further upped the ante by offering free boxes of Crayola crayons and coloring books for as long as supplies lasted. Other retailers began Black Friday sales early Thanksgiving morning and ran them through as late as 11:00 pm Friday evening. Forever 21 went in the opposite direction, opening at normal hours on Friday, and running late sales until 2:00 am Saturday morning. Historically, it was common for Black Friday sales to extend throughout the following weekend. However, this practice has largely disappeared in recent years, perhaps because of an effort by retailers to create a greater sense of urgency.

Black Friday in the good old days In Canada the large population centers on Lake Ontario and the Lower Mainland in Canada have always attracted cross-border shopping into the US states, and as Black Friday became more popular in the US, Canadians often flocked to the US because of their lower prices and a stronger Canadian dollar. After 2001, many were traveling for the deals across the border. Starting in 2008 and 2009, due to the parity of the Canadian dollar compared with the American dollar, several major Canadian retailers ran Black Friday deals of their own to discourage shoppers from leaving Canada. The year 2012 saw the biggest Black Friday to date in Canada, as Canadian retailers embraced it in an attempt to keep shoppers from travelling across the border. Before the advent of Black Friday in Canada, the most comparable holiday was Boxing Day in terms of retailer impact and consumerism. Black Fridays in the US seem to provide deeper or more extreme price cuts than Canadian retailers, even for the same international retailer. In recent years, Black Friday has been promoted in Australia too, so a lot of stores run Black Friday promotions both in-store and online retailers throughout the whole country. Since the start of the 21st century, there have been attempts by great online commercial groups with origins in the United States such as Amazon to introduce a retail "Black Friday" everywhere and in 2013 Asda (a subsidiary of the American firm Walmart) announced its "Walmart's Black Friday by ASDA" campaign promoting the American concept of a retail "Black Friday" in the UK and Europe as well. Some online and in-store companies have adopted the American-style Black Friday sale day, although others appear skeptical, with one 2013 comment piece in the trade publication Retail Week labelling it "simply an Americanism, which doesn't translate very well." In 2014, more UK-based retailers adopted the Black Friday marketing scheme than ever. Among them were ao.com, very.co.uk, John Lewis and Argos, who all offered discounted prices to entice Christmas shoppers. During Black Friday sales in 2014, police forces were called to stores across Britain to deal with crowd control issues, assaults, threatening customers and traffic issues. Black Friday appears to be growing in popularity year on year in the UK and all through European countries where the sales are quickly increasing and mostly internet retailers have used the event as an occasion to attract new customers with discounts, but bricks and mortar stores have already begun to adapt the shopping event. In Mexico and other South American countries like Brasil, Black Friday was the inspiration for the government and retailing industry to create an annual weekend of discounts and extended credit terms, El Buen Fin, meaning "the good weekend" in Spanish. El Buen Fin has been in existence since 2011 and takes place on November in the weekend prior to the Monday in which the Mexican Revolution holiday is pushed from its original date of November 20, as a result of the measure taken by the government of pushing certain holidays to the Monday of their week in order to avoid the workers and students to make a ”larger” weekend (for example, not attending in a Friday after a Thursday holiday, thus making a 4-day weekend). On this weekend, major retailers extend their store hours and offer special promotions, including extended credit terms and price promotions. The popularity of Black Friday is also increasing in India. The reason for this is the growing number of e-commerce websites. The big e-commerce retailers in India are trying to emulate the concept of shopping festivals from the United States like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Some websites offer information about day-after-Thanksgiving specials up to a month in advance. The text listings of items and prices are usually accompanied by pictures of the actual ad circulars. These are either leaked by insiders or intentionally released by large retailers to give consumers insight and allow them time to plan.In recent years, some retailers (including Walmart, Target, OfficeMax, Big Lots, and Staples) have claimed that the advertisements they send in advance of Black Friday and the prices included in those advertisements are copyrighted and are trade secrets. In South Africa, Austria and Switzerland, Black Friday Sale is a joint sales initiative by hundreds of online vendors—among them Zalando, Disney Store, Galeria Kaufhof and Sony. Over its first 24-hour run on November 28, 2013, more than 1.2 million people visited the site, making it the single largest online shopping event in German-speaking countries. There has been growing interest for black Friday in Poland as well. The counterpart of Black Friday in China is Singles' Day or Guanggun Jie, literally: "Single Sticks' Holiday" that is an entertainment festival famous among young Mainland Chinese people, to celebrate the fact that they are proud of being single. The date, November 11th (11/11), is chosen because the number "1" resembles an individual that is alone. This festival has become the largest offline and online shopping day in the world, with sales in Alibaba's sites Tmall and Taobao at US$5.8 billion in 2013, US$9.3 billion in 2014, US$14.3 billion in 2015, US$17.8 billion in 2016, and over US$25.4 billion in 2017. JD.com Read the full article

[arlengrossman]

How It Happened

https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-billionaires-won-the-50-year-841?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=302288&post_id=151253908&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=r3bio&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email The Hartmann Report The Billionaires Won: The 50-Year War on Democracy That Built Trump’s Oligarchy and Killed the American Dream Bought politicians, and a court on their…

[posttexasstressdisorder]

Is this the October Surprise?

Thom Hartmann

September 28, 2024 2:20PM ET

U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith makes a statement to reporters after a grand jury returned an indictment of former U.S. President Donald Trump in the special counsel's investigation of efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat, at Smith's offices in Washington, U.S., August 1, 2023. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo

— October surprise?Jack Smith has filed a massive collection of evidence demonstrating Trump’s direct involvement in an attempted coup against the government of the United States, and Judge Chutkan may make it publicly available. The next two to three weeks will decide what we see and when, as Trump’s lawyers first will file their opposition to the release. For anybody who’s been paying attention, we all knew Trump and his buddies were criming against our country during the last weeks of his presidency (apparently Merrick Garland missed that for two years), but the release will probably drive a short news cycle which may inform a few low information voters.

— For the first time ever, Democrats make it rain in all 50 states. Over at Daily Kos, Morgan Stephens is reporting that the DNC is sending money to every state in the union, something we haven’t seen since Howard Dean’s “50 state strategy” back in 2008. This is great news; rightwing billionaires have been funding Republicans, particularly in low population states, for decades and the result has been the Red sweep of rural states and areas. Democrats are going to try to break some Republican supermajorities and help out down-ticket Red state candidates; the Harris campaign has also pitched in $25 million for the effort. Now, if they’d just convince some leftie mega donors to buy radio stations in those Red states (media is cheap in those areas!), we could seriously get about flipping a few purple or even Blue.

— Speaking of radio… Louise and I are in New Orleans where yesterday I was the opening keynote speaker for the Grassroots Radio Conference. Last night we hung out with old friends David Sirota and Sam Seder (who keynoted this morning) and new friend Wajahat Ali at the home of the conference organizers, Dr. MarkAlain Dery and his extraordinary wife Liana Elliott, who also started and run WHIV here in New Orleans. The conference is about and for mostly low-power FM stations that are popping up all around the country (my show is on many of them). This is a very encouraging trend!

— Justice Department sues Alabama for purging voters off the rolls. As I’ve noted in several of my newsletters here, Republicans across America are purging their voting rolls, depriving literally millions of people of their right to vote. Ever since 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court said a state can do this if a voter fails to vote in the last election, they’ve been going whole hog, but in a few cases they’ve been stopped or slowed down. Most recently, the Justice Department sued Alabama for their purges, saying it’s too close to the election. If you live in a state Republicans control, go to vote.gov and double-check your voter registration; if you live in a Blue part of the state and didn’t vote in the midterms, chances are they’ve already removed you from the rolls and you’ll have to re-register to vote.

— Jews and Catholics warn against Trump’s latest attack on religious voters. In two rallies, Trump has told Jewish people that if he fails to win the election it’ll be their fault. He made similar comments in a Truth Social post about Catholics. Now some religious groups are starting to push back by warning their people about political tests for religious people, but they’re massively outnumbered by the thousands of churches and televangelists and religious radio stations that are blatantly and illegally promoting Republican candidates this year. The IRS really needs to enforce the law!

— Will NYC Mayor Adams claim he was just taking tips? Ever since six Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that if a politician does favors for somebody (in this case, the country of Turkey) and then gets paid or spiffed, that’s not a bribe that can be prosecuted but a tip. It’d be a novel defense and its probable that Adams took gifts before he helped out the Turks, so it’ll be interesting to see if his lawyers try this one out. The level of corruption among the six Republicans on the Court is truly breathtaking, and it’s a bad sign for our democracy as they continue to promote a corrupt political culture.

— Once again, the media will refuse to do their damn job and fact-check Republican lies, this time in Tuesday’s Vance/Walz debate. Expect Vance to use the “firehose of lies” strategy, where you throw out a half-dozen or so lies in a single sentence or two, forcing your opponent to burn his time rebutting them. Trump tried it with over 30 lies in his debate with Harris, and the moderators only called him on two of them. Now CBS “News” says they’ll allow Vance to tell all the lies he wants and it’ll be up to Walz to fact-check them because, apparently, facts don’t matter any longer in the American news media culture. Disgusting.

— Crazy Alert! JD Vance is attending an event today with a corrupt evangelist who said Harris uses “witchcraft.” Lance Wallnau is a big-shot in the evangelical world, and he’s doing a tour of swing states this month to encourage people to vote Republican. His efforts, by the way, are being subsidized by your and my tax dollars, as he claims a nonprofit statute. Earlier this month, Wallnau tried out the misogynistic and hateful old “Jezebel” trope against Vice President Harris, saying, “She can look presidential. That’s the seduction of what I would say is witchcraft. That’s the manipulation of imagery that creates an impression contrary to the truth, but it seduces you into seeing it. So that spirit, that occult spirit, I believe is operating on her and through her.” If anybody is channeling evil spirits, in my opinion it’s Wallnau; he’s the embodiment of the people Jesus warned us about.

NOW READ: Comrade Trump isn’t defending capitalism — he’s defending white power

[fahrni]

Saturday Morning Coffee

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I haven’t reported on Ms. Gracie’s sleep schedule for a while. She’s finally — FINALLY — letting me sleep longer. It seems I can get to bed around 11:30 and she doesn’t need to do her business until 5:30 or so so. Sometimes 6:30! It’s been wonderful. Puppies really are like human babies in a lot of ways.

On with the links!

Justine Tunney

It’s called apelink.c and it’s a fine piece of poetry that weaves together the Portable Executable, ELF, Mach-O, and PKZIP file formats into shell scripts that run on most PCs and servers without needing to be installed.

This is kind of cool and, again, I like having an open solution folks could evolve.

I can’t figure out how to put together a good search query to find an article on it but macOS does this today with its application bundles. I suppose it’s not exactly the same but the idea certainly is.

Tim Carmody • kottke.org

The ideas Dave is talking about in this podcast are serious (even if he is laughing a lot), and he spells them out in text at a site called Textcasting.org.

I think I get what Dave is saying but I’d need to spend more time thinking about it. To get buy in from all the big platforms would mean either compromise or extensions to the format that only certain platforms would use. In other words, it’s a can of worms.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be done and that it’s not worth doing. It just means it’ll be difficult.

We already have blogs, links, and RSS. I publish posts to my blog to other sources automagically. But, that means my platform has to know how the API to that platform works. If there were a standard format for uploading RSS or some other structured document format I could see that being appealing.

Would the publisher push the changes to various other platforms or would each platform pull the post, like RSS works today? 🤔

Ivan Mehta • TechCrunch

Instagram head Adam Mosseri said today that a Threads API is in the works. This will give developers a chance to create different apps and experiences around Threads.

I like it when API’s are created to open up platforms but I have a feeling this one will be extremely limited. And what happened to using ActivityPub and Fediverse support? Why not do that? Oh, right, it would mean completely opening Threads to developers. They don’t want that because they need those eyeballs clearly focused on Threads.

Hey, how about starting with RSS? Let me subscribe to a users RSS feed for their posts. That would be really nice and allow me to follow some brands without cluttering my Threads timeline.

Also, give us Mastodon integration. 😀

Jon Schwarz • The Intercept

Former president Jimmy Carter said Tuesday on the nationally syndicated radio show the Thom Hartmann Program that the United States is now an “oligarchy” in which “unlimited political bribery” has created “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.” Both Democrats and Republicans, Carter said, “look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves.”

I know Jimmy Carter is seen as a Presidential failure by many, but there is no questioning his commitment to humanity and everything he’s given post Presidency. He’s a national treasure and someone we should listen to.

Of course nobody will. Nobody except we commoners not part of the political establishment.

I have no clue how to change this stuff but I’d like to see it happen. The unlimited money pouring into campaigns needs to be reined in.

Could a set of laws be created to give all campaigns an equal amount of money with equal amount of airtime and web presence to level the playing field?

Lucidity

I saved my company half a million dollars in about five minutes. This is more money than I’ve made for my employers over the course of my entire career because this industry is a sham. I clicked about five buttons.

This story made me chuckle a couple times. Corporations can get so bogged down in process and politics it’s amazing they can accomplish anything, much less a useful computing infrastructure.

David Corn • Mother Jones

Mike Johnson Hates America, But He Believes He Can Save It

It seems like Mr. Jones is quite the Christian Nationalist and hasn’t the slightest clue what our founding fathers intended for us.

Having a national religion is an abomination. The First Amendment to the Constitution is pretty clear on the matter.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It’s right there in black and white. We have the freedom to choose a religion. That can include Satanism. You don’t have to like it, you just have to live with it.

v8.dev

A new way to bring garbage collected programming languages efficiently to WebAssembly

Here’s a bit of light technical reading for you! It’s incredible what hoops we jump through to achieve amazing things in computing.

I still believe the CLI standard should’ve been the runtime of choice for the browser.

Indivisible

We’re stepping back from the increasingly dangerous and dysfunctional ‘X’, and we’re sorry it’s taken this long

I suppose we’ll continue to see this. The big question is where do they land? They’ll probably have to have a presence on Mastodon, Blue Sky, and Threads.

Liberty Dunworth • NME

Record labels and recording companies have been working to prevent artists from re-recording their albums like Taylor Swift, according to reports.

Can you blame artists for wanting to own the rights to their work? I certainly can’t.

The record labels should be ashamed. It’s kind of a scammy business and it’s too bad musical acts haven’t figured out a why to band together and move record labels out of the picture altogether.

I say that and of course I can’t do anything about my reliance on Apple to get my app in front of millions of people.

Jacquelyn Melinek • TechCrunch

Sam Bankman-Fried, the co-founder and former CEO of crypto exchange FTX and trading firm Alameda Research, has been found guilty on all seven counts related to fraud and money laundering.

I guess he effed around and found out!

For me this brings up all the Orange Man trials. Why did this one happen so quickly and his are dragging out?

Anywho. I’m sure SBF will be taking these charges to the next higher court, then the next, and so on. The rich and famous have such an advantage in the legal system.

Elizabeth Blackstock • Jalopnik

It’s getting tough out there for the poor folks who have never faced systemic inequality but desperately want to feel oppressed. That’s why America First Legal — a conservative legal group led by Stephen Miller, a former adviser to former President Trump — is claiming that NASCAR is actually racist against white American men. That’s a first!

This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Have you ever watched a NASCAR race? It’s probably 99% white faces in the stands.

They’re just pissed NASCAR finally came into the 20th century and banned Confederate flags from NASCAR races.

Poor racists and their “But ma heritage!” Yeah, a heritage of hate and enslaving people. Great heritage. 🤬

Jay Barmann • sfist.com

Downtown Tech Office Shuts Down Its Free Cocktail Bar For Employees, CEO Says ‘The Office Is Dead’

Not even free booze could bring employees back to the office.

If you’re interested in socializing you should go to the office. It’s fine. I know a lot of people who prefer it to working from home.

I’ve seriously considered going into the office one day a week to change things up and hang out around other people. I’ve been to our office less than 20 times since folks started returning. I got COVID last summer during a group on-site and more recently had an on-site to nail down some API design and someone had COVID and didn’t know it until they returned home at the end of the week. Thankfully I dodged that bullet.

Maybe they should open a pub. Might as well do something useful with that liquor license, right? 🤔

Ryan Erik King • Jalopnik

Bubba Wallace’s No. 23 Toyota Camry will be doing a special Star Wars paint scheme for the NASCAR Cup Series season finale this weekend at Phoenix Raceway. The livery is intended to promote 23XI Racing sponsor Columbia Sportswear’s upcoming Star Wars collection, but the design is far more than just a couple of logos and movie characters slapped onto some bodywork.

If you’re a Star Wars fan or a NASCAR fan you owe it to yourself to go watch the video. Not only is Bubba Wallace’s car sporting a Star Wars theme so is Tyler Reddick’s.