#union underground

[jdrespling]

Interview with Patrick Kennison and Marten Andersson of Lita Ford

Empire Extreme got to sit down with Guitarist Patrick Kennison and Bassist Marten Andersson of Lita Ford about playing the M3 festival, playing with Lita Fire and past/present projects. Check it out:

[toweringclam]

Resident Evil villain songs:

Albert Wesker: Flobots "Handlebars"

William Birkin: Drowning Pool "Bodies"

Oswell Spencer: TMBG "Kiss Me, Son of God"

Alex Wesker: Jack Off Jill "Fear of Dying"

Alexia Ashford: Team Starkid "Adore Me"

Derek C. Simmons: Within Temptation "What Have You Done"

Morgan Lansdale: Sonata Arctica "Land of thr Free"

Sergei Vladimir: Nine Inch Nails "Happiness in Slavery"

James Marcus: The Union Underground "Mr. Deadman"

Carla Radames: Poppy "I Disagree"

The Bakers: Miracle of Sound "Welcome to the Family" (ok this is cheating)

Karl Heisenberg: Lordi "Biomechanic Man"

Eveline: Bright September "Sleepless Lullaby"

Brian Irons: Meat Loaf "In the Land of the Pig, the Butcher is King"

Ada Wong: Dido "Hunter"

Jack Krauser: Nightwish "10th Man Down"

Maybe I'll come up with more some other time.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Dinkscrump Linkdump

I'm about to leave for a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me on Feb 14 in BOSTON for FREE at BOSKONE , and on Feb 15 for a virtual event with YANIS VAROUFAKIS. More tour dates here.

Well, Saturday's come around and I have a gigantic list of links that didn't fit into this week's newsletter, so it's time for another linkdump, 26th in the series:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

My posting is about to get a lot more erratic, as I'm days away from leaving on a 20+ city book-tour, which starts in Boston on Feb 14, with a sold-out event at the Brookline Booksmith:

https://brooklinebooksmith.com/event/2025-02-14/sold-out-cory-doctorow-ken-liu-picks-and-shovels

But Bostonians get another bite at the apple: I'm appearing at Boskone, the city's venerable sf convention, a few hours before my Brookline gig, and admission is free:

https://schedule.boskone.org/62/

The rest of the tour (including a virtual event with Yanis Varoufakis on the 15th) is here, and more dates (New Zealand, possibly Pittsburgh and Atlanta) are being added all the time:

https://craphound.com/novels/redteamblues/2025/02/06/announcing-the-picks-and-shovels-book-tour/

Of course, even as I scramble to get ready to hit the road for months, I'm regrettably forced to give some rent-free space in my head to Elon Fucking Musk. This week, I wrote about DOGE as a government-scale private-equity style plundering of the nation:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/07/broccoli-hair-brownshirts/#shameless

But that was before I read Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman's Lawfare article about how Musk's seizure of payment chokepoints will allow him (and Trump) to surveil the entire economy and wield unilateral, unaccountable power:

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/elon-musk-weaponizes-the-government

In 2023, Farrell and Newman published an important book called Underground Empire, explaining how, during the War on Terror, GWB (and then Obama) weaponized global payment processing systems (most notably SWIFT) and other boring, technical systems, and then used them to wield enormous power around the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

Farrell and Newman's point isn't merely that this power was used unwisely or cruelly, but also that the co-opted systems had an actual, useful, important job to do – a job that was only possible if these systems were widely viewed as credibly neutral and apolitical. The book ends with a sobering message about the chaos on the horizon if (when) other countries walk away from these system, leaving infrastructure vacuums in their wake. In their new Lawfare piece, Farrell and Newman imply not just that Musk and Trump are fashioning a powerful weapon out of the nation's digital infrastructure, but also that this could permanently undermine the vital national systems they're seizing control over, with no obvious candidates to replace them.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are still trying to find their asses with both hands, even as voters across the nation bombard them with demands to actually do something. I'm gonna call my senators and rep right after I finish this and remind them that when South Korea's autocratic president attempted a coup, lawmakers stormed the capital, leaping the fences while livestreaming to voters:

https://www.axios.com/2025/02/06/democrats-congress-trump-musk-doge-calls

But not everyone is taking Musk's bullshit lying down. The AFL-CIO has led a coalition of unions in suing DOGE:

https://gizmodo.com/americas-unions-sue-doge-launch-the-department-of-people-who-work-for-a-living-2000559998

And they've launched a counterinitiative with the delightful name of "The Department of People Who Work for a Living":

https://deptofpeoplewhowork.org/

It's nice to see some inside/outside strategy underway. After all, Musk is cruel and disgusting, but he – and the lawyers and creeps who back him – are also very, very stupid, and they're fucking up all over the place.

Take shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency charged with defending America from financial predators (e.g. would-be usurers hoping to turn their social media sites into payment processing platforms). Under Biden's CFPB chief Rohit Chopra, the Bureau was an absolute powerhouse, adopting rules, investigating scammers, and punishing wrongdoers, all in service to the American people:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/26/taanstafl/#stay-hungry

So naturally Musk and Trump have shut down the Bureau. But, as Adam Levitin writes for Credit Slips, this was a profoundly stupid move. You see, under Dodd-Frank – the post-2008 financial crisis law that created the CFPB – state attorneys general are empowered to enforce its rules. Those rules can't be amended or rescinded for so long as the CFPB is in a coma. What's more, any "violation of an enumerated consumer law is a violation of the Consumer Financial Protection Act," which can be gone after by state AGs. Another thing: the Truth in Lending Act has a threshold for small loans, below which the Act doesn't apply. The CFPB is supposed to adjust that threshold for inflation, but without a CFPB, that threshold will be frozen in amber like the federal minimum wage, bringing every-larger constellations of financial activity within scope for AG enforcement in any or every state in the Union. Also: none of this can be changed without a 60-vote Senate majority. Nice one, Elon:

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2025/02/shutting-down-cfpb-is-not-like-shutting-down-usaid.html

That isn't the only way that Trump shot himself in the dick last week. As Luke Savage writes, threatening to put tariffs on Canadian goods (and to annex Canada and make it the 51st state) had a profound effect on Canadian politics:

https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/all-bets-are-off

Before last week, Justin Trudeau's political legacy seemed assured. His many leadership failures, along with a billionaire-funded dark-money hate-machine that targeted him with culture-war nonsense and climate denial all added up to record low approval ratings. It was so bad that Trudeau actually sent Parliament home (recklessly leaving Canada without a legislature on the eve of Trump's presidency) and resigned as Liberal Party leader.

A week ago, pretty much everyone in Canada figured that the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was about to romp to victory with a Ba'ath-style Parliamentary majority. Poilievre was and is an extraordinarily weak candidate, a guy who has literally never had a job except for "politician," who nevertheless ran as a political outsider, leading a coalition of racists, climate exterminationists, xenophobes, forced-birth militants, and other cryptofascists and low-tax brain-worm victims. The threat of a Poilievre government with a commanding majority was frankly terrifying. Think of him as someone with Trump's agenda and Mitch McConnell's ruthless administrative competence. Trump is bad enough – but smart Trump? Nightmare.

Then came the Trump tariffs and the annexation threats, and overnight, the Tories' 20-point lead narrowed to a two-point lead, which continues to shrink. Poilievre's brand boils down to "Make Canada America Again" – dismantle medicare, smash unions, punish immigrants, ban abortion. With Canadians booing the American anthem at NFL and NBA games and Quebecois demonstrators waving maple-leaf flags, this is not a good time to be running as the America guy.

Don't get me wrong. Trudeau is terrible. Bill Clinton terrible, say. But Poilievre? A fucking monster. Canada's political future may just have been rescued by Trump's big, stupid mouth. Thanks, eh?

Meanwhile, south of the border, our American cousins keep getting fed into the corporate woodchipper. It's been just over a year since Mainers went to the polls and voted in a Right to Repair law with an 83% majority. But a year later, the law is foundering, amid a corporate legal blitz led by the automakers, who have also put Massachusetts' massive popular 2020 Right to Repair law on ice with endless lawfare. :

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/07/automakers-sue-to-kill-maines-hugely-popular-right-to-repair-law/

This is the status quo in America. As a highly influential, widely cited 2014 peer-reviewed study found:

economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

In other words, the only time the American people get what they demand is when giant corporations and oligarchs want it too. But when the plutes want something that the people despise, they almost always get their way.

Speaking of which, how's things going with Uber?

This week, Hubert Horan, the aviation industry analyst whose writings on Uber are the most important analysis of the company's business, investor scams, wage theft, and lobbying, published his long-awaited 34th research note on the company:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-thirty-four-tony-wests-calamitous-legacy-at-uber-and-with-the-kamala-harris-campaign.html

This edition is devoted to Tony West, Uber's Chief Legal Officer, and also brother-in-law to Kamala Harris, as well as manager of her disastrous failure of a 2024 election campaign. West may have run a Democratic presidential campaign, but he epitomizes the corporate corruption that gave rise to Trump. As Horan writes, West's first major accomplishment at Uber was to get the company exonerated for intimidating customers who were raped by Uber drivers. But his obituary will lead with the fact that he got Prop 22 passed in Calfornia, legalizing Uber's worker misclassification gambit, which allows the company to pay well below minimum wage and evade all workplace protection laws.

It was West who tapped Silicon Valley's tech oligarchs for large-dollar donations to the Harris campaign, which presumably played a substantial role in Harri's unwillingness to take a tough line on Big Tech while on the trail, creating the (correct) impression among voters that Harris would stand up for big business over their own interests.

It's an important read, and it's a reminder that the Democrats lost the last election every bit as much as Trump won it, and that their paralysis in the face of a national crisis is absolutely in character for the Democratic Party.

But on the other hand, the antitrust surge in the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and China (!) over the past five years are all the more remarkable and heartening in light of the dismal and corrupt state of world governments. After all, there is no billionaire-backed dark money lobby whipping up support for smashing corporate power. The antitrust victories of the 2020s marked a turning point – the first time in my memory when extremely popular policies that the wealthy hated triumphed.

Decapitating the agencies that made those policies won't change the enormous political rage that led to the antitrust surge. If anything, it will only feed it. Enforcers like Rohit Chopra, Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter did brilliant, important work – but they were only able to do it because of us. They're out of office, but we're still here. Don't ever forget that.

I certainly won't. This week, I turned in the edited manuscript for my next book, a nonfiction title called Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish next October:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

The day I turned it in Ars Technica ran a huge package called "As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders," reeling off the most disgusting high-tech ripoffs trying to worm their way into your home and wallet:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/as-internet-enshittification-marches-on-here-are-some-of-the-worst-offenders/

This sparked an epic Reddit thread on r/NoStupidQuestions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1ij42yh/what_are_some_other_examples_of_enshittification/

I love to see how giving a name and a description to this phenomenon has captured and directed some of that rage. And for the record, it doesn't bother me at all that some of these people are using "enshittification" to mean "corporations fucking shit up" without regard to my formal definition of the process. As I wrote last October:

Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.

And also: there's a lot of stuff that's just shitty right now, which is one of the reasons my word's putting up such great numbers. People are getting fed up with it, in ways large…and small. Take the post-pandemic trend of using your phone in speaker-mode in public places. I'm a prison abolitionist, but I'll make an exception for people who do this. Display 'em in stocks. Chain 'em up by their wrists. Or, you know, do what they do in France: fine them €150 for using a speakerphone on the train:

https://www.thelocal.fr/20250206/french-train-passenger-fined-e150-for-using-phone-on-speaker

Speaking of gruesome tortures, the essential Long Forgotten blog has posted its extensive, thoughtful review of the changes to Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. Very few people can write about built environment entertainment like Long Forgotten (the only other person who comes to mind is the excellent Foxx Nolte). Long Forgotten's verdict is "mostly good, but man, that new gift shop *suuuuucks:

https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2025/02/beyond-bride-other-changes-in-2025.html

OK, it's time for me to go and make my packing list for the tour. I'm going to leave you with a song. Last night, my pal Cynthia Hathaway turned me on to the Shotgun Jazz band, led by trumpeter/frontwoman Maria Dixon. If you like Louis Prima-style shout-singing, you'll love 'em – I bought everything they had on Bandcamp this morning:

https://www.shotgunjazzband.com/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/08/commixture/#petardhoists

Image: i ♥ happy!! (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Messy_storage_room_with_boxes.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[bitter69uk]

Recently watched: strange and obscure neo-noir Union City (1980). Tagline: “In 1953, Russia exploded the H-bomb. Hollywood discovered Marilyn Monroe. Washington reeled under McCarthyism. While something was about to happen in … Union City!” The sole feature film directed by Mark Reichert, Union City has a bad reputation (when it’s remembered at all) but it’s of interest – especially for admirers of the band Blondie: Deborah Harry stars and Chris Stein composed the soundtrack. Having said that, I can imagine Blondie fans feeling nonplussed by Reichert’s deliberately unglamorous presentation. When we’re first introduced to Harry as frustrated housewife Lilian, she is filmed from behind, with brown hair and wearing an apron, frying pork chops and sauerkraut. Of course, she’s not truly “mousey” – it IS Harry, after all. And Lilian gets a lingerie-clad boudoir scene later and towards the end, bleaches her hair blonde. Anyway, Union City is adapted from the 1937 Cornell Woolrich short story “The Corpse Next Door”. (The action is updated here to the early fifties. The period costumes and décor have an interesting R W Fassbinder vibe). Synopsis: neurotic businessman Harlan (Dennis Lipscomb) becomes fixated on uncovering who is stealing the milk bottles from outside his front door early every morning, thus ignoring the womanly needs of wife Lilian, who begins an affair with their apartment building’s hunky superintendent Larry Longacre (heartbreakingly handsome young Everett McGill aka "Big" Ed Hurley on Twin Peaks). Union City unfolds in an alienated, deadpan way, sharing the same underground New York sensibility as the cinema of, say, Scott and Beth B. Everyone delivers their lines in a detached, benumbed manner, except for the panic-stricken Harlan and Irina Maleeva as deranged neighbour The Contessa, whose bizarre delivery is operatic. Interestingly, 1980s rock diva Pat Benatar (who was frequently dismissed in some quarters as an ersatz Deborah Harry) crops up in a small role and is surprisingly effective (in her close-ups, Benatar possesses an almost Shelley Duvall quality). Union City is weird. Claustrophobic. Alienating. Arty. All qualities I happen to like! Union City is on YouTube.

[vagonca-rigo]

You like trains, I like trains, I wanna share with you a train that connects us more than one would think!

This little adorable 2' Českomoravská Kolben-Daněk locomotive, built in 1940!

One of the final locomotives built by CKD before it became BMM during the occupation.

And somehow, it made its way from Europe, to California, then over to Indiana. And when it arrived at the Hesston Steam Museum in Indiana in the 80s or 90s, they checked it over and found chalk marks on the inside of the boiler from when it was built.

It had never been steamed before!

Anyway hehe wanted to share an adorable little loco Ive seen and ridden behind

RIDDEN BEHIND?? I'M INCREDIBLY JEALOUS!! AND SUCH PRETTY LIVERY....

And it was THAT fresh? Sounds like a successful attempt at saving it from use/dismantling by the nazis, though I see that the story behind it is a complete mystery with only speculations around...still, very interesting!! :3c

[lanada]

Dead man's letters | Konstantin Lopushansky 1986

[shinymisty-blog]

Fun Fact!

In Issue 3 of the Sonic Boom comics by Archie, there is a panel where Cubot references Eggman's past henchmen, BREAKING the fourth wall down completely!

Funny little side fact about this reference:

Both the Underground and X henchmen were going to appear in my Sonic Boom "AU" story. I was developing the AU even before I knew about this. XD

Sleet and Dingo were living with Eggman's Cousin, Julian Robotnik. I mentioned it in another post a bit more in detail, but they are just two loving dorks who played some important roles in the story.

what I haven't mentioned was Decoe, Bocoe, and Bokkun's involvement in the story. And I can't go too deep into it without spoiling things.

But the tl;dr is that Decoe, Bocoe, and Bokkun come from a different Universe (similar to how Morpho does in the show). They were able to escape a rather cruel Eggman and, thus, have serious trust issues, ESPECIALLY with this universe's Eggman. They end up living with Morpho and Mom-bot.

[eyeofthelama]

💍🖤 congrats to my brudda & sister in law !

Shot by Me | IG: EYEOFTHELAMA

[kcloveswrestling]

I SWEAR THEY WERE PLAYING ACROSS THE NATION

PLEASE BRING IT BACK FULL TIME FOR RAW

Triple Paul, I am BEGGING you. BRING IT BACK😭🥹

[akhtar-zamil]

Stacy keibler dancing on wrestlemania 18

[postcardsfromwanderings]

Kosmonavtlar Metro Station i Taskent

This metro station celebrates the Soviet Union's space program and its walls are covered with painted portraits of cosmonauts

[are-we-really-doing-this]

LISTEN TO BITTER BY THE UNION UNDERGROUND, DO IT RIGHT NOW.

[onemillennia]

Jmarz$ backstage at the CHUMTAKEOVER show at Union Stage

Photography by Ayedatsmanny

Shot on Sony Handycam VHS

July 2024

Union Stage, Washington D.C

[ash-board]

And they refuse to see the change in me, why won't they wake up!!

[skygodtraumabond]

Hey, I know that there’s a lot going on for you, and I know things are tough. but it’s a big thanks to your help, and your efforts that people here are recovering so quickly. There’s a few places where everything is practically back to normal because of what you did during that first shadow sky.

Go beat up that white haired bitch.

Thank the strength of the Guardian. I'm glad the recovery efforts are going so well back in Hoenn. I might have a strained relationship with my homeland, but it's still my homeland, and more importantly it's a place full of innocent people. Good people. People who don't deserve the horrors Team Snagem has inflicted on the world.

But I need you to understand that I am just one person.

I am one person, not even a professional, who's just doing the best they can like everyone else. My team might be a little stronger than most, but I don't have the resources of the Rangers or the League at my back. I'm just one guy. And I'm really not even good at just being that.

I'm glad you appreciate what I've done, but I'm not the reason why everything's going as smoothly as it has. It's been a group effort.