I just accidentally found out that James Garner's daughter paints, and some of them are pretty neat: Flow Art by Gigi Garner. I think this one is called "Child's Play". (All the proceeds go to the animal rescue charity she set up in honor of her father.)
First, there was an end to guessing about the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau when they finally replaced Chopra and then filled the spot with an architect of Project 2025, and "Vought Stops CFPB From Functioning With Illegal Order: The budget director and acting head of the CFPB also tried to defund the agency, but found it was already funded through the fiscal year." But then, "Vought Restores CFPB Procedure That Sustains Mortgage Markets: The situation reveals that sometimes, even arsonists need the building they’re burning down to stay upright. There's an old saying about the dog that caught the car: They don't know what to do next. Let me tell you the case of the dog that caught the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Russ Vought is an own-the-libs kind of guy, an ideological warrior who delights in watching the world burn. Shutting down the CFPB is his idea of paradise; now the rugged capitalists can get back to work making America great again without interference from meddling bureaucrats determined to punish success. Then he heard about the APOR tables. APOR stands for the 'average prime offer rate,' and it's a little tool that keeps the mortgage market running. It involves public servants, every week, going in and calculating it. Those staffers work at the CFPB, and if they're locked out, you have no APOR tables. And over time, if you have no APOR tables, you have no mortgage market, or at least an uncertain and economically damaging mess. In the face of this, tough guy Vought blinked, and in so doing revealed why even the most John Galt-ian banker needs the government every now and again." It turns out that "Government by Malicious Autopilot" doesn't work very well.
From Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate, "Elon Musk's Power Grab Is Lawless, Dangerous, and—Yes—a Coup: The federal government is currently under relentless and unlawful assault by a man no one elected to lead it. With Donald Trump's blessing and enabling, Elon Musk and his confederates have laid siege to the executive branch in an onslaught whose appalling and far-reaching consequences have barely begun to be reported, much less understood. Musk's team is tearing through federal agencies at a shocking clip, gaining access to classified material, private personal information, and payment systems that distribute trillions of dollars every year, all in alleged breach of the law. The richest person in the world, who works for no recognizable government entity and answers to nobody, apparently believes he has unilateral authority to withhold duly appropriated funds, violate basic security protocols protecting state secrets, and abolish a global agency in direct contravention of Congress' explicit command. He is reportedly leading a purge of the federal workforce, persecuting life-saving charities, and pushing out principled civil servants who stand in the way of his rampage. What we are witnessing is an unconstitutional seizure of power unfolding so rapidly that, by design, the public and media cannot keep up. Musk, who spent nearly $300 million to get Trump elected, is now attempting to restructure the government around his own whims, vendettas, and obsessions. He is, in effect, serving as co-president without winning a single vote, as the actual president looks on from the sidelines. Musk seems to reject basic aspects of the nation's constitutional democracy, replacing the separation of powers with the rule of an autocrat. Many of his offensives appear to reject the legitimacy of any legal limitations that stand in his way, treating federal statutes and precedents as mere suggestions he can take or leave at will."
All the ways Elon Musk is breaking the law, explained by a law professor: There are a lot of them."
From Haaretz, "Trump and Netanyahu Have Devised the Crime of the Century: Israel's war aimed to make Gaza uninhabitable and find a place for evacuees, as many in the government and military have stated. Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented an imperialist horror show. An American and an Israeli, each with his own criminal indictments, decided to determine the future of the Palestinian people. The plan for evacuating the residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries is a war crime, and it being introduced by the president of the United States is a death sentence for international law. It's the crime of the century. Trump talks about Gaza like a capitalist who wants to develop real estate. He called it a demolition zone, as it has always been, and invented plans for building a city of the future without its original residents."
Hamilton Nolan interviews "Stephanie Kelton on the Disastrous Republican Economic Agenda," and she sees a frightening imposition of austerity and Democrats who are deluded about the danger. "They definitely appear to be floundering. Are floundering. I'm almost at a loss to find anything that looks like a battle plan to counter in any significant way what we're facing. To sort of sit back and say 'Well, the Republicans are gonna burn it all down. So we'll count on, two years from now, getting the House back and picking up seats, and maybe then we can put forward an alternative plan.' We don't have two years. You won't be able to pick up the pieces. And if your message is, 'We'll pick up the pieces and assemble them the way before'—people didn't like the way the system was structured before. That's why, in part, Donald Trump won in the first place. You have to offer people a different vision if you want to actually win. If your message is, 'Put us back in charge, and we'll give you back the economy we had before they destroyed it,' I don't think that's where Democrats should be right now."
I don't know if you can see this if you're not subscribed to The Lever, but this is from the newsletter on "The Lost Memos That Predicted This Era: THE PLUTONOMY MEMOS: As we welcome in 2025, it's worth noting that this year is the 20th anniversary of the release of the so-called Plutonomy Memos — a series of Nostradamus-like reports that predicted much of the world we live in today. The memos written in 2005 and 2006 came from Citigroup, and they effectively admit that Wall Street and its neoliberal political allies were creating a feudal American economy. These documents — which you can find here, here, and here — survive on economist Brad DeLong's blog and in a few old media mentions, book references, and tweets but barely exist on the internet (Citigroup reportedly worked to get them memory-holed off the Internet). 'There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take,' the Citigroup analysts wrote. 'There are the rest, the 'non-rich,' the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.' Underscoring the accuracy of these predictions, a new UBS report finds that billionaires' total wealth has more than doubled over the past ten years to $14 trillion."
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism, "The Bogus Justification for AI Uptake and the Real Reason for the Scam: Your humble blogger has been reluctant to dignify AI, even in the face of technologists we know and respect saying that it is truly revolutionary. But then the question becomes 'Revolutionary for what?' The enthusiasm for AI, aside from investors in its realm and various professional hangers-on, comes from businesses out of the prospect of cost savings due to productivity increases. And most are unabashed in saying that this means replacing workers. But as we will soon show, AI mainly decreases rather than increases productivity. So if that is the case, why has the fanfare continued at a fever pitch? It is not hard to discern that, irrespective of actual performance, AI is yet another tool to discipline labor, here the sort of white collar and professional laborers that management would tend to view as uppity, particularly those that push back over corners-cutting and rules-breaking. In this it falls in the proud tradition of other labor-bargaining-power-reducing yet overhyped gimmicks like outsourcing and offshoring." Yves backs that part up, too.
Doctorow, "All bets are off: When unions are outlawed, only outlaws will have unions. Unions don't owe their existence to labor laws that protect organizing activities. Rather, labor laws exist because once-illegal unions were formed in the teeth of violent suppression, and those unions demanded — and got — labor law. Bosses have hated unions since the start, and they've really hated laws protecting workers. Dress this up in whatever self-serving rationale you want — "the freedom to contract," or "meritocracy" — it all cashes out to this: when workers bargain collectively, value that would otherwise go to investors and executives goes to the workers. I'm not just talking about wages here, either. If an employer is forced — by a union, or by a labor law that only exists because of union militancy — to operate a safe workplace, they have to spend money on things like fire suppression, PPE, and paid breaks to avoid repetitive strain injuries. In the absence of some force that corrals bosses into providing these safety measures, they can use that money to pay themselves, and externalize the cost of on-the-job injuries to their workers. The cost and price of a good or service is the tangible expression of power. It is a matter of politics, not economics. If consumer protection agencies demand that companies provide safe, well-manufactured goods, if there are prohibitions on price-fixing and profiteering, then value shifts from the corporation to its customers."
You know how on CSI cops are always doing bullet matches to figure out if the bullet came from that gun? Well, there's no science backing up the idea that anyone can reliably do that. A judge held a hearing on the usefulness of such testing and ruled it out for a case — a landmark ruling that meant a real advance in how expert testimony could be treated. But then, "A Chicago judge just erased her predecessor's historic ruling on forensic firearms analysis: The courts continue to think that legitimacy comes not from correcting their mistakes, but insisting that they never make them. [...] But as of last month, Hooks's ruling is no longer valid in Illinois. After a bizarre series of events, which began with an allegation of racism against Hooks and resulted in his retirement, the judge who replaced him then vacated the opinion, effectively erasing it from Illinois case law. Just like that, a small bombshell and long overdue win for science-based forensics was taken off the books."
Stoller on the shut-down of the CFPB, "Monopoly Round-Up: On Ending the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: In the bargain after the financial crisis, banks got a bailout in return for some mild oversight. They, along with big tech, have now broken that deal. And the consequences will be significant. [...] By shuttering the CFPB, Trump is not just going back to a pre-financial crisis status quo, but to something actually weaker than that. There is essentially no longer any Federal enforcement of consumer protection rules for financial products."
Matt Duss at the Guardian, "Democrats have become the party of war. Americans are tired of it: In defending the militarist status quo, Democrats ceded the anti-war lane to Republicans. As they enter the political wilderness, it's time to reckon with what they got so wrong. The most devastating appraisal of the 2024 Democratic national convention was delivered by the neoconservative doyen Bill Kristol: 'Leon Panetta quoting Ronald Reagan! My kind of Democratic convention.' He meant it as praise. Earlier in the day, rumors had been flying around Chicago about that evening's possible surprise speakers. Who would it be? Beyoncé? Taylor Swift? Close! It turned out to be the 86-year-old former CIA director and secretary of defense who last served in government over a decade ago. In his speech, he cited Ronald Reagan to rail against 'isolationism', telling the assembled crowd: 'Our warriors need a tough, cool-headed commander-in-chief to defend our democracy from tyrants and terrorists,' and declaring that Kamala Harris would be that leader. Trotting out an ageing national security mandarin to reminisce about the 'war on terror' was both tone deaf, and, like the Harris campaign in general, seemed like a huge misread of what voters wanted from prospective commanders-in-chief in 2024." It was like they were trying to copy all of Hillary Clinton's mistakes.
The fact that Trump insisted the 2020 election was rigged is not a reason to shrug off making sure our elections are reliable; on the contrary, it's just one more reason we should make sure all elections are either hand-counted or at least audited. "Why We Should Still Audit the 2024 Election—and Every Election: [...] Unless the electronic vote is cross checked with paper ballots, it would be easy for an attack to go undetected, Duncan Buell Ph.D. told Drop Site News. 'If they were to insert a hack, they would also insert the code that would delete the hack on the way out the door and we would never, ever see it.' he said. Buell, an author on the letter and Chair Emeritus in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina, continued: 'I'm thinking of, you know, nation state actors, the Koreans, possibly even a couple of Russian companies that do this kind of thing.'" Not even sure we can trust the (American) owners of the machines, since they are privately held and operated by partisans with their own agendas
"Curing Economics' Addiction to Unreal Theories: A Review of Ricardo's Dream, by Nat Dyer Read almost any recent critique of neoclassical economic theory, and you will find its unreality pointed out. Homo economicus is nothing like flesh-and-blood humans, we are told—again, and again, and again. Remarkably, this critique has been leveled against the precursors of neoclassical economics, all the way back to the origin of the profession. That's what we can learn from a new book titled Ricardo's Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray, by Nat Dyer, an able scholar and entertaining writer on the subject. The title refers to David Ricardo (1772-1823), whose influence was on a par with Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill. His dream was to discover economic laws as universal and mathematically tractable as Newton's laws of motion. He became so mesmerized by his models that he gave them priority over the more complicated real world—just like the neoclassical economists of today."
Congressional Dish, where Jennifer Briney reads the bills Congress passes so you won't have to.
"Researchers Create Real-Life "Spider-Man" Web-Slinging Tech"
7:51 minutes of amusing stand-up (in an unfortunately murky video): "Tommy Sledge, PI"
Remember this? Craig Ferguson, The lost Doctor Who cold open — "The triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism."
A beautiful little Star Trek short: "Unification"
Leonard Nimoy on Carol Burnette
Life in 3D doing an impressive cover of "Unchained Melody"|
No comments:
Post a Comment