The Confluence

In the past couple of weeks, the Trump administration has banned the sale of foreign robot vacuums and drones.

Is it because they can be used to spy on US citizens? To do what, exactly?

Or his he thinking that they can be used as weapons?

That last one is curious because since the Ukrainian war began, I’ve been wondering how easy it would be to turn things like robot vacuums into lethal weapons. I’m using MINE for vacuuming floors, thank you very much.

But how small could you make them? Could you make them so small they would be indistinguishable from insects like palmetto bugs? And when all the insects got close enough to each other, could they do quantum sensing and become aggregate explosives?

Not that I would know how to do this but I’m wondering if maybe the Iranians do. Or maybe Trump himself if he wanted to stage a terrorist attack.

These are the things I think about between work and Jane Austen. Just pondering what you’re pondering… on the bus or shopping at Aldi’s. As one does.

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We’re the generation between Boomers and Gen X. We hate being included with the Boomers because our cultural and financial experiences are uniquely different.

We missed the summer of love, the Vietnam war (well, we saw it on TV with Walter Cronkite as children), the gendered curriculum in middle school and high school passed us by, abortion was always an option for us, college was a realistic goal for anyone who wanted to go. We played on the streets until the lights came on, we rode our bikes all over town and into the woods, we walked to school. We used rotary telephones and kinda knew how to use a paper map. We were the tailing edge of the Wonder Years. The protests were over by the time we knew what they were for.

The thing about being Gen Jones is like being the younger child in a family with a Golden Child. They get all the attention, the nice stuff, the better jobs, pensions. We bought their starter homes with interest rates of 8% or more and were house poor longer.

We were just starting university when Reagan descended upon us and told those of us from lower class families that government had no obligation to help us get through college. He cut us loose to grab whatever financial help remained. He raised a surplus tax on us for our social security at the very second we got jobs after the Reagan recession and then proceeded to cut every governmental program we might have benefitted from. It’s been death by 1000 cuts ever since.

But we still remember eating our Cheerios before school watching NASA launch another Apollo rocket into space. That was when WE owned the space agency and the patents that OUR scientists invented.

We were young adults when we used the first computers at work. (They were Apples in my case with the flying toaster screen saver, followed by Microsoft everything and Unix, sorry, Linux) We wrote the first webpages, without an editor. Yeah, try that, zoomers. We were the first ones to use ftp to query the soda machine in one of the CMU buildings to see how cold the Cokes were. We were miles away from. It was just fun.

Our experiences have been a lot like the generations that came after us. We are equally screwed. We got shafted by recession after recession and miserable raises and the introduction of meaningless, predetermined performance evaluations. We were the first generation that was forced to put our retirement savings in a global casino. Some of us lost that money and our careers in the Great Recession of 2008 and for years after that. Some of us never recovered.

Now, we are the first generation about to lose the one thing Reagan promised would be there if we paid a little more in taxes every paycheck- social security.

So, we had the best that America had to offer in our childhoods and government really was there to help us with school supplies and accessible Pell grants and cheap student loans even as tuition started to rise steeply while we were still in college and years of student loan payments lay before us. Our futures looked good anyway. The war ended, the oil shocks began but we were assured that by the time we got to now, there would be solutions for peak oil and we’d all have cheap solar panels on our houses like the White House did until Reagan came in and tore it all down.

But as long as we still have the working memory of the before time, we can and should work to bring it back.

Walk to work music:

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Sky News to Abdul El-Sayed:

Q – “Trump says you’re full of shit.

Abdul El-Sayed: At least I don’t let mine go in the middle of the Oval Office.”

There’s a whole lot more where that came from at Ron Filipkowski’s Substack Post. Yes, indeedy, these Democratic candidates can be taught. 🤩

********************

Hey, I’m just chillin’ lately, pulling weeds and planning a kitchen refresh. Go outside and play. Summer doesn’t last forever and if anything truly important happens, the civic alerts and sirens will go off.

No matter what, we will vote the Republicans out of office in November and Donald Trump’s ass will be toast. Keep your eyes on the prize.

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Or old man shakes fist at cloud.

I don’t know what’s got into him but im very disappointed in the way he’s carrying on over Abdul El-Sayed’s primary win. For godssakes it’s just one guy. Sure it’s an important senate seat but Carville can’t seem to read the room.

Americans are sick and tired of feeling like a crop that billionaires are constantly harvesting. If you’re working class, you get the impression that it’s their money now and they’re giving you an allowance that they have determined is sufficient to live on and no amount of “hard work” is enough for them.

I just read a job posting that had on the bottom of it a paragraph that stated that this was an “at will” job and the employer not only had the right to terminate your employment under circumstances convenient to it but it also had the right to change your compensation based on whatever criteria. That’s a new one. You get a job, you move your family, your spouse may have to change employers and you find housing you can afford based on your acceptance letter. Then they pull the rug from under you and cut your pay because… what, exactly? It doesn’t say but I’m going to guess that you will have had to be born gifted with exactly the skills they are looking for and never have to call in sick or unexpectedly from home for any reason when you’re expected to come to the office 5days /week.

That’s how insane life has gotten in the working world. Your life and paycheck are at the will of a crazy employer. I won’t say what corporation this is in Pittsburgh but it has a reputation of chewing through employees before this insane posting and regrettably, fhe other employers here follow its example.

This is forcing precariousness on even more Americans. It’s not just the outrageous amount of money we pay for literally everything, it’s that someone else is deciding what you can do with the tiny amount of money left over. Well, we know the answer to this. Obviously, you save it. Save until you can’t do anything else because you will be blamed if you end up too poor to retire no matter what your life circumstances.

And the biggest kick in the teeth lately is all that tariff money, $100 billion of it that was collected as a tax from consumers by businesses who were forced to pay the tariff up front, well that money isn’t going back to consumers who are now paying higher prices regardless of whether the tariff has been rescinded. No, it’s going back to the businesses who already collected the money from us. So, we are getting dinged at one end while businesses walk away with getting double their money.

James Carville can’t put all of the blame on Republicans. It can’t go on that Americans have to take this sh*t from one party and when the other party takes over it either doesn’t aggressively enforce the rule of law (Biden) or doesn’t aggressively protect the livelihoods of Americans (Obama).

Enough of the compulsive bipartisanship that only goes one way. Enough of the centrism. These days, the political parties have been pulled so far to the right that to get back to the center, you would have to go all the way back to Franklin D Roosevelt.

Carville KNOWS this. So why is he throwing a tantrum that these Democrats are embracing socialism? The country has been tending that way for about 20 years but always have to bow to these student body president Democrats.

A couple of weeks ago, Elisa Slotkin, the OTHER Senator from Michigan, put out a short video on YouTube about a bill she wanted passed that would protect the auto industry from cheap foreign EVs. And you know, I could maybe get behind this if the American auto industry hadn’t decided to stop making American EV’s a year after Trump came back into office. Slotkin isn’t thinking about the consumer who are now stuck paying $40k for a car that they don’t completely own anymore (you have to subscribe to use you heated seats). There is no resiliency into the system in case of an oil shock and no choice for Americans who actually believe in climate change. Slotkin thinks she’s doing us all a favor because we’ve protected Ford and GM from having to take risks and evolve.

THAT’S the kind of Democrat who is dragging us all down, James. It’s not the obvious flakes like Fetterman whose stroke and AIPAC money is scrambling his brains. Yes, he’s a problem but the Democrats have always had a spoiler in its midst. The bigger problem is the Democrats who reflexively do the Republicans’ bidding and act like they’re doing us favors.

Don’t even get me started on Obama’s legacy and all of the things that weren’t on his legislative agenda once he was bought by Wall Street.

We can’t go on like this, James. It’s unsustainable. We’ve had enough of being fleeced, shaken down, trampled on and insulted by rich old men and tech bros.

So, get a grip. One DSA senator isn’t going to cause the world order to collapse. The idiot in the White House and his sycophants from both parties are going to do that.

Would I prefer that they call themselves something like the Four Freedoms coalition in the Democratic Party? Yes. It would have been the same damn thing as Democratic Socialism but it has precedent in America.

Now, go read a book or watch a Disney movie and calm down.

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Check out this video by Lucas Bean about how MAGA voters think like children.

Let’s try to differentiate between the MAGA voters who indulge in perversity, that is doing the unexpected, socially disruptive, oppositional, or contrarian mostly to get a rise out of people. Perversity could mean something illegal but we’re not referring to that not are we talking about breaking the rules, thinking outside the box in art or innovation, for example.

So hardcore MAGA voters are perverse. I think we’ve been looking for a way to differentiate them and that fits for me in explaining the “do or die, Trump all the way he can do whatever he wants because it pisses off the libs and I want to get away with saying what I’m really thinking, libs will be dominated, Stephen miller is my guru” MAGA voters. They’re the resistant 30%.

What I think the video is referring to above is not that hardcore MAGA doesn’t think like children but the casual MAGA or Trump voters do. This tracks with my own personal experience growing up in a religious cult and my observations on the scapegoating mechanism.

(IYKYK)

In the cult I was raised in, materials, talks and assemblies were conducted in a way that a fourth grader could understand them. In fact, some of the publications were used in talks where there is a question from the speaker and the answer is in the footnotes of the page they are on. So, if you can read at a fourth grade level, you could always ALWAYS get the answer right. There is praise for getting the answer right in a public setting.

Everything is simple. The end of the world is coming, you need to get off the fence, here are the rules you need to follow, the world outside our group is bad, associating with people in the world is bad, higher education will stumble you, step out of line and you will be obliterated for eternity.

Simple. Stick to that and you’ll be fine.

In the video, Lucas Bean explains that it is crucial for people in movements like MAGA to not think abstractly. The rhetoric must be kept very simple and childlike. This is not because the people who join MAGA are not able to think abstractly. It’s because they are too lazy to do it. They want someone else to do their thinking for them. So accepting simple explanations for why they are struggling to make ends meet, for example, is just easier.

When MAGA voters in a study are forced to think abstractly, they are capable of shifting their political beliefs. But abstract thinking is hard to maintain if you’re not already disciplined to do that.

That’s why Trump loves the poorly educated and why fundamentalist cults don’t like their members to go to college. Higher education trains people in abstract thinking. Do it enough and you become resistant to simple slogans that will ruin your life and your country’s reputation.

PSA of the day: if I were a casual Trump supporter and starting to feel confused and disappointed by Trump, I’d hang out more with my lib friends and family members and stay off social media and Fox News and other Trump friendly media until the midterms are over. Trump’s media machine knows you are susceptible to simple statements, it has profiled how you think, it knows how to trick you and it will target you to make you confused. Your lib friends will just talk you to death but will not hurt you.

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Paul Bloom says perversity is not necessarily what you think it is:

Just a follow up: my contacts with MAGA people lead me to a similar conclusion. They had oppositional defiant disorder when they were teenagers. Then they got their hands slapped in some way and they’ve resented it ever since.

They don’t want anybody to tell them what to do. And the more they get rewarded with praise for acting out, the more they act out.

That’s MAGA in a nutshell.

There may not be an end in sight. We live with these people all the time. Sometimes, cultural restraints keep them in line, some times they are allowed to run amok. And I suspect that the observation that MAGA thrives among the poorly educated might be because this kind of perversity doesn’t result in art or innovation. To do either of those things requires some kind of discipline to know where it is possible to break the rules to create something new. MAGA lacks that discipline.

Perversion for its own sake without the creativity leads to acts of stupidity, cruelty and destruction. But it can’t last indefinitely because once you’ve run around with scissors, broken everything and ruined yours and others livelihoods for no other reason than you can, there will be a backlash.

“Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion”.

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There are reports everywhere about how we are out of ammunition and missile defense systems and that’s why we need to clean out the treasury for the pentagon.

I call bullshit.

We had non-stop war from 2001 to 2021. That’s 20 years of us never hearing one low ammo story. I take that back. Early on in the Afghanistan/Itaq war era we had a low ammo report and flooded a manufacturer in Pennsylvania with money to increase the stocks. That didn’t take 20 years and after we heard very little about it.

Last year, we gave the pentagon something like $1.5 Trillion dollars and now it wants almost $100 billion more.

Where did all the money go? If only we had independent inspectors general to look into that.

In the meantime, if the pentagon gets another nickel without explanation, I’d consider it theft or we are giving it away at greatly inflated prices to Elon Musk for his bucket list trip to Mars.

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Mitch is no longer with us because he is either dead or insensate, unconscious and deteriorating, and is either in a morgue or hospice and the only reason we haven’t had a proof of life from an objective third party is because the Republicans are perpetrating a fraud on the American people in order to retain power and they think they can get away with it.

Says me.

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That’s what? The seventh prime minister of the UK since that stupid simple majority vote for the UK to leave the EU?

Let’s see…

Cameron: Brexit vote? Why not. What could possibly go wrong?

Teresa May: Great, great. I didn’t like this Brexit thing to begin with. Now I’ve got to make it happen. I hate Brussels. Shoot me now. 🙄

Boris: Brexit will be amazing even the hard Brexit. I alone can fix it! (Turns out he couldn’t)

Liz Truss: Now is the time to raise interest rates on mortgages! Whoo-hoo! Innovator of the Truss unit. (lettuce lasted longer). Also, possibly killed the Queen after meeting with her. Once. Two days before she died.

Rishi Sunak: Brexit sure is confounding. Lots of people much poorer than before, schools caving in, NHS didn’t get the money Brexit promised. Hmm, I’m a billionaire, because I worked hard. (He married into the billions.) Gosh, it sucks to be poor. This wouldn’t have happened to them if they cared more about their futures. Well, I’m out.

Keir Starmer: *tap, tap* is this thing on? Ohai there. This is Labour. It’s been 16 years since we got a chance to touch the machinery. And there’s no money. And Trump is back in office.

JFC.

Andy Burnham: Labour again. We were a bit lukewarm for a couple of years. But not anymore! Let’s try this again. Uhhh… where is the start button?

I think it’s safe to say that where Putin infiltrated a country, turned polarization up to 11, bought the politicians that would vote to rape the public and transfer wealth and as many assets as possible to the ultra rich, it’s been like the era of the four bad emperors plus two. He also made Brexit a smashing success.

Oh yes, there were definitely winners. They were the financial sector that barely suffered a scratch and the multi-national corporations who could afford to hire a new division to just handle the EU paperwork. For everyone else in the UK, it’s been a disaster.

Burnham doesn’t have much to work with and not a lot of time. I saw October mentioned. The young are restless, Gary Stevenson says there needs to be much higher taxes on assets ASAP. The working class has been strip mined to exhaustion and the middle class is starting to feel the pinch. They’re next.

I hope Andy does something. Anything. Just try anything, Andy. Show the rest of the world that it’s just a phase.

And now, one from the peanut gallery:

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“Only billionaires and the Amish can afford to be true libertarians.”

There, I said it.

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