Holy shit, the laundry room fire story is real.

It’s a bad era to be in the Navy.

This is a problem I have with Google Maps, who insists that some roads cannot be bicycled upon. Maybe because they’re designated as freeways? Dunno!

But yes, sometimes Google doesn’t have enough information about the pathways that are for other than cars.

In the 1970s, Jerry Falwell figured out how to get fundamentalist Christians to vote for whoever he wanted, just so long as the candidate committed to reducing abortion access. They didn’t care if the same candidate was getting payouts from corporations and passing laws to let them bust strikes and pollute the rivers.

And this figured largely into getting Reagan elected in 1980. And Reagan busted up labor and opened up Washington to lobbyists and special interests groups, and the economy, which had a beefy, robust middle class, went k-shaped from then forward.

Falwell didn’t actually care about abortion, incidentally. He cared that the law was now forcing his white-only college to integrate black people.

Capitalists don’t like honest competition, since it requires them to research positive innovations.

But Marx tells us (in Das Kapital ) that the capitalist will always be seek to bypass regulations and ultimately capture the regulating government.

And yes, the scientific advancements of the moon shots returned $14 for every $1 spent. Using that as a reference, lobbying federal and state governments return $120 for every $1 spent.

TIL private equity consolidated all the firetruck manufacturers into a single entity, and then slowed the rate of production, more than doubling the price and the wait time. Firehouses can no longer afford trucks.

When I view right-wing outrage, it’s so often blatantly wrong (and doesn’t pass a simple factcheck) that I used to just believe that they were incompetent. (And some of the arguments they make do show they can’t logic).

Then I realized that they doing what biblical scholar Dan McClellan calls costly virtue signalling. The social media post isn’t for outsiders, but insiders to signal to each other that they are of the body and belong to the same cult.

The affordability crisis is a Democrat hoax is the same signal as They’re eating the dogs which is the same as blood libel, and it doesn’t matter whether or not any of them are true. In fact, the subject of these statements are to point out targets for those MAGA members who are looking to express their loyalty with violence.

I assumed this was a MAGA flex.

If that’s all a CEO was, then we’d have much more functional companies. But the CEO is also the top manager of the company and dictates policies that affect how the company is run. We’re seeing specific examples of what is nothing short of labor abuse by executives such as Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos. And they choose their policies for purely emotional reasons, as an expression of resentment and vindictiveness toward their own workforce.

In fact, this is the core of their fantasy regarding AI, that with enough R&D it will be cheap enough to replace their human staff entirely with robots, who don’t have opinions and don’t fight for better treatment.

If a company separated the executive suite from upper management, and instead had a brain trust to maximize profits by hard data and cold calculation, I submit human labor would be better treated, since well-treated workers operate at an improved rate of productivity, which actually makes it profitable to make sure they take their breaks and eat their lunches.

History shows us the ownership class always thinks their workers are willfully withholding effort, and as we’ve seen during the North Atlantic slave era, the ownership class will work labor to death if they are allowed to do so.

Then they aren’t rare books necessarily.

Personally, I find being human shameful, in that we keep getting stuck dominated by the ownership class and unable to organize against them. This won’t be the first time, but the ultra-wealthy are so rich it might be the last.

But that isn’t how I originally took it when I first learned of the atrocities committed by Americans or in the name of the US, past and present.

History is messy everywhere. Human civilization has always been exploitative and violent. What we can hope for is to make strides forward in developing morality and creating societies where life, liberty and civil rights are extended to everyone. The enlightenment and its notion of universal inalienable rights was a big step. We Americans just couldn’t get our wealthy cotton lords to give up their livelihood and wealth. Nor could the French give up their petit bourgeoisie.

Since then, the UN has a Universal Declaration of Human Rights for nations to aspire to, but no nation actually recognizes them all or enforces the ones they got. But liberal societies now know what to work towards if ever they can get it going.

Right now, the US is in a world of shit. We’re watching all the progress since the civil war unravel. But some historians are optimistic about it, noting that we’ve had slide-backs like this before, and when the people responded, it allowed the US to ironclad civil rights a bit more. The US is taking a while, but the arc of history really does bend towards universal liberty.

(SCOTUS is an interesting point of focus, as it’s one of the big direct powers that is unraveling our rights year after year. Now that we understand we can’t just leave it there and hope to fix the US, we’re going to have to do something to overhaul the court. I wonder what that will look like.)

Our current mess even features a conspiracy of the ultra wealthy. It’s hard to decide when it started, because different capitalists were pissed off and swore revenge for different reasons. And then there’s the new order of tech bros and Protestant Evangelical ministers that have devoted themselves to white Christian nationalism. They are just grew up with autocratic ideology and have forsaken all notions of charity or compassion. The Disney/Ford era conspirators would be aghast at what the project has become.

But either we’re going to collectively learn we don’t want to be assholes dominated by an incompetent upper class (and they are incompetent – they’re doing nothing to preserve the social contract) and we’re going to collectively overthrow them and vow to do better, or we’re going to ignore the climate crisis until we collectively run out of water, and war, famine, pestilence and drought take most of us.

If that happens, we might go extinct and then it’s up to some other species to evolve big brains and try again. But Homo Erectus went through a rough patch where there were less than ten-thousand of them for millennia. They’d then get better and colonize the world until they were out-competed by more modern cousins. Also HE lasted two million years, to our 250,000. So this just may be a long term pause before we try to civilize again, and maybe by then we will have become less susceptible to fearmongers.

I think the reverse can be true if footage is filmed by other onlookers which then is uploaded to social media for influencers to break down what happened.

The dude in a Target making a scene about the Satanic pride wear (the artist drew some devils in unrelated work) was pretty much a flop.

I would be stoked if a Satanist¹ rose up to counter an evangelist like this and was prepared to do so.

¹ Is satanist proper? I know there are different kinds of satanists, from TST folk to LaVeyan Satanists and unlike Christians, have very little to do with each other.

The whole point of post-enlightenment government is to serve the public good. But then it gets captured by capitalist interests (as Karl Marx explains in Das Kapital) at which point the government serves capital.

Does anyone remember circa 2014 that radical jihadists in the middle east were destroying ancient and medieval artifacts, including stone heads? And I remember here in the liberal west we thought that was awful.

This is not the only thing that makes me think of that. Also Trump’s recent calls to reduce the size of US national parks and open them up to oil and uranium mining exploitation.

I had figured it would, once gambling regulations were bypassed, and no-one recognized that gambling houses make for a moral hazard.

For a long time the US economy has depended on companies exploiting human cognitive biases and addictive mechanisms, from selling booze to bank service fees, to click-wrapped ToS agreements, and yes, to gambling.

There’s a reason we regulated it, much the way we regulate advertising so that it’s not deceptive.

One beef is the slop of fear and rage that is used to sell far right news media. FOX News even encourages its viewership to abandon all over news sources, like an abusive domestic partner.

If we don’t figure out a way out of it, so that confidence ploys and cognitive manipulation for profit are once again regarded as foul play and business in bad faith, then we’re just going to be owned by the ownership class. Literally.

But they’re not very smart, so they’ll not do a thing to address the climate crisis.

It’s been a consistent play of Trump since even his campaign in 2015-2016. He says something stupid or does something stupid. His defenders say he didn’t mean it like that and try to offer nuance or context, and then Trump clarifies that no, the plain meaning of what he said was exactly what he intended.

But yeah, after Hokit disparaged Michelle Obama at White House UFC fight, I had a moment of clarity that the new masculine flex is to discharge your strength to do something awful, something cruel or tasteless or obviously amoral, to demonstrate either that you are beyond the reach of consequences or because you don’t care about the consequences. Another recent example is when Trump interfered with the World Cup and cancelled the red card and one-game penalty of Folarin Balogun.

I doubt that it’s just manosphere-types emulating Donald Trump, but because this is a thing he specifically does time and again, it’s recognizable when other people do it.

I have a fantasy that someone tries using data driven systems to run business. They’d still need AI to do all the C-speak and top-tier sales work, but as it is upper management commonly resents their own workforce and enacts policy just to be vindictive.

Imagine a game company that didn’t crunch because it knew crunching only slowed productivity and wrecked the health and morale of the dev team.

Imagine a company who didn’t issue RTO mandates because it saw it’s telecommuters are more productive and happier working from home.

Imagine if businesses didn’t surveillance-max and micromanage their administrative clerks and fulfillment teams understanding that doing so slows them down and makes them miserable.

I don’t know for certain that AI-assisted computers can run businesses and manage well, but we have countless examples of how upper management lets their feelings get in the way of maximizing profit and demonstrate incompetence and lack of adult maturity.

The bar really is that low.

Isn’t doubling down on stupid takes a big masculinity flex in 2026?

All the alpha males seem to do it.

I topped from below. Partners told me what they wanted done to them, and I did it to them.

We called it negotiation but I knew what it really was.

Daniella Mestyanek Young (aka Knitting Cult Lady ) notes that in cults, the leader is always immune to the restrictions set on followers.

Sometimes this is passed on to lieutenants. Case in point the spokeswomen for the Tradwife movement have careers and are very vocal, as they’re telling other women to stay at home, breed and stay silent.

Let’s also remember that before the screens, we had shitty textbooks, and underpaid teachers and a serious shortage of supplies.

Schools in the United States need more than a review of tech, but a complete overhaul and a budget that doesn’t look like Republicans are literally trying to kill the education system.