September, 2017 archive
The Value of Labor 0
Robert Reich disputes those who argue that the working and middle classes’ income has fallen in real terms because the value of their labor has fallen. Here’s a bit:
(snip some more examples)
But they did the reverse: They spent more and more of their ever-growing wealth and power on rigging the game to their own advantage.
(Wording corrected.)
Have Cake, Eat It Too, Bitcoin Dept. 0
If it acts like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and persons treat it like they treat ducks, why, then, clearly it must be a mongoose.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Do polite stuff.
Officials say the bullet struck a friend in the abdomen . . . .
“Erasing History” 0
Bruce Lowry observes the eraser marks:
The report found that “very few public commemorations of African Americans’ suffering during the post-slavery era exist today” and that “no prominent monument or memorial” existed to mark the deaths of the nearly 4,000 Southern lynchings that had been documented at the time of the EJI’s report in 2015.
Follow the link for the complete article.
A Rudderless Ship of State 0
Shorter Dan Simpson: Incoherent bluster is not a foreign policy.
Understanding the Trumpler 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, Joe Navarro, without naming names, offers a guide.
Profiled 0
A life-long Seattle resident tells the story of what happened when she pulled over (good on her, by the way) to answer a message on her cell phone. A nugget:
The driver left her car idling in the middle of the street and approached my window.
“Am I in your way? What’s going on?” I asked.
“Yes, you are. I live here.”
“I thought this was a public street? I could be waiting for my child.”
“Well, I have children, too. And I pay a shit ton of money to live here. You need to leave.”
I was shaken. I, too, live in this neighborhood. I lived on this very street. I learned to ride a bike here. My daughter plays at this playground. And yet, because I was a black woman, the other driver assumed I didn’t belong, and ordered me to leave.
Read it.
The Power of Google 0
Josh Marshall has a long and thoughtful piece on the power of Google (and, by extension, other concentrators of influence). The piece was prompted by allegations of Google’s bullying a website the views of which Google found distasteful (no, it wasn’t one of those websites that have been so much in the news lately). Rather, it seems from the context of Marshall’s remarks, which are all I know of the situation at this point (links are in the post) to be a website that questioned the concentration of power in the hands of corporations, including digital outfits such as Google.
I have always found Josh Marshall to be a careful and deliberate thinker and commend the post to your attention. Here’s a bit:
