Democrats once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising big money from corporate and Wall Street executives, and getting votes from upper middle-class households in “swing” suburbs...Details about the roles of the Republican Party and the media at his webpage.
Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and for four of those years had control of both houses of congress. But in that time they failed to reverse the decline in working-class wages and jobs.
Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.
They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class – failing to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violate them, or help workers form unions with a simple up-or-down votes.
Partly as a result, union membership sank from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 12 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.
Both Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated.
The unsurprising result has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft the working class. That created an opening for demagoguery, in the form of Trump...
20 November 2016
The Democratic Party as one of Trump's "enablers"
In an essay at his website, Robert Reich lists three entities that enabled Donald Trump to acquire the presidency. The first two are the Republican Party and the "media." Here are his observations re the third enabler - the Democratic Party.
Millions of donkeys, horses, and mules died in WWI
"650 Officers and Enlisted Men of auxiliary Remount Depot, No 326, Camp Cody, NM Symbol of Head Pose of “The Devil”, Saddle Horse Ridden by Maj. Frank G. Brewer, Remount Commander © Mark Raen."Via the Pics subreddit.
In Trump's America, it's dangerous to wear a bandanna
As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle:
The woman set off for a hike on Monday... When she returned to her car at the California park, however, the woman discovered that the vehicle’s rear window was smashed in and her purse was gone, Jones said. Additionally, there was a note left behind.
“Hijab wearing bitch,” it read. “This is our nation now get the fuck out.”The woman, Nicki Pancholy, told the San Francisco Chronicle that she does cover her head with a bandanna — but she is not Muslim. The newspaper reported that the Pancholy, 41, has lupus; KNTV-TV reported that she was trying to protect herself from the sun.
Via The Washington Post.
Beach sand is not a permanent feature
From an interesting longread at TheVerge:
To the casual observer, the beach may look like the only natural bit of the city, a fringe of shore reaching out from under the glass and pastel skyline. But this would be false: the beach is every bit as artificial as the towers and turquoise pools. For years the sea has been eating away at the shore, and the city has spent millions of dollars pumping up sand from the seafloor to replace it, only to have it wash away again. Every handful of sand on Miami Beach was placed there by someone.
That sand is washing away ever faster. The sea around Miami is rising a third of an inch a year, and it’s accelerating. The region is far from alone in its predicament, or in its response to an eroding coast: it’s becoming hard to find a populated beach in the United States that doesn’t require regular infusions of sand...
"There isn’t a natural grain of sand on the beach in Northern New Jersey; there is no Miami Beach unless we build it," Young says. "The real endangered species on the coast of the US isn’t the piping plover or the loggerhead sea turtle. It’s an unengineered beach."..
On July 31st, 2015, the Army Corps released a plan for patching eroding sections of Miami Beach. Miami-Dade’s sand resources had been exhausted, the Corps wrote, and some of the best alternatives lay to the north, offshore of Martin and St. Lucie counties. Though the shoals were in federal waters and the northern counties had no greater right to them than anyone else, they viewed the sand as theirs, and with the Corps’ announcement began the latest skirmish in what local officials call "the sand wars."..
16 November 2016
Two-headed sharks are now a thing
As reported by National Geographic:
Two-headed sharks may sound like a figment of the big screen, but they exist—and more are turning up worldwide, scientists say... [four examples cited]...
Sans-Coma and colleagues say a genetic disorder seems to be the most plausible cause for the two-headed catshark... But wild sharks' malformations could come from a variety of factors, including viral infections, metabolic disorders, pollution, or a dwindling gene pool due to overfishing, which leads to inbreeding, and thus genetic abnormalities...
Galván-Magaña, who authored the 2011 study, doesn't think two-headed sharks are more common—but rather that there are more scientific journals around to publish accounts.
Product shrinkage
A rant from The Guardian:
I’m not sure I understand the problem. It looks nothing like a Toblerone any more! It looks like a Toblerone rip-off you might buy from unmarked cardboard boxes in markets!Related: Higher prices bite chocolate makers.
I see. Why has this happened? Because Toblerone is a penny pincher. A gappy new Toblerone contains less chocolate than before, which makes them less expensive to make.
Surely in the face of rising ingredient prices, this is a sensible way to protect the consumer. Then just have fewer triangles! Make the bars shorter! Don’t turn them into this gappy monstrosity! It simply isn’t British!
You know that Toblerone is Swiss, right? Actually smartypants, I think you’ll find it is owned by Mondelēz, an American multinational company.
Wait a second, did you say Mondelēz? I did.
Isn’t that the company that bought Cadbury in 2009? Now you come to mention it, yes. It’s the company that took Dairy Milk out of Creme Eggs last year. It’s the company that stopped producing Cadbury chocolate coins. The company that rounded the squares in Dairy Milk bars. The company that put Cadbury chocolate in cheese spread, and put Ritz crackers in Cadbury chocolate, and covered Roses in those miserable tear-open wrappers...
How does someone "take ownership" of my needs ?
What does it even mean? I've been seeing this inquiry on various feedback documents - this one after a successful tech upgrade yesterday.
I understand why this happens. This company, like every other one, outsources its online "help" service to third-world sites and uses feedback to weed out the unsatisfactory temporary hires.
But "taking ownership of my needs" sounds like I've been interacting with a sin-eater. And why a 10-point scale, forcryinoutloud? And get off my lawn; I'm grouchy this morning.
Rifles being fired
"A pile of illegal firearms burns in a field on the outskirts of Nairobi, set alight by government officials as part of a campaign to stem the flow of illicit guns into the country." Via The Guardian.
"Post-truth" defined
It's the Oxford Dictionaries "Word of the Year" for 2016.
After much discussion, debate, and research, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth – an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’...More at the link. Post-truth beat out chatbot and coulrophobia, among others.
The concept of post-truth has been in existence for the past decade, but Oxford Dictionaries has seen a spike in frequency this year in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States. It has also become associated with a particular noun, in the phrase post-truth politics. ..
The compound word post-truth exemplifies an expansion in the meaning of the prefix post- that has become increasingly prominent in recent years. Rather than simply referring to the time after a specified situation or event – as in post-war or post-match – the prefix in post-truth has a meaning more like ‘belonging to a time in which the specified concept has become unimportant or irrelevant’. This nuance seems to have originated in the mid-20th century, in formations such as post-national (1945) and post-racial (1971).
Post-truth seems to have been first used in this meaning in a 1992 essay by the late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation magazine. Reflecting on the Iran-Contra scandal and the Persian Gulf War, Tesich lamented that ‘we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world’.
15 November 2016
"Haute couture"
Created by Maya Hansen, who also makes the accessory below (Steampunk? Goth? I don't know, and I'm not sure if these two items go together - I got left behind in the cardigan era...). But they do bring back some memories of my collegiate years as the manager of a JV hockey team.
Via Arsenic in the Shell.
Hepatitis A spread by strawberries in margaritas
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Strawberries at three El Paso County restaurants have been connected to a multistate hepatitis A outbreak... strawberries used in margaritas at the restaurants... may have been contaminated with the virus.Everyone knows to wash commercially-purchased strawberries before eating them, but who would suspect strawberries in margaritas not having been washed.
Health officials say anyone who ate or drank strawberries at the restaurants should receive hepatitis A vaccinations.
Health officials have connected more than 100 hepatitis A cases to frozen strawberries imported from Egypt since Jan. 1.
And it's a strange world we live in where it's cheaper to import strawberries from Egypt than it is to grow them in this country.
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