I finally unsubscribed

I donated to the Harris/Walz campaign a while back, and you know what that means: I’ve been inundated with texts/emails begging me for money a dozen times a day. I tolerated them because I support the Democrats, and I was planning to donate again soon.

I finally had to unsubscribe/block/delete all their messages, because right now they are constantly pushing the Oprah endorsement. No. Oprah is a soft-brained snake oil salesman who got rich promoting feel-good nonsense, and who inflicted Dr Oz and Dr Phil on the world. Go away.

I’m still voting for Harris/Walz in November, but I am not going to stomach Oprah cluttering up my in-box.

Boeing on strike!

Union members cheer during a news conference following a vote count on the union contract at the IAM District 751 Main Union Hall in Seattle, Washington, US, on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. Boeing Co. factory workers are poised to walk off the job, crippling manufacturing across the planemaker’s Seattle commercial jet hub after members of its largest union rejected a contract offer and voted to strike. Photographer: M. Scott Brauer/Bloomberg

One of my major complaints about growing up in Seattle is that it was essentially a one-company town. My dad worked at Boeing when he could, but was frequently laid off — they could do that, just fire thousands of people on any downturn — and later rehired. The population was just a sponge that would serve the Boeing workforce as necessary, and when there was a major layoff the entire region would suffer. As a kid, my parents were good about insulating us from the major consequences, but did notice when suddenly we’d have to move to a more run-down house, and we’d have a lot of tuna casserole for dinner, and our dental appointments were cancelled.

Seattle has diversified since then, but Boeing is still the elephant swimming in Puget Sound, and when Boeing goes on strike, it hurts the entire region. The workers have good cause, though.

Alex Mutch, a striking aircraft inspector, said he had been saving up for the strike since he was hired five years ago.

“We have been left hanging on a leash for almost 16 years and missed out on a lot of opportunities for cost-of-living adjustments, especially with the rate inflation has gone up,” Mutch said. “My grocery bill has doubled since I moved down here. Not to mention the cost of rent.”

It’s not just Boeing that has caused this strike — it’s the whole damn system of predatory capitalism. Food prices have shot up where I live, while the grocery stores make record profits, and you can’t blame that on Boeing. There’s a whole industry thriving everywhere on buying up houses and renting them out to workers, at massive advantage to landlords. Seattle has a massive homelessness problem, with these horrible fences put up all over my old neighborhoods to prevent people from camping there, and no, they’re not building enough housing, because that would dilute the landlord’s profits. I’m supposed to be selling my mother’s old home, and I’ve gotten offers sight unseen from real estate companies that want to scoop it up fast and cheap.

Boeing offered a huge salary increase, and it wasn’t enough.

Under the agreement, the average pay for machinists would have risen from $75,608 to $106,350 per year without overtime, according to the company. But workers said the offer failed to take into account the high cost of living in the Seattle region and the years that employees had gone without significant raises.

There’s another major factor affecting workers. People don’t want to leave Washington state. It’s a beautiful, pleasant place to leave, but management would love to relocate the plants to a cheaper, less idyllic location, where they could save money with a new assortment of less highly trained workers. This has happened multiple times, where they announce that they want to relocate people who have built lives in that gorgeous state.

Union members said they have been frustrated for years with Boeing’s tactics, including threats to move airliner production out of the region.

My dad always wanted to work at Boeing, where the pay was good and the benefits were great, but I guarantee you that if he’d been told he was being relocated to Oklahoma he would have quit on the spot. Sorry, Oklahoma, I’m sure you’re a lovely state, but compared to the west coast…no, just no.

This issue comes up in multiple stories, but it’s always understated, for some reason. The WaPo has an article titled Why Boeing workers voted to strike after rejecting proposed deal, which doesn’t actually say much about why, except this one sentence, which also mention the relocation concerns.

Boeing machinists, who build the company’s flagship planes, have not had a new contract in 16 years and have been bargaining for months over higher pay, better benefits and a promise from the company that it will keep assembling its planes in Washington state.

I think this is probably a bigger issue than anyone is reporting. Boeing has a deep scar in its heart from the McDonnell-Douglas merger that ended up replacing expert, engineering-based management with a gang of clowns with MBAs who moved everything to Chicago, leading to the current crop of woes, such as airplane doors blowing out and a space capsule that wasn’t safe to return in. The damage to the company’s reputation was directly caused by the displacement of skilled leadership, so it’s no surprise that workers want assurances that they’re not going to be similarly replaced.

This is another consequence of predatory capitalism. You know who else is feeling the effects? NASA. A couple of billionaires decide to exploit the expertise generated by NASA, and suddenly there’s a brain drain that’s dismantling an institution. A panel met to review the status of the agency, and they did not have good things to say.

A panel of independent experts reported this week that NASA lacks funding to maintain most of its decades-old facilities, could lose its engineering prowess to the commercial space industry, and has a shortsighted roadmap for technology development.

SpaceX has not been an entirely positive force on the space industry.

The panel members also spotlighted concerns they heard from NASA employees that an increasing reliance on commercial partners could decay the skills of the agency’s workforce. The committee acknowledged the successes of NASA’s commercial cargo and crew program, which are based on fixed-price service contracts, but cautioned that excessive use of such contracts puts NASA employees in oversight roles rather than hands-on engineering jobs.

This puts NASA at risk of losing its most talented engineers, who might move to companies for more rewarding and higher-paying work. “Very few of the nation’s most innovative scientists and engineers would likely seek or remain in such pure oversight positions,” the panel wrote.

“I think it’s the committee’s consensus view that the United States would be best served for its future by continuing to have engineering prowess in NASA and not have the agency just become a funding pass-through or a contract monitor,” said Kathy Sullivan, a retired space shuttle astronaut and former administrator of NOAA.

This chart shows the condition of NASA facilities, divided by center and discipline. A red circle means poor, yellow means fair to marginal, and green means compliant. The size of the circle corresponds to the number of facilities at each center.

Capitalists always undervalue the importance of people and expertise — they treat them as trivially fungible. I’m just reminded that one of the biggest obstacles to rebuilding Notre Dame, or building a new, equivalent construction, is that the knowledge and skill of expert stonemasons has faded away over the centuries. We’ve got stone, we’ve got timber, we have machines that enable heavy construction work, but we don’t have the deep knowledge of generations of masons anymore, and we’d have to reconstruct the appropriate technologies all over again, at great expense.

Boeing and NASA are repositories of practical knowledge that you can’t quickly replace, especially not when our current system would think you can just swap in Elon Musk to take over 75-100 years of hard-earned expertise.

We got our soundbite

It slaps.

I don’t really care what the intent of the creator was, it shows what a buffoon this guy is.

Can we cancel this weird creep now?

Dave Rubin is one of the dumbest online pundits on the planet, and he’s also one of those people caught with his hands in the Russian cookie jar. Rubin weighed in on Taylor Swift’s endorsement, and it’s one of the sleaziest, most repulsive takes you’ll see.

“Let’s talk a little bit about how this fits into the pop culture part of this, because the pop culture is a huge driver of the cultural narrative,” said Rubin. “Poor Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris on Instagram after the debate on ABC, proudly calls herself ‘a childless cat lady.’ Elon Musk, who they hate, saw that and he wrote this: ‘Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.’ So he’s mocking and exposing the ridiculousness, right?”

“It’s like Taylor Swift, you are a young, pretty girl,” said Rubin. “Do you know what the gang members from Venezuela do to young, pretty girls? It ain’t pretty. So what do we have to do? We just have to keep finding each other to whatever extent we can, we have to keep waking people up, it is the only chance we have in these remaining 60 days.”

Seriously, dude? “Vote for Trump or you’ll be raped by a Venezualan gang”? Combining racism, classism, and threats of sexual assault is an ugly mix, you know. That’s just how desperate the Trumpers are getting.

Game over, man

Taylor Swift has endorsed Kamala Harris/Tim Walz.

Lest you think the Republicans will be steamrollered, have no fear: Donald Trump quickly countered.

When asked Wednesday morning about Swift endorsing the Democratic nominee, Trump tried to shake it off, telling Fox News he prefers Swift’s close friend Brittany Mahomes over the singer.
“I actually like Mrs. Mahomes much better if you want to know the truth,” Trump said. “She’s a big Trump fan. I was not a Taylor Swift fan.”

Who?

I looked her up on Wikipedia.

Brittany Lynne Mahomes (née Matthews; born August 31, 1995) is an American sports team co-owner and former soccer player who played as a forward for Icelandic club UMF Afturelding. She is a founding co-owner of the Kansas City Current, a team in the American professional top-division National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL).

She is married to Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.

OK, I’m still saying, “Who?”

It’s a good thing that the election won’t be decided by celebrity endorsements, but I do think Harris might have an edge here.

This is rather horrible.

He’s just confirming that the Trump cult is weird and creepy.

I watched the debate

I did. I sat through the whole thing, and I did not enjoy it.

Harris said nothing radical. No surprising policy changes; she wants to stay the course with Israel, demanding a cease fire and release of the hostages, but what I wanted to hear was that she would leverage the sale of arms to pressure Israel into ending the genocide — nope, she couldn’t say that. She did promise other positive changes, though with a $6K tax credit for new families and $50K for new business startups. Otherwise, she hammered on Trump a bit, as expected. “In this debate tonight, you’re going to hear from the same old tired playbook, a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling,” she predicted. She was exactly right.

Trump glowered through the whole thing. He looked resentful at being there, and yeah, he kept returning to immigration. He really hates a lot of people, and wants to deport millions of people, all those dangerous criminals pouring over the border, released from prisons and insane asylums. He repeated that nonsense about immigrants hunting down your beloved pets and killing them and eating them.

Asked about abortion, he claimed that everyone, including women, Democrats, and professors, loved the fact that he killed Roe v. Wade. No, they do not. Asked if he would veto a bill that proposed a nationwide abortion ban, he dodged the question. Asked about January 6th, he said “I didn’t do it.” He’s a liar and a coward.

Here’s a 20 minute summary of the whole thing.

The highlight for me, though, was when he was asked about what he planned to replace Obamacare with, he admitted he didn’t have any specific plans, he had concepts of plans.

He’s a hate-filled sack of shit. He’s got nothing but jingo and contempt for anyone who doesn’t look like him.

Maybe that will be enough to get him elected, unfortunately.

Lies, lies, and more lies

It’s just that easy!

What to expect from the debate tonight: as we get closer and closer to the election, the lies get more and more extreme.

Former President Donald Trump repeated his false claim that children are undergoing transition-related surgeries during their school day, exacerbating existing fears among conservatives that educators are pushing children to become transgender and aiding transitions without parental awareness.

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house, and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school, and your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump said at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state, on Saturday.

What the hell is wrong with Trump and his audience? And he repeats it again!

When asked by the group’s co-founder how he would address the “explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender,” Trump said: “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

There is no evidence that a student has ever undergone gender-affirming surgery at a school in the United States nor is there evidence that a U.S. school has sent a student to receive such a procedure elsewhere.

My transgender friends are constantly complaining about how many hoops they have to jump through, how many years it takes to get approval, and how many states won’t even allow you to buy the drugs for maintenance. I’ll have to inform them that all you had to do was say that you used a different pronoun in middle school, and zip, you’re sent to the school nurse, who has a fully equipped surgery, and the sex change is done in a day.

Yeah, right.

And the MAGA idiots will believe it, and are ready for the next lie.

Which happens to be that Haitian immigrants are flooding the country and stealing your pets to eat raw in their apartments in the slums. Sure, fully believable. Everyone knows that housecat is the national dish of Haiti.

This summary of Israel’s defenses holds up

Accurate.

A quick guide to Israel’s PR methods:
1. We haven’t heard reports of deaths, will check into it;
2. The people were killed, but by a faulty Palestinian rocket/bomb;
3. OK we killed them, but they were terrorists;
4. OK they were civilians, but they were being used as human shields;
5. OK there were no fighters in the area, so it was our mistake. But we kill civilians by accident, they do it on purpose;
6. OK we kill far more civilians than they do, but look at how terrible other countries are!
7. Why are you still talking about Israel? Are you some kind of anti-semite?
Test this against the next interview you hear or watch.
Adam Johannes, Secretary, Cardiff Stop the War Coalition

Debate schmebate

Great. We’re having a another presidential debate tomorrow. I predict it will be a debacle.

I won’t predict who will win, because that is going to be shaped by people’s subjective impressions and the way impressions will be shaped by the media. And one thing I can definitely predict is that the media will fuck it up.

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.

Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.

Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”

This debate shouldn’t be happening, because in a functional democracy the senile narcissist running for the Republican party should have been repudiated long ago.