The guy who owns the business where I work is a 90-year-old Ukrainian. He was a boy during Stalin's Holodomor, and his family was constantly trying to find food so they wouldn't starve. At one point he broke into a house and found a huge wheel of cheese. If that hadn't happened his entire family would have died.
Man's inhumanity never ceases to amaze, doesn't it?

"There is no Tesla CEO today." 10 Tesla Investors Lose $132.5 Billion From Musk's Twitter Fiasco.

Pretty hurtin', folks. I hope he ends up living in a Maytag box under the overpass. Musk is nothing more than a fail machine.

https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/tesla-stock-investors-lose-132-5-billion-from-musks-twitter-fiasco/

Every year I put aside time during the holidays to read the ghost stories of MR. James (1862-1936).

He's known as the founder of the ‘antiquarian ghost story’ for centering them around very old objects that "harbour weird and unsettling associations for us."

He began writing the stories for a close circle of friends and colleagues at the University of Cambridge. He would read them aloud every Christmas Eve.

The stories are kind of Lovecraftian, but without a surrounding mythos (a la Cthulhu).

One thing Hitler did when he first took power was crush the labor movement. That's an example of government and the employer class being too intertwined and working together to make workers miserable.
That, basically, is fascist economics.
We're pretty close to that I think.

New article on Trump's mismanagement of covid, from Thom Hartmann.
In February 2021, Laurie Garrett wrote about Trump's being guilty of pandemicide. This article goes further, alleging that Trump's endless bungling was racially motivated.
I don't know about that, but there's literally no way around the fact that his actions directly resulted in (so far) nearly 1.1 million deaths and >99M cases.
I've always said he should be dragged to the Hague. Any day would be great.
https://hartmannreport.com/p/is-america-blind-to-trumps-genocide

Just watched the Munk debate on journalism and was astounded. Gladwell served as the perfect example of a completely out-of-touch, overpaid "journalist" whose staff of interns does all his grunt work. Does he even *know* that his marching orders come second hand from an "editorial team" that gets its instructions from a government matrix comprising the DNC, the intelligence agencies, Big Tech etc?
What a despicable little toolbag.

Here's the full debate ICYMI somehow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvaf7XOOFHc

Between "The Twitter Files," "The Facebook Files" and everything else, we're seeing that Big Tech wants to keep people from "seeing all sides."

But it'd probably help things cohere a bit better and keep people better informed if the mainstream media would stop pushing "fair and balanced debate" when one or the other side is so consistently and obviously wrong, and instead just report the facts for once.

Protip: there's no such thing as an "alternative fact."

Union organizations don't need more mobilizers scolding people, they need more smart organizers who genuinely like people and get a kick out of talking to all types.
People don't like to be told what to do. They want to be understood, and they want to be respected for the work they do.
Most workers would rather have good working conditions than more pay.

Charles Koch *is* the climate crisis.

In August, his Americans for Prosperity group ran ads pressuring the 2 most corrupt Democratic senators - Joe Manchin & Kyrsten Sinema - to block the Inflation Reduction Act.

Yesterday, Manchin's attempt to sneak an oil industry giveaway into the (mandatory) military spending bill was nixed after weeks of pushback by climate action groups.

With Warnock's win, Koch will try to find another Democratic lackey to help those other 2 scumbags.

Wrt Matt Taibbi's "Twitter Files" story, it's not all cut and dried.

As one writer stated, once you decide to use a corporate social media site, you've abandoned certain Constitutional rights and entered a private "mall, that has its own rules. I mean, we know that Fox News has its own reality, amirite?

Musk should be paying more attention to all the hate speech that's going on over there, and maybe try to figure out the difference between hate speech and free speech while he's at it.

A single avocado uses 60 gallons of water to grow in California.
The Colorado River is getting lower and lower and it's not coming back, so it seems a little dumb to keep growing avocados in California, especially if you don't want the entire west turning into a desert as within a decade or so.

Workers are the only ones risking their lives every day to keep the country running as the pandemic becomes more and more endemic, and they won't put up with it forever. There should be a massive wealth tax levied so that front line workers could be provided with everything they need, including sabbaticals. I think everyone could use a few months off.

Elon Musk isn't a Republican, just a charlatan who's appropriating right-wing extremist culture. This continues his tradition of never having had an original idea.

Climate activists need to join with labor activists if they ever want to win the fight against fossil fuel. Green initiatives would require "just transition" for the fossil fuel workforce so those people don't starve. Those workers totally know what time it is, they just need guarantees.
It's nobody's fault. I believe that the oil scumbags are doing everything they can to keep the activist left divided.

The climate catastrophe is going to force us to restructure a lot of things, and a lot sooner than you think. We're watching unregulated free market capitalism crumble before our very eyes. Won't be too much longer.

I've been reading a lot of Jane McAlevey's words on labor organization, and it's convinced me that climate activists need to join with labor activists if they want to win.
Green initiatives would require "just transition" for fossil fuel industry workers so they don't lose their livelihoods while production processes get switched over (it's actually cheap to do it). Those workers know what time it is, they just need guarantees.

Free market greed is the most toxic threat to the planet.

Big Business lobbying of Congress has been out of control since the 1970s, when a consumer-protections bill was defeated after a small number of paid-off Democrats defected.

Afterward, House Speaker "Tip" O'Neill (D-Mass) said “I have never seen such extensive lobbying.”

That was in the wake of the 1971 "Powell memo," a blueprint for corporate domination of American democracy, which prompted the corporatists to move to DC from NY.

The left needs to organize better. Infighting hasn't worked.

Happy Indigenous People day from the EAST. COAST.

Every day, 110 people are shot to death in the US. That's more than the *combined* daily number of US military deaths during the wars in Vietnam (11), Korea (30), the American Revolutionary War (11), the Mexican–American War (29) and the War of 1812 (15).

All of this - the mass shootings, the sense that gun owners are all crazy (or wise, depending on your beliefs) is driven by the NRA. Once a gun safety organization, it's now the marketing arm of gunmakers who want to sell as many as possible.

Boy, Elon Musk's midlife crisis has been pretty epic, wouldn't you say? 🤔