In his 1980 book The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler suggested a national childcare system that put pre-schoolers in the facilitated care of retirees in nursing homes during working hours. It would be a win-win, with daycare and elderly loneliness solved in one shot.

Just sayin'.

Please forgive the off-platform spam, but if you're bored tonight, join the Twitter Space @jackfortunati are hosting at 7 pm EST. We'll look at things that all non-right-wing/non-conservative voters have in common, how social media keeps people who are on the left spending all their time in thought bubbles and fighting among themselves instead of uniting. Set reminder by clicking the link below, it'll be awesome & groovy, I promise:
https://twitter.com/esaeger/status/1616082186255433733

People forget that there are groups that lobby on behalf of citizens' needs, like Public Citizen, which disassociated itself from founder Ralph Nader after many blamed his presidential run for Al Gore's 2000 loss (unfortunately).
We really need to get back to supporting those kinds of groups. These days they seem like lost relics of a better civilization.

In 2013, Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee that top Wall Street executives shouldn't be prosecuted for the crimes they committed in 2008 - like completely nuking the entire world's economy - "because it could destabilize the economy."

Boy, it's really hard to take this country seriously sometimes, you know?

Most people don't get it, but when politicians talk about not being able to pay for SS it's a myth, a fake red-blue argument to get votes. The government can print as many dollars as it wants. It does that whenever Wall Street and military industrialists ask for it. It could do the same thing for healthcare, college debt and whatnot. They just don't, so that people stay fearful and stressed about losing their jobs. This epic, colossal lie needs to be revealed for what it is, all the time.

I'd never gotten bot-swarmed until the other day, when I tweeted this:
--
In 2021 the New Hampshire Libertarian Party advocated for the legalization of child labor "because schools suck."
Monied interests don't care about your kids and they never will, not ever.
--
The NHLP responded, and for days, tons of accounts with 0-30 followers have boosted (Liked) anti-education replies. One non-bot guy started to lose it and I told him he sounded like Charles Manson.
I've been having *so* much fun. 😹

"We have the technology to produce chemical weapons. We will not remain idle forever."
"Meanwhile, doctors monitor bone marrow damage with [unintelligible] believed dead in Bethlehem."
"Someone came in a car with an Uzi and killed his friend in a grave down the crossroads by the mosque. The friend of the dead man promises 'We'll never forget'."

- Skinny Puppy, "VX Gas Attack"

Like the Fed, the Supreme Court is presented as a group of people whose wisdom is so deep that it can't be questioned by regular people.

The SC gave us Citizens United, Dobbs v. Jackson and Bush v. Gore, while the Fed - which traditionally does nothing more than mess with interest rates in order to "fix the economy" - raised them recently in a move that will cause stagflation.

Both bodies screw up so consistently and bigly that it's a wonder anyone takes either of them seriously at all.

For destroying the entire US economy by scamming low-income home-buyers with subprime home loans, the final punishments were:

Bank of America: $16 billion fine
Goldman Sachs: $5 billion fine
Wells Fargo: $1.2 billion fine

Total current value of all 3 companies: $563 billion

Total executives arrested to date: zero

There's a teachable lesson in there maybe?

Seriously, between all the soul-crushing problems like the climate, middle class misery and *actual uncontrolled plagues* it feels like we have no leadership at all right now. It's just 10 rich vampire-ghouls cleaning out the bank vaults while they rest of us try to avoid having to live in our cars.

Every Ronald Reagan airport, library and public building should be renamed and his statues melted down for scrap, that'd be great.
And his supercarrier should be renamed the USS George Floyd.

Musk is appropriating 2017-era 4chan culture to impress 20-year-old girls. Sick pathetic pup, that guy.

Happy holidays everyone. One thing the Republicans are great at is "reverse marketing," that is, making the most brilliant, humanistic ideas sound stupid or too beneficial to citizens to be taken seriously. To them, full employment through government with an MMT strategy just "isn't how it works." They want us to embrace suffering and needless death from lack of healthcare.

The Democrats shouldn't have abandoned unions and consumer protections to compete with the GOP on free market strategies.

Masking & social distancing were what ended the "Spanish flu" of 1918. In San Francisco, people who refused to mask faced such punishments as fines, prison sentences and getting their names printed in the paper.

The rich, including San Francisco's mayor, were occasionally caught without masks but never went to jail.

It's a bit aggravating that there's always been a really unfair class angle to these things, like when elites got the first covid vaxes.

When labor organizers talk to employees about unionizing, they usually find that getting more money is a lot less important to them than getting their managers to stop treating them like disposable equipment in workplaces they completely hate going to. Respect for their skills - whatever they may be - is what they want.

Ron DeSantis info (apparently this made the rounds a while ago but it was news to me):

Empire Files interviewed a Guantanamo detainee who claims to know DeSantis on sight, as he helped to decide "legal" torture methods.

As a lawyer in Guantanamo during the worst US torture period, DeSantis' first duty *was* to his commander.

He's a monster.

Lol just wondering, in the last couple of weeks, has anyone else said "Trump" when you actually meant to say "Musk?" I have.

I have no idea how anyone could possibly feel happy when there's misery everywhere and no one's doing anything about it. We're watching Friedman's unregulated free market experiment fail right in front of our eyes and the only ones who don't understand it are the ridiculously wealthy and a bunch of powerless politicians who eventually resort to insider trading like all the other really "successful" ones. Those are the real optics. That's what people see.

I dunno, did you already know that the ancient Peruvians made hundreds of huge, miles-wide drawings that can only be seen from way, way up in the air, and that we're still finding them? Whatever, I didn't, this is about as weird as it friggin gets.
Repeat, they're *still* finding them.
By flying over them.
In planes.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/new-nazca-lines-discovery-2231132

You know, maybe if Congresspersons didn't have to spend nearly all of their time begging wealthy ghouls for money and the rest of their time voting on names for post office buildings and increased military funding the military doesn't even particularly want, they'd actually do something to keep people from starving to death in a country made of millions of acres of corn.