2021-01-30
2021-01-29
I have had my doubts about how good these trains will be in the Montreal winters.
Guess that's one of the main reasons for testing, isn't it?
The "representative segment" on the South Shore, as the REM calls it, "is made up of all the components of the automated system, which will be present on the REM's 67-kilometre network, as well as two stations, Brossard and Du Quartier stations, equipped with platforms screen doors."
The tests will make sure all those components, which include the communications, electrical and acceleration systems are running smoothly, the REM tells MTL Blog.
The train will first remain at low speeds to "test its functionalities and gradually test the interfaces between each of the components of the metro system."
Testing will then ramp up and the trains will eventually reach speeds of 100 km/h.
2021-01-28
Money, money money. Lots of money - just not for you and me.
https://scheerpost.com/2021/01/27/billionaires-gone-wild-pandemic-profiteering-by-the-numbers/
Classic example of a corporation caught doing something stupid - the Twats they are!
This is what happens when tech corporations get in bed w/the right wing.
While Twitter and Rodríguez himself claim to be apolitical, his Twitter history shows the company’s Latin America public policy coordinator promoting U.S.-backed regime-change operations.
In February 2019, the Trump administration backed a coup attempt against Venezuela’s socialist government. USAID (which funded Rodríguez’s former employer in Chiapas) collaborated with the U.S. military to try to violently force a so-called “aid” convoy across a bridge on the Colombian-Venezuelan border.
Rodríguez used his Twitter account at the time to encourage people to join this U.S. government-backed “AidVenezuela” campaign, a thinly disguised coup attempt.
Twats they certainly are.
2021-01-26
Sure, this company got bigger and made a lot more money during COVID-19.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/26/greed-in-the-suites-from-walgreens-to-walmart/
The solutions?
The question these numbers raise for the American people: Which corporations should we as a society be rewarding, those companies whose execs enrich themselves at worker expense or those that do a much better job at valuing the contributions all their employees are making?
In moments of past national crisis — like World War II — lawmakers took action to prevent corporate profiteering. They put in place stiff excess profits taxes. We could act in that same spirit today. We could, for instance, raise the tax rate on companies that pay their top execs unconscionably more than their workers.
We could also start linking government contracts to corporate pay scales: no tax dollars to any corporations that pay their top execs over a certain multiple of what their workers take home.
2021-01-25
A guitar I'm thinking about.
Normally I associate hollow body guitars with 1950's and 1960's American Blues, Country and Rockabilly music.
These look cool though, and sound interesting.
Can't tell if they have gutaways, but sure seems like it. Still I'd get one anyways.
2021-01-24
Think censorship isn't real?
Think I was kidding about this last post?
https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-censorship-mania-threat-progressive-media/5735240
Serious resistance by American workers to the ever-growing wars of aggression and deterioration of their living and working conditions has long been an inevitable.development. Amid the current depression-level economic conditions and other dislocations of life in the U.S., SOP 303 may well be implemented to shut down vital communication by workers – the vast majority of American people – as legitimate resistance grows ever stronger.
Implementation of the SOP 303 plan would not be technically difficult. It’s true that no individual organization or government agency directly controls the entire internet. But the major social media platforms – including Facebook, Youtube, and Google – as well as mobile phone networks such as Verizon, are already closely integrated with the U.S. state.
2021-01-23
The price left-wingers pay when they advocate for censorship ...
This is what happens when concentrated power rests in the hands of a few.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/01/23/pers-j23.html
The attack on leading members of the SEP and other left-wing organizations is a calculated act of censorship, at the behest of the state and the ruling class, to silence opposition. These actions are part of a years-long campaign to create the framework for censorship in the United States and internationally.
What one calls a crumbling empire, I see as a crapitalism -> the late stage of the late stage from capitalism to fascism.
Yes, that fascism.
https://scheerpost.com/2021/01/23/everywhere-you-look-american-empire-is-crumbling/
All of which won't save all species on the planet from the truly real threat -> global warming.
2021-01-22
Maybe this is Victoria's Secret?
Doesn't this bother anyone that all these kids (mostly girls) are forced into these abusive, destructive and criminal acts?
I guess if you allow yourself or your daughters to shop there, it doesn't.
2021-01-19
Nothing corporate-friendly about Dr. King indeed.
https://scheerpost.com/2021/01/18/there-was-nothing-corporate-friendly-about-martin-luther-king-jr/
Yes I've seen corporations do exactly what's described here -> ''use his name as a bulwark against the collective action of poor and dispossessed people,
propping themselves up instead. Today, with carefully excerpted texts
like “everyone can be great, because everyone can serve” as proof,
King’s words are all too often manipulated to sanctify a truly
superficial response to the burning crises of systemic racism, poverty,
homelessness, hunger, and so much more. Yet even a cursory glance at the
historical record should remind us all that King represented an
incendiary reality in terms of the America of his time (and, sadly, of
ours, too) and that there was nothing corporate-friendly about his
image."
2021-01-18
Hmm perhaps it's time I order this book.
Here is an excerpt.
https://scheerpost.com/2021/01/18/hedges-why-they-hate-us/
The malaise that infects Americans is global. Hundreds of millions of people have been severed by modernity from traditions, beliefs, and rituals, as well as communal structures, which kept them rooted. They have been callously cast aside by global capitalism as superfluous. This has engendered an atavistic rage against the technocratic world that condemns them. This rage is expressed in many forms — Nativism, neofascism, jihadism, the Christian right, alt‐right militias, and the anarchic violence of antifa. The resentment spring from the same deep wells of despair. This despair exacerbates racism, bigotry, and xenophobia. It poisons civil discourse. It celebrates hypermasculinity, violence, and chauvinism. It promises the return to a mythical past.
Corporate elites, rather than accept their responsibility for the global anarchy, define the clash as one between Western civilization and racist thugs and medieval barbarians. They see in the extreme nationalists, anarchists, religious fundamentalists, and jihadists a baffling irrationality that can be quelled only with force. They have yet to grasp that the disenfranchised do not hate them for their values. They hate them because of their duplicity, greed, use of indiscriminate industrial violence, and hypocrisy.
2021-01-17
Being two-faced has its advantages - if you're an Empire.
https://www.greanvillepost.com/2021/01/16/the-two-faces-of-the-us-empire/
If you live in wealthy western nations, or in the US itself, you are mostly presented with the first face. The artificial culture pipeline runs from Hollywood to the rest of the world and keeps everyone seeing American life as fun, enjoyable and packed full of hilarious repartee, interspersed with the sexual attention of beautiful women and kicking bad guys into molten lava. Freedom and Democracy™️. Capitalism is totally working. You can trust these guys to run the world. News at eleven.
If you live in the Middle East, Asia, or in the Global South, you are far more likely to encounter the second face. The blood-spattered face. The face of murder. The face of tyranny. The face whose actions amount to nothing other than an endless war on disobedience, where any government which tries to insist on its own national, military, resource, commercial or financial sovereignty is smashed into the dirt by any means necessary until it either collapses or complies.
Thank you Caitlin.
2021-01-14
Quote of the day - 01-14-2021.
Dorothee Benz (https://fair.org/home/being-neutral-in-the-face-of-a-fascist-threat-is-not-an-acceptable-journalistic-value/)
Structurally, foundationally, ideologically, the function of the police has always been to defend the system as it exists, and the system is a white supremacist system. The ruling power started 500 years ago with settler colonizers; it went on to include genocide, slavery, strikebreaking in the more modern capitalist era. It has never included defending democracy. That is a central understanding of how the police work. They weren’t overwhelmed. They knew; they just didn’t think it was a problem.
2021-01-12
While it's great to see someone with accountability being charged ...
... I remain skeptical on whether he'll get convicted, much less end up in jail.
https://hiphopwired.com/939428/rick-snyder-flint-probe-charges/
Justice has been a long act of patience for residents of Flint after the water crisis scandal the rocked the proud Michigan city. Earlier on Tuesday (Jan. 11), it has been reported widely that former Gov. Rick Snyder and other connected individuals will face charges this week after a 2019 probe revealed misdoings on the administration’s part.
2021-01-11
2021-01-10
2021-01-09
A lesson in character assassination.
Hint: it helps the establishment further the transition from crapitalism to fascism.
Varoufakis’ point is that when Assange was accused of being a rapist, as he was before the U.S. made clear the real case against him – by trying to extradite him from the U.K. for exposing its war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan – he could not defend himself without alienating a significant constituency of his natural supporters, those on the left who identify as feminists. Which is exactly what happened.
Similarly, as Varoufakis notes from earlier conversations he had with Assange, the WikiLeaks founder was in no position to properly defend himself against accusations that he colluded with Russia and Donald Trump to help Trump win the 2016 U.S. presidential election against Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.
At the time, Assange’s supporters were able to point out that the leaked emails were true and that they were in the public interest because they showed deep corruption in the Democratic Party establishment. But those arguments were drowned out by a narrative confected by the U.S. media and security establishments that WikiLeaks’ publication of the emails was political interference because the emails had supposedly been hacked by Russia to sway the election result.
2021-01-05
All those cheering the Assange UK extradition ruling should not celebrate too soon.
I certainly don't, after reading this from Chris Hedges (https://consortiumnews.com/2021/01/04/chris-hedges-the-empire-is-not-done-with-julian-assange/).
2021-01-01
Well so much for that piano arriving before the end of 2020.
Yesterday afternoon I got message that the shipper had it in a warehouse about 30 minutes from here; with the delivery date being yesterday.
20 minutes later, the date got changed to Saturday. Don't you just love the lack of accountability in big corporations?
Good thing I wasn't relying on getting that piano yesterday for a gig.