That's simple.
It's because the 1% installs leaders that are demented. It's called the illusion of democracy (aka capitalism):
2022-04-29
Well it certainly wasn't the best of seasons ...
But I wrong when I predicted the Habs wouldn't even crack 20 wins.
They got 22. And the last one in style - 10-2 against the Panthers.
Carey Price gets the win.
Cole Caufield gets a hat-trick.
A strange feeling.
A couple of years ago, a person joined the company I worked with. Turned out they were from the same town as me, went to the same school as me, played some of the sports I played, even played music as I did. But, this person was joining a few levels higher up than I was, and not only managed people, but teams of people.
One would think I would've made some effort to get to know this person a little given our commonality, but no.
In fact, I made not only made no effort to try and get to know this person at all (this person didn't know me, or interact with where I worked, so I'm not surprised they never made any similar effort), but I went out of my way to avoid any meetings where I even had to listen to them talk. I think this was for fear that if they did know anything about me, they'd reach out and start chatting.
Recently I heard they'd been let go, under less than stellar circumstances. While a part of me snickered inside on some level, doing so forced me to look back on my own ways I didn't interact with this person.
What was it about me not reaching out - was I so afraid that we'd be compared, and that my status would be perceived as less or lower by others around me? I mean after all, we've been working remotely for the last 2+ years; what difference would it have made? As well, for me working in IT has always been a job, so what I do I really care if I'm talking to someone with an apparent similar background?
Maybe it's that I didn't like or want to be compared against?
Or perhaps I felt my own level and status didn't measure up to part?
And what about how I felt after they'd been let go - did I really have any right to feel superior? Certainly I didn't do what they did, but on the other hand I had comparatively less responsibility - so why should I feel better about myself? I'm still doing the same work for the same group, with the same amount of respect I had back then vs. now, so who am I to feel smug?
Strange, isn't it?
2022-04-27
Platitude of the day - 04-27-2022.
Data is just like energy in that you need a lot of it.
You also need to be able to distinguish between the good and useful, from all else.
2022-04-26
2022-04-25
You know how I know that capitalism isn't a democracy by any stretch?
That billionaires and corporations can continue their endless theft of money upward - even killing to keep it going.
While someone who actually revealed this, is actually about to be killed themselves namely Julian Assange.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/tragedy-julian-assange/5778390
2022-04-23
2022-04-22
Quote of the day - 04-22-2022
Dorothee Benz via FAIR
The Washington Post—with its pretension to be the defender of democracy (“democracy dies in darkness”)—was fine with implying that Trump’s policies were beyond the pale, but is less inclined to paint the same policies the same way under the return-to-normal administration of Biden. What they disliked about Trump was not really his policies, but the fact that he said the quiet part out loud—in the case of immigration, the overt racism, xenophobia and undisguised cruelty—and his unpredictability. With Biden, there is a return to a predictable bipartisan range of politics and policy.
And equally predictably, the Post has returned to its habit of legitimizing and stabilizing the US presidency, and framing immigration policy as part of a chess match between Democrats and Republicans.
Underlying the reflex to defend the administration is an unexamined bias in favor of our racist immigration and border policies, policies that have overall been the same before, during and after the Trump administration.
2022-04-20
Earth Day: U.S. Warming Rankings
KEY CONCEPTS
- The U.S. has warmed by 2.6°F since the first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970.
- 49 states and 99% of 246 U.S. cities analyzed by Climate Central have warmed since 1970.
- The fastest-warming city was Reno, Nev. and the fastest-warming state was Alaska.
- Continued warming can harm people and the planet, but there are many ways to cut heat-trapping emissions from energy, transportation, agriculture, and more.
https://medialibrary.climatecentral.org/resources/earth-day-warming-rankings
2022-04-18
The path to facism is often rooted in militarism, bloodlust, money, xenophobia ...
... and last but not least:censorship. As Chris Hedges warns.
https://scheerpost.com/2022/04/18/hedges-american-commissars/
Censorship will not halt America’s march towards Christian fascism. Weimar Germany attempted to thwart Nazi fascism by enforcing rigorous hate-speech laws. In the 1920s, it banned the Nazi party. Nazi leaders, including Joseph Goebbels, were prosecuted for hate speech. Julius Streicher, who ran the virulently anti-Semetic tabloid The Stormer (Der Stürmer), was fired from his teaching post, repeatedly fined and had his newspapers confiscated. He was taken to court numerous times for libel and served a series of jail sentences.
But like those serving sentences for the assault on the Capitol on January 6, or like Trump, the persecution of Nazi leaders only enhanced their stature the longer the German ruling class failed to address the economic and social misery.
There are many similarities to the 1930s, including the power of predatory international banks to consolidate wealth into the hands of a few oligarchs and impose punishing austerity measures on the global working class.
“More than anything else, the Nazis were a nationalist protest movement against globalization,” notes Benjamin Carter Hett in “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and The Downfall of the Weimar Republic.”
Shutting down critics in a decayed and corrupt society is equivalent to turning off the oxygen on a seriously ill patient. It hastens mortality rather than delaying or preventing it. The convergence of a looming economic crisis, fear by a bankrupt ruling class that they will soon be banished from power, the growing ecological catastrophe and the inability to thwart self-destructive military adventurism against Russia and China, have set the stage for an American implosion.
Those of us who see it coming, and who desperately seek to prevent it, have become the enemy.
2022-04-15
You know what you get when you let bullies make the rules?
You get ... guess?
... lots of bullying, yes!
Oh,and lots of death too.
Like here -> https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/israeli-violent-tactics-west-bank-spiral-out-control/
The reality is that whilst the Israeli army is certainly displaying signs of great fear, it is also following rules of engagement which allow for them to shoot Palestinians dead in any circumstance they choose. According to the revised rules of engagement, as of December last year, the Israeli military is permitted to not only shoot to kill Palestinians when they pose a threat to Israelis, but also any Palestinian believed by the military to have committed an act which posed a threat in the past. The Israeli rules of engagement ordinarily stipulate that if you believe you see any threat to your life as a soldier, you can essentially shoot to kill a Palestinian. If that wasn’t bad enough, according to the updated “open-fire” policy, even a Palestinian who previously posed a threat is now fair game if they are running away with their back turned. Add these rules of engagement with the fact that Israeli forces are facing a growing uprising inside the West Bank, along with the fact that many Israeli soldiers harbor ultra-Nationalist and racist views against Palestinians, it is a recipe for disaster.
Amazing. Someone should do a study on a correlation between bullying and cowardice.
The corporate blame game.
Tell me something I don't know:
... if a manager has decided an employee is a poor performer, objective evidence that an error is not the employee's fault doesn't matter.
I have a theory about this.
Too often, managers believe someone is a poor performer simply because they don't like that person.
The personal bias is built-in. It won't be easily shifted. How many times does the word "like" get substituted for words like "rate," "respect" or even "appreciate"?
2022-04-14
2022-04-12
Well I've gone ahead with something new.
Oh no - nothing Earth-shattering.
I started writing a story. It's funny (to me) how I spent countless/endless hours thinking about it all the time, and how that time could've been spent writing a lot of things down.
But no matter.
One thing I have to pay attention to more now, is ensuring that when insights or good ideas come to mind - is to write those down as they happen.
When I let idea pass through - it's gone forever.
2022-04-09
Two more local jag-off drivers with no regard for thw law.
BTR6198
(WA) - 04-09-2022 - Gray hatchback driven by an entitled young white
female. Did her best to look away as she drove right through the walkway
where I had the right of way.
BCG6225
(WA) - 04-09-2022 - Black sedan driven by a white male. Almost ran me
over on the same walkway (I was coming back from my appointment). Got a picture of this one though.
2022-04-07
2022-04-06
One oligarchy following in the footsteps of another.
Russia has agreed to sell oil to India in India’s own sovereign currency, the rupee; to China in yuan; and to Turkey in lira. These national currencies can then be spent on the goods and services sold by those countries. Arguably, every country should be able to trade in global markets in its own sovereign currency; that is what a fiat currency is – a medium of exchange backed by the agreement of the people to accept it at value for their goods and services, backed by the “full faith and credit” of the nation.
But that sort of global barter system would break down just as local barter systems do, if one party to the trade did not want the goods or services of the other party. In that case, some intermediate reserve currency would be necessary to serve as a medium of exchange.
Glazyev and his counterparts are working on that. In a translated interview posted on The Saker, Glazyev stated:
We are currently working on a draft international agreement on the introduction of a new world settlement currency, pegged to the national currencies of the participating countries and to exchange-traded goods that determine real values. We won’t need American and European banks. A new payment system based on modern digital technologies with a blockchain is developing in the world, where banks are losing their importance.
Russia and China have both developed alternatives to the SWIFT messaging system from which certain Russian banks have been blocked. London-based commentator Alexander Mercouris makes the interesting observation that going outside SWIFT means Western banks cannot track Russian and Chinese trades.
2022-04-05
Leave it to Glenn Greenwald to call this out.
If I do have one critique, I wish Glenn would use the apt word to describe what establishment media do - misandry.
I mean, what else can one describe this as?
And Lorenz has left behind a long list of victims — from teenagers whose old tweets and family history she dug up and published to a businesswoman whose life she destroyed to journalists and others about whom she maliciously lied. She was one of the media leaders mocking and shaming a college student for having published an op-ed in The New York Times on how intolerance for dissent from liberal pieties on college campuses has made her afraid to speak out. She’s the vintage mean girl. So malignant and deceitful and destructive are Lorenz’s shoddy journalistic methods that it took more than an hour for this investigative reporter to document in this great YouTube video all the lies and destruction Lorenz has left in her wake.
Yet look at what NBC just did. While flamboyantly displaying his newly minted credential as a Great Male Ally, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd ended the segment with this sermon: “folks who live online know exactly what they’re doing when they target a journalist.” Do Todd and his fellow weeping actors not realize that they just spent five minutes doing exactly that: targeting journalists by blaming us for the trauma and suicidal ideation of the weeping Washington Post columnist? Why is it permissible for employees of NBC and The Washington Post and the rest to constantly use their platform to malign and demonize journalists, but we cannot criticize them without being accused of unleashing misogynistic violence?
And what about all of Lorenz’s victims? Why do their trauma and the wreckage of their lives from her reports not matter? The answer is obvious. What elites have succeeded in training people to believe is that, somehow, what matters most is the emotional comfort of the society’s most powerful and influential political and media figures. They have the unfettered right to demean and denounce and vilify whomever they want, no matter how powerless, but you cannot speak up or object when they do just that.
Drone driving - the next hazzard on the roads?
Think I'm kidding?
Back on terra firma, FedEx has already partnered with the startup Aurora, which specializes in autonomous driving systems, to test freight transport via fully automated trucks, again for trips from depot to depot.
Why do I think this is going to be very dangerous?
Oh I know - > Large corporations using public transportation to test out their new toys, while said public are trapped with dealing with the results.
Hearty congratulations to Exxon Mobil on a grand quarter.
Really great to see fossil fuel companies simultaneously exploit war efforts in Ukraine AND accelerated the demise of the planet via unabated Greenhouse Gas Emissions!
2022-04-04
The future - is now or never.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-3/
What we do - or don't do - will be forever.
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