Posted by Alexander Jerri
The Futurologist's Problem
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
I got together with my friend Professor Wadwa the other night for drinks. Let me explain, first of all, that this is not Professor Vivek Wadhwa, the noted academic, entrepreneur, and advocate for decency in immigration law. This is Professor Manish Wadwa, the noted futurologist, wannabe thought leader and tax consultant.
He has money, and when he's in town he treats me to drinks. He earned his money the old-fashioned way: slipping on the ice in front of Neiman-Marcus. But he's very generous because, although he considers himself a rugged individualist and a self-made man, he freely admits luck has had a lot to do with his current financial well-being.
After an evening's conversation with the professor, I'm usually left inspired and confused. Let me see if I can organize my thoughts enough to describe what we discussed.
I believe Wadwa had an idea, which can be summed up thus: what if there were a computer job exchange to divide up the jobs no one wanted to do, so everyone could do them for a little bit a week instead of some unlucky slobs having to do them all day every day for their entire lives?
Wadwa has a keen mind, but most of his brilliant ideas leave a lot of unanswered questions. "What," I asked him, "would be the incentive for the rich to do their part? They could just pay the poor people to do their share of the lousy jobs, and we'd be back where we started.
"What if it was more than a lousy-job exchange?" I went on. "What if it was a global database of everything everyone needed to have someone else do, or to have help doing? And these jobs, tasks, help on a project, they'd be divorced from money."
"Why would someone do something for no money?" Wadwa asked.
"I don't know, why did people do things before there was money? Mutual community welfare and gratitude, prestige, affection."
"But those things are impossible to measure," Wadwa countered, "that's why money's superior. Anyway, a lot of people would show their gratitude and affection with gifts, which the wealthy have more power to give."
"All right, how about this," I probed. "What if robots did everything? Our system is already computerized, we just network all the things, like an internet of things, the whole thing, and robots do everything."
"What about brain surgery?"
"A robot can do brain surgery! It's not – it's just brain surgery."
"What about... read more
Posted by Alexander Jerri
On This Day in Rotten History...
In 1732 – (285 years ago) – the armory at a castle in Campo Maior, Portugal — which contained some five thousand pieces of ammunition, and almost a hundred tons of gunpowder — was struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. The explosion was spectacular, not only destroying the armory but starting a fire that caused major damage to the castle and its fortress, injuring most of its inhabitants.
In 1893 – (124 years ago) – one of the last large tracts of unassigned public land in the American West was opened for settlement in a land run at the so-called Cherokee Outlet in what is now the state of Oklahoma. The Cherokee nation had been pressured to sell the federal government six million acres of grazing land. On the morning of the land run, more than a hundred thousand people with horses and wagons prepared to race into the area to plant claim flags on some forty thousand surveyed and plotted homesteads. Some of the would-be settlers had been camping in the area for months — and though US Army troops tried to keep order, they failed to prevent a number of violators, later known as “Sooners,” from sneaking in before the noontime starting gun to grab the best plots of free land for themselves. In the manic chaos of the run, most participants failed to claim a plot. And of those who did, many would soon be disappointed to find that the dry, dusty land was no good for growing crops.
In 1977 – (40 years ago) — Marc Bolan, star of the British pop-rock band T. Rex, emerged at four in the morning from a long dinner with friends at a restaurant in London’s Berkeley Square. He was accompanied by his girlfriend, the American singer Gloria Jones. It had been a long day and evening, and Bolan had been drinking through most of it. He gave Jones the keys to his Mini GT, and they began the drive home. Neither Bolan nor Jones wore a seat belt. Less than a mile from Bolan’s house, Jones lost control of the car — which slid off the road, crashed into a steel-reinforced fence, and came to rest at the base of a sycamore tree. Both occupants were thrown from the car. Jones survived the accident, but Bolan’s skull was ripped open by a protruding bolt on a fencepost, and he died instantly — two weeks before what would have been his thirtieth birthday.
Rotten History is... read more
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Listen live from 9AM - 1:00PM Central on WNUR 89.3FM / stream at www.thisishell.com / subscribe to the podcast
9:15 - Security analyst Azeem Ibrahim explores Myanmar's campaign of genocide against the Rohingya.
Azeem is author of The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide from Oxford University Press.
10:00 - Journalist Sharon Lerner examines the legacy of environmental racism the EPA ignores.
Sharon wrote the articles A Legacy of Environmental Racism and EPA Welcomed Industry Feedback Before Reversing Pesticide Ban, Ignoring Health Concerns for The Intercept.
10:35 - Journalist Martha Pskowski explains how Coca-Cola is sucking Chiapas dry.
Martha wrote the article Coca-Cola Sucks Wells Dry in Chiapas, Forcing Residents to Buy Water for Truthout.
11:05 - Author Sasha Abramsky explains how irrational fear rules, and guides, life in America.
Sasha is author of the book Jumping at Shadows: The Triumph of Fear and the End of the American Dream from PublicAffairs.
12:05 - Sociologist Christian Parenti watches capitalism's climate-driven crisis wash away our cities.
Christian wrote the article If We Fail for Jacobin.
12:45 - In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen has drinks with a wannabe thought leader and tax consultant.
Jeff's Tinder algorithm might need some retooling.
Posted by Alexander Jerri
The Cult That Wouldn't Die... Of Salmonella
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
Good morning, fellow-travelers. Hillary Clinton wrote another book, this one rehashing her losing battle to become the first female President of the United States, blaming everyone but herself, which is what politicians are supposed to do. I don't fault her for this. Unlike some of you, I don't think she is a special war criminal. She is certainly no more a war criminal than Condoleezza Rice or Madeline Albright, and all three of them stand like wispy seedlings beside the mighty sequoia of US war criminals, Henry Kissinger. Have they named a sequoia after Kissinger? It's long overdue.
But neither is she such a shining light of uncompromising progressive leadership that preferring an ancient left-leaning Jew indicates a psychosexually genocidal motive.
There were certainly some Bernie supporters whom it was reasonable to suspect of hating Hillary out of misogynist resentment. Likewise, though the majority of Hillary supporters are not unself-aware auto-inductees into a reactionary, self-pitying cult of personality, some are, too many, it's embarrassing, it's grotesque, and it's disappointing to see Hillary in her new book feeding them back the very lines of thought their psychoses generated. But, again, she is a politician, and it is fair play.
Did Bernie's primary candidacy hurt Hillary? Of course. An election is a contest. A popularity contest. If the person opposing you in a popularity contest gets popular, that is by definition an injury to you. Furthermore, Bernie remained popular, but, let's be fair: trying to be popular is part of his job.
To those with an actual leftist critique of capitalism, Bernie's campaign highlighted Hillary's shortcomings in that regard. It is good that we are now, thanks to Bernie, suspicious of progressives who are unwilling to speak forcefully against the miscreants milking our communities of resources. It's unfortunate that Hillary lagged behind the rest of us in understanding that kissing corporate ass could be considered a drawback to a large portion of the liberal coalition. Now that we all understand it, though, maybe next time we can field a really good candidate who is prepared not only to go at least partway to the mat for people of color, women, and the gender non-binary, but one who also doesn't suck corporate ass like it's a cream-filled doughnut.
Yes, Obama got... read more
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Listen live from 10AM - 12PM Central on Lumpen Radio 105.5FM Chicago / stream at www.thisishell.com / subscribe to the podcast
10:15 - Historian Kim Phillips-Fein traces today's austerity politics to New York's 1970s fiscal crisis.
Kim is author of Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics from Picador.
11:00 - Sociologist Christian Parenti watches capitalism's climate-driven crisis wash away our cities.
Christian wrote the article If We Fail for Jacobin.
11:45 - In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen says 'It's not global warming, it's Hillary.'
They just blame her for everything, these guys.
Posted by Alexander Jerri
The Drowned World
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink. Are you ready to live under the sea or die trying?
Did you see any of those pictures of the Interstate 10 Ocean in Texas? Pardon me, the sea. Did you see the sea? There didn't used to be a sea there. I drove that highway all the way from Baton Rouge through Houston and Austin, back in aught 1, arrived in Los Angeles the night before 9-11, and didn't see a single fish. Not even a grouper. I saw a plane fly into a building, through a nightmarishly clear sky, the next morning on TV. But no grouper.
So now the ocean's here. I think it's here to stay. I think the whole southern USA is going back underwater, like nature intended, before the Freeze Miser locked up all the water at the poles. Days were wetter then.
We can do this, America. We can get used to anything. You'll get used to the water. It's cold when you first get in, but then you get used to it. We got used to distrusting the Spectacle, after Nixon had to resign when it came out that he'd ordered Halderman and Erlichman to hypnotize Oswald to kill JFK. We got used to having a regulatory system run by the industries they're supposed to regulate. We got used to not having enough money for food, shelter, medical care, and education. We got used to the owners of massive, mind-blowing, stratospheric wealth telling us there just wasn't enough to pay us a decent wage or support the common weal. We got used to cops gunning down black people or murdering them in jail for any reason or no reason.
We did these things, we made these changes within our very selves, because it was our patriotic duty. We may not have a communal sense of distributing resources, but we do have a collective love of our country. And I don't think learning to breathe underwater is too much for America's Jesus to ask of us. On Venus, they're so patriotic they breathe ammonia, and on Mars they breathe almost nothing at all. We're lucky to be getting oxygen. Is it really too much trouble to extract dissolved oxygen from seawater? Come on, grow some gills, binch. If a goddam fish can do it, so can you.
We've gone soft, having all this readily available oxygen floating in the air, a veritable luxury dessert cart of oxygen, wheeled right to our table. We've become like delicate woodland sprites, prancing and sparkling and tinkling about the forest floor, sipping nectar from daffodils. We've become lazy lotus-eaters,... read more
