Archive for the ‘The shit monsoon’ Category

When will it be Labor Day?

September 5, 2022

The late, great Gahan Wilson.

We never hear of Capital Day, not because Capital has no day, but because every day is Capital Day. The struggle in which we are now engaged will end only when every day is Labor Day.Eugene V. Debs, Labor Day 1903

It’s still Capital Day. For now, anyway.

At The Guardian, Douglas Rushkoff recounts his chat with a secretive group of super-wealthy dudes “preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether.”

In short, they’ve grown tired of our sniveling about their shitting in our shared sandbox and wonder whether they might be able to dispense with us altogether.

Writes Rushkoff, a self-described humanist and Marxist media theorist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives:

Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.

One of the capitalists’ main concerns centered on how to control their security people after The Event — “their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.”

Yep, that could be risky. A SEAL might grow weary of barking for fish from the plump, well-manicured pinkies of a plutocrat. How to get away from it all when you need to take a few of “them” with you?

What happens when Labor Day finally comes around for real?

R.I.P., Barbara Ehrenreich

September 2, 2022

She took what they were giving ’cause she was working for a living.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the journalist, activist, and author who never lost touch with her working-class roots, has clocked out. She was 81.

Her New York Times obit draws from the introduction to “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” in which she recounts wondering with a magazine editor how the unskilled survive on the wages paid them and then blurting out something that she “had many opportunities to regret: ‘Someone ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism — you know, go out there and try it for themselves.'”

Which is exactly what Ehrenreich did, of course, working and living as a waitress, hotel maid, nursing-home aide, and Walmart “associate,” among other things. Then she came back and told us all about it.

And though she would be writing it up, she wasn’t phoning it in:

People knew me as a waitress, a cleaning person, a nursing home aide, or a retail clerk not because I acted like one but because that’s what I was, at least for the time I was with them. In every job, in every place I lived, the work absorbed all my energy and much of my intellect. I wasn’t kidding around. Even though I suspected from the start that the mathematics of wages and rents were working against me, I made a mighty effort to succeed.

She was not, and is not, alone. And in her Evaluation at the end of the book, Ehrenreich proposed that those of us who live in comfort while others barely scrape by should feel not just guilt, but shame.

When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.

What a gift was Ehrenreich’s life. Peace unto her, her family, friends, and readers.

More, late*

December 21, 2020

A little light and a lot more tunnel.

“Pandemic Deal by Congress Provides Economic Relief, for Now,” reports The New York Times.

But it’s too little, too late, and perhaps the last of Uncle Sammy’s pennies in the ol’ tin cup for a while, adds The Old Grey Hoor, in an analysis by Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley.

The injection of money comes months too late for tens of thousands of failed businesses, however, and it may not be enough to sustain unemployed workers until the labor market rebounds. Moreover, it could be the last help from Washington the economy gets anytime soon.

Call me cynical, but I think we need some brighter bulbs on this job.

*Apologies to Chris in the Morning.

Meanwhile, back in Iowa. …

February 7, 2020

The DNC strives to make chicken salad from … well … you know.

Reg: I now propose that all seven of these ex-brothers be now entered in the minutes as probationary martyrs to the cause.

Loretta: I second that, Reg.

Reg: Thank you, Loretta. On the nod. Siblings! Let us not be downhearted! One total catastrophe like this is just the beginning!

• Editor’s note: My sense of humor briefly deserted me yesterday. But I think I should get off with crucifixion (first offense).

Blockhead

January 8, 2019

Thick as a brick.

Kinda busy right now

August 9, 2017

The Acme® DIY Bomb Shelter.

Oh

November 9, 2016

shit-11092016

Sturm und Drang

August 23, 2016
The weatherman expects welcome moisture through the weekend before the inevitable warming and drying trend resumes.

The weatherman expects welcome moisture through the weekend before the inevitable warming and drying trend resumes.

The so-called monsoons have been washing away the memory of a too-hot July as August heads for the barn.

Mornings are nice and cool — just 61 at the moment — and the afternoon highs have been topping out in the upper 70s, with the rains rolling in around dinnertime. This is hard to beat, I don’t mind telling you.

Also hard to beat is Ronald McDonald McTrump, mostly because he has that pesky Secret Service detail frisking everyone for blackjacks, ax handles and baseball bats. Agent Orange just keeps bouncing around the country from rally to rally, not so much campaigning as entertaining, which makes me wonder whether he’s really after the presidency. Could he instead be pursuing some sort of honky media empire based on the WWF/WWE model of raising a fine crop of money in a carefully tended bed of fresh bullshit?

Think about it. As Stephen K. Miller noted over at National Review back in April, “Pro wrestling’s biggest stage was where Donald Trump the political populist was born.”

In pro wrestling you have good guys, bad guys and crooked referees. Nicknames abound (Little Marco, Macho Man, Lyin’ Ted, Jake the Snake). Everyone knows the game is rigged, but who cares? It’s showtime, baby!

God knows there’s not much to watch down at Konrad’s Kountry Klavern these days. They could use a little uplifting Christian entertainment. The teevee’s full to bustin’ with mud people, Jews, homos, trannies and smarties (they’re the worstest). Where are Joe Friday and Bill Gannon, Ozzie and Harriet, Ed Sullivan and Topo Gigio? (OK, so that was just a little gay.)

You’ll know I was right if at the first debate El Trumpo body-slams the Hilldebeast, Megyn Kelly smacks Gwen Ifill with a folding chair, and money rains down from the ceiling. Katie bar the door!

Two dogs, same bone

February 24, 2015
It's a gray morning in Duke City, and the wizards predict a chance of snow.

It’s a gray morning in Duke City, and the wizards predict a chance of snow.

Once again we are reminded that elections have consequences.

Scott Walker, by some accounts the foremost of the 2,375,296 Republicans running for that party’s 2016 presidential nomination, is going after working folks again with “right to work” legislation. He professed no interest in reviving this anti-union measure while campaigning to keep his present job, but that was so 15 minutes ago. A tricornered hat full of Tea Bagger gold is all he cares about now.

Elsewhere, Bill O’Reilly is flailing around like a big dumb mutt in the dogcatcher’s truck, trying to convince the suckers that he was a double Ernie Pyle with a side of Ed Murrow back in the day, doing it hand-to-hand with the bad guys in the Falklands when he was actually boffing a sheep in his suite at the Hilton Buenos Aires.

He’ll be successful, of course, for the same reason that Walker will get his latest union-busting tool. Larry’s wife can tell you why.

The Shit Monsoon: Repairs revisited

August 14, 2012

At left, fresh vinyl in the laundry room; at right, new tile in the crapper (though still no crapper).

Yesterday was a perfect day for a bike ride. The temperatures peaked somewhere in the upper 70s, I had a tailwind for most of the uphill bits, and it even rained a bit during the homebound stretch. I didn’t have a rain jacket, but I didn’t care, because it felt great. Plus the bike had fenders.

Good thing I made time for cycling, too. Because today, after nearly three months of not much happening as regards restoration of the basement following The Shit Monsoon of Memorial Day Weekend, not one but two crews showed up to lay tile and vinyl. Tomorrow comes the carpet, and later this week, the toilet and vanity. Good times.

The downside — and there always is one — is that it is another beautiful day for cycling, yet here I sit, enjoying a symphony of jackhammers and saws, because Herself has pissed off to Denver for a meeting and there is no one else to mind the store. The cats are notoriously unreliable in such matters, and Mister Boo would be down there happily eating adhesive and grout because he thinks everything is food. Swear to God. He’d scarf down a bowl of cat piss and sawdust as though it were steak tartare.

Speaking of folks who will swallow anything, David Stockman isn’t one of them — not when it comes to Paul Ryan and his alleged budget “plan.” Ronnie Raygun’s OMB chief ripped Ryan a new one in The New York Times, and Ed Kilgore of Political Animal adds his personal touch to the bits and pieces he quotes.

Over at The Nation, meanwhile. John Nichols takes the opportunity to contrast Ryan’s Randite vision with Wisconsin’s progressive tradition.

And at The Maddow Blog, Steve Benen calls out Ryan for hypocrisy, noting that while he was raising against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Ryan was right there with his hand out like everyone else.