America descending into fascism

I hate videos, I find text much easier to absorb.  But, here it is.

Preparing for a fascist America

by some Yalies at IWM Vienna

The ongoing coup against American democracy raises serious concerns for democracy worldwide. In this talk, Stanley argues that the history of the United States, as well as its present situation, justifies these concerns. More specifically, Stanley argues that the anti-democratic form that is emerging in the United States is a kind of racial fascism. Europe should prepare for the possibility of a fascist United States. Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. The author of Know How, Language in Context, Knowledge and Practical Interests and How Propaganda Works also writes for publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Review, The Guardian and Project Syndicate. He is currently working with David Beaver on the forthcoming book Politics of Language: An Essay in Non-Ideal Theory.

COVID myths

From an immunologist

The myths: “Myth #1: It’s just a cold now so let’s get it over with”; “Myth #2: Being fully immunised stops infection”; “Myth #3: Variant-specific vaccines are the answer.” Lots and lots of charts.

researchers… found that for every health outcome measured, the Hazard Ratio — a measure of how often something happens in one group compared to another — increased with each COVID-19 infection.

Atmospheric water generation

50 ish years ago in Boy Scouts I learned to make a “solar still” for survival and have always been interested in getting potable water from water vapor 

Living in a moderate humidity climate (central coast California) with recurring drought conditions it seems like such a thing might help with resilience.

Technologically, not much is needed but there is an energy burden.  Solar can work.  Overall, infrastructure cost plus operating costs make this very expensive water.  But comparable  to a delivery service…

Fog catchers are possible 

fairly advanced commercialization   is available 

You can also buy a plug’n’play 

H2O machine

I will probably make it happen in our next house.

I’ll have 5-8 kW solar plus one or two Powerwalls plus maybe the Source product, and a tiny veggie and herb garden.

Lay in a deep pantry and we have a chance to ride out pandemics…

On government

From 

Ian Welsh

Government is the people who make choices about law and policy, plus those who implement the policies and enforce the laws.

The strength of a government can be measured by how much they can implement those policies and enforce those laws, and by how many non-approved actors are running shadow governments. It is normal for apparently non-governmental organization to implement the will of government.

In our society large firms actually enforce or fail to enforce most tax law, private companies build most buildings and weapons the government funds, and so on. These organizations are effectively arms of government.

Excerpt from his series on Political concepts

how I understand and use various political concepts, first because anyone who wants to know the standard usage can find it on the Web or in sociological and political science textbooks; and second because people who read me (and who gave to the fundraiser) will mostly find my understanding more useful and interesting. While these concepts cover only a small piece of my world-view, it’s an important one, and it’s a chunk of the model I use to understand and then explain the world when I write.

US COVID response

Explained to an Asian audience

the United States is one of the worst countries in the world at controlling COVID-19, which has not only claimed more than one million American lives but has also caused and continues to cause enormous social and economic devastation in the country. This article examines the impact of U.S. anti-COVID policy and what the Western media has to say about it. Three main conclusions can be drawn

the actual damage of COVID-19 to U.S. society has been greatly underestimated. Historically, pandemics have allowed pre-existing structural fractures in capitalist society to be exposed and magnified. The coronavirus has killed over a million people and infection rates remain high; the long-term post-COVID symptoms continue to damage people’s health, with minorities and the poor suffering disproportionately. The functioning of U.S. society has been severely disrupted, with working-class families bearing the heaviest costs.

China’s socialist benevolent policy, scientific management, and ability to learn from this pandemic, as well as the discipline and sacrifice of its people, have shown incredible results in protecting people’s lives and preparing for the future. 

the pandemic has forced the U.S. elite to wage their ideological war in an increasingly intense and virulent manner. 

Ferrer and the Modern School

His manifesto

Quite the alternative to our current system churning out compliant drones

PSA on airborne COVID , 3M respirator

From the John Snow project

On YouTube

John Snow figured out the source of Londons cholera outbreak  in 1854 which he curtailed by removing the handle of a water pump.

3M developed a respirator in 2008 which, if adopted and stockpiled, might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Limits to growth

50 years!

Revisited

The main problem underlying conventional economics is its reliance on a conceptualization of the economy that deliberately ignores the physical context of which it is necessarily part, including the most elementary laws of physics. This means combating the assumption that resources and energy are unlimited, without even considering the fallout of the activity or the planet’s limited carrying capacity. In view of the hegemonic nature of economic thought and its ability to mold the framework of social thought, this is crucially important, because it makes finding effective solutions to the eco-social crisis virtually impossible.

…

Classical economists, the founders of political economy as a discipline, have nevertheless undoubtedly been aware of what we might call the social metabolism: the relationship between nature and the economy.5 Their predecessor, the physiocratic school, whose principal exponent was François Quesnay, had already interpreted the economic question in the eighteenth century on the basis of agrarian flows and concluded that any surplus is possible thanks to the gifts given to us by nature. David Ricardo, in turn, was aware of differing soil fertility and put together a theory of decreasing land yields that led him to think that capitalism could not grow indefinitely. Reverend Thomas Malthus introduced his now famous thesis on population growth as a constraint on economic growth. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, too, considered that capitalism would come up against limits to its own development due to the downward trend of the rate of return. Marx was extremely interested in the scientific advances of his time and accorded considerable importance to the concept of social metabolism, which he is widely credited with having introduced into social science.6

In the twentieth century, in striving to make the discipline more scientific, economic thinking moved further away from the physical and even social conditions under which any economy must necessarily operate. Neoclassical thought, as reformulated by Léon Walras, Alfred Marshall, and William Stanley Jevons, among others, permeated economic science as a whole and led to a break with the previous political economy, giving rise to notions of production and wealth completely disconnected from a natural base. Meanwhile, the search for theoretical explanations of economic growth and its possible failures continued with the economists Roy F. Harrod and Evsey Domar, who developed a model that concluded that economic growth was fundamentally unstable and that meeting the conditions for stability was extremely complicated.7 This Keynesian-inspired model provoked a response from neoclassical economists such as Robert Solow and Trevor Swan, who laid the foundations for the paradigm of economic growth and whose models are still being studied as a priority in every economics department around the world. These are the models that, in the end, define to a large extent economists’ scope of thought.

Privatization of everything

A book that I should read

The Privatization of Everything, by the founder of In the Public Interest, an organization dedicated to shared prosperity and the common good, chronicles the efforts to turn our public goods into private profit centers. Ever since Ronald Reagan labeled government a dangerous threat, privatization has touched every aspect of our lives, from water and trash collection to the justice system and the military.