Stuff to ponder as Your World ™ continues to turn to Shit

Caveat: Under ordinary circumstances I would refrain from promoting an essay from a website I have come to so despise--despite its getting numerous things in socio-political analysis more or less right. Rather, when something worthwhile appears there, my habit is to try and cite its author's original publication-site, usually some other web-page.

In the following case, however, that's not possible, for the rather crappy website where I found the essay apparently is the article's original site of publication--by invitation.

So, as this is so important an essay, I'm choosing to break with my custom and cite the essay—in this case, it's a reporter's interview of Thomas Frank—with a link to the blog which hosts it.

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If You Read This Book, It’ll Make You a Radical: A Conversation with Thomas Frank | Posted on September 11, 2018 by Yves Smith

(Interview) By John Siman

"Thomas Frank’s new collection of essays: Rendezvous with Oblivion: Reports from a Sinking Society (Metropolitan Books 2018) and Listen, Liberal; or,Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? (ibid. 2016) :


(excerpt)

...

... "JS (John Siman) : But this gets to the irony of the thing. (locates highlighted passage in book) I’m going to ask you one of the questions you ask in Rendezvous with Oblivion: “Why are worshipers of competence so often incompetent?” (p. 165). That’s a huge question."

TCF (Thomas Frank) :"That’s one of the big mysteries. Look. Take a step back. I had met Barack Obama. He was a professor at the University of Chicago, and I’d been a student there. And he was super smart. Anyhow, I met him and was really impressed by him. All the liberals in Hyde Park — that’s the neighborhood we lived in — loved him, and I was one of them, and I loved him too. And I was so happy when he got elected.

"Anyhow, I knew one thing he would do for sure, and that is he would end the reign of cronyism and incompetence that marked the Bush administration and before them the Reagan administration. These were administrations that actively promoted incompetent people. And I knew Obama wouldn’t do that, and I knew Obama would bring in the smartest people, and he’d get the best economists. Remember, when he got elected we were in the pit of the crisis — we were at this terrible moment — and here comes exactly the right man to solve the problem. He did exactly what I just described: He brought in (pause) Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard, considered the greatest economist of his generation — and, you know, go down the list: He had Nobel Prize winners, he had people who’d won genius grants, he had The Best and the Brightest. And they didn’t really deal with the problem. They let the Wall Street perpetrators off the hook — in a catastrophic way, I would argue. They come up with a health care system that was half-baked. Anyhow, the question becomes — after watching the great disappointments of the Obama years — the question becomes: Why did government-by-expert fail?"

JS: "So how did this happen? Why?"

TCF: "The answer is understanding experts not as individual geniuses but as members of a class. This is the great missing link in all of our talk about expertise. Experts aren’t just experts: They are members of a class. And they act like a class. They have loyalty to one another; they have a disdain for others, people who aren’t like them, who they perceive as being lower than them, and there’s this whole hierarchy of status that they are at the pinnacle of.

"And once you understand this, then everything falls into place! So why did they let the Wall Street bankers off the hook? Because these people were them. These people are their peers. Why did they refuse to do what obviously needed to be done with the health care system? Because they didn’t want to do that to their friends in Big Pharma. Why didn’t Obama get tough with Google® and Facebook®? They obviously have this kind of scary monopoly power that we haven’t seen in a long time. Instead, he brought them into the White House, he identified with them. Again, it’s the same thing. Once you understand this, you say: Wait a minute — so the Democratic Party is a vehicle of this particular social class! It all makes sense. And all of a sudden all of these screw-ups make sense. And, you know, all of their rhetoric makes sense. And the way they treat working class people makes sense. And they way they treat so many other demographic groups makes sense — all of the old-time elements of the Democratic Party®: unions, minorities, et cetera. They all get to ride in back. It’s the professionals — you know, the professional class — that sits up front and has its hands on the steering wheel." ... ...

You there--yeah, you, with the suburban or trendy very-urban home-mortgage, the two rather-late-model automobiles, the kids in private school or university, you with the house and landscaped-lawn maintained by immigrant labor: you may think you're safe, insulated, protected in this ever more highly-protected and patrolled walled-off-world around us. You may think so, but you're very much mistaken.

The forces you've allowed to gather and grow are not going to leave you and all that is so dear to you in peace and safety. Instead, as these forces have already done to so many of those of us living outside the supposedly-secure walled-off enclaves, they're going to eventually come for you and devour you.

Don't dare say you had no idea. You deserve what's in store for you. Many of us didn't really deserve it. You do.

"The forces you've allowed to gather and grow are not going to leave you and all that is so dear to you in peace and safety. Instead, as these forces have already done to so many of those of us living outside the supposedly-secure walled-off enclaves, they're going to eventually come for you and devour you."

I have often thought that the cadres of reflective coated clad beings who march their way through our neighborhoods are actually aliens from outer space gathering data and by the time we find out the true nature of their leaf blowers it will be too late.

>3 RickHarsch: Think about it: 'blowing leaves'. Wake up, man!

I like Thomas Frank. I think what he says about Obama and his administration is right on the money....and it's pertinent in a future sense---how if in any way the democrats are going to be better when they're back in power? I mean I hope they will be.

As far as the present sense we have a shit show like we've never seen before--I think the Trump administrations corruption eclipses anything I've ever seen before and that's going back pretty much to the Kennedy years. It takes quite a lot to eclipse Nixon and Clinton and not that Reagan and the Bush's weren't corrupt either.

Iran/Contra/Drugs/El Salvador/Nicaragua/Guatemala/Grenada/Panama/Afghanistan/Iraq

>5 RickHarsch:

NOTE: For others who read this thread and may not know:

I've already sworn in a previous open post many months ago that I shall never again under any circumstances read this member's comments no matter the topic nor ever again respond to him directly. Occasionally, for those who aren't aware of that, I may re-post this note for the readers' information.

>1 proximity1: I am sure most here thought of this quote by the late William F. Buckley Jr. before I did:

“I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_F._Buckley,_Jr.

Also quoted in >1 proximity1: “They come up with a health care system that was half-baked.”

It was a modern miracle they hammered through the health care system they did as “universal health care” in the USA was killed quickly in Clinton’s administration - by well monied lobbiest IMOHO

#6--seems a bit harsch. I don't think he cares.

>8 lriley: Indeed, I find it hilarious that he can't just shut up about it and go on his way. I'm a scab he can't stop picking.

>8 lriley:

I don't either.

The "For others who read this thread..." doesn't mean you, it means other than the usual lot who post their drivel in threads I open. Your posts help illustrate why the discussion threads at LT are so often such a waste of time.

>10 proximity1: Thanks. That was enlightening.

#10---well I haven't lost all hope in you. One of these days you may wake up.

I read 'The Audacity of Hope' around the time Obama first got elected. I was quite disappointed. I don't think Obama had an original idea, ever. I thought then, as I do now, that he was probably the most over-rated American president since Reagan. Detroit, Flint, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine: I see a whole lot of failures, foreign and domestic, and very few successes. Meanwhile, the US debt has gone from, "I don't know how we will ever pay this off!" to "I don't know how we will keep paying the interest!" Oh, but he did kill Osama Bin Laden! That makes it all worthwhile!

When Obama first announced Americans would have universal health care, I was, like most Canadians, thinking: finally! Then he announced the actual plan, which couldn't be more complicated, and we were all saying: 'What the...?!' In Canada, it couldn't be simpler. Every citizen or permanent resident gets a card. You show the card when you go to a doctor or the hospital. Taxes pay for it. That's it. Easy-peasy.

>13 madpoet: Detroit, Flint, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine: I see a whole lot of failures, foreign and domestic, and very few successes.

Detroit had a tax auction of an area the size of Boston in 2007. I don't know what you were expecting; he didn't do anything miraculous, but he didn't change it for the worse. How is the US president responsible for Russia invading its neighbor? We can talk about Afghanistan and Syria and Flint, but the question is what could he have done better?

Meanwhile, the US debt has gone from, "I don't know how we will ever pay this off!" to "I don't know how we will keep paying the interest!"

Increase of the debt by percent per year*
Ronald Reagan: 13.9%
George H.W. Bush: 11.5%
Bill Clinton: 4.0%
George W. Bush: 8.5%
Obama: 7.5%

So you're bagging on a president who took office in a depression, who did better by percent than any previous president back to Reagan except a president who was in office in the affluent 90s. Not to mention that in theory, the only power the President has is vetoing Congress's bills.

In Canada, it couldn't be simpler. Every citizen or permanent resident gets a card. You show the card when you go to a doctor or the hospital. Taxes pay for it.

And in Hawaii, when they want to heat the house, they open the door, not burn all that expensive heating fuel like you Canadians do. I'm glad you Canadians have socialized medicine, but nothing Obama could have done would have got that past Congress. Yes, if you expect a president to do magical things impossible for mortal man, then you will be disappointed. It's arguable if ObamaCare was the best we could have got past Congress but socialized medicine was not happening.

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2018/01/15/obamas-federal-debt-grew-at-a... I started with https://www.thebalance.com/us-debt-by-president-by-dollar-and-percent-3306296 , whose numbers are slightly different but close enough.

>13 madpoet:

Plain good sense there--all around.

Clearly, most U.S. Americans cannot manage such feats of socio-political civilization. This is beyond them. And it's likely that the overwhelming majority of them can't match your political common sense.

You saw through Obama's shucking & jiving bullshit. They didn't.

You know the old saying: "Live and learn." Down in the U.S., that's "live and don't learn nuthin'. Suffer and keep on sufferin'."

>13 madpoet: >14 prosfilaes:

Obama did not close Guantanamo.
Obama did not end the Aghanistan war; in effect, he committed many war crimes in Pakistan, killing countless civilians, which likely extended the war.
Obama had the power to fix the Flint crisis. He did not.
Obama had the right to name a Supreme Court justice; he caved in and failed to do so.
Obama had the window through which financial reform was possible--he hired the enemy.
Obama's health care reform was written by insurance complanies. If he had wanted something rivalling Canada's program he could have gotten it
Obama came to power a popular man, largely because of the criminal regime his was replacing. He squandered virtually every opportunity to become a great president, to at least tame the oligarchy. He failed utterly, or succeeded in embedding himself into the power elite.

#16--I agree with all that. I'll add Obama also talked about clean energy, rebuilding sagging infrastructure--those things turned into just that--talk. There are a number of other things--his bailing out of Wall St.--his coordination with law enforcement to suppress the Occupy movement--his looking the other way from police violence at the DAPL protest. He codified the Bush tax cuts--another big hand out to the wealthy and to corporate power who can never get enough so the new idiot comes along to give them even more with his tax bill. Anything the previous Bush administration did Obama carried forward--like the wars, the torture, the Patriot Act, the tax cuts and the ironic thing is everything Obama accomplished his successor has done his level best to tear down and apart.

.....and when after Obama left office he takes a year + holiday jetsetting around the world--only after that to come back and lecture the electorate on their civic responsibilities as if we're incapable of seeing just what a nutjob his replacement is.

I'm not grateful for Obama's 8 years--the fact is I can't think of one single POTUS in my entire lifetime going back to Eisenhower who wasn't majorly flawed. IMO the best of the bunch was Jimmy Carter. His two greatest sins were being played by the Gulf States and the Shah. Comparably though he wasn't into wars like those who proceeded and followed him and when his time was up he fucked off back to his farmhouse in Plains Georgia to live a relatively normal existence. Apparently no one ever told him he was supposed to cash in.

>14 prosfilaes: I don't blame Obama for the problems he faced when he came into office. But he talked about 'Change' and 'Hope' like he was going to be different. Where's the difference? He was just like every American president before him.

He went from 'Change we can believe in' and 'The Audacity of Hope' to... at least 'he didn't change it for the worse' Wow. So inspiring! What a hero!

At least he could have closed the prison in Guantanamo. He didn't even do that.

>16 RickHarsch: Totally agree with you, for once.

(Youtube.com) What is Killing Western Civilization? With Douglas Murray, Claire Fox and Yaron Brook

( Ayn Rand Institute | Streamed live on Sep 21, 2018 | )

(Youtube.com) Douglas Murray in conversation with Jordan Peterson (182 600 views)

( UnHerd, Published on Sep 4, 2018 | )

>19 madpoet: (don't be overly alarmed)

>18 madpoet: He was just like every American president before him.

Which is consistent with you believing him to be the best president of all time. These types of standards are fatal to democracy; dictators can work by fiat and block any mention of the failures of his programs or the corruption of his people, but leaders in democracy are bound by law and checks and balances, and have their weaknesses exposed by the press.

No, he was no Mao Zedong. He was an American president, limited by Congress on one side and the Supreme Court on the other.

'he didn't change it for the worse'

He made the largest step towards socialized medicine in American history, and you're grousing he didn't provide socialized medicine to the US, even if that would have taken overriding the will of the people and destroying the Constitutional checks and balances in his way.

>22 prosfilaes: Obama produced a half-baked health care plan. The kindest appraisal would be that it was 'better than nothing' or 'the best that he could do.' But still the worst system among developed countries.

Meanwhile, in foreign policy... not much different from his predecessors. In fact he expanded the use of drone strikes, which are now an integral part of American tactics and strategy, and was completely ineffectual (it is hard to imagine anyone doing worse) in dealing with Syria or the Russian invasion of Crimea. NATO is weaker, and both Russia and Iran are stronger than when he came to office. No progress whatsoever regarding Israel-Palestine or North Korea's nuclear program (just like the guys before him).

Domestically, he fiddled while Detroit and Flint burned. Just because it wasn't a hurricane, like Katrina, doesn't mean it wasn't a disaster.

I guess we should give him credit for withdrawing from Iraq. We'll ignore how he let ISIS flourish in northern Iraq, or how Iraq is now basically an Iranian puppet state.

>23 madpoet: 'the best that he could do.'

The best anyone could do in his position. Again, you're whining that he didn't do the impossible, or at least the impossible without violating the Constitution.

was completely ineffectual (it is hard to imagine anyone doing worse) in dealing with ... the Russian invasion of Crimea.

What should have been done? It seems pretty easy to imagine worse; the issue was confined to Ukraine and Russia, and didn't escalate to a large-scale conflict, instead of going down like Austria-Hungary's invasion of Serbia.

I guess we should give him credit for withdrawing from Iraq. We'll ignore how he let ISIS flourish in northern Iraq, or how Iraq is now basically an Iranian puppet state.

What did you want him to do? It was a mess, and one that wasn't going to be easily and quickly cleaned up. If he kept a military presence there to stop ISIS, you would be complaining that he didn't leave Iraq.

Yes, if you give impossible standards, then President Obama won't meet them. I could discuss his problems, but it seems pointless if you're not willing to offer a standard that he could have achieved.

>22 prosfilaes: >23 madpoet:
Prosfilaes is right to implicitly recognize the presence of a power elite that constrains presidents, but it would be naive to think that Obama did not have a great deal more latitude than any president since Reagan, whose deregulation regime effectively ended the hope for a humane capitalism, rolling back gains of labor, education, practically any gains on the part of what 'average' (and less?) US American. Obama could not have successfully taken apart the power elite, but it is definitely true that insurance companies were relieved at his pliability. He had what Reagan did--the ear of the people, the trust, and the mandate for change--within limits. He could not have created a state with socialized medicine alone, but he could have offered a government option. Presidents can, when trusted, go on the air and get what they want. He could have spoken truthfully about the difficulties of closing Guantanamo and had the place empty within a year.
See the new Moore film for his performance on Flint.
As for Drones, well, they allow for generally recognized illegal warfare to be waged on essentially guerillas, and in a similar way to how that was done in Vietnam, going after them anywhere, everywhere, regardless of who else gets killed. At some point his escalation of drone warfare and the use of JSOC will generally be recognized as a dark turning point in US imperial history.
In Syria he allowed a Bush program of destabilization, without regard to results, to continue--his Bay of Pigs--allying the US with what they wanted to believe were freedom fighters and not the same brand of warriors the US worked with in Afghanistan before the Taliban.
In the Ukraine, Obama failed to recognize the importance of the country as a Soviet buffer state--as the US treats much of the world--and pushed, rather than restrain, the EU, which obviously, as a strategy, failed miserably.

...limited by Congress and the Supreme Court? Really, as Bush was?

Not a word of specified criticism of Frank's points--

not a word where Obama's defenders point out exactly where and how Frank's critique is false, unfair or unsupportable by the observable facts.

Just the usual bullshit from Obama-bot apologists.

Who is Frank? Is he in the Proximate Vacuum?

>24 prosfilaes: When someone comes along waving the banner of 'Change' and especially claiming that he, and he alone, can bring that change... well, one would of course expect more from him. He didn't deliver. And so, being neither a terrible president nor a great one, but just a mediocrity... he will be forgotten.

Regarding Crimea, Putin saw weakness and vacillation in the White House, and he took advantage of it. Instead of responding forcefully (and yes, sometimes a little military brinkmanship is necessary, as during the Cuban missile crisis) the West imposed a few light sanctions. Which emboldened Putin further to support separatists in East Ukraine. If that had gone well, perhaps the rest of Ukraine or even the Baltic States would have been his next target. Fortunately, Ukraine fought back, rapidly reforming and re-equipping their military.

Now Russia, Iran and Turkey have meetings to discuss Syria's future-- leaving out the U.S. and other western countries. Can you imagine that happening before Obama? Is that in the West's interests, to let Iran and Russia decide the Middle East's future?

>28 madpoet: being neither a terrible president nor a great one, but just a mediocrity...

Okay, so let's go back forty years; of the presidents back to Carter, who do you think was better than Obama? If he's mediocre, then half of those presidents had to be better than him.

Regarding Crimea, Putin saw weakness and vacillation in the White House, and he took advantage of it.

That's a version of history I've never heard before. Putin invaded Crimea the same month the pro-Russia president was deposed and a pro-Western president was put in place, because Sevastopol was politically and militarily valuable to Russia.

sometimes a little military brinkmanship is necessary, as during the Cuban missile crisis

Even in retrospect, the outcome of the Cuban missile crisis is not one that strikes me as inevitable. With a little worse luck, that could have sparked WWIII. And Cuba is right off the US shoreline; Crimea is physically connected to Russia. The comparison is scary.

Is that in the West's interests, to let Iran and Russia decide the Middle East's future?

Possibly. A Middle East that's controlled from the Middle East may be more stable then one that's a gameboard for great powers.

>29 prosfilaes: I think it is generally thought by now that Kennedy was reckless during the Cuban missile crisis and it could have been handled in such a way that nuclear war was not a threat.

>29 prosfilaes: "Okay, so let's go back forty years; of the presidents back to Carter, who do you think was better than Obama? If he's (i.e. Obama is) mediocre, then half of those presidents had to be better than him."

I'll just take this opportunity to point out that, as logic, the above (in bold italics) is simply laughable. I'm not even going to bother pointing out why it is laughable. That would be to point out what ought to be obvious but, for you, clearly is anything but obvious. And this is just the latest in a very long line of examples of how you just cannot think straight.

>31 proximity1: So Prosfilaes won't have to say it, let me point out that >31 proximity1: is, and this is obvious, so I won't say it, even though it isn't obvious to the obviator-in-chief, such is the nature of the obvious (obviously), which is why.

Originally posted Monday, 3 December 2018
(added Wednesday, 5 December 2018 : (A) )
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What ads in the New Yorker magazine tell us about the American oligarchy | Thomas E Ricks | Sun 2 Dec 2018 11.00 GMT

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Curtains for the Clintons | By Maureen Dowd | 1 December 2018

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Camille Paglia: ‘Hillary wants Trump to win again’ | (A) |

"The Democrats (my party) have been in chaos since the 2016 election and have no coherent message except Trump hatred"

|

Originally posted on 16 December, 2018
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(from The Atlantic magazine | Education | ) "The Liberal Arts May Not Survive the 21st Century" :

Wisconsin built a public higher-education system that was admired around the world. But it may not withstand a tech-hungry economy.

| 13 December, 2018 by Adam Harris

(Photo source/credit: Nikjvt / Palokha Tetiana / Shutterstock / Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic 2018 )

(Quote)

... ...

Both Willis and Summers agree on one critical point: What happens in Wisconsin could become a model for higher education across the country. What divides them is whether that would be a good thing.

One thing is sure, however: Financial realities such as those facing Stevens Point are not far off for many regional institutions. “The reality is that we just can’t be everything to everyone, regardless of the public-good value of some of the coursework,” Summers said. “Those constraints are very real.” There are few encouraging signs—if any—that states will once again pump dollars into state colleges to get them back to 2008 levels and, as Mitchell of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, those levels still were not enough to make college affordable for most students.

But as much as this is a tale of a resource-strapped institution, it’s also a tale of something else—something that has nothing to do with the school’s budget and everything to do with the state of higher education in the 21st century. And that’s because even if the state were to miraculously open the coffers for state institutions, Summers said he would likely still eliminate the history major and others in favor of more focus on STEM fields bolstered by a broader general-education curriculum.

“If we suddenly received more dollars,” he told me, “we’d have to ask some pretty hard questions about where we’d want to invest those dollars—and again, I’d point to enrollment figures.” If the demand is for the fields with clearly prescribed career pathways, that’s where the resources should flow, he said. “We are obligated to make sure that we’re serving those students in the best way possible, and for that money, we need to focus on the liberal-arts core curriculum of the university,” he told me.

"To Willis, this sounds like the manifestation of Scott Walker’s 2015 plan, shirking the “search for truth” in favor of meeting economic needs. “I think that’s what our administration is thinking about,” he said, “that our role here in central Wisconsin is to anticipate what jobs are going to be needed and to develop programs accordingly." The problem, he fears, is that that alone will never be enough.

The national conversation around higher education is shifting, raising doubts about whether the liberal arts—as we have come to know them—are built to survive a tech-hungry economy.

(end quote)

Funny:

societies (the Anglophone ones) which, for centuries, got "Shakespeare" all wrong, which couldn't recognize or understand the real person behind the work, but which went on teaching students about 'Shakespeare' in their muddle-headed fashion anyway, have now evolved into this, almost a full century after having been faced with much better and largely sufficient corrective scholarship (which has been deliberately shunned by professional academics)—evolved into societies in which higher-education's leadership apparently believe (or surrender to) the idea that university-education should simply operate according to principles of vocational trade-schools.

These are, of course, completely unrelated phenomena—aren't they?

So now it has all sunk to a "Shakespeare ate Bacon" meme?

Can anyone dig down below that to an even lower level of crap-headedness?

Knock yourselves out, folks.

Interestingly, when I was in that Wisconsin system, and after I had graduated from the first level of the Wisconsin system, with a degree in sociology and history, I was not at all likely to obtain a job in either of those disciplines, nor did I attempt to find one--but I was quite pleased with my education.

When I was in school at UNC chapel Hill back in the 1970’s my friends who were majoring in English had accolades for a Jesuit priest instructor who had devoted his life to the study of Shakespeare and had global recognition for his expertise. That might be a template for future education - Buddhist priest instructors who have taken a vow of poverty as comparative studies instructors?

>36 RickHarsch: I had several friends who were getting their PHD’s in sociology because you had to have that to make a living they said. After becoming the head of a county department one friend said she had trouble hiring high school grads, much less people with a sociology degree, because the funding was so low for her department she could not pay much - I got the feeling she stole employees from McDonalds.

>37 DugsBooks:

For pity's sake! a twice-wasted lifetime! First wasted on the idiocy of becoming a Jesuit priest, topped off by a second life-course in folly: the profession of the Shakespeare-mythology.

I'll say this for (?) the guy: he was consistent.

At the end of his life, as legacy, he had nothing to show for himself except those he'd led into confusion and error concerning either "God" etc. or concerning "Shakespeare" or, in some cases, both.

Now that's a tragedy!

If you'd like a tour through the wreckage of liberal arts study and some good ideas for why they've become deservedly endangered, I can't recommend a better introduction to the wasteland than Cornell University's English department faculty. There are perhaps two or three who I'd hope to see spared their teaching posts--Andrew Galloway and Thomas Hill. For the rest, students and the liberal arts in general would be better off if these professors and all others like them were sent off to do something like picking vegetables and fruit in California.

More from FUCKING LOUSY BRITAIN
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Just maybe--contrary to reported sightings-- there never were any December-2018-Gatwick-Airport unauthorized drones
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Off and on over the course of a three-day period recently, Britain's second-busiest international airport, Gatwick, was reduced to paralysis as authorities tried to find and identify the small, privately-operated drone flying devices reported by dozens of people to be over and around the vicinity of the airport's flight-paths.

It now appears that there may never have been any such drone activity at all, the many thousands of passengers' holiday-travel disrupted over mistaken sightings and a Sussex police service which leapt to extreme measures without ever properly assessing the actual reports' credibility and foundations. Two people, arrested and questioned for some 36 hours have been released without charge and are no longer considered suspect of any involvement in this (supposed) drone-flight activity; that didn't prevent the press from publishing their names and photographs and labelling them as presumably responsible for the days-long travel chaos.

More examples of the absurd state of contemporary British life-- as fools with little good sense but lots of authority go off half-cocked while other MUCH more serious and long-standing ills go ignored as usual.

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SEE ALSO:

(from The Spectator) | "How Terror Changed Europe's Christmas markets" | by Douglas Murray | 21 December 2018

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Not merely "terror" but, rather, "terror" + "unbelievable stupidity"

>37 DugsBooks: Setting out to devote my life to literature, I went on to find that driving a taxi was a good job because I could make enough money to take half a year off to write before going back and driving again. But the best job was security guard at a plant on the Mississippi, on an island, a wood and garbage burning power plant, and that job, working nights, paid me back in the late 80s 6 plus an hour and I had a minimum five free hours to read and write.
The thing is, though, that I knew what was necessary to get a job via university and I chose not to study anything that was likely to get me a job. The trade-off was clear: I get a good education and no job, while, say engineers, got good jobs, but little in the way of what I consider necessary education. If I were to go back to social engineering, though, I believe reforms are possible that could improve the lot of both engineers and sociology/history majors. As it was, I was happy with my little brain and all the things it did.

“I Don’t Give a Shit About the Industry I’m Disrupting” : How Silicon Valley Hacked Our Minds and Lost Its Conscience

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“In San Francisco, the crown jewel of Silicon Valley, there are no poor neighborhoods, just poor people. Squeezed between million-dollar apartments and Michelin-starred restaurants is a rising tide of homelessness: vagrants begging for scraps from the tech zillionaires on Market Street, families who couldn’t afford the rent after the latest IPO, Uber drivers sleeping in their cars in the Safeway parking lot. The nouveau wealth capital of America is a land of decadence and irony, where Juul (banned from selling e-cigarettes in the county) just bought a $400 million office tower and Vinod Khosla thinks he owns the beach. Further down the 101 in Menlo Park and Sunnyvale, Facebook and Google employees are raising their kids tech-free.

“This is the world the smartphone has built. In 1994, Vanity Fair (magazine) inaugurated the New Establishment list to celebrate the rise of a new entrepreneurial class that promised—how young we were then!—to 'make the world a better place.' They were digital-age whiz kids challenging the old boys club, rebels and hackers getting their first taste of real power. Twenty-five years later, the upstarts are now the establishment, the undisputed titans of America’s second gilded age.

“How quickly it all changed. Twitter, which aided the Arab Spring, now abets America’s culture civil war, and its cofounder Jack Dorsey is more concerned with going on silent retreats than silencing Nazis. Mark Zuckerberg, who dreamed of bringing free internet to Africa, spends his days dodging questions about the genocide in Myanmar. Dara Khosrowshahi has righted the amoral culture of Uber but is struggling to squeeze profits from its gig-economy workforce. (For SoftBank leader Masayoshi Son, self-driving cars can’t come soon enough.) WeWork, another of SoftBank’s crown jewels, is struggling to right the ship after the exit of CEO Adam Neumann, whose questionable business stratagems prompted investors to turn skittish and ultimately helped sink the company’s IPO. Even Slack, which was going to save us from the drudgery of work, has merely insinuated drudgery deeper into the fiber of our lives.

“Unwinding the problems these entrepreneurs have wrought is difficult, as anyone on the 2019 New Establishment list can attest. YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki has spoken passionately of “trying to strike a balance” between removing hate speech and cultivating free expression but is quick with excuses when pressed on the specifics ('If we were to take down every video…'). Poor Zuckerberg couldn’t for the life of him figure out how to rid Facebook of anti-vaxxers or Russian bots—at least until regulators began threatening multibillion-dollar fines and high-profile tech insiders (including Tristan Harris and Roger McNamee) began speaking publicly about breaking up the company. “Fish don’t see water,” one tech investor explained when I asked how Silicon Valley sees itself in this age of cultural backlash. Another senior-level tech employee, who has worked in the industry for more than a decade, wasn’t so kind. 'I don’t think they smell their own shit,' she said.

“There is still a sense of wonder: Elon Musk is planning a Mars colony; Satya Nadella is pouring money into artificial intelligence; Larry Page has invested in flying cars. Wojcicki’s younger sister, Anne, is building a genetic database that is already being used to design new drugs (with a $300 million investment from Glaxo­SmithKline) and fuel cutting-edge academic research. Jeff Bezos has teamed up with titans of the financial industry to lower health care costs, while Brian Armstrong’s cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, aims to disrupt the financial industry altogether. In Hollywood, technology has forced the studios to compete with Netflix and Amazon, fueling another golden age of video.

“Meanwhile, venture capital is flowing outward, remaking the world for better and worse. There are start-ups growing flawless diamonds with plasma reactors, plant-based meats that 'bleed' beet juice, shoes made from eucalyptus fibers. One start-up founder I recently met is growing genetically modified mushrooms that can be turned into imitation leather for belts and shoes, reducing the need for cows and helping slow climate change. (A thousand artisan villages in India won’t know what hit them.)

“Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and one half of the eponymous V.C. firm Andreessen Horowitz, used to say that 'software eats the world.' These days it feels more appropriate to say that 'Silicon Valley eats the world'—or has eaten it already.

“Within the cloistered world of Silicon Valley, everything now appears to be a form of performance art. When Dorsey and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff got into a spat over how to fight homelessness in San Francisco, they didn’t get on the phone, or meet at a Blue Bottle Coffee, to hash out their ideas in private. Instead they got into a very public Twitter fight over Proposition C, a ballot initiative that would have raised taxes on the city’s wealthiest businesses to address the crisis.

“ 'We’re happy to pay our taxes. We just want to be treated fairly with respect to our peer companies, many of whom are 2-10x larger than us,' complained Dorsey, speaking on behalf of the other company he runs, Square. Benioff, who supported the measure, was full of righteous indignation. 'If you’re going to fight a relatively small tax, which is one half of one percent to help our number 1 issue, then you better prepared to talk about what you are doing versus what you don’t want to do,' he shot back. (The measure ultimately passed.)

“Bay Area high society has its reasons for wanting to seem like part of the solution. It’s estimated that this year alone, 5,000 tech workers could become millionaires. Another report released this year found that San Francisco has the highest density of billionaires of any city in the entire world. Of course, all success is relative, as Dorsey was quick to point out. Nobody wants to pay an extra 0.5% gross sales receipt tax, especially when there’s a rate multiplier that hits financial companies (like Square) harder than information companies (like Salesforce). Last month Square sued the city to recoup $1.27 million in gross receipt taxes, arguing that it had been misclassified.

“But the rot goes deeper, down to the very core of Silicon Valley’s myths about itself. This was evident last year at one of Sequoia Capital’s leadership speaker series, in which Tony Xu, the young CEO of DoorDash, returned to his alma mater, Stanford University, to tell a story about the founding of his company. 'I’d like to start by sharing a story about toner,' Xu said with a smile. The toner tale began on that very campus, the day after his graduation in 2013. Xu and his three cofounders had just launched a small food-delivery service in Palo Alto, and with only $18,000 in the bank, they didn’t have enough money for marketing or promotion. So Xu returned to Stanford to steal supplies. 'In the evening I would raid toner on this campus,' Xu said, vaingloriously explaining that he had found a loophole in the Stanford education system where, even though he had already graduated, his ID card still allowed him to use the printers in the different libraries around campus. Xu was so proud of his larceny that he looked up the rates at a nearby Kinkos to see how much money he had managed to steal, and was elated to discover it would have cost $33,000 had he paid for the promotion with his own money.

“' 'That story of breaking all of the Stanford printers,' Xu told the audience, is a 'hallmark of the DoorDash culture.' Indeed, he’s right. DoorDash has built a business out of price arbitrage, or, if you prefer, stealing. The food-delivery company was a pioneer of a business model in which customers were misled about the real price of their food, allowing Xu to siphon extra dollars off each menu item. (For example, a pizza that cost $10 would be listed as costing $15 in the DoorDash app.) Like Travis Kalanick at Uber, Xu found it easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. When DoorDash started developing “exclusive” delivery partnerships with restaurants and fast-food joints, In-N-Out Burger didn’t want to partner with the company. Xu decided to just go around it, sticking a fake In-N-Out logo in the DoorDash app and doing the deliveries anyway. That was, until In-N-Out sued the company for trademark infringement. (The case was eventually settled.) As if stealing from a university and customers wasn’t enough, over the past year, DoorDash had been essentially pocketing the tips customers believed they were giving directly to drivers. It wasn’t until a New York Times report detailed this deceptive practice that the company said it would reverse course. (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment.)
“What makes the DoorDash story so perfectly emblematic of Silicon Valley—even more so than those of the mammoth Facebooks, Googles, and Amazons of the world—is that someone like Xu can take an industry as innocuous as delivering hummus and pizzas and find a way to be utterly immoral while disrupting it. What’s more, and where Xu really encapsulates the entirety of malevolent tech culture, is that he is oblivious to the fact that what he is doing is morally repugnant. He stood up in front of those students at Stanford, bragged about stealing from the school, and made it sound like an act of heroism.

“ 'It’s 100% spin,' said the senior tech employee. 'Just think about the philosophy of disrupting an industry, the entire act of doing so is saying, “I don’t give a shit about the industry I’m disrupting.” At the same time, she said, 'No one in Silicon Valley goes to sleep with a guilty conscience.' Indeed, when you look at everyone from Xu to Zuckerberg, that seems to be the case.

“Maybe this is why Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are so busy trying to move to Mars and the moon. Who would want to live on a planet that looks like San Francisco?

“Not everyone sees their own industry as being the villain in the Big Bad Wolf story. There are some who blame Little Red Riding Hood. One venture capitalist tried to explain that the story isn’t as bad as everyone makes it out to be, and that most people get more good out of tech than journalists care to write about. That people are able to connect all over the world with one another; that the few instances of bad behavior are a result of the people on the platforms, not the platforms themselves. But that was one person among many. Another venture capitalist told me the problem is the wiring of the people who run companies like Facebook, not the wiring of the platforms themselves. “I think the core problem is that people like Zuck are not normal human beings,” he explained with a chuckle.

Amidst all the agita, there is a sense of fatalism, maybe even a peace, that comes with the knowledge that machine minds will soon remove mere mortal concerns. While the rest of the world is just beginning to grapple with smartphone addiction and data privacy, tech visionaries are busy cooking up new nightmares: grocery stores run by robots and self-driving cars, brain-computer interfaces and augmented-reality contact lenses. 'What’s the point' of worrying about Facebook and DoorDash,' one V.C. said. 'It’s not like we’re going to be here that much longer anyway.' ”
…

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The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them into shapes, and gives to aery nothing
A locale habitation and a name.
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A Midsummer Night's Dream, (V, i, 12-17)

Related* reading:

Sadomasochism in everyday life : the dynamics of power and powerlessness by Lynn S. Chancer