Go East Young Man

One obstacle to making America great again is the general ignorance of the work force. A piece in the NY Times highlights all the companies moving to India so they can hire educated workers: "American companies are assembling their work forces in India mainly because it has become difficult to find the right kind of workers in the United States. Studies find that a third of all new engineering jobs go unfilled, while nearly 1.2 million Indians graduate with engineering degrees every year." MAGAs are upset with offshoring and wish they had their shit jobs back, assembling widgets on an assembly line. But they also want 35 dollars an hour plus benefits for doing mindless tasks. The trouble is, any of that soul-crushing labor that isn't done by robots is being done by people living on ten dollars a day. And those companies looking for skilled workers are going to places other than the U.S. " We’ve got an inexorable trend right now, where enterprises understand that you can globalize the work,” Ms. Kops said. She has tried setting up global centers within the United States but says that “we just don’t have the education engine” to staff them." American kids want to be influencers or play professional sports. In the meantime they are happy posting in their parent's basement. American employers are asking: “Can you get 5,000 folks who know how to do this kind of work? You can’t,” she said. “But you can do it in India, and you can do it in other places in the world.” Fortunately for American dummies there is always the military. This is what a teacher wrote today: "I teach college students, and many are unable to focus for a sustained period, read a 20-page article or write coherently." Boys are sucked into the Jordan Peterson Manosphere. It turns out artificial intelligence won't actually have to be all that intelligent in order to replace American workers. Of course those students who go to Christian schools will know a lot about Jericho and Cannan and Egypt. I'm not mourning the dismantling of the Education Department because they really weren't helping. Not sure who will be going to U.S. schools to learn about American exceptionalism except patriots.

More Ted Pilled

Interesting piece in the Times today about the resilient popularity of Ted Kaczynski's manifesto of 1995 (The Strange Post Partisan Popularity of the Unabomber by Charles Homans) Ted's own take on Jacques Ellul's theory that "civilization had aquired a mind of its own" resonates today in so many ways it's scary. I'm thinking here of Nate Hagan's notion of the "superorganism" or in a Marxist sense, of the "greedy and self-enjoying,a-subjective system of which no one is realy or fully in control", that is the self-reproducing force called Capital. The Deep Green Resistance folks point to "industrial civilization", which falls in line with Ted's thinking as well. Or in the historical sense we could just say modernity, with its tight bond to technology. The Unabomber's cabin was moved from Lincoln Mt to FBI headquarters in Washington DC. The only remaining reason to visit Lincoln is the Sculpture Park located east of town. Then there is Artificial General Intelligence, the possibility of which which Ted hinted at as well. Definitely a "mind of its own" in a reductive yet still terrifying sense. Remember, Ted is prophesizing all this pre-internet, a time fewer and fewer of us even remember. People like him and Marshal Mc Luhan, Joseph Conrad, Allen Ginsberg and Hunter S Thompson - they had an often tortured gift for seeing where trends might lead. Few could have imagined a time when these new Tech Masters of the Universe would decide it is their perogative to control the state! And the direction Progress is willed to take our species. The pushback exists, but it is still on the fringes; the website Tech Won't save Us, Richard King's book Here Be Monsters are a couple of examples. Mostly we see acquiescence, the resigned acceptance of that which the technocrats tell us will be good for us. We are told it will lead to trillions in new wealth, to a better life for all. There are reasons to be skeptical. At least with medical research such as gene therapy and cloning and such there are people considering bioethics. With AI there is too much profit at stake. Like the sorcerer's apprentice, we are doomed to learn the hard way.

Unscientific Random Sample

Overheard at the gym locker room: "Did you see what those sick fucks are doing to those Teslas? Dude, I'm tempted to go buy a Tesla and sit in the bushes waiting with my rifle. I would so love to have them come try to mess with it." Pause. "So what truck did you bring today, the Chevy or the Ford?" "Chevy." Young working class dudes itching for some action, lot of tough talk about antifa, etc..but who knows? They might pull the trigger.The irony is Andreas Malm's call for sabotage against SUV's ( not "eco-friendly EVs") but these are the times we live in, the "morbid sysmptoms" as Gramsci called them. It can't properly be called a backlash to Trumps "greenlash" ie.. dismantling EPA, drill baby drill, etc...Just more post-post-modern incoherence and ideological rubble. I agree with Danny Bessner, co-host of American Prestige (along with Derek Davison) and Hingepoints (with Matt Christman), that we are looking at what Marx called "the common ruin of the competing classes". No one is getting out of this unscathed. I would be curious to know how many underground militias are operating here in the American Readout (Montana and Idaho). I watch these young guys working out in front of the big mirrors, admiring their musculature, their beefiness. Dreams of protecting virgin maidens swirling through their tiny brains. Like in the good old Clint Eastwood Bruce Willis days of angry manhood. I mentioned the anxious foreign policy establishment in the last post but some of the fossil Fuel Majors are nervous as well. They had a whole public relations campaign going on about how they were responsible partners in conservation and research and innovation yada yada while they raked in record profits. Now they have to kiss the MAGA ring, go back to Chinese hoax, not a good look. They loved the Obama/Biden "all of the above" strategy with its hydrogen hubs and battery plants and Direct Air Capture subsidies. All investments de-risked by the U.S. taxpayer and lots of profit on the back end. Now all of that is too "woke".

Doomloop

To take your mind off your shrinking 401K and worthless Trump meme coin you could go on a Trump Tour! Climb Mount Mc Kinley, go sailing in the Gulf of America. A way for American farmers to spend their government-provided cash payments (otherwise known as welfare) for the crops they won't be planting thanks to the tariffs. Enbridge Pipeline Company is now sponsoring Native Network One, the radio station that broadcasts news for Indian country. These Hamas supporting students at Columbia should be thankful they are only being deported. Usually the U.S. drone-strikes terrorists when they are walking down the street. Remember, we are on a war footing. Ocasio-Cortez is learning a hard lesson in electoralism. The "left-wing progressive" who defended Joe Biden till the last second is now the leader of the Democrat Reistance, claiming a thirty day extension would have given them time to "negotiate" with Repubs. Except they don't have any "cards", as Trump explained to Zelinsky. Like Gazans have no "cards". Or Haitians or Syrians or Sudanese or billions of others. Threatening to shut down the government is so exhausted I expect Newt Gingrich to return for an encore. On the economy front, Doomberg believes the Trump strategy is to initiate massive "creative destruction". Get it over with now with a sharp recession that clears out all the dead wood ie.. losers, unproductive capital, those not maximizing utility, etc. There's still plenty of room out by the freeway for people to pitch their tents. Three billion humans on our planet use less electricity per capita than one American refrigerator. This is what Marxists call "combined and uneven development". This backlash against DEI can be traced back to the 1619 Project, a multi-media research project by Nicole Hannah-Jones that placed slavery and its consequences at the heart of the American experience. That and the genocide of the Native inhabitants runs right up against the myth making of the Right so now that they are in power they will just re-write history, get rid of inconvenient facts and bully academia into submission. Make examples of a few folks, ban some books, shouldn't be long before they start showing John Wayne movies in schools. Not that schools taught real history to start with. I guess it's a good thing we have courts but it seems like a pathetic substitute for actual politics.

Jitters

I find it interesting that there are four separate articles on the Foreign Affairs website that deal with climate change. They only give you one free one to read so I chose The Troubled Enery Transition, where they explain in great deal how and why capitalism has failed to curb emissions before insisting capitalism must do so. Somehow. Despite all the contradictions. Basically they fall back on "clean" natural gas and nuclear. They then go on to say today's "trouble" "makes clear that the process will unfold over a long period." One problem I see. We don't actually have "a long period" in which to make radical changes. You don't want to wait till you are in the middle of a mass extinction event, at or near cascading "tipping points" tp begin some gradual process. Perhaps had this "transition" begun say forty years ago, when it first became obvious, we could have had a more "pragmatic", less disruptive and slower "unfolding". But that didn't happen. Oops. A few other gems. They say we should cooperate with Asia and help finance adaptation and mitigation in the global South. Yeah sure. When pigs fly. The point is- the adults in the room have the jitters. Their carefully crafted consensus around liberal "democratic" capitalism has been hijacked by a bunch of anarchist hyper-capitalists led by a charismatic grifter. You can easily imagine these policy elites hoping for another Obama to pop up to save them from chaos, at least temporarily. EPA head Lee Zeldin will not let America fall for the "Green New Scam", or, as he calls it, "the climate change religion". Woke pagan hippies will not get in the way of economic growth, if he has anything to say. He proposed "the greatest rollback of environmental regulations in history", because putting a little Trumpian flourish on pronouncements is now de rigueur. All that government overeach cuts into profits and most folks have forgotten the image of rivers on fire. It's not the content of the policy change so much as the notion that in 2025 it is popular with a large segment of the population. Another scary tipping point. Sorry environmentalists, conservationists, etc.. try to be good "green capitalists" and this is what you get for all your years of advocacy and voting and donating to green NGOs. Time to sic the lawyers on em.

The Resistance

A worker at the Vermont ski resort J.D. Vance took his family to was critical online. She expressed her opinion, consequences be damned. The Resistance is alive and well. “If a 25-year-old can risk her job to — quite politely — speak truth to power, the rest of us can figure out some things to do as well,” Mr. Bill McKibben said. By "truth to power" he means posting. Like I'm doing! But in all his years as a "climate leader" McKibben has not figured out "things to do". Other than vote harder and beg your elected representative to do the right thing. The reasonable thing. "I went down to the demonstration, to get my fair share of abuse..." Jagger /Richards Driving through town I saw some people carrying signs so I followed them to the intersection fo Hwy 93 and Main street where folks were gathering to promte "science". (Exile on Main Street?) With each honk the energized liberals cheered and waved their signs harder. Who can be against against Science, they laughed? look at all that science hath brought! Reason and rationality, empirical evidence and facts. We are speaking truth to power! Resist! As a cynical old radical I found this all terribly sad. If science and knowledge can't sway them, what about morality and justice and responsibility? “By turning its back on international climate financing, the U.S. is failing its moral obligation as a historic polluter, abandoning the global community and shirking its share of our collective responsibility,” said Namrata Chowdhary, the chief of public engagement for 350.org, a climate advocacy group. I hate to keep picking on 350, but at some point you need to understand that profit cares nothing about morality and the authority of science has been radically diminished. It was science which shut down the economy during the pandemic. It is science that is telling us not to utilize the liquid gold lying beneath our feet. Of course science also killed God and promised humans mastery over Nature and that hasn;t worked out so great either. The point here is that we need to trust our own eyes. When we see two actors playing President in the Oval office, that is precisely what it is. When they say "this is going to be great television" that is what they mean. And it also means we have to accept the reality that we are all actors playing Citizen in the same absurd drama. Yes I know perfectly well ( it is theatre) but nonetheless I will keep voting for change. Yes I know perfectly well that liberal capitalist "democracy" produces a constant assault on my dignity and constant anxiety but nonetheless...

Rare Earths

First, you have to love the U.S offering "protection" at the right price, which just happens to be valuable minerals. That's some straight-up mafia-style transactional-break the kneecap shit. When we use the term "naked" aggression it means it is not veiled, not supplied with an acceptable covering of diplomatic civility. Notice the liberal aversion to naked nationalism, the AmericaFirst agenda that dispenses with any pretense of leveling or aid or charity. How dare they abandon our precious narrative! We were helping the world "develop" so that the wealth gap wouldn't be so uneven. Sorry. Time to embrace the cruelty: Let Them Eat Mud Cookies! Now it is straight-up, out in the open smash and grab. All of it fueled by fossil fuels because that's where the profit is. No more "transition" bullshit. This "drill baby drill" mantra gets lost in the noise but I think it is exactly where you want to focus. It explains much of the rest because the new technologies which they are betting will save capitalism requires ungodly amounts of energy (and water). A changing climate will not be allowed to limit this expansion. Except that it will. This is not a Real that anyone wants to face. So we disavow. Otherwise we would have to face the far more traumatic reality of a greedy and self-enjoying a-subjective system of which no one is really or fully in control, namely Capital. Soy bean farmers in Iowa nervous about "export policy". "A thousand telephones that will not ring." The dessicated corpses of migrants who got lost in the Arizona desert. Laughing hyenas and clapping seals as the Naked King delivers punch lines and hands out treats to the audience. Israel’s foreign ministry saying on X on Tuesday night that Mr. Trump’s idea was “an opportunity for the Gazans to have free choice based on their free will. This should be encouraged!” What he didn't say was: And Enjoyed!