Very clever for liquid capital to cause large masses of society to support open borders and unrestricted immigration for “humanitarian” reasons, when these same forces have precipitated the crises in the countries from which people are fleeing.

Of course this is all in service of disruption of both the societies from which the displaced are fleeing, and they ones into which they find themselves. Reducing wages, sowing political discontent and nativism, breaking political systems — all of these are goals, and being achieved quite well.

Absolutely brilliant, from a dispassionate, Machiavellian point of view: using people’s (especially liberals’) compassion and desire to assist those in need to destroy societal relations and to advance the interests of the 1% and liquid capital.

It’s just genius, and even more so because most don’t and aren’t permitted by their own ideology to ever discover the con.

What a shot.

Without a space in
The widening world, no hold
Is found in dreaming

One of the major flaws of Wonder Woman was too much of characters focusing on Wonder Woman’s attractiveness and too little focus on how unusual and extraordinary she would have seemed in 1918 London — far more and in utterly different ways than the movie stressed.

People wouldn’t have noticed that she was pretty. At least not at first. They’d have noticed that she was an assertive, dominant giant.

Average male height in the UK in 1918 was around 168cm. I can’t find specific figures for London, but at that time people in most major (especially very polluted cities like 1918 London) were shorter. But we’ll go with 168cm or 5’6″.

There is no canonical source for Wonder Woman’s height, but many list her as being 6’3″ or 190.5cm. Gal Gadot is herself 5’10” or 178cm.

Gadot herself — not Wonder Woman — would’ve towered over the average man of the time, and would’ve likely been taller than nearly every man she encountered — if using only Gadot’s natural height, not Wonder Woman’s likely stature. In other words, Gadot herself would’ve been nearly a head taller than most men of that time.

Wonder Woman, though, would’ve been just herculean as compared to the average male in 1900s London. She would’ve absolutely stuck out (not for that alone, but certainly for that more than her beauty).

Gwendolyn Christie is 6’3″. Here she is next to a guy who is 5’8″. Consider that the average male height at the time was a full two inches shorter than that.

Finally saw Wonder Woman.

Not much to say about it. Poorly written and with too many pointless action sequences and with not enough dialog.

Thank the gods, though, for Gal Gadot. She is truly a superhero because she alone saved the movie. Without her, that twaddle wouldn’t’ve been worth a viewing.

But she makes it worth it. Ignore the plot, ignore most of the action sequences, but watch it for Gadot and her portrayal. She takes the godawful dialog and forges it into something witty and interesting, and somehow vivifies trite scenes I’ve viewed in a dozen other films, importing life and fun into them from who knows where.

The sexual “morality” of the left and the right is strikingly similar, though framed very differently: the left frames it as “protection from harm” while the right frames it as “propriety and modesty” but since both dwell in and unconsciously take their propensities from the culture in which both dwell, essentially they are both sex-phobic, with the left pretending to be sexually open — but they aren’t really at all.

I’m one of the few liberals who has dwelled in both very conservative, patriarchal cultures and extremely left-wing ones, and sexually, most Americans are comically repressed.

A work friend of mine who is not American says things constantly like, “Gah! Americans are such prudes!” And she’s not talking about conservatives.

The average left-wing “sexually open” American would in Germany be considered a puritan goody-goody.

But it’s the culture; hard for people to see when they’re in it.

As the Northwest Boils, an Aversion to Air-Conditioners Wilts.

Funny how all the sanctimonious “No one really needs air conditioning” claptrap disappears when it starts getting really hot, like it does in the South.

I utterly despise cold, but if there were no AC, I’d not live south of New York state. About half of the country would not be very survivable without cool air piped in, and I’d certainly not be able to work — especially not doing anything remotely intellectual.

Charter has moved millions of customers to new—and often higher—pricing.

Yep! And are also completely unreliable. Until we switched to AT&T fiber, Spectrum’s service would go down as often as 20 times a day. For weeks. In fact, when we called to cancel our account after not using it for nearly a month, the service was down. The rep told me over the phone.

Thus, the switch to AT&T. Despite my trepidation, it’s completely reliable, 3.5 times as fast (and 25x as fast up), and costs $30 per month less.

Fuck you, Spectrum. Fuck you very much.

The recently invented and made-up word 'neoliberal' here, being used by Horkheimer (writing in English) in 1946 pic.twitter.com/oitoxDp3DS

— Tom Whyman (@HealthUntoDeath) August 2, 2017

Erasure of history and gaslighting of those who attempt to historicize an ideology is perhaps the most common way to derail discussion of said ideology.

Trump Is Destroying Our Democracy.

No. Neoliberalism and its festering destroyed our democracy, aided and abetted by both Republicans and Democrats who benefited from it.

Trump is a symptom, not a cause.

People like Mounck prospered under the status quo, so they are mourning its demise. Meanwhile, when it was truly time to resist they never did much or cared much about all the forgotten folks who suffered and continue to suffer and to die under the reign of neoliberalism. I bet Mounck supported TARP, for instance.

People who oppose Trump and who didn’t oppose Obama are not worth a damn in my book.

Here’s my new ride. It’s a 2017 Chevy SS. Really it’s just a re-badged Australian Holden Commodore, with the Chevy bowties slapped on and a few other minor changes.

It’s been (intentionally) sold in low numbers in the US, which many car reviewers seem not to understand. Never advertised, and not intended as anything more than a special-interest car, it filled a niche for those who don’t like driving testosterone apocalypses but still want performance and speed. And damn, does it have both of those.

The car looks black in many photos, but actually is it somewhat darker than British Racing Green. Here it is in less favorable light but where the color can be seen well.

It’s the last of its breed; no carmakers in the future will for a variety of reasons sell large (it doesn’t look it in these photos, but it’s quite a big car) sedans with huge V-8s in them ever again. 2017 was the last year for the SS and for any Holden.

But if I have to drive, I decided I’d rather do it in something I actually enjoy. Hence the new beast.

The SS handles and drives like a car half its weight and size. Notice the huge brakes? They’ll stop it from 60-0 in 108 feet — which is amazing for a car that tips the scales at nearly 4,000 pounds. By comparison, the braking distance of a 2016 Nissan Maxima is 123 feet. So when I brake, I have to be very careful as few cars on the road can stop as quickly as this one. And it does 0-60 in 4.5 seconds, which is just preposterous in the best of ways.

Here’s what Motor Trend had to say about this car’s demise.

I have the automatic because I drove stick for over 10 years and don’t want to do it anymore, but I agree with every word of that review. It’s the best car I’ve ever driven, including a few cars twice its price. It’s a joy to drive, and has none of the balkiness of similarly-powered cars and almost no quirks. It just does exactly what you want it to do, every time. And it’s completely reliable even for being so powerful — GM’s LS engines are among the most dependable in the world.

So it looks like a family sedan but handles and drives closer to a Corvette or a Maserati. And because I don’t believe in paying BMW badge prices, I got it for half the price that suckers pay for “badge” cars.

Now a few more photos.

Monthly premiums for California health insurance plans sold under the Affordable Care Act will rise by an average of 12.5% next year.

But Kevin Drum and Amanda Marcotte said it was all lies! Who you gonna believe, Drum and Marcotte or your lyin’ eyes and bleeding wallet?

The increase is disingenuously attributed to uncertainty in the health care market, but that’s just a canard as they also rose 13% last year.

Trumpcare would’ve killed you by you not having healthcare at all.

The ACA kills you by bankrupting you and driving you to opioid addition to cope with your miserable life.

Or as Kevin Drum says, “All is well cuz I got mine!”

Not only should publicly-funded research results be freely available, but the researchers or someone actually decent at writing should be required to write up the paper in a form that a normally-intelligent high school graduate could understand the majority of.

No, this isn’t easy. I’ve done this sort of task before. And some things can’t be simplified and retain any semblance of rectitude. In reality, though, most things can be distilled a great deal without losing much accuracy at all. In my experience, something like 60%+ of jargon is intra-domain signaling and not that useful even to the practitioners.

I’m fairly intelligent, by most accounts. And it takes me several hours to read a 50-page paper and truly understand it — and that’s in fields I know something about. In fields I do not, it could be days.

I just don’t have time to read all the things I’d like to, and the average person simply won’t read anything at all in the format in which most papers are presented.

This won’t increase greatly the rate at which papers are read by laypeople. I’m under no illusions here. It will, though, likely make journalistic synopses more accurate and it will make it easier for people like me to read papers who just don’t have time to devote to it as more than a small part-time pursuit.

I know: there is no funding for this and there is not likely to be. But as a semi-utopian vision, it is a good one.