Wertheimer [any] @ Wertheimer @hexbear.net

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128

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Joined

5 yr. ago

If I remember correctly, there are only two things that all the sources agree Jesus said:

1. The church is like a mustard seed
2. Divorce is bad

Back at the convention the next morning, a Border Patrol agent was walking the agency’s emotional support dog around the conference perimeter. Her name was Willow, her handler said, and she was 5 years old.

She was giant and soft, with impeccable fur, and had already flown to sixteen different countries. She belonged to a special, docile German breed called the Leonburger and her job was to confer warmth to Border Patrol agents on the verge of committing suicide. She would work as long as she wanted to work and was hungry for lunch, the handler said.

Willow should quit her job without giving notice.

Pack them anyway - they're phasing this out in different airports and one of your stops may not have the machines they prefer.

Passengers flying out of Hancock International Airport in Syracuse, New York, did not have to take off their shoes on Monday, CNN affiliate WSTM reported. However, on Tuesday morning at Chicago O’Hare, CNN affiliate WLS saw passengers still being asked to remove footwear.

We gotta rename hexbear.net/PPB

That thumbnail tho

75 hours until Trump holds an interview while wearing a "Not Involved In Human Trafficking" shirt

It seems all of us, the Trump administration included, underestimated the number of people who genuinely believed that Trump hung out with Epstein so as to "keep your friends close, but your enemies closer." I think we all thought that was bad faith but it turns out some folks were just that gullible, and even they have a limit.

(They'll forget about it in a week, probably, but it's been interesting to observe.)

Was that Knut Hamsun? Let's hope it was only one.

Hamsun's novels are actually really great. I haven't seen the biopic so maybe he went bad earlier than I think, but if only he'd dropped dead the day he won his Nobel instead of living another 32 years.

Someone must have told him about it last night because his most recent tweet sez:

"To all the socialists: the labour theory of value, posited by Marx, is total horseshit. Reality has disproven it again and again."

Robert Chapman's Empire of Normality is exactly what you're looking for

If you and your spouse are both on SSI I believe your combined benefits drop by at least 1/3.

Um, actually, Marx never wrote about "value" at all. He does have a bunch of texts about something called "Wert," which if I'm not mistaken is a non-cancerous form of viral growth usually occurring on the hands or feet.

And this from a dude who was himself a settler-colonialist!

I have an "invisible disability," at least on my better days, so I can see this attitude in some people's faces when they ask me what I do for a living.

And yet. About 30% of all income in the U.S. is unearned. Benefits payments are a small portion of that, and the vast, vast majority of benefits payments like SSI ultimately end up in the hands of landlords. But somehow my disability check makes chuds angrier than the fact that most of that check goes to rent.

The owners of this wealth, or capital, capture around 30 percent of the income produced by the country every year. This income flows to them, not because they work for it, but merely because they own income-generating assets like real estate, equity, and debt. In 2015, total US capital income was around $4.8 trillion.

If this unearned portion of the national income was distributed equally to every individual in society, then each person would receive around $15,000 of income per year in addition to whatever else they receive from working. For a family of four, this dividend alone would bring their household income to $60,000 per year.

$15,000, incidentally, is more than the maximum annual SSI payment. So even if so-called "laziness" were classified as a disability it would actually be the "lazy" who are getting a raw deal.

Found this article but most everything that Google is giving me is from paywalled academic journals - if you have any other recommended reading please let me know.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/some-critics-argue-internal-colony-theory-outdated-heres-why-theyre-wrong

Edit - Particularly interested in more recent work. The Robert Allen study on internal neocolonialism they cite is from 1969 and the Lawrence Friedman book that discusses "differential segregation" is from 1970, and I'm curious to see this applied to post-2008 developments as well.

Over the last forty years, the human landscape of the United States has been fundamentally transformed. The metamorphosis is partially visible in the ascendance of glittering, coastal hubs for finance, infotech, and the so-called creative class. But this is only the tip of an economic iceberg, the bulk of which lies in the darkness of the declining heartland or on the dimly lit fringe of sprawling cities. This is America’s hinterland, populated by towering grain threshers and hunched farmworkers, where laborers drawn from every corner of the world crowd into factories and “fulfillment centers” and where cold storage trailers are filled with fentanyl-bloated corpses when the morgues cannot contain the dead.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/H/bo28433484.html

Article: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-of-life/

The analysis, from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP), looks beyond whether people can afford daily necessities like food and shelter to consider whether they have the means to pay for things like the technology tools necessary for their jobs, higher education, and health and child care.

(More in the other thread)

Article: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-of-life/

The analysis, from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP), looks beyond whether people can afford daily necessities like food and shelter to consider whether they have the means to pay for things like the technology tools necessary for their jobs, higher education, and health and child care.

...

The Ludwig Institute also says that the nation's official unemployment rate of 4.2% greatly understates the level of economic distress around the U.S. Factoring in workers who are stuck in poverty-wage jobs and people who are unable to find full-time employment, the U.S. jobless rate now tops 24%, according to LISEP, which defines these groups as "functionally unemployed."

...

By those standards, the lowest-earning Americans around the U.S. are falling well short of what they need to maintain a decent standard of living, according to LISEP. These households, which in 2023 earned an average of $38,000 per year, would need to make $67,000 to afford the items the group tracks as part of its index, which also includes the cost of professional clothing and basic leisure activities.