All posts by Joseph

Political Rants

That’s one small step for money.

The increasingly crusty-looking billionaire owner of Virgin Galactic Richard Branson took a sub-orbital flight aboard a rocket plane last week. News outlets like MSNBC spent nearly an entire day’s worth of air time covering this monumental achievement and the presser/victory rally that followed. So, just to be clear – a self-obsessed billionaire essentially did what Yuri Gagarin did sixty years ago, and somehow it’s news.

Of course, there’s more to this than space flight. On one level, it’s a childish pissing match between three billionaires – Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk – all of whom want to CONQUER SPACE. More than that even, it’s a marketing effort, helped along by drooling press coverage by everyone from CNBC to the New York Times.

Ticket to nowhere

The Times article made note of the fact that the cost of a ticket on one of Branson’s rocket-planes rose from $200K to $250K since they first went on sale, perhaps dampened somewhat by a crash in 2014. “For the vast majority of Americans,” the Times correspondent observes, “the cost of such a trip is out of reach.” Can’t get anything past these people.

Not that the vast majority of Americans will be missing anything. After all, Virgin is offering a trip to space, not a trip from one place to another. It’s basically a carnival ride for the uber wealthy. And believe me, those people have no shortage of carnival rides as it is.

A modest proposal

Now, people might justly accuse me of being hostile, even abusive with respect to the uber rich. Fair enough. Mea culpa! But at the risk of providing even more fuel for this accusation, I have a modest suggestion to make. Now that Branson has banked all this free advertising from MSNBC, CNBC, and various print media outlets, there are ways that his little space enterprise might actually do humanity some good.

If this media carnival around the flight of the VSS Unity has its desired effect, billionaires might buy tickets like hotcakes. Hopefully, that will prompt Branson and his various competitors to start offering excursions to the Moon, Mars, and other reachable planets. With Earth currently on fire as a product of their collective greed, our Billionaires may be tempted to spend longer and longer periods of time on other planets. If that happens, all we need to do is bar re-entry. That would take care of our billionaire problem, full stop.

Or, we could do the more practical thing and just tax the living piss out of them. That solution doesn’t make for great television, but it has the virtue of eliminating unaccountable power in a very practical and do-able way. All it takes is the will to do it.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Usual Rubbish

Someone put a crimp in Lincoln’s style

2000 Years to Christmas

Ring the bell tower. We don’t have one? Well, then pull the fire alarm. What? No fire alarm? Are you telling me we’ve been squatting here for twenty years and there’s no freaking fire alarm? I am depressed.

Hello and welcome to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. I’m afraid you find us in crisis mode this week. We’ve just received a ransom message from the former King of the Catskills (or so they claim) saying that they’ve kidnapped Anti-matter Lincoln and are demanding a considerable forfeit for his safer return.

My lack of god! Will these scoundrels stop at nothing? They abduct an obvious senior citizen – Anti Lincoln is 196 if he’s a day – and cart him off like a sack of grain in hopes of squeezing riches out of his squat-mates. He went off to take his constitutional this morning (he always takes the constitution for a little walk first thing) and when he didn’t return, we knew something was up.

Crimped like a sea dog

Now, this would be bad enough if Anti-Lincoln were just being held somewhere against his will. That, sadly, is not the case. The nefarious King of the Catskills has informed us that Anti-Lincoln has been consigned to a chain gang. They’re sending him to work the butterscotch mines outside of St. Johnsville. In other words, they crimped the bastard!

Look …. I’ve seen what butterscotch mining can do to a man. That’s hard labor. Someone of Anti-Lincoln’s age and temperament won’t last a week. We’re sending Marvin (my personal robot assistant) with a jug of water and a flashlight to see if he can help. Chances are good, though, that they’ll just crimp Marvin as well and put him on the automation detail.

This could work.

Go fund my ass

What can we do? Well …. the kidnappers want crypto currency, so we were thinking maybe a fundraiser – setting up crowdfunding to bail Anti-Lincoln out. Either that or busking on the corner for bit coin. Of course, we’re terrible at raising money under any circumstances, so that seems kind of like a non-starter.

We could also try to beam him out of there using Trevor James Constable’s patented Orgone Generating Device. Of course, that would require knowing his precise location. A few feet off and we could be beaming a Lincoln-shaped column of molten butterscotch into our living room. (Something I don’t want to even contemplate.)

Wait a minute …. Anti Lincoln just walked in through the front door. And apparently he knows nothing of this kidnapping business. It’s almost as if the King of the Catskills made it all up. Sheesh …. can’t trust anyone these days.

Political Rants

When labor remembers how to say no

What keeps a worker going to the job, day after day, even if s/he hates it like fire? The need for money, mostly. During the pandemic, however, that need was outweighed by something more basic – namely, the desire to stay alive.

When going to work began to entail risking your life for a broad swath of workers, those who had a choice in the matter chose to remain at home. The government made some effort to facilitate this, at least in some segments of the economy. There were those deemed essential workers who were compelled to risk their lives. This included many undocumented immigrants who picked our food and cared for our elderly while we hid from COVID.

Now that Americans are being strongly encouraged to return to their desks, their machines, their stations, etc., many are reluctant to do so. No doubt some folks have decided that this was an opportune time to drop out of the workforce entirely. Others are not convinced it’s safe. But I suspect many are holding back from returning to their crappy jobs because, frankly, they’ve had it with that shit, and who can blame them?

King Tut-Tut

Enter Donny Deutsch, some second-generation ad man who shows up on MSNBC every five minutes to share some rhetorical pearls of dubious provenance. Deutsch squeezed out this gem on Twitter the other day, then expanded on it when he appeared on Morning Joe:

Has the American work ethic softened? Maybe a little too much coddling of employees going on… just saying

So apparently this trust fund baby feels like capital isn’t disciplining labor sufficiently in the wake of the COVID shutdown. He feels like employers are being too flexible and are letting their workers work from home, etc. That’s undermining the “work ethic”. (I know he doesn’t own his dad’s business anymore, but if he did, I could tell you exactly why HIS employees wouldn’t be returning to the office. )

Green Solutions

It likely wouldn’t occur to someone like Deutsch that there is an obvious capitalist solution to the problem he’s describing. It’s called pay people more. It’s called treat them better.

Most of the jobs he’s talking about are ones that can easily be done remotely. If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that all this driving back and forth to office complexes is a tremendous waste of energy and resources. Even with many people choosing to stay out for a variety of reasons, I imagine a large percentage of those who’ve returned to the office work for an employer who is doing what Deutsch so admires – demanding that they sit at their workstation and look busy.

Times like these, I truly think that capitalism only survives by virtue of worker complacency, hopelessness, and cynicism. When some outside factor, like COVID, shakes things up, for a hot moment they can see the stupidity of this owner-wage slave relationship and start demanding more. There’s your silver lining.

luv u.

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.