Sophianotloren

I am only one generation removed from the history of African American migrants who, between 1917 and 1970, travelled North seeking economic opportunity, education, and respite from the strictures of Jim Crow South. The story that unfolds in the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North is therefore a deeply personal one. On my third and most recent visit, my pulse raced with anticipation as I walked toward the main gallery, even though I knew what was to come. The sound of many languages echoed throughout the hall as people from all over the world gathered to partake in the stories of my grandfather and grandmother, who both made their own migration North, where they settled in Wilmington, Delaware, and worked at a Chrysler factory for years. My grandfather was born and raised in rural Alabama. My grandmother picked cotton on a farm in Virginia.

For this reason, as a viewer I felt both grateful for the captions that accompany each image, written in Lawrence’s deceptively simplistic prose — “they did not always leave because they were promised work in the North. Many of them left because of Southern conditions … they were unable to make a living where they were” — and simultaneously possessed by a selfish impulse to shout at my fellow patrons: “This is living history!” It is not bound by the glass case holding its artifacts; neither is it a story book with a clear beginning and end that the rustic style of Lawrence’s illustrations might suggest.

Without rendering individuals as literary or political symbols, One-Way Ticket is a story we continue to see play out in the news, in courtrooms, and in overpoliced Black communities every day. It is prescient timing that this collection is brought together for the first time in 20 years, as One-Way Ticket is in direct dialogue with recent violence we’ve seen directed at Black bodies from Baltimore to New York, and in other urban centers where so many Black people concentrated during the Great Migration — and where they would be patrolled for years to come.

The tempera panels themselves, positioned side by side, are like cells in a stock-reel animation. You can feel the hustle and bustle of the people and almost hear the scream of the train cars. Like Lawrence’s other collections, One-Way Ticket depicts a defining moment in African American history. His larger body of work also covers the life and times of Fredrick Douglass, the story of the Underground Railroad and journeywoman Harriet Tubman, and the Haitian revolution and leadership of Toussaint L’Overture.

Based on subject matter alone, his work could easily be read as uncomplicated narratives of Black heroism. A closer read, however, reveals a dark irony and macabre sense of humor that borders on the subversive.

In panel 16, for instance, a black woman slumps over a kitchen table in utter defeat. The caption reads: “Although the Negro was used to lynching, he found this an opportune time for him to leave where one had occurred.” Stated with a dry, almost casual tone, this caption both articulates the feeling of resignation and abandonment that the slumped woman conveys, while the odd word choice captures the absurdity and despair that must inhabit a place where there is anything “opportune” seen in a lynching.

In panel 44, after outlining the many reasons why Black people migrated to the North in the great numbers that they did — famine, floods, lack of education, Jim Crow, and lynchings — Lawrence reminds us with dubious conviction: “Living conditions were better in the North.” This statement is made without any support and is paired with the cartoonish image of a T-bone steak, like something in a mirage. The set of panels that follow dispel this myth, acknowledging that, in fact, life in the North for a majority of Blacks did not mean T-bone steak, but labor camps, housing discrimination, unhealthy living conditions, and race riots. Lawrence upturns the question of what was “better” or “worse” for Black people, honing in instead on the cross-cutting and overarching systems of oppression that define both the American North and South.

Finally, in an image meant to illustrate (and critique?) the role of the black church as a social hub of growing urban Black communities, the black congregation joins in worship, overlooked by a mural of a white Jesus and Mother Mary.

The adjoining rooms contain a vast collection of photographs, paintings, writings, and archival footage from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. Over the speakers an array of African American musicians and composers offer a soundtrack to this experience that ranges from the epic sweep of William Grant Still’s symphonies to the back-water-blues of Bessie Smith.

Other highlights include the streaming archival footage of Billie Holiday crooning “Strange Fruit.” Slinking on stage in a shimmery knit dress, thin and wan, her lips curl around the notes as she leads you on a journey. You can see the Spanish moss and smell the rot of Magnolias, sweet and fresh.

The photography collection, subtitled The Artist as Historian, stands as one of the most impressive features of One-Way Ticket, containing work by Ben Shahn, including “Picking Cotton, Pullaski County Arkansas” (October 1935), and Gordon Parks, “Children with Doll, Washington DC” (1942). Paired with the thunder of Paul Robeson’s rendition of “Ol Man River” (1928), you can hear the clouds gather on the horizon of Shahn’s “Picking Cotton,” and almost feel the breeze through the cotton stalks as the subject’s gaze strikes the viewer as vast as the landscape.

Parks’s “Children with Doll” is equally enigmatic, depicting two knobby-kneed black children affectionately posing with a blond and blue-eyed baby doll. Here, Parks centers a discourse on the roles that advertising culture, media, and representation play in the systemization of oppression and the stigmatization of Blackness, echoing the symbolism of Lawrence’s conspicuous white Jesus.

In another astonishing photo by Parks, “Bedroom Wall (Woman in her bedroom, Southwest section, Washington, DC)” (1942), a Black woman in a work dress sits on the edge of a bed, her hands resting behind her as she gazes into the distance. In the reflection of a round mirror the viewer glimpses her in a private and no doubt rare moment of stillness. Behind her is a dresser with a circle-shaped vanity. The “O” of the vanity creates a circle within the circle of the reflecting mirror — a black hole, a distortion. Next to her reflection hangs a photograph of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, his iconic, white face intruding on the composition, further alienating the woman’s sense of place. She is trapped, as it were, in a hall of mirrors. She could be my grandmother, and, incidentally, a description of the image reveals that, like my grandmother, at one point in her life, this woman too made a living cooking and cleaning for white people. Looking at the woman in this photograph and the range of other familiar images, sounds, and aesthetics that make up One-Way Ticket, it becomes clear to me that this isn’t just my history or an African American story, and neither is it the past exactly. This is American life.

One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North continues at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (11 W 53rd St, Midtown West, Manhattan) through September 7. 

Trumpmania is what you get after the conservative wasn't compassionate and the liberal abandoned hope for change. He's a symptom, not a cure

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) August 31, 2015

...In your weird fetish to be “objective”, the Republicans learned the little trick that makes you dance like organ grinder monkeys. Whatever goofy-assed idea they came up with, you’d reflexively cede them half the distance between the truth and their goal.

There was a book I loved when I was a little driftglass called, “Half Magic” by Edgar Eager, about a talisman that granted the user exactly half of what they asked for. Wish to be ten times stronger that Lancelot, you’ll get five. Wish for a million in cash, you get 500K. In the Mainstream Media, the Right Wing of the Republican Party found their Half Magic Charm. And each time you met them halfway, they moved the goalposts another twenty yards again...and you jogged right on along behind them, ten yards at a time.

The “compromise” between the truth and a lie...is a lie. The “compromise” between science and superstition...is superstition. Now, would you care to guess what the compromise between tolerance and bigotry is? Between knowledge and ignorance? Between Ann Coulter and Paul Krugman?

...

For over 20 years, the Right Wing has gotten fat and rich and powerful running the same scam on you buffoons over and over again. No matter how batshit crazy their position is, you’ll concede half the stage, half the clock and give them the benefit of the doubt. Which give them an automatic victory. They showed up at the table with little more that bad-acid delusions, and now the control 50% of the battlefield because you defaulted it right into their laps.

And when you don’t completely capitulate to 100% of their insanity, they turn right around and feed that into their own Pravada Media as Further Proof of the evil left wing media conspiracy.

“Victim,” they shriek. “Anti-religious Bigot!” They rant this from the rooftops because of the tiny bit of sane ground you did not surrender...and you jellied eels dependably cave in even more.

And thus they have led you – and the rest of the nation you whose common interests you were supposed to be serving -- by these half measures, right into the foyer of your own slaughterhouse.

It’s really quite an amazing story. Too bad we don’t have a press anymore to report it.

The only thing that has changed in the last 10 years is that any remnant of the myth of Beltway media's ignorant complicity is now completely gone.  By now it is clear that deliberately flogging the Big Lie of Both Siderism no matter what has been their business model all along.

Ben Carson knows exactly what BLM should be doing.

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The biggest obstacle a protest movement faces isn’t resistance from people on the other side. Quite the opposite: One purpose of protest actions is to make your opponents come out of the shadows and demonstrate the previously hidden power dynamics that hold the status quo in place.

So when Sheriff Clark deputized all the adult white males of Dallas County and met protest marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, he didn’t break the Civil Rights movement, he made it. He showed the world that the relationship between the races in Alabama was predicated on officially sanctioned white violence.

Clark didn’t know it, but he was following the script Martin Luther King had laid out two years earlier in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail“:

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.

Drama needs a villain, and Clark had unwittingly signed up for the role.

So if people like Sheriff Clark and Bull Connor are not an activist movement’s biggest obstacle, what is? The people who say, “I agree with your goals, but you’re doing it all wrong.” They compare an actual social-action movement, one that is organizing in the real world and doing things, to their own fantasy movement, which they are not lifting a finger to make real. So what their criticism actually promotes is not a competing real-world program of action, but a passivity that says: “Not this. Not here. Not now.”

In MLK’s day, the criticism centered on timing: Wasn’t King pushing for too much too fast, without giving his white moderate allies time to take the smaller, more deliberate actions that seemed reasonable to them? His Birmingham-jail letter answered:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

This is the proper context for reading Ben Carson’s recent op-ed in USA Today: “#BlackLivesMatter misfire“. Carson’s objection to the BLM protests isn’t time, it’s target. But his message is otherwise very much the same as the pseudo-sympathetic moderates who bedeviled King: Not this.

Carson’s fantasy protest movement (which he is not lifting a finger to make real) would find a better target than police violence against blacks.

The notion that some lives might matter less than others is meant to enrage. That anger is distracting us from what matters most. We’re right to be angry, but we have to stay smart.

Of course, the protesters are right that racial policing issues exist and some rotten policemen took actions that killed innocent people. Those actions were inexcusable and they should be prosecuted to deter such acts in the future.

But unjust treatment from police did not fill our inner cities with people who face growing hopelessness. Young men and women can’t find jobs. Parents don’t have the skills to compete in a modern job market. Far too many families are torn and tattered by self-inflicted wounds. Violence often walks alongside people who have given up hope.

He goes on to list some better targets for protest: school boards that don’t educate black children, entertainment corporations that glamorize black thuggery, city governments that tolerate unsafe black neighborhoods, crack houses in black neighborhoods, and the two major political parties.

And you know something? There’s no point in arguing with him about those targets, because they’d all be good. In the same way that Carson can say “the protesters are right” about racial policing issues, I can likewise support his fantasy protesters.

But you know who is perfectly positioned to start such protests in the real world? Ben Carson. He is a presidential candidate with a considerable following — second to Donald Trump in a lot of recent Republican presidential polls. TV crews and newspaper reporters follow him wherever he goes. They’re just waiting for him to make some actual news.

Imagine if Carson had closed his op-ed by announcing a march on Baltimore’s city hall or a sit-in in front of the Chicago Board of Education. Unlike most BLM leaders, Carson could absolutely guarantee coverage on all major TV networks. Pundits all over the country would talk about his demands and the problems they addressed.

Who knows? If Carson is right in his criticism of BLM, if they have legitimate grievances but are misguided tactically, then his better-targeted protests might change the whole national conversation. He might make BLM irrelevant by drawing bigger crowds, raising more energy, and having a more direct impact.

Or consider one of the other things he says needs to be done:

Finally, we need to go over to the Republican Party. We need to tell them they have ignored us for too long. They need to invite us in and listen to us.

But Ben: You just appeared in a Republican presidential debate that 28 million people watched on TV! The GOP invited you in and they were listening to you. Why didn’t you raise any racial issues then?

Imagine if Carson had used his closing statement to call out the Republican Party for ignoring the black community and minimizing its issues — exactly what he says needs to be done. That clip would have been replayed on every news network in the country. It might even have taken Donald Trump out of the headlines for a day or two.

But he didn’t do that.

Here’s the point Carson’s op-ed glides over: There’s room for more than one protest in the world. Nobody has given BLM the monopoly on expressing black frustration or fighting for social justice, so nobody has to stop BLM before starting a rival movement. Just because one group picks one set of targets doesn’t stop another group from picking different ones.

Anybody who thinks he has a better way to promote change and racial justice is perfectly free to go that way. If you think BLM is doing it wrong, then go out and do it right.

If that’s really what you want to do.

But what if your purpose is to support the status quo, and maybe to gain the gratitude of the Powers That Be by helping derail and delegitimize the only effective action that’s currently happening? Then you should do what Ben Carson is doing: Fantasize about protest movements that could be happening, but aren’t.

Because that’s one thing the Powers That Be can always count on: Fantasy protests never change anything.

atopfourthwall:

amimijones:

loisfreakinglane:

endless evidence that peter parker is most interesting as a former teen superhero defending and dispensing advice to current teen superheroes

atopfourthwall

GEE IT’S ALMOST LIKE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT AND AGING IS BENEFICIAL.

Spider-Man is the superhero equivalent of the billionaire who dropped out of college who gives speeches to kids about how they should stay in school.

Authors United, a trade guild representing 500 authors, submitted a formal request to the Department of Justice seeking an investigation into Amazon, accusing the online retailer of violating antitrust laws. The guild alleges Amazon is a monopoly responsible for price fixing. However, that might not be enough to prosecute Amazon, as Fortune points out:

But the more important point is that simply having a monopoly (in the sense of having a dominant share of a discrete market) isn’t a breach of U.S. antitrust law, although most people seem to believe that it is—or that it should be. What’s illegal is using that monopoly to stifle competition. And not just to stifle competition, but to do so in a way that makes things worse for consumers.

Related Posts:

• Amazon Monopoly Threatens Everything
• Publishers Earn More than Authors on E-Book Sales
• The Rumpus Interview with Richard Russo
• Japanese Bookstore Beats Amazon to the Punch
• This Week in Indie Bookstores

MEXICO CITY — “I’ll just keep on … till I get it right,” croons Tammy Wynette’s melancholy, droning voice to viewers as they enter Mexico City’s LABOR gallery, where a show titled after Ceal Floyer’s seminal sound work from 2005 is on view. Including sound, installation, video, photography, and painting, Till I Get It Right is rhythmic, with looping and repetitive pieces dating back to the 1970s alongside brand-new work commissioned for the show. Like a mixtape or a mash-up, the exhibition curated by Tim Goossens is a combination of elements repeated across time and/or space, suggesting self-reflective acceptance of the processes that define us or our work.

Wynette’s 1972 country hit, also titled “Til I Get It Right,” is about repeatedly falling in love, living through the pain, and accepting the imperfections of human existence. The original lyric says, “So I’ll just keep on falling in love, till I get it right.” Floyer’s choice to edit out the words “falling in love” leaves the phrase abstracted, barely discernible from the original yet open ended. In addition to the acceptance of trying and falling short, Floyer’s work asks: What are we trying to get right? How do we know what’s right?

As a contemporary artist, Floyer has more in common with Diplo or Skrillex than Wynette. She is a DJ who builds her work by appropriating and combining pieces of culture that already exist in the world; the use and editing of the country song speaks to her role as a remixer rather than an originator. The exhibition at LABOR is a sort of double appropriation, then, as it also showcases Goossens’s practice as a DJ, combining established and emerging artists with new and old work in one space. His selections suggest that success and failure are both fetishized as constructs of a capitalist regime which displaces them as unattainable — hypotheticals that exist only in the future and past. Till I Get It Right manages to be at once hopeful and melancholy, asking: Will we ever get it right?

In the main gallery space, a human-sized black orb is suspended in the air and drifts through the space. The piece by Edith Dekyndt, titled “Ground Control/Major Tom,” has a surreal presence: it looks heavy but floats freely. The reference to David Bowie’s 1969 “Space Oddity” furthers the idea that the show might be one big mixtape for overcoming heartache and alienation.

The orb floats up to the top of the gallery, within inches of the ceiling, and slowly descends again. Its movements are unpredictable. An apparent wink at our failure to control our own lives, its passage is affected drastically by a passing person or breath of air. The orb never rests. It moves silently through the space, like us, in constant pursuit. A metaphor and maybe an argument for the insistent change that shapes us, it blocks out the light falling on the walls. Ominous because of its size and color, it careens in and out of the viewer’s field of vision.

A looping video installation by Nicolas Provost shows a surfer forever dropping into the perfect wave — a never-ending leap of faith. The seamless loop creates an almost believable illustration of infinite achievement; the work embodies artificial perfection, dreams produced in studios and factories. At the same time, the video creates a paradise where dropping is the destination and process is the peak. The infinite moment of adrenaline suggests there is treasure in trying. While the phrase “Till I Get it Right” still implies the ideal of a destination — a particularly American obsession with individual progress and achievement — it also suggests the freedom to be exactly who we are.

Till I Get it Right continues at LABOR gallery (Gral. F. Ramírez 5, Daniel Garza, Miguel Hidalgo, 11830 Distriro Federal, Mexico City) through September 11.

Conservative media and Fox News in particular have spent years – decades, if you count talk radio – training their audiences to believe that exhortations against sexism and racism are nothing but the “political correctness” police trying to kill your good time. … You can’t tell people, day in and day out, that nothing is more fun than putting some mouthy broad in her place and then get upset when they continue to think it’s fun, even when the mouthy broad is one of yours.

— Amanda Marcotte “Why Fox News’ Defense of Megyn Kelly is Going to Backfire“

This week’s featured articles are “Hey, Nerds! Politics is a System. Figure it out.” and “Protesting in Your Dreams“.

This week everybody was talking about Hurricane Katrina

which hit New Orleans ten years ago Saturday. A bunch of interesting retrospectives have appeared.

Slate posted “The Myths of Katrina“, including the notion that “no one could have predicted” what happened. In fact, the gist of the disaster appeared in a local newspaper article three years earlier: the levee failures, and what would happen next:

Amid this maelstrom, the estimated 200,000 or more people left behind in an evacuation will be struggling to survive. Some will be housed at the Superdome, the designated shelter in New Orleans for people too sick or infirm to leave the city. Others will end up in last-minute emergency refuges that will offer minimal safety. But many will simply be on their own, in homes or looking for high ground.

… Hundreds of thousands would be left homeless, and it would take months to dry out the area and begin to make it livable. But there wouldn’t be much for residents to come home to. The local economy would be in ruins

The anniversary is an ambivalent moment. New Orleans is a viable city again, so that’s worth celebrating. But the recovery has been uneven, with upscale neighborhoods rebuilding quickly and many poorer areas still full of abandoned homes.

The new New Orleans is a smaller, somewhat wealthier, and definitely whiter city; about 100,000 of its black Katrina-refugees never returned. As 538 elucidates, these losses were concentrated among middle-income and upper-income blacks, particularly the young professionals. Among whites it’s the reverse: young white professionals and entrepreneurs are flocking in. Jacobin comments about one gentrifying neighborhood:

The declining poverty rate does not speak to some miraculous redistribution of wealth to working-class families, but rather to their forced exit amid a corresponding influx of high-income residents.

and another shooting

This one happened on live television.

With every new shooting, we go through the motions of trying to put gun control back on the agenda. But (as Dan Hodges summed up in a tweet) Newtown really kicked the life out of that movement. If massacres of white professional-class school children are acceptable, requiring not even a smidgen of change, it’s hard to raise energy to try again.

If you do decide to try again, Vox has collected data for you and presented it well. Two things stood out for me:

• We’re averaging about one mass shooting (i.e., 4+ victims) per day. So if the aftermath of a mass shooting is not an appropriate time to talk about gun control (because that would “politicize tragedy”), then there will never be an appropriate time.
• States with a lot of guns have about the same number of suicides-by-other-means as states with fewer guns, but quadruple the number of firearm-suicides. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that guns cause suicides. Remember that the next time you think about buying a gun. Someday you’ll be depressed, and you’ll know that gun is sitting there.

and 2016

A second poll confirms that Bernie Sanders really is ahead in New Hampshire. Another poll suggests he’s making serious gains in Iowa.

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I’m getting increasingly annoyed at the media coverage of both Sanders and Clinton.

You know which 2016 candidate is consistently drawing the biggest crowds? Not Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders. (BTW, Sanders beats Trump 45%-37% in a head-to-head match-up. So which one is the more serious candidate?)

And yet Bernie’s ability to draw a crowd is not news. Whether Trump’s recent rally in Alabama was bigger or smaller than Sanders’ rallies Portland and Los Angeles is open to interpretation. (Some estimates of Trump’s crowd were marginally larger than Sanders’.) But what’s not open to interpretation is the coverage: The news networks hyped Trump’s rally before it happened and treated it like a major event afterwards. But the sizes of Sanders’ crowds, when they get mentioned at all, are presented as weird little factoids.

When Sanders gets encouraging poll numbers, like the recent NH and Iowa ones I just mentioned, nobody says, “Wow! People really like this guy.” Nobody focuses on what he’s saying or why it’s inspiring so much enthusiasm. Instead, the story is about Clinton’s weakness: Democrats are so dissatisfied with Hillary that even Bernie Sanders might beat her in New Hampshire and Iowa.

And that brings me to the Clinton coverage, which has been even worse. The only stories you hear about Clinton consist of something-might-be-wrong-somewhere speculation about her emails. And yet, if you stick to the facts, it’s hard to justify the claim that anything actually is wrong. I’ve had a hard time finding a clear statement of what might be wrong, or a clear accusation whose truth or falsehood could be established. Quite likely this is Benghazi or Filegate or Vince Foster all over again.

I don’t see the media applying this maybe-something-somewhere-might-turn-out-to-be-bad standard to any other candidate. Rick Perry is under indictment. Scott Walker had an election-fraud investigation quashed under questionable circumstances by Wisconsin’s partisan Supreme Court. Like Clinton, Jeb Bush used a private email account while governor, and decided for himself which emails to release to the public. Marco Rubio has received “hundreds of thousands of dollars” of personal assistance from a billionaire he’s done political favors for.

Is any of that getting Clinton-style coverage? Coverage based on imagining what might turn out to be wrong (if new incriminating evidence somehow appears) rather than restricting attention to what we actually know? I’m not saying those stories should get that kind of attention, but why is the Clinton-email story getting it?

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Frank Bruni explores the mystery of why Donald Trump seems to be the choice of the GOP’s Evangelical Christian wing:

Let me get this straight. If I want the admiration and blessings of the most flamboyant, judgmental Christians in America, I should marry three times, do a queasy-making amount of sexual boasting, verbally degrade women, talk trash about pretty much everyone else while I’m at it, encourage gamblers to hemorrhage their savings in casinos bearing my name and crow incessantly about how much money I’ve amassed?

Has anybody seen a camel pass through the eye of a needle lately? That would explain it. Crooks and Liars compares Trump’s indifference to religion in his own life to Dick Cheney’s draft-dodging:

Right-wingers … don’t really care about whether a candidate or elected official has lived in accordance with their values. What they want is a candidate or elected official who will use their values (or, frankly, use anything) as a club to beat the people they don’t like — Democrats, liberals, immigrants, Muslims.

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A standard applause line at Trump rallies is when he says the Bible is his favorite book, but when pressed in an interview to pick out one or two favorite verses, he had no answer. In her recent interview with Trump, Sarah Palin referred to this as a “gotcha” question — I suppose because you can’t expect a good Christian to remember phrases like “the 23rd Psalm” or “the Sermon on the Mount” off the top of his head.

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Trump hasn’t produced any TV ads yet. (Whether or not he’ll spend the serious money necessary to buy TV time is my main criterion for determining whether he’s seriously running for president or just using his campaign to build his brand.) So Jimmy Kimmel made one for him:

Kimmel satirizes of the vagueness of Trump’s message, but that’s precisely what makes it dangerous: Trump’s vaguely targeted anger allows his audiences to imagine him railing against whatever makes them angry. Hence the calls of “white power” from his Alabama supporters.

The New Yorker has more:

On June 28th, twelve days after Trump’s announcement, the Daily Stormer, America’s most popular neo-Nazi news site, endorsed him for President: “Trump is willing to say what most Americans think: it’s time to deport these people.” The Daily Stormer urged white men to “vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents our interests.” …

Jared Taylor, the editor of American Renaissance, a white-nationalist magazine and Web site based in Oakton, Virginia, told me, in regard to Trump, “I’m sure he would repudiate any association with people like me, but his support comes from people who are more like me than he might like to admit.”

Trump also has earned the support of David Duke and various other white nationalists. He hasn’t sought their endorsements, but he doesn’t have to. He’s angry at a lot of the same people they hate. The exact why doesn’t matter.

Another implication of vagueness is even scarier: Without a lot of specific policy ideas, or a coherent political philosophy, or a political viewpoint expressed consistently through the years, the Trump campaign by default becomes a cult of personality. Trump’s America will be “great again” not because of any specific thing it will do, but because of him. Our greatness will follow from the greatness of our leader.

I think that’s why words like fascist are starting to crop up, and comparisons to Europe’s far-right movements.

and you also might be interested in …

When talking about the poor, it helps to have data about who they are.

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Here’s the scariest thing I saw this week.

A front page contributor on Red State comments:

There is no vocal advocate of Donald Trump’s GOP candidacy in 2016 that would tell you this publically, but I’ll bet $20 that a significant plurality of Trump’s backers feel what the women in this Youtube video below feel on a daily basis. They would only demur because they are sick and tired of being accused of racism for feeling the way they feel.

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and let’s close with some reassurance

Whatever you did this week, you didn’t screw up this badly.

I said I would post the audiobook version today, but we got to our stretch goal of $10,000 so fast I posted it over the weekend to thank people. So for those of you who don’t loiter on the Internet during the weekends, the complete audio, including the downloadable version, is here. Go get it!

I’m also super-pleased to say that as of 7:45 this morning, we raised $10,987.59 for Con or Bust, which funds conventions memberships for people of color. That’s a lot of convention memberships, and I’m really proud that of that accomplishment.

(Also, for those worried about it, an update on Con or Bust’s tax-deduction status; the short version is that it’s pretty likely you’ll be able to take that charitable deduction come tax time. So yay!)

My thanks to Alexandra Erin, who (as Theo Pratt) wrote something that it was a joy to narrate, and to Kate Nepveu, who as the administrator of Con or Bust kept track of incoming donations. I had the easy part; I just had to speak into a microphone. They did all the work.

And thank you, if you were one of the folks who donated to Con or Bust. It’s good to do good. And also, it’s not too late — you can still donate if you like.

I don’t have strong feelings about whether it was right for Vox to pull the essay it commissioned from Torbjörn Tännsjö about the “repugnant conclusion.” As a freelancer, I’m inclined to think that when you ask for something you shouldn’t then reject it because it was what you asked for.

On the other hand, as to whether Matthews or Klein is right about the merits of the essay…let me say that is unpersuasive in the extreme. Perhaps the fact that the core premises (we can know that most people are happy, people have an obligation to potentially make themselves significantly less happy out of an obligation to unborn people even when the ongoing existence of the human race is not an issue, etc.) remain begged questions is unavoidable in a brief essay. Presumably his scholarly work deals with these questions in more detail, although I would be shocked if he defended his assumptions convincingly.

But I don’t think he can get a pass for one particular elephant in the room. Klein mentions the issue of reproductive freedom. Tännsjö’s argument does seem to imply that it is immoral to abort a healthy fetus, although it doesn’t necessarily require that abortion be criminalized. But this is only the beginning of the gender equity problems. Pregnancy — even when a pregnant woman has access to decent medical care — cares substantial health risks and imposes substantial discomforts. Moreover, these burdens are not equally distributed. Only people with female reproductive organs can become pregnant; all but a vanishingly small minority of people who get pregnant identify as women. And because women are a historically subordinated class, they generally bear a disproportionate amount of the burdens of childcare as well as bearing the burdens of pregnancy. A claim that there is a moral duty to have as many children as possible entails massive gender inequities.

How does Tännsjö deal with this obvious objection? He doesn’t. At all. Indeed, the essay keeps saying “I” and “we” in the context of having children when the person who will get pregnant is in fact a “she.” And, needless to say, the fact that Tännsjö does not have to bear the health risks and discomforts of pregnancy makes it much easier for him to ignore them entirely when arguing that women have an obligation to maximize their reproductive output. Even in a short essay, to entirely ignore issues of gender equity in this context is, how shall I put this, repugnant.

Klein:

But the other issue was that the piece was commissioned when we were looking to launch a new section for unusual, provocative arguments. That section, for various reasons, didn’t launch (though maybe we’ll revisit it someday!), and so we didn’t have a place to put this piece where it felt to me like it would make editorial sense.

Whether or not they should have published it having commissioned it — and I’m inclined to think that Klein’s editorial judgment was sound — Tännsjö’s essay is a good illustration of why the idea of publishing “provocative” arguments for the contrarian sake of it should remain dead and buried.

One of the more difficult aspects of living as a sex worker is never knowing exactly whom you can trust. Sometimes even allies can say offensive things or break confidentiality. In the wake of such indiscretions, it’s sex workers themselves who are left to navigate that broken trust and the increased vulnerability that comes along […]

PARIS — Felice Varini’s environmental paintings can only be experienced in architectural space. A geometric abstract painter, his site-specific works are in the vein of Daniel Buren and Niele Toroni’s conceptual installations. Varini’s technique involves a light projection of a geometric drawing cast into a three-dimensional space that he then retraces and paints in.

Four of these wall paintings are now temporarily on view at the Parc de la Villette, which is a very large space freely open to the public. However, individual viewpoints selected by each visitor makes the découpage work feel personal, if you have the time and eye for it. Some folks I observed raced for those moments when the geometric forms cohere. Other visitors lingered in the broken-up side views (as I did). Three indoor works in La Villette en Suites Paintings must be entered into and moved around in for them to click. That is the only way of “getting” these meticulous in situ paintings. Take that, homogeneous three-dimensional material reality!

But the phenomenological experience of “getting there” in order to “get it” is the most attractive part: once I discovered the vantage point at which a coherent geometric form congeals, I found myself thinking so what, as if I’d encountered something of a gimmick. What is interesting is how, in my view, Varini uses architectural surfaces to create spatial paintings, not geometric forms per se. What is enjoyable is that moment of approaching a trompe l’oeil when space is reduced into a virtual two-dimensional image.

When moving through “Rouge jaune noir bleu entre les disques et les trapezes” (Black Blue Red Yellow Between Discs and Trapezoids) (2015), for example, the painting offers up kinetic, even ramshackle, super-cubist focal points. The color forms promised in the title only become coherent after navigating a considerable distance. This temporal experience of the work stresses the relational truth of perception.

With Varini, every visual path is also a path of meaning. “Sept carrés pour sept colonnes” (Seven Squares for Seven Columns) (2015) is more of an investigation of vision than an investigation of painting, thus reframing the fundamental principles of painting. The center of the image is composed of a geometric void, much like our cognitive experiences. Even from the “correct” vantage point, the blue image maintains its multi-centered, fragmentary character.

The figure-ground relationships in “Seven Squares for Seven Columns” are unstable and the gaze is anything but immobilized. With this work I experienced a reversal of three-dimensionality and two-dimensionality that felt like an LSD experience, where individual forms somewhat evaporate and dissolve into the environment, and there is an acute awareness of the substructure of reality.

The orange spiral of the largest painting, “Arcs de cercle sur diagonale” (Diagonal Arcs) (2015), interplays with the outdoor architecture of the Grande Halle on such a scale (it ends on the walls of the Cité de la Musique) that it does away with traditional framing devices. The pleasure of this work lies in the shifting viewpoints entertained on a long walk. The work’s initial le voilà moment is the way I first discovered Varini’s work with his “Vingt-trois disques évidés plus douze moitiés et quatre quarts” (Twenty-three Hollow Discs Plus Twelve Halves and Four Quarters) (2013) at the Dynamo Grand Palais show. I turned a corner and there it all was, hanging in front of me, already snapped into place. This is how Varini’s work is usually photographed. So with “Diagonal Arcs,” I started out with a cohesive form (albeit impressed with its scale) and as I walked through it I observed it breaking down. Which was a pleasurable experience. The airy shift between viewing the figurative plane and the physical space reminded me of certain analytical sculpture as influenced by Minimal Art, such as that by Fred Sandback.

But it was also hard not to perceive this way of working as another potential extravagant way of juxtaposing real estate and contemporary art — something that is more and more driven by commercial investment interests. This is a tendency that standardizes and flattens out both much public space and much art. I worry that Varini’s technique, while not guilty here, combines real estate and art so seamlessly that great caution must be taken with it.

“Diagonal Arcs” provoked me to look for the real in the virtual image, prompting my gaze to linger over the surfaces’ textural variations. I was no longer looking for a vantage point, but coming across fragments of a once tight, logo-like geometrical figure. This enhanced my understanding of depth of field and its vanishing — a vanishing that must be considered by artistic communities everywhere, who are endangered by real estate developers who increasingly use a branding method that relies heavily on architecture and art conjoining.

As such, Varini’s La Villette en Suites Paintings offers up a cautionary tale about both the use of painting and its spatial dispersal. Perhaps the time has come to designate other cultural objectives for it.

Felice Varini: La Villette en Suites Paintings continues at the Grande Halle & Pavillon Paul-Delouvrier, Parc de la Villette (211 Avenue Jean Jaurès, Paris) through September 13. 

On Monday, August 29, NRO's Jonah Goldberg advises people in New Orleans to "grow gills" (each post header below links back to the original):

ATTN: SUPERDOME RESIDENTS

I think it's time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you're working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he's not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It's never too soon to be prepared.

...
At every turn, the right has stepped up to the plate like John Cole and Cunning Realist, or revealed their race hatred, like the folks at the Corner. I mean, people like John Derbyshire have dug up their 1964 nigger hatred guide. I wonder if they pipe in Johnny Rebel and Skrewdriver as they work?

I think it reveals something else, that the divide on the right which is coming is going to be about how they see America. Joe Scarborough has long been a whipping boy for the left, but he actually stood up and tried to help people. The Manchester Union Leader, so right that it should be printed in German, ripped into Bush for his failures. I think a lot of these people see Americans in trouble and want to help them. They certainly act that way.
...

...

A couple of days ago I was reading a Bob Sommersby post chiding Atrios for calling the Corner folks racist. I had to admit that I don't read Bob much, and with that post, he simply entered irrelevancy. He went on about people being helped in "red states" and blogs recreating the yippies. It was weird, as if he had been living in a cave the last week. I know he has his hobby horses, but after that, I can't imagine anyone taking him seriously anymore.

Why?

Because I have never seen such racism in my life on or offline.

I posted the crap posted by the racists at the Corner, and frankly I'm stunned.

I'm also deliriously happy.

Why, because, they are shown to be the extremists that they are. When I call Jonah a racist, I will forever have his gills post to prove my point.

...

The Southern Strategy has been exposed for what it was, a fraud to con whites into hating blacks while benefitting the rich. Oddly enough, Bush's crony state has failed white Mississippi as badly as black New Orleans. Many conservatives have demanded both accountability and effective responses.

But there are others, like the folks at the Corner, who need to prove how good it is to be white.

You have to see Mark Williams on Headline News. Not only did the Dem react in horror, Karyn Bryant, who is biracial, was equally stunned and angry. OxyBoy Rush called NO Mayor Nagin Nayger

But what is so stunning is how out of tune they are.

They don't get it.

Sometimes the world changes before your eyes. December 7th was such a day, November 22nd was one, so was July 4th. Those days didn't just change America, they changed the way we saw the world.

The right blogosphere, used to defending Bush, is caught on the wrong side here and not only do they don't know it, they keep digging deeper. Ann Coulter says something so dumb, so obviously disprovable, it's like she doesn't get that the rules have changed. Her petty attacks are wildly inappropriate, and more importantly, just not relevant. Everyone from the Southern Baptist Convention to MTV are helping to raise money and feed people. The only people not doing anything are the righties. They're too busy pointing fingers at poor, helpless people who might have picked up a case of water so they didn't die in 90+ degree streets with no shade.

If the GOP is the daddy party, it's a crooked deadbeat dad telling the judge that partial payment is fine, even if the kids are on the street.

Americans don't like open racism, even the TV reporters recoiled after seeing how people used their footage to demonize the poor.

This is the most serious domestic crisis since Pearl Harbor, and these folks are acting like it's still Ok to be Bund members. They don't get that everything changed after Bush failed to help the Katrina survivors.

The right bloggers are treating this as politics.

A lot of people, left and right, realize the implications here, and Bush is being hammered because of this. If there had been a terrorist attack on a chemical plant or if an LNG tanker, FEMA's inaction would have killed thousands of people from untreated trauma injuries. This is no longer about politics, but survival.

To be frank, all 9/11 did was change the scale of our response to terrorism. It didn't even really change Manhattan. The dead linger in my memory, but except for the few blocks in Manhattan, life went on. Three thousand families were changed. Here, hundreds of thousands of families are going to be changed forever. A lot of sadness, but the subways never stopped running.

But New Orleans is gone. I mean, a unique way of life is gone. It doesn't get much more serious than this. And the right bloggers are making jokes and arguing about buses.

...

A few weeks ago, I linked to a good in-depth discussion of how DuPont had poisoned the people of Parkersburg, West Virginia through the production of C8, the chemical making up the key component of Teflon. The Huffington Post now has a very long and in-depth piece on the same subject, which you should also read. I won’t go over the details again except to say that DuPont, like basically all chemical corporations, treat the environment, workers, and the surrounding communities with a complete lack of basic respect in its quest to maximize profit. But two points to pull out. First:

By the early 1970s, Congress was once again debating how to regulate the chemicals that now formed the fabric of American domestic life. Both houses drafted legislation that would empower the Environmental Protection Agency to study the health and environmental effects of chemicals and regulate their use. But the industry unleashed another lobbying blitz. Under the final version of the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, existing chemicals were again grandfathered in. Manufacturers did have to inform the EPA when they introduced new chemicals—but no testing was required. The resulting regulatory regime, which exists to this day, is remarkably laissez-faire. Only a handful of the 80,000-plus chemicals on the market have ever been tested for safety—meaning that we are all, in effect, guinea pigs in a vast, haphazard chemistry experiment.

This is a really key issue. Like fracking and so many other technological developments of industrial life, we have given corporations carte blanche to create profitable markets in chemicals without meaningful testing, and especially without meaningful public testing that would give people a right to know what chemicals are in their air, water, food, and workplaces. Only if disasters strike of the thalidomide level does real accountability to corporations ever take place. Meanwhile, more chemicals can be created, dumped, and forgotten about, all at continuing profit. Even here, with overwhelming evidence of how DuPont created birth defects, massive wildlife and livestock dieoffs, cancers in workers and local residents, etc., the company still have not faced real accountability. Instead it is using every known tactic of corporations to delay compensation and try to offload legal liability. This gets us to the second point.

Meanwhile, this past July, DuPont spun off its specialty chemicals division into a separate company called Chemours. The new enterprise will assume the liability for DuPont’s most polluted sites, including Washington Works—but it will only have one-quarter of DuPont’s revenue. Many people with cases pending against DuPont worry that it will use this arrangement to avoid paying damages or, at the very least, stall any resulting payouts. “I’m sure part of their theory is the longer they delay, the more people will die,” said Deitzler, the Parkersburg-based lawyer. “It’s already worked. Before we could even file cases, many of the people who’ve been affected passed on.”

Creating new companies that are underfunded in order to deal with liabilities is an old corporate trick. Dollars to donuts Chemours declares bankruptcy in the next decade that allows DuPont to escape from any meaningful compensation at all.

Meanwhile, DuPoint has moved on from C8. But to what?

Under the current regulatory system, DuPont is not required to ensure that these chemicals are free of the qualities that made C8 so toxic. While relatively little is known about these substances, most of them have very similar structures and properties to C8, and the limited information that is available reveals troubling effects. Also, while some of the replacement chemicals break down faster than C8 does, they need to be used in larger quantities to achieve the same results, a fact that has caused alarm in the scientific community. This May, 200 scientists—chemists, toxicologists, and epidemiologists among them—signed a statement urging governments to restrict the use of these chemicals because of the “risks of adverse effects on human health and the environment.”

Until that happens, these substances will continue to spread, unchecked. Not long ago, the Little Hocking water district commissioned a study to see whether any of the C8 replacements were contaminating the town’s aquifer. Researchers tested worms unearthed from Little Hocking’s well field, a scraggly meadow overlooking the vast expanse of storage tanks and smokestacks at the Washington Works plant. They found a number of C8’s chemical cousins, including C5, C6, C7, C9 and C10. Once again, local residents may have been unwittingly exposed to toxins whose ultimate effect on human health is unknown.

The weak regulatory system combines with the nation’s profit-first ideology and corporate malfeasance to ensure that nothing will change here. Maybe one of these chemicals will, 20 years from now, be found to also kill people. If the system is similar to today, another decade will pass before any kind of compensation is required and then DuPont will continue to find more ways out and local people will suffer.

There was a lot of good commentary late last week to the NLRB decision in the Browning-Ferris case, ruling that joint employer status applied to this contractor for the purpose of unionization and other labor law, potentially repealing some of corporations’ favorite strategies for protecting themselves from legal accountability. Let me link to a couple. First, Catherine Fisk:

The most interesting implication, given the recent strikes in the fast food industry, is whether the decision means that corporate restaurants like McDonald’s are the joint employer with their franchisees. The Board has cases pending that will present this issue and it will decide them in due course. The test the Board articulated in Browning-Ferris is that two entities are joint employers “if they share or codetermine those matters governing the essential terms and conditions of employment” which includes “hiring, firing, discipline, supervision, and direction,” as well as “wages and hours,” “the number of workers to be supplied, controlling scheduling, seniority, and overtime, and assigning work and determining the manner and method of work performance.” And the Board said the codetermination of these matters need not be done “directly and immediately, and not in a limited or routine manner” but it is enough if the control is exerted in an “indirect” or “routine” way so long as the user employer “affects the means or manner of employees’ work and terms of employment, either directly or through an intermediary.”

What the dissent is anxious about is precisely what workers’ rights advocates have been talking about for decades. Should companies that effectively dictate working conditions by the price they are willing to pay suppliers (whether it is suppliers of labor, as in Browning-Ferris, or suppliers of goods, as in supply chain cases) be obligated to bargain with the employees who supply that labor or those goods? Should janitors or security guards in an office building or warehouse workers be able to pressure the building manager or the logistics company (as opposed to the labor contractor for which they work) for a pay raise or safety protections?

One issue the Browning Ferris case does not decide but the dissent talks about at some length is whether the common law right of control test adopted by the majority also has implications for a different issue, which is the difference between employees (who are workers that a hiring entity has the right to control) or independent contractors (workers that the hiring entity does not control). The majority said little about this, but the dissent lambastes the majority for adopting a version of the common law test that might narrow the definition of independent contractor, making more workers employees. If the dissent is right, then the years long effort of Federal Express to run a huge package delivery service without employing any drivers might fail, and so, too, might Uber’s argument that it’s become the country’s fastest-growing taxi service by simply being a technology company that employs no drivers.

Great! Republicans’ worst nightmares are precisely what I and so many other labor supporters hope happens. These follow-up NLRB cases are going to be incredibly important and I think the fears of the dissent point the way they are probably going to go. Of course, there is a legal appeal as well that conservatives will push, which rationally should allow the NLRB jurisdiction but given conservative judicial activism may well not. E. Tammy Kim interviews people on both sides of this issue that lay out the stakes.

“The Board’s tortured analysis will undoubtedly be met with skepticism and will be rejected by local franchise owners, legislators and, ultimately, the courts,” said Steve Caldeira, president and CEO of the International Franchise Association. “IFA and its allies are asking Congress to intervene to halt these out-of-control, unelected Washington bureaucrats to preserve the established joint employer standard relied upon by America’s 780,000 franchise businesses and the 8.5 million jobs they directly create.”

While groups like the IFA accused the NLRB of ignoring the economic reality of the franchise structure, the Fight for $15 fast-food movement applauded the Board’s recognition that large corporations exert control over individual stores and restaurants.

“McDonald’s is the boss — that’s true by any standard,” said Kendall Fells, organizing director of Fight for $15. “The company controls everything from the speed of the drive-thru to the way workers fold customers’ bags. It’s common sense that McDonald’s should be held accountable for the rights of workers at its franchised stores.”

Although the NLRB’s ruling only applies to labor law and not employment cases — minimum wage, overtime or discrimination — it could influence other venues. Several such cases brought by Fight for $15 workers are pending in federal court.

“The Board has been out of whack with federal and state laws with respect to employment,” said attorney Moshe Marvit, fellow at the liberal think tank the Century Foundation. “The decision is influenced by other agency decisions, and OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration), for example, will follow the Board’s lead.”

The potential for that influence is real and could be meaningful, albeit pretty reliant on the Democrats winning the election in 2016. Meanwhile, what are conservatives saying? It’s pretty comic!

For example, the NLRB’s new standard could force Silicon Valley startups to hire the receptionists and cleaners they currently get from staffing or property management companies. It will adversely impact the innovative sharing economy, where technology has drastically lowered transaction costs, enabling people to come together to share services in novel new business relationships. In the end, some jobs will be absorbed by companies’ corporate headquarters, to minimize unexpected liability; some jobs will be eliminated. The NLRB has set back the clock 40 years, to an era of corporate giants when few people had the option of being their own bosses while pursuing innovative employment arrangements.

Also great! Outside of the double speak that claims exploitative working relationships is freedom.

You may have some questions about just how McDonald’s runs its franchising operations and why the company is the focus of so much attention with the NLRB’s Browning decision from last week. Of course, franchising can mean a lot of different things with a number of varying arrangements. In the case of McDonald’s, the company seeks detailed control over the franchisee in ways that other fast food companies do not, arrangements that suggest an almost Don Blankenship-level of control over work that makes an argument it is not a joint employer highly dubious. Jeff Spross has more on this.

The funny wrinkle in McDonald’s case is that a lot of the company’s franchisees really don’t like the model. They have to pay the corporate mothership 4 to 5 percent of their revenue for a franchise fee, and then another 4 to 5 percent to go into an advertising fund. The franchises then have to pay another 12 percent to McDonald’s for rent. Meanwhile, the central company gives franchisees a slew of requirements in terms of remodeling, computer systems, and other expenses they must incur to stay in the franchise agreement.

By all accounts, McDonald’s has cracked down on its franchisees in recent years. It controls most of the prices on the menu, and between that and its hefty operating demands, it’s squeezing franchisees so that the way to make the business model successful is to pay the workers less. Dissatisfaction amongst McDonald’s franchise owners is reportedly at an all-time high, so they clearly feel they’re under fire.

But then you have to ask: Under fire compared to whom? The average American worker, or other small business owners pulling down $100,000-plus a year?

Another wrinkle, according to Kalnins, is that McDonald’s is genuinely an outlier in the aggressiveness with which it deals with its franchises. In other chains, franchisees can own hundreds of stores, and sometimes be public corporations unto themselves. But “McDonald’s really wants small owners,” Kalnins explained — somebody overseeing three, four, or five units. “Somebody who’s checking out what’s going on in those units every day.”

The upside for McDonald’s is franchisees who are “much more loyal and will do what you want them to, because of their smaller size.” The downside is a far more aggressive interference on the part of McDonald’s in terms of the running of the stores and its relationships with workers.

Another thing that makes McDonald’s an outlier is it’s one of the few chains that owns the property for every last one of its stores, and thus charges its franchisees the rent. Kalnins said he’s spoken with franchise consultants who figured that while the 12 percent of revenue that McDonald’s charges for rent is high compared to the standard 10 percent small businesses usually face from real estate owners, it’s not extraordinary. But “if you add the rent to it then certainly they’re paying more than for other chains. And that’s relatively unusual.”

Given all of this, how is McDonald’s not the direct employer of the workers? They are of course, even if they’ve offloaded the onerous parts of hiring onto the franchisee. And became McDonald’s corporate so controls all the details of work, this operates in some of the same ways that the apparel industry’s exploitative subcontracting system does–by making sure that the only way the franchisee is going to make any money is to squeeze workers as hard as possible, with a bottom baseline only a federal or state labor law that may or may not be stringently enforced on the ground. This is another reason why we need to push back against these sorts of labor arrangements through holding corporations legally accountable for the workers making their products regardless of whether they are directly employed, subcontracted, franchisees, temp workers, etc. These latter systems exist precisely for the kind of advantages McDonald’s has created here. Hopefully the NLRB will continue bringing this system back under control.

When you are a hardware guy and you live in a time of crisis, sooner or later you find yourself working for some casino equipment company. You become an insider and learn a lot about their tricks. I’ve been in touch with that business for about 30 years. I made a lot of projects for gambling machines which are currently in use, and I had a lot of contact with casino people, both owners and gamblers.

Now I’m sure you expect of me to tell you about the tricks they use to make you spend your money. And I will: there are no technical tricks. This isn’t because they are honest people, but because they don’t need it. Mathematics and Psychology do all the work.

Does the risk of gambling pay off? Mathematically speaking, no – but it’s up to you to decide for yourself. One thing is for certain – whether you decide to gamble or not, it’s good to know how those casino machines work. Know thy enemy.

The Typical Gambler’s Financial Chart

Let’s see how the amount of gambler’s money fluctuates over the course of a typical slot machine game. Player starts with credit S and usually has small loses, but also small gains. Sometimes he wins a larger sum, but in the long run, it’s clear that he is moving towards zero. This is just an example of an average game and while it will not always look like this, most of the time it will. Even if he wins on a good day, you can simply scale the same diagram and apply it over a longer period of his life.

The gambling machine does not “draw” this diagram in advance, it does not even plan more than one step ahead. There is no “secret plan”, but only the simple arithmetic rule which determines the amount of gain, or, in some cases, the probability of winning. When you combine it with the randomization process, you get the diagram, and that’s all.

Formally speaking, the game is fair, and in accordance with the regulations. The odds are fair for both sides, although the casino has a small edge on its side, as it has expenses to cover.

If the game is truly fair, then why are there so many rich casino owners, and even more poor gamblers? There is no special reason, we all know that a small portion of input goes to the casino, and we agreed that it’s fair, but that’s where the mathematics and psychology kick in. First, that “small” amount of money is taken from the player every time he presses the button, or runs the new cycle, whichever game he plays. That cycle can run for just a few seconds, so the cumulative effect can be significant. If you are the game development engineer, keep in mind that if the game is faster, the casino owners will love it more. Guess why?

This diagram illustrates why the game has to be fast. Let’s assume that, after the first hypothetical game, the losing/gaining chances are similar to Gaussian distribution. The greatest odds are in the center of Gaussian bell curve, but there are also the small chances for a big gain or a big loss, especially if the player has a risky style. It’s important to note that the diagram is not balanced, as the chances of losing are slightly higher.

The left hand diagram is valid only for the first game, after which the player presses the button again. After five games, the cumulative effect becomes visible, and after 30 games everything is clear. Even after that, the game goes on until the system collapses, which usually means that there’s no money left on the player’s side. He knows how this works, yet he continues playing till the end. Is it still fair? I have my doubts.

A long time ago, I was asked to make a modification for an old poker video game. After each succesful round, a player could perform an action where he had a chance of 50-50 to double or lose his last winnings. He had to push one of two buttons, guessing if the card (with the back side visible) was smaller or greater than 7. I had to reverse engineer the firmware for an 8-bit 6502 microprocessor, so I had to disassemble the code and see how it works. I was truly surprised to see that at that moment the card number still does not exist – instead, there is a decision, made by the system, whether the player will win or lose! When the player presses the button, the card number is randomly generated (inside the range of the desired result) and its bitmap gets written into the video memory.

I witnessed a lot of players who, when they would lose, shouted “Damn, why didn’t I press…”. How could I tell them that the outcome would have been the same?

Psychology of Gambling

Everyone who has spent some time in a casino, knows that every gambling machine reacts very theatrically to winning, with loud music and jingling sounds, and every loss is quiet and promply followed by an invitation for the next game. Great winnings are remembered and frequently mentioned for a long time, and the losses are forgotten. That’s how the illusion that gambling pays off is created. This feature is called selective exposition, and it plays an important role, not only in gambling addiction, but also in the belief in the supernatural, psychic ability, astrology, quackery and so on.

Look again at the first chart. There are a lot of good winnings, which are marked with smileys. Each of them brought pleasure and hope to the player, and only the last one brought him dissatisfaction. The gains are great and come by surprise, and losings are small and gradual – you could say they are hardly noticeable. Does it pay off, to feel a lot of happiness and only a little bit of discomfort? It’s up to the gambler to decide, but the delusion obviously works, as he never sees himself as a loser, even when he had lost everything. He knows that, as soon as he gets more money, he will come again and it will, undoubtedly, be his lucky day.

Looking at the first chart, it’s hard to resist the feeling that he should have ended the game at the moment his credit was twice of what he had at the start. Looking back, it would be clear to the player as well, but it was the heat of the moment – he got his dose of serotonin (hormone of happiness), and it’s not a good thing to be high on when you have to make a smart decision. It has led to the narrowing of his consciousness, he experienced it as his “lucky moment”, which is a trap for every gambler. Did you ever wonder why there is no daylight and no clock in the casino? The time has stopped in the whole world and all you have to do is to gamble.

Very few players can tell when it’s wise to quit gambling. It is really hard to stop when it has just started going well, and when the new gain is just around the corner. There is only one situation when the player gets the idea to stop playing, other than running out of money: when he gets the super jackpot. Then it’s time to enjoy, not to play. He takes his money and leaves, but there is always tomorrow, when he comes to take more. Of course, with a larger bet, as he is a high stakes player now. He won’t settle until he gives back everything he had won.

Recently I was installing some equipment in a nice casino in southern Macedonia which sees a lot of Greek visitors. Everyone got excited when a Greek woman won a 24.000 € jackpot. My first thought was that, if she is clever enough, she will leave and never step into the casino ever again. When I was there again after two weeks, the staff from the casino told me that she had already “returned” about half of the sum. Another two weeks passed, and her count was way below zero.

I’m Not Superstitious, It Brings Bad Luck

Most, if not all, gamblers are superstitious. They have their lucky day, lucky garment, lucky number, whatever – there’s always an obvious reason for winning or losing. So, the good winning from the first chart was because of a player’s lucky t-shirt (it was blue, his lucky colour), but everything went wrong when he crossed his legs unintentionally. Also, he must not forget to do his lucky ritual tomorrow before entering the casino.

Being superstitious usually means being bad at mathematics and logic, and especially at critical thinking. After all, if passionate gamblers knew how to think critically, they would probably never step into the world of gambling.

As the illiterates in the theory of probability, gamblers are frequent victims of the logical paradox known as the “Gamblers Fallacy”, expecting that a series of the same results will correspond with the opposite outcome. For example, if a roulette wheel lands on black for a number of times in a row, they expect it to land on red. It’s also amusing how the players of bingo and lottery games often draw the opposite conclusion – if a certain number had been drawn more frequently than others, that means it is predestined to be drawn, and it should be used even more.

These two “schools of thought” mutually exclude each other and, of course, both of them are wrong. If the roulette wheel lands on red 10 times, the next turn has the exact same odds of landing on red or black. As the mathematicans say, dice has no memory.

Many gamblers that try to hack the lottery, casino or online games, create numerous betting systems. Unfortunately for them, mathematic algorithms in most games are very simple, which makes it hard to find any weak point which could be exploited for a gambling strategy.

When a gambler scores a large win, which is just a step short of the “superbingo”, that step appears to be much smaller than it really is. For instance, if he plays the 7/39 Lotto (translated) and has 6 numbers matched, he feels he was very close to the ultimate prize, but in fact he was pretty far. There are 224 possible 6’s and only one 7, which is 99.6% versus 0.4%. Doesn’t look so “very close” anymore!

The human brain is good at making snap estimations in a lot of real life situations, but when it’s about the probability theory and large numbers, it easily gets fooled. If you combine it with selective exposition, it can lead to very bad evaluation and then to bad decisions. Someone who organizes gambling events of any kind, knows this and he tries to spread the story about winners, and never mentions thousands, or even millions of people who got nothing for their money.

Can You Hack the Casino?

But, never say never! The well known exception to everything that was said here, is the blackjack game. Players can use tactics to gain a certain edge in the game, but it assumes using either illegal devices, or special mental techniques, which include intensive memorization and computation, with a risk of being permanently blacklisted. Some players are also hunting for bugs in online games, but it is more likely that they will lose a lot of money experimenting, rather than finding a viable weak point.

Do you think you can hack the casino, even an online one? To accomplish this, be prepared to outsmart a team of well paid professionals, who spent a lot of time and resources to make sure you don’t. You probably won’t score with one simple project, but if you have a solid knowledge background and spend a lot of time studying the problem, you might stand a chance.

The most vulnerable gambling machines are those with mechanical randomizers and automated reading. Optical readers (bar-code or cameras with OCR software) may be fooled by excess light (modified laser pointer or similar device), and RFID readers with 125 KHz or 13,56 MHz jammers. Anyone who knows how to use it, can sabotage the machine with the device, if he does not like the ball or dice which was just drawn. I have seen a lot of casinos that are not equipped with sensors which could prevent this kind of attack. Anyhow, it is too dangerous to use this idea in its raw form, so an attacker would need to carefully consider his approach, and of course, keep an eye out for surveillance cameras.

Albert Einstein once said: “No one can possibly win at roulette unless he steals money from the table while the croupier isn’t looking.” He was probably the greatest hacker of all times, but everybody has the right to be wrong.

[Illustration by Bob Zivkovic]

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​​Voja Antonic works as a freelance microcontroller engineer in Belgrade. His first microprocessor projects, based on Z80, date back to 1977, just a few years after the appearance of the first Intel’s 4004. He assembled the firmware manually, by pen and paper. In 1983, he published his original DIY microcomputer project called Galaksija, which was built by around 8000 enthusiasts in the former Yugoslavia. To date he has published more than 50 projects, mostly based on microcontrollers, and released all of them in the public domain.

Filed under: Featured

“In contrast, all my husband and I had to do was sign a form. Our competence to choose the outcome of our embryo was never questioned. There were no mandatory lectures on gestation, no requirement that I be explicitly told that personhood begins at conception or that I view a picture of a day-five embryo. There was no compulsory waiting period for me to reconsider my decision. In fact, no state imposes these restrictions — so common for abortion patients — on patients with frozen embryos. With rare exceptions, the government doesn’t interfere with an IVF patient’s choices except to resolve disagreements between couples. The disparity between how the law treats abortion patients and IVF patients reveals an ugly truth about abortion restrictions: that they are often less about protecting life than about controlling women’s bodies. Both IVF and abortion involve the destruction of fertilized eggs that could potentially develop into people. But only abortion concerns women who have had sex that they don’t want to lead to childbirth. Abortion restrictions use unwanted pregnancy as a punishment for “irresponsible sex” and remind women of the consequences of being unchaste: If you didn’t want to endure a mandatory vaginal ultrasound , you shouldn’t have had sex in the first place .”

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Fertility clinics destroy embryos all the time. Why aren’t conservatives after them?

(via

azspot

)

Think I broke my hand I hit reblog so fast

(via artedish)

a-giant-spider:

i dunno about you guys but if i’m not sure if a snake is venomous or not i don’t think my first step would be to grab & examine its ass 

fromonesurvivortoanother:

Donald Trump’s campaign is like the ultimate in white male privilege

if a Black man reacted to insults and detractors the way Donald Trump does, he’d be called “angry”, “irrational”, and “uncivilized”

if a woman reacted that way she’d be called “catty”, bitch”, and “emotional”

but when a white guy does it people say he’s “honest”, “direct”, and has “guts” 

no other demographic can get away with publicly acting like a two year old who just woke up from a nap more than white dudes

there’s wide public acceptance and even admiration for this kind of behavior when the right kind of person does it 

skypestripper:

hearing a story thats obviously made up

An item from the cult of Sabazius

Hand of Sabazius, Roman, 3rd century, made of bronze.

Many religions were syncretistic, meaning that as they grew and came into contact with other religions, they adopted new beliefs and modified their practices to reflect their changing environment. Both Greek and Roman religious beliefs were deeply influenced by the so-called mystery religions of the East, including the Egyptian cult of Isis, which revealed beliefs and practices to the initiated that remained unexplained, or mysterious, to the uninitiated. Most popular Roman cults had associations with these mystery religions and included the prospect of an afterlife. 

Sabazius was an eastern god of fertility and vegetation, who in Roman times was worshiped in association with other deities, particularly Dionysus (or Bacchus, as he was generally known to the Romans). His cult inspired a series of votive images of hands, the fingers of which form the gesture of benediction still familiar in Christian practice. Missing from this example is the small figure of Sabazius himself, who was typically seated in the palm of the hand above the ram’s head. Around him are his major cult symbols, including a snake, a lizard, and the heads of a lion, a ram, and a bull. On the tip of the thumb is the pinecone of Dionysus. The opening in the wrist, shaped like a temple, had a hinged door that revealed an unknown, lost object, perhaps a reclining mother and child, as seen in other examples. (walters)

Courtesy of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, USA. Via their online collections: 54.2453.

gholateg:

saint-nevermore:

grenousses:

redunderwear:

bear witness to the greatest force ever assembled in history

My bebbies!

eatthattoast:

Skelfies

jonn-lock:

Forest Whale. I have another version of this…hopefully it turns out okay.

FACEBOOK

TWITTER

DEVIANTART

midnight-sun-rising:

infamymonster:

sourcedumal:

rodidor:

its-a-different-world:

datdudediggz:

thetallblacknerd:

onelastperfectverse:

anomaly1:

nipsndnaps:

datdudediggz:

douevencomicbro:

when you forget you comic af

lets keep the party going

anomaly1 Do this please 

When your comic af is comic af

thetallblacknerd Get on this shit bro

When you have conflicting personas. WHO AM I????? Oh wait

When you comic af and realize you also regal af

WHERE THE LADIES AT!?!?!?

I LOVE YOU GUYS THIS MADE MY NIGHT

This is my new favorite post.

LMFAO I LOVE IT! But for real, where the girls at tho?

Hang on guys, I got this

Suddenly a woman appears!

But not just any woman….

A WONDER WOMAN

YASSSSS!!! HERE FOR THIS!

karenhealey:

transgenderfluidemily:

riddickthecub:

sweet-destiel:

love-calamity:

captn-bucky:

best-of-memes:

Artist attempts to create most frustrating products imaginable

IM SO ANGRY AT THE WATERING CAN OMG

I’m so uncomfortable

as the post progressed i kept frowning more and more

This is some bullshit

Lol I wanna own these

I could drink out of that last one, and I would DO IT, from SPITE.

that broom would be great for sweeping underneath things!

anomalously-written:

You know what I love? 
Names. 
You know what I love more than just names? 
Geographically accurate names.

—-

(Current popular names all over the world)

—-

The following information was found here

Names From The Ancient World

• Eastern
• Egypt
• Greece
• Rome
• Africa

—-

Medieval European Names
Medieval English Names

—-

Anglo-Saxon/Old English Names

• Dithematic Names (Name with two elements)
• Monothematic Names (Single element names & bynames)
• Religion (Gods; Goddesses; Calendar)
• Rulers

—-

CELTIC

• Ireland 
  [Celtic-Male Origin | Celtic-Female Origin | More]
• Scotland 
  [Naming Patterns | Celtic Origin | Biblical Origin | More]
• Wales 
  [Naming Practices | Biblical Origin | Welsh Surnames | More]
• Brittany 
  [Male | Female | Surnames | More]
• Old Celtic 
  [Male | Female | Religion | Cornwall | Isle of Man | More]

—-

Modern English First Names

• The Central Stock of English First Names
• Linknames (feminine forms of Biblical, Celtic, germanic, Greek, Latin and Modern male names)
• Saints (calendar of saints, patron saints)
• Modern Coinages
  Placenames | Blended | Combined | Borrowed Words | Unisex
• Surname Adaptations (English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh and Foreign surnames used as first names)
• Themed Names (twins, mulit-births, colors, creatures dates, etc)
• More

—-

Western European Names

• France | Naming Practices | Medieval | More
• Italy | Latin | Medieval | More
• Germany | Naming Practices | Medieval | More
• Austria | First Names | Surnames | Rulers
• Switzerland | First Names | Surnames
• Netherlands | Naming Practices | Friesland | More
• Belgium | Naming Practices | Walloon | More
• Spain | Catalonia | Aragon | Asturias | Galicia | More
• Portugal | Biblical Origin | Latin Origin | More
• Basque | Male | Female | Surnames
  

—-

Eastern European Names

• Poland | Slavonic Origin | Various | More
• Hungary | Pronunciation etc | Names | More
• Czech-Slovak | Czech | Slovak | Czechoslovakia | More
• Albania | Male | Female | Surnames
• Bulgaria | First Names | Surnames | More
• Romania | Male | Female | Surnames
• Former Yugoslavia
  Former Yugoslavia | Bosnia-Hercegovina | Croatia | Macedonia | Montenegro | Serbia | Slovenia
• Greece | Greek Origin | Latin Origin | Surnames | More

—-

Scandinavian Names

• Old Norse | Male | Female | Name Elements | More
• Norway | Norse Origin | Germanic Origin | Surnames | More
• Sweden | Norse Origin | Germanic Origin | Surnames | More
• Denmark | Norse Origin | Various Origin | Surnames | More
• Iceland | Norse Origin | Various Origin | Surnames | More
• Faroe Islands | Norse Origin | Foreign Origin | Surnames
• Finland | Pronunciation | Religion | Finnish | Compounds | More

—-

Former Soviet Union Names

• Russia | Naming Practices | Slavic Origin | Surnames | More
• Europe and the Caucasus 
  Ukraine | Belarus | Moldavia | Georgia | Armenia | Azerbaijan | Caucasus
• Baltic States
  Estonia | Latvia | Lithuania | Finland
• Asian Republics
  Kazakhstan | Tajikistan | Turkmenistan | Uzbekistan | Kirghizistan 

—-

African Names

• Northern Africa | Gen. Names
  Morocco | Algeria | Tunisia | Libya | Egypt | Western Sahara 
• Eastern Africa | Gen. Names
  Sudan | Ethiopia | Eritrea | Somalia | Djibouti | Uganda | Burundi | Rwanda | Kenya | Tanzania | Swahili 
• Central Africa | Gen. Names
  Chad | Central African Republic | Cameroon | Equatorial Guinea | Gabon | Congo | Democratic Republic of Congo 
• Western Africa | Gen. Names
  Mauritania | Mali | Burkina Fasu | Senegal | Gambia | Guinea-Bissau | Guinea | Sierra Leone | Liberia | Ivory Coast | Ghana | Togo | Benin | Niger | Nigeria 
  
• Southern Africa | Gen. Names
  Angola | Zambia | Zimbabwe | Malawi | Mozambique | Namibia | Botswana | South Africa | Lesotho | Swaziland
• African Islands
  Madagascar | Comoro Islands | Mauritius | Cape Verde Islands | Seychelles | Sao Tome and Principe 

—-

Northern Native American Names

• Native names used in modern America
• Various Native American Nations
• Algonquin [Cheyenne, Shawnee, Mohican/Mahican]
• Apache [Mimbreno, Warm Springs, White Mountain, Bedonkohe, Chiricahua]
• Iroquois [Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onundagas, Seneca, Tuscaroa]
• Ojibwa [Ojibway, Potawatomi, Chippewa]
• Cherokee | Choctaw | Creek | Crow | Hopi | Kiowa | Miwok | Navajo | Nez Perce | Omaha | Osage | Seminole | Sioux | Yakima
• Inuit

Southern and Central Native American Names

• Aztec [History, Male, Female, Religion, Calendars, Rulers]
• Inca [Male, Female, Religion, Calendars]
• Maya [History, Male, Female, Religion, Calendars]
• Amazonian [Names from tribes living in the rain forests]

—-

India

• Hindu Names
  Male Names [A | B | C - K | L- Z] | Female | More
• Hindu Gods
• Sikh
• Others

—-

Middle and Near Eastern 

• Arab/Muslim
  Male | Female | More
• East
  Iran | Turkey | Kurds | Pakistan | Bangladesh | Afghanistan
• Jewish Names
  Biblical | Yiddish | Modern | Various | Surnames

—-

• China 
  Info | Male | Female  
• Japan 
  Info | Male | Female
• Korea 
  Info | Male | Female
• Mongolia
• Himalayan 
  Nepal | Bhutan | Tibet
• Indochina 
  Burma | Thailand | Vietnam | Cambodia | Laos
• South East Asia 
  Indonesia | Malaysia | Brunei | The Philippines

—-

Pacific 

• Polynesia
  Maori | Samoa | Tonga | French Polynesia | Fiji | Cook Islands | Easter Island | Hawai’i | Australia
• Micronesia
  Federated States of Micronesia | Kirbati | Marashall Islands | Marianas Islands and Guam | Nauru | Belau
• Melanesia
  Soloman Islands | Papua New Guinea | Vanuatu | Tuvalu

eternal-dannation:

i-kool-kat:

bitterbitchclubpresident:

did-you-kno:

With same-sex couples, either person has 24 hours to send a message.

Whitney Wolfe, co-founder and former employee of Tinder, is the founder and CEO of Bumble. She says the rule isn’t just to give women more power, but to also keep the space safe for them.

“We want to encourage kindness and online accountability. If you send a [rude] photo, you are watermarked. If you send something hurtful, you will forever be stamped. We want people to treat others with respect.”

Source

daaaaaaamn!!!

amazing!!! boost this for my single friends, how awesome to only talk to people you choose to??? 

wowie.

Ouu, ok.

lmao go read the reviews in the app store there are so many angry men complaining about how they aren’t getting messages

!!!! Nice!!!