School starts today! The strike planned by the Seattle Education Association will not happen because the teachers union and Seattle Public Schools reached a tentative agreement as children slept (at around 11 p.m.). The Seattle Times reports that the “details” of this agreement have not been made public, but one of the key reasons teachers authorized the strike a week ago was that SPS planned deep cuts to special education. The tentative agreement still has to be ratified by SEA and SPS.
My fellow vampires, get ready to leave your air conditioned coffins. Our season is just around the corner. The days are getting shorter and the cold ever stronger. “I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you. Which shall be the darkness of [the vampire] God.” Expect a high 66 today.
Scientists have possibly detected dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up about 27 percent of the known universe. Ordinary matter accounts for only 5 percent; the rest is dark energy. There are several candidates for dark matter, the main of which is Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS). This group of theoretical elementary particles is thought to interact with gravity and the weak force. An experiment conducted deep in a South Dakota mine captured a flash of light that fits the bill for an interaction between liquid xenon and a WIMP. If more such events are detected, then the tightly bolted door to a whole new part of the universe will finally be opened.
The late and controversial sociobiologist E.O. Wilson made this important observation in On Human Nature: The purpose of the human brain is not to open the secrets of the universe. And the universe is not here to be examined by brainy people. I love the way Hegel worded this strange and even troubling situation: “The essence of the universe, closed though it is for itself, has no barrier to defend itself against the courage to know it.” The universe was supposed to be closed. We humans entered the scene like one who accidentally walks into the room of a sleeping person.
And there you go. The Trump administration is now calling bike lanes DEI. This nonsense is not at all surprising. Since around 2021, the right has linked DEI with its real concern: green capitalism and its infrastructure. Anything resembling a mainstream inclusion programs and private/government environmental investments is considered “woke capitalism.” The word “woke” is the key to this line of attack because it’s drawn from Black American English, which is considered inferior (mockable) to white American English (noble). In this way, green capitalism is racially stigmatized. It’s a very old trick that has proved to be indefatigable. Just look at the president of the United States. Remove racism from this particular equation, and you would end up with a man in Sing Sing rather than sitting in the White House.
But what are “woke” bike lanes really all about? American capitalism is in a rut because those who profited from fossil fuels grew too wealthy (thanks to tax cuts and government subsides) and they now have the financial power to successfully attack anything that has a whiff of what the famous but long-dead Austrian and conservative economist, Joseph Schumpeter, called “creative destruction.” The argument he made is this: Capitalism moves forward by replacing older and saturated industries or business models with new disruptive innovations that open new markets (alternative market-making). The car displaced trains, but it seems nothing can displace cars, the foundation of 20th-century American capitalism, because cars drink what these men are selling.
But there is something else. Bikes are not only better for public health and the environment, they are also cheaper: no mandatory insurance, no massive debt financing, no parking costs. The key myth of the present economy is that its products and services become more affordable the more their market grows. But look at this report in CNN: “Inexpensive new cars becoming tougher and tougher to find.” One research firm found that a decade ago, the majority of new automobiles had a price tag that was lower than $30,000. Now, only 14 percent of cars cost less than that amount. What must be factored in all of this is that wages have grown slowly or not all during this period. If more people biked or used public transportation, they would be less manageable (or, put more directly, have less “fear of the sack”) because their bills would be less crushing.
By the way, if anyone is interested, I have a huuuge island in Lake America that’s on sale for a song. Don’t wait for even a minute; you don’t want to miss this once-in-a-lifetime deal.
Google caved to the ravings of a madman.
So did Apple: The President personally reached out.
But MapQuest said hell no to Trump, and not for the first time.
Trump’s next big idea to make beef cheaper for consumers? Cut red tape for American ranchers. By this he means, of course, gutting food safety. And he wants to do this at a time when a large number of ranchers are struggling to remain solvent. It’s also, and not coincidently, a time when not a day seems to pass without some grocery item being recalled. Maybe Americans should seriously consider reviving the Victory Gardens of World War II. But this time around, we shall call them Surviving MAGA Gardens.
Now for our morning dose of Marx: This passage, which is from the first volume of Das Kapital, concerns the good old days when Mr. Moneybags’s profits were not nettled by food safety regulations: “Englishmen, always well up in the Bible, knew well enough that man, unless by elective grace a capitalist, or landlord, or sinecurist, is commanded to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow, but they did not know that he had to eat daily in his bread a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge of abscesses, cobwebs, dead black-beetles, and putrid German yeast, without counting alum, sand, and other agreeable mineral ingredients.”
You know things are really bad when the New York Post is offering advice for detecting dodgy beef coming “from another country.” What should Americans do? Look for “‘Product of USA’ or ‘Made in the USA’ labels, as this means the item is exclusively from animals born, raised, slaughtered and processed in the US.” But, really, who can you trust in these hardcore MAGA times? Your best bet is not to eat any beef and stick with plant-based alternatives.
Let’s end Slog AM with this nearly unsurpassed purification of the 80s stimmung by Haruomi Hosono, “Non-Standard Mixture.”
