Most Ordinary Americans in 2016 Are Richer Than John D. Rockefeller in 1916.
A great English-language article on the anniversary of Boris Nemtsov ‘ s assassination. It’s so rare that one sees anything intelligent written about the post-Soviet space in English.
Ursula Le Guin keeps embarrassing herself. This time, she makes a fool of herself by lecturing somebody who actually is a serious writer. This lack of self-awareness is very sad.
The Putinoid Ian Welsh is a Trump admirer. Color me unsurprised.
A historian attempts to follow Tudor hygiene with a daily regime of linen underwear.
How Evangelicals explain their support for Trump. Very enlightening.
Clarissa's Blog 
Moving to Canada, Eh!
“If Donald Trump does end up winning the presidency, then there could end up being a lot more controversy than there is now. One other thing to realize is that if Trump does end up in the White House, there will be a lot less celebrities in the United States as Al Sharpton, Samuel L. Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, Jon Stewart, and others may be gone.”
Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/2835395/list-of-celebrities-who-will-leave-the-u-s-if-donald-trump-becomes-president-jon-stewart-whoopi-goldberg-al-sharpton-more/#m04GDqr2v7d0LiSy.99
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The title of that article — “Celebrities who WILL leave” — is deliberately misleading. The body of the article refers to celebrities “who have said they’d be WILLING to leave” — quite a literal difference .
They’re all bluffing, anyway. Does anybody really think that all those privileged, rich “important people” are going to move to Canada, where among other things, their very high annual incomes will be taxed at a much higher rate than in the U.S.?
And if they actually do leave (they won’t) — who cares?
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I agree, all of this talk by celebrities of leaving the country is quite silly. One, because I do not expect Trump to actually make it to the White House; two, because it is one thing to move abroad and another to give up your US passport (I’ll believe all of them then); and three, yes, c’mon, all of them have resources and privilege enough to ride out whatever might happen. Which is perhaps not so true for a lot of the rest of us.
On a related note, I think the author of the Rockefeller article has confused the concepts of “wealth” and “standard of living.” I certainly do have more creature comforts than old Johnnie ever did; better health care too, I’d probably already be dead if the current year was 1916. All that is standard of living.
But Mr. Rockefeller had the security of knowing he and his were not going to run out of money. My family has no guarantee that our economic standing will remain at its current level. That is the difference between being rich or wealthy and many of the rest of us. We can lose our means of support, we can go through our savings, we can go bankrupt. And that is true whether we live in the age of horse drawn carriages or self-driving auto mobiles.
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Anxiety does not correlate with the amount one has in one’s bank account. Anti-anxiety meds are very popular among the very rich.
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Are we sure the rich are not downing ativans because it’s a nice buzz and a lot less calories than a stiff drink?
Perhaps it is not a quiet, background anxiety about economic security but that is the only thing I have been able to come up with. Even the most confident middle and upper-middle class people I have known have nothing like the sense of deep entitlement the wealthy people I’ve been acquainted with have.
So maybe I am wrong about exactly what the wealthy “have” but there is something. And I will still maintain that “standard of living” should not be treated as equivalent to “wealth.”
I get irritated every time I see an article like the one linked to because it is a sleight of hand. It is one step away from, “He can’t be poor, he has a cell phone!” As if cell phones were some luxury good, as if it couldn’t be that person’s only phone and that it couldn’t be cheaper to have one cell phone rather than a land line. Especially if that someone had circumstances that meant they moved a lot.
I think it is possible to revel in our high standard of living without lying to ourselves about class differences.
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I read the Tudor hygiene piece with interest. The one thing the author didn’t address was whether or not having sex contributed to the smelliness. I would think that would make for a more ripe smell of you didn’t shower for three months.
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That Tudor hygiene piece made me shudder. The woman obviously went scent blind to her own scent and had no oral sex of any kind during this period. Did she even have a period? She’s not even sponge bathing herself (which requires water)! In addition she doesn’t specifically mention abstaining from body hair removal (shaving your armpits and other parts of your body like your genitals is a modern thing), or deodorant or using a modern washer and dryer so I assume she did all three. Body hair traps funk.
Look, I remember going on a vacation in the summer with a bus tour for two weeks and having the unfortunate mishap of almost all of my clothing in addition to most of my underwear missing. The tour guide said I didn’t have to hold on to my luggage and it would make it on the bus but it didn’t and I specifically gave him a horrible rating for this incredible mistake. I took daily showers and washed my underclothes daily while using the hotel hairdryer. It was miserable and funky and nobody said anything but I could smell it and feel it. I had to borrow some of my mother’s clothing and buy emergency underwear. My scalp is crawling at the idea of not washing my hair for three months. She must have very dry skin. Ugh, ugh, ugh.
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shakti – Your 2-week summer bus tour sounds awful!
I was thinking about this article while showering today, and I thought that I’d never have been awake if I lived in the Tudor era. Showering is the only thing that dusts off my cobwebs in the morning and helps my brain to start functioning. I’m sure I’d figure out another way to wake up, but in comparison to showering, it would probably not be as good.
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Regarding that Ian Welsh link: I see a lot of wishful thinking.
Now Trump won’t do all of what should be done. He won’t, for example, radically raise taxes on rich people. But he despises the financial industry and will hammer them, he will put up tariffs, he will redirect domestic demand to domestic industry.
AHAHAHAH rich people on that level do not fuck with the financial industry (he probably lives off the interest of a CD or a money market fund such) and there’s nothing in his past behavior to suggest that he’d even put up a tariff when he’s happily slapped his name on many things which are manufactured in China/elsewhere because it’s cheap. The chamber of commerce and McConnell doesn’t believe it, otherwise McConnell would never say “I can work with him” and we’d be seeing tons of negative superPAC ads from the chamber.
The only clothing associated with him that’s made in the USA are his political hats and even those are non union (video see at 4:10) The man has zero interest in higher wages for American workers in any respect.
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Exactly. Seeing Trump as some kind of economic progressive is delusional.
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Right now (this comment timestamp, 2/28/16) there’s a live feed for a benefit concert called Justice for Flint https://www.maestro.io/revolt?v=ytl-oDW1l1i5Kjc
This shouldn’t be happening in the USA in 2016.
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Republicans want to know why Hilary supports secret Muslim Obama.
“How might Hillary’s relationship with Isis affect her potential presidency? Can someone who’s cavorted so intimately with Isis put her prejudices aside for the good of the country? And does Hillary miss Isis? The American people deserve answers.”
http://gawker.com/hillary-clinton-once-had-a-cat-named-isis-1761313450
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Fiction becoming reality 🙂 :
A Russian scientist has created what he claims is the world’s smallest book, and is preparing to submit it to Guinness World Records for verification.
Microminiaturist Vladimir Aniskin, from Novosibirsk in Siberia, spent five years developing the technology to create the book, which measures 70 by 90 micrometres, or 0.07mm by 0.09mm. It then took him a month to create, by hand, two versions. The first, Levsha, is named after Nikolai Leskov’s 19th-century story The Steel Flea, in which a craftsman from Tula beats the English by managing to nail flea shoes on the clockwork flea they have created. Aniskin’s Levsha contains the names of other microminiaturists who can also, in his words “shoe the flea”. His second book, Alphabet, contains the Russian alphabet.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/02/miniature-milestone-as-russian-claims-new-record-for-worlds-tiniest-book-vladimir-aniskin
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Interesting take on why some conflicts get more coverage than others:
Where there is a local conflict that does not involve different civilisations, there is less interest and participation by other countries – in Rwanda or the Congo, for example. Though other countries have become involved either in supporting one side or the other in the conflict or in trying to bring about peace between the belligerent parties, these are usually neighbouring countries from the same civilisation.
Huntington likened the different civilizations to geological tectonic plates, and predicted that most conflicts, and the most severe ones, would take place on the “fault lines” between civilizations. Gaza is on one of the fault lines, and the north-east Congo is not.
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The problem with this explanation is that one can choose to assign the status of a civilization to anything. If I want to argue that Rwanda is a separate civilization, I can easily do that.
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Our Schools Are Becoming CIA Torture Chambers
,,,
The subsequent “learned helplessness” exhibited by torture victims is countered by another Seligman invention, “learned optimism,” which turns compliant human subjects into persistent, self-controlled, and gritty go-getters who will not let any amount of abuse or degradation interfere with beliefs in self-heroic capabilities.
The Seligman treatment has been used by David Levin at KIPP to behaviorally neuter children and then to have the same children self-administer heavy doses of No Excuses positivity in order to maintain high test scores regardless of children’s home life marked by pathological economic conditions.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/20/1403713/-Our-Schools-Are-Becoming-CIA-Torture-Chambers
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Original solution to cheating on tests in India 🙂 :
In Bihar, candidates asked to strip down to their underwear for Army exam
Sources at the Army Regional Office (ARO) said the candidates were asked to remove their clothes to “save time on frisking so many people”.
After that defining freezeframe from Vaishali last year of people perched on the window shades of a multi-storey building, passing on answer chits to students appearing for exams inside, comes another image from Bihar showing the other side of the coin.
This one, from Sunday, shows over 1,150 candidates, dressed only in their underwear, sitting cross-legged on an open ground in Muzaffarpur, putting pen to paper in the hope of making it to the Army. They said they were ordered to do so by supervisors to ensure they don’t cheat in the recruitment exam for soldiers on general duty and in the clerical and technical categories.
http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/bihar-for-this-army-exam-honesty-is-stripping-down-to-underwear/
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Now: http://go.cnn.com/
Another Dem Debate.
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I almost missed the whole thing!
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