It's A Big Club And You Ain't In It!

bloomberg |  To show how exclusive you are, there’s nothing like turning away a billionaire.

Two members of the three comma club were among those nominated to join R360, a new, invitation-only investment and networking group for people with net worth of $100 million or more. Neither billionaire made it past the membership committee, according to Charles Garcia, one of the group’s managing partners.

“I took some grief for that,” said the 60-year-old entrepreneur, a consummate networker who founded Sterling Financial Investment Group in the late 1990s and chaired South Florida chapters of wealth network Tiger 21 for many years. “One person seemed to want to leverage the group to benefit their own business activities, and the other didn’t want to integrate his family.”

Neither of those are in line with the values considered core to the group. Members with those values — which include honor, entrepreneurial grit and generosity of spirit — are invited to go on a three-year “journey” to gain mastery across six kinds of capital: financial, intellectual, spiritual, human, emotional and social. A three-year family membership costs $180,000.

There are countless formal and informal networks for wealthy individuals and families, and R360 aims to find a place among them. Tiger 21, perhaps the most widely known group, has nearly 1,000 members paying dues of $30,000 a year. 

For the ultra-wealthy, these groups provide a sort of confidential, supercharged coaching network on everything from figuring out one’s purpose in life to learning more about philanthropy to understanding the blockchain.

“When people get wealth of $100 million or more, their issues are far greater than for people who are wealthy but not at that level,” said Michael Cole, 61, one of R360’s managing partners and the former chief executive officer of Cresset Asset Management. “They’ve achieved success, and are looking more at how can I make an impact on things that matter to me — for myself, for my family, for society.”

Then there are philanthropic networks, such as the invite-only Synergos Global Philanthropy Circle, founded by Peggy Dulany and her late father, David Rockefeller, with more than 100 member families around the world. Like R360, GPC describes membership as a journey — a year-long cycle of “inspiring, engaging and connecting philanthropists and social investors to create a better world.” Dues are $25,000 a year.

These independent groups are in addition to those those formed by private banks and high-end wealth-management firms, which pour resources into building networks designed to connect, educate, entertain — and retain — their ultra-wealthy clients and their children.

They can also be flourishing businesses themselves. Tiger 21 was founded in 1999 by entrepreneur Michael Sonnenfeldt, who sold roughly a 50% stake to private equity firm Education Growth Partners in 2019 for an undisclosed sum.

R360 is set up as a limited partnership, with 48 founding partners contributing $350,000 each, which equates to about a 60% ownership. The group wants to add about 50 members a year until reaching 500 in the U.S. and 500 abroad. Garcia stresses that R360 will never be sold, and that “the idea is to have this around 100, 200 years from now.”

Does Walgreen's Theft Of Employee Wages Vastly Exceed Its Losses To Shoplifting?

popular |  In the United States, only certain types of theft are newsworthy. 

For example, on June 14, 2021, a reporter for KGO-TV in San Francisco tweeted a cellphone video of a man in Walgreens filling a garbage bag with stolen items and riding his bicycle out of the store. According to San Francisco's crime database, the value of the merchandise stolen in the incident was between $200 and $950. 

This just happened at the @Walgreens on Gough & Fell Streets in San Francisco. #NoConsequences @chesaboudin pic.twitter.com/uSbnTQQk4J

— Lyanne Melendez (@LyanneMelendez) June 14, 2021

According to an analysis by FAIR, a media watchdog, this single incident generated 309 stories between June 14 and July 12. A search by Popular Information reveals that, since July 12, there have been dozens of additional stories mentioning the incident. The theft has been covered in a slew of major publications including the New York Times, USA Today and CNN.

In most coverage, the video is presented as proof that there are no consequences for shoplifting in San Francisco. But the man in the video, Jean Lugo-Romero, was arrested about a week later and faces 15 charges, including "grand theft, second-degree burglary and shoplifting." He was recently transferred to county jail where he is being held without bond. 

Just a few months earlier, in November 2020, Walgreens paid a $4.5 million settlement to resolve a class-action lawsuit alleging that it stole wages from thousands of its employees in California between 2010 and 2017. The lawsuit alleged that Walgreens "rounded down employees' hours on their timecards, required employees to pass through security checks before and after their shift without compensating them for time worked, and failed to pay premium wages to employees who were denied legally required meal breaks." 

Walgreens' settlement includes attorney's fees and other penalties, but $2,830,000 went to Walgreens employees to compensate them for the wages that the company had stolen. And, because it is a settlement, that amount represents a small fraction of the total liability. According to the order approving the settlement, it represents "approximately 22% of the potential damages."

So this is a story of a corporation that stole millions of dollars from its own employees. How much news coverage did it generate? There was a single 221-word story in Bloomberg Law, an industry publication. And that's it. There has been no coverage in the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, or the dozens of other publications that covered the story of a man stealing a few hundred dollars of merchandise.

 

What Kind Of Crimes Capture "Our" Attention?

darrellowens  |  I don’t really know if there’s a crime wave regardless of the perception that there is one. I don’t trust police statistics besides homicide, home invasion and auto burglaries. I don’t know many people who would make a police report about assault or theft. I worked at a Walgreens with an extensive theft problem and know first hand only extreme cases were reported to the police. In San Francisco, there’s seven fewer homicides, two hundred more burglaries and fifty more motor thefts than last year. Is that a crime wave? I suppose. The entire country has seen increased crime since the pandemic. The only thing that sticks out about San Francisco is the appalling high drug overdoses last year in which no other Bay Area county came close.

Couldn’t help but notice that the vast majority of mob burglaries happened outside of San Francisco, though. I notice that only crimes in San Francisco require public responses from district attorney Chesa Boudin. Alameda County district attorney Nancy O’Malley is never made to answer for the very clear crime wave in Oakland right now. O’Malley virtually never appears in any publication about the endless homicides, the endless dispensary attacks, or even the freeway shootings that have killed two in the last couple months including a mother and a baby, on top of 80 freeway shootings last year in Alameda County. Nothing about district attorney Diana Becton who bears apparently no responsibility for the numerous homicides in Pittsburg and Antioch, or the burglaries in Walnut Creek. Jeff Rosen, Santa Clara County DA, home of the Lululemon and this recent shoe store mob burglary? Never heard of him.

It’s only Boudin, apparently, who’s expected to give public comment to media about crime. Why? It’s not as if he runs SFPD. He doesn’t make staffing decisions, he doesn’t decide who gets arrested and where beat patrols go. He’s a prosecutor. Because he pointed out that punitive behavior isn’t always warranted in every situation, now he’s become target #1 for all social ills in San Francisco with a recall initiative, despite no real evidence that he’s more lenient on prosecutions than his Bay Area counterparts, or that the crime wave is unique to San Francisco.

What really gets to me though is that there is a clear crime wave happening. Oakland’s at its 127th homicide as of typing this. When I started this substack 2 days ago it was at its 126th. Where’s the faces of the victims? Where’s the twitter videos? Who even are these homicide victims? With exception to the murdered KRON guard Kevin Nishita or baby Jasper Wu, we hardly even know them.

Prior to the pandemic, homicides in Oakland were at all time lows, but now the homicide levels for a second year in a row is reaching 1990s levels of death. But since these are mainly confined to East Oakland and West Oakland, and the victims are mostly Black and Brown, nobody really cares. After all, it’s where murder is expected to happen and to the people it's expected to happen to. When crime happens where it’s not supposed to happen like in suburban Walnut Creek or downtown San Francisco, suddenly it gets hyper media focus.

Louis Vuitton and Nordstrom have become incessantly repeated names as if they’re people, not 15 year old Shamara Young, 34 year old Danny McNary Jr, 41 year old Kanawa Long, 22 year old Devani Aleman Sanchez, 24 year old Suiti Mesui, 33 year old Lindsey Logue, 52 year old Dirk Tillotson, 30 year old Willie Lennon III and the list goes on. What about the numerous unidentified people who were gunned down and had their lives taken from them? The media doesn’t care because they died in the zipcodes where society has deemed it acceptable and not news worthy.

There were three instances of shootings in Oakland the weekend of the Louis Vuitton burglary. Two people—two human beings—died. Shot to death by a gun, bled out on the street with their minds in panic. One a 17 year old boy who spent over 6,000 days being born, raised, having life struggles and successes, having family, going to school — all erased in just a few seconds. No follow up stories by newspapers, no check-ins on the family from journalists. No social media outrage. Nothing.

Just another sex and age description in the homicide weekly wrap up. Public dollars goes not to the therapy for the families who lost their relatives or have been terrorized by crackling bullets, not just in Oakland or Antioch but in Bayview-Hunter’s Point or the troubled areas in downtown San Francisco, but instead to free parking and street closures for suburban Black Friday shoppers.

Are Social Media Influencers Organizing These Flash Mobs...?

MSN  |  A Chicago bus driver landed in the hospital after he was beaten on the streets Saturday night, resulting in a 15-year-old boy being arrested. 

The bus driver, 49, was inspecting his bus at about 9 p.m. after he heard a loud sound. He was reportedly pushed and punched by both a male and female, police said. An unidentified 15-year-old boy was charged with a felony count of aggravated battery of a transit employee and disorderly conduct in connection. 

Footage allegedly showing the incident has spread on social media. A large group of youths is seen surrounding the bus driver and hitting and kicking him as onlookers cheer and record the incident. 

CHICAGO WOMEN PUNCHED, SHOVED IN STRING OF ROBBERIES OVER 25-MINUTE PERIOD, POLICE SAID

Chicago police, however, did not confirm to Fox News that the video circulating shows the attack on the 49-year-old bus driver. Police directed Fox News to the "initial narrative" that only two suspects were involved and added that police "do not have any additional information."

Violence plagued the Loop in Chicago on Saturday night. A 15-year-old was shot in the arm, dozens of young people flooded the area, fights broke out, police made 21 arrests of youths, a police officer suffered a broken arm, another officer was injured, and a convenience store owner was punched in the face. 

Second Ward Alderman Brian Hopkins said police have evidence that the large groups formed due to social media influencers who organized a flash mob.

Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot said "swift action" will be taken and that parents need to take responsibility for their kids.

"We are going to take significant, swift action to quell any issues," Lightfoot said of the incident. "[Saturday night] there were a large number of children that were down at Millennium Park. We followed the protocols that we put in place from the summer of 2020. When it was time for them to leave the park, we made sure they left the park without incident." 

"These kids have to take responsibility, but I’m going to say the parents have to take responsibility," she said. "Do you know where your kid is? Are you making sure that you’re talking to your children about how they should act in a large crowd?"  Fist tap Dale 

Is The Organized Looting A Political Statement?

twitter |  I'm starting to think that organized looting may represent a deeper ambition to make a political statement against capitalism and "the system."

Sharing some reactions to my thread on boarded up SF below.

(A 🧵, 1/x)

First - the thread. It has reached about 15 million impressions - driven primarily by critics and trolls.

Here are the stats just of the first tweet.

Linked here:

Unroll available on Thread Reader

https://twitter.com/michelletandler/status/1465393612577853440?s=20

I went through a few hundred of the replies and quote tweets yesterday morning.

It was a painful read.

The tweets are filled with anger and hatred. If you are easily triggered do not read this thread. I was very disturbed reading these.

If you want to see my notes they are linked in this Notion Doc.

However - to summarize there were a few categories of critical responses:
1. You are evil
2. Rich/businesses/property is evil
3. Gov/System is broken
4. This is justified
5. Misc/other

First up - "you are evil". The primary arguments were:
+ You just want to shop for luxury goods
+ You just care about money/things looking good
+ You are white (and have benefited from racism)
+ You are racist

A few more from "you are evil" theme (note - there were hundreds of these):

The second theme was that the rich/businesses/ property are evil (1/2)

Dr. Matthew Memoli Pushed Back On The Jab Mandate And Got Smothered With An NIH Pillow....,

Fist tap Brother John

For The World To Live, America Must ______?

foreignpolicy |   To imagine that economics leads to political de-escalation would be, to say the least, historically naive. As U.S. history teaches, socioeconomic clashes can play out violently. The South fought a civil war in defense of slavery, a mode of production based on forced labor. Nor do producers, outrun by technology, necessarily surrender quietly to the force of technological logic. Think about the protracted rearguard actions mounted in defense of agrarian interests that distorts global food markets all the way to the present day. The most gothic visions see the United States plunged into something akin to a civil war between fossil fuels and anti-fossil fuel factions. That may be fanciful, but what is harder to deny is the United States, whether governed by Democrats or Republicans, has a lamentable track record of managing and mitigating the job losses and social dislocation that follows deep economic change.

In 2012, economist David Autor and his co-authors published a famous paper on what they called the “China syndrome.” They showed how China’s integration into the world economy and a surge of imports to the United States raised incomes overall but, at the same time, irreparably damaged many manufacturing communities across the United States. Ahead of COP26, Autor and his co-authors released an updated paper, which compared the China shock with the impact of coal’s rundown. Damage to local economies from the coal industry’s decline was even worse. If the China shock is widely blamed for unhinging the blue-collar coalition that once supported Democrats, the effect of the coal industry’s collapse was even more unambiguous: 2016 saw a heavy pro-Trump swing across America’s coal regions.

The answer from the Democratic Party’s left wing, after they won control of the House of Representatives in 2018, was the Green New Deal. It sought to address this challenge by combining gigantic investment in renewables with an alliance with organized labor and marginalized groups to create a “just transition.” It was a head-on effort to win the argument for an energy transition, not just as an opportunity for green growth but as a moment of social reconstruction as well. It was a grand vision adequate to the scale of the climate crisis. When Sen. Bernie Sanders folded his presidential bid in 2020, many of his key advisors were incorporated into Biden’s policy team—and with good reason. Given the dislocation an energy transition is likely to cause, the industrial revolution Kerry advocates would be political poison were it not backed by a Green New Deal vision.

But Biden was not carried to victory in 2020 on the back of enthusiasm for green policies. In Texas, there is reason to believe an anti-climate, pro-oil vote helped yield a better-than-expected result for Trump. On Capitol Hill, Biden’s infrastructure plans have been cut to ribbons by a Congress with a nominal Democratic majority. The outlook for the 2022 midterms is grim. Decarbonization may be a promising business proposition in some sectors, but it is not an issue that will help Democrats win the majority they would need to give comprehensive climate policy a robust political platform.

We are thus back at the impasse. The idea that economic logic by itself will deliver an unambiguous case for ambitious climate policy in the United States is naive. But so too is the idea that a Green New Deal-style program will carry a progressive Democratic Party to triumphant victory. The possibility of a deepening sociopolitical divide around the climate issue and inconsistent and incoherent policy cannot be denied. While individual eco-entrepreneurs like Musk may get rich, the fear must be that the United States never develops a coherent social response to the energy transition.

Ecological Reality's Human Overshoot

visualcapitalist |  Anthropogenic mass is defined as the mass embedded in inanimate solid objects made by humans that have not been demolished or taken out of service—which is separately defined as anthropogenic mass waste.

Over the past century or so, human-made mass has increased rapidly, doubling approximately every 20 years. The collective mass of these materials has gone from 3% of the world’s biomass in 1900 to being on par with it today.

While we often overlook the presence of raw materials, they are what make the modern economy possible. To build roads, houses, buildings, printer paper, coffee mugs, computers, and all other human-made things, it requires billions of tons of fossil fuels, metals and minerals, wood, and agricultural products.

Human-Made Mass

Every year, we extract almost 90 billion tons of raw materials from the Earth. A single smartphone, for example, can carry roughly 80% of the stable elements on the periodic table.

The rate of accumulation for anthropogenic mass has now reached 30 gigatons (Gt)—equivalent to 30 billion metric tons—per year, based on the average for the past five years. This corresponds to each person on the globe producing more than his or her body weight in anthropogenic mass every week.

At the top of the list is concrete. Used for building and infrastructure, concrete is the second most used substance in the world, after water.

Human-Made Mass	Description	1900 (mass/Gt)	1940 (mass/Gt)	1980 (mass/Gt)	2020 (mass/Gt)
Concrete	Used for building and infrastructure, including cement, gravel and sand	2	10	86	549
Aggregates	Gravel and sand, mainly used as bedding for roads and buildings	17	30	135	386
Bricks	Mostly composed of clay and used for constructions	11	16	28	92
Asphalt	Bitumen, gravel and sand, used mainly for road construction/pavement	0	1	22	65
Metals	Mostly iron/steel, aluminum and copper	1	3	13	39
Other	Solid wood products, paper/paperboard, container and flat glass and plastic	4	6	11	23

Bricks and aggregates like gravel and sand also represent a big part of human-made mass.

Although small compared to other materials in our list, the mass of plastic we’ve made is greater than the overall mass of all terrestrial and marine animals combined.

As the rate of growth of human-made mass continues to accelerate, it could become triple the total amount of global living biomass by 2040.

Ecological Reality

visualcapitalist |  Our planet supports approximately 8.7 million species, of which over a quarter live in water.

But humans can have a hard time comprehending numbers this big, so it can be difficult to really appreciate the breadth of this incredible diversity of life on Earth.

In order to fully grasp this scale, we draw from research by Bar-On et al. to break down the total composition of the living world, in terms of its biomass, and where we fit into this picture.

Why Carbon?

A “carbon-based life form” might sound like something out of science fiction, but that’s what we and all other living things are.

Carbon is used in complex molecules and compounds—making it an essential part of our biology. That’s why biomass, or the mass of organisms, is typically measured in terms of carbon makeup.

In our visualization, one cube represents 1 million metric tons of carbon, and every thousand of these cubes is equal to 1 Gigaton (Gt C).

Here’s how the numbers stack up in terms of biomass of life on Earth:

Taxon	Mass (Gt C)	% of total
Plants	450	82.4%
Bacteria	70	12.8%
Fungi	12	2.2%
Archaea	7	1.3%
Protists	4	0.70%
Animals	2.589	0.47%
Viruses	0.2	0.04%
Total	545.8	100.0%

Plants make up the overwhelming majority of biomass on Earth. There are 320,000 species of plants, and their vital photosynthetic processes keep entire ecosystems from falling apart.

Fungi is the third most abundant type of life—and although 148,000 species of fungi have been identified by scientists, it’s estimated there may be millions more.

The World Is Upside Down And The Laws Of The Universe Shaken...,

LATimes  |  “They’re trying to move us backward,” said Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles. “We don’t want to move backward; we want to move forward.”

Abdullah called Avant’s killing “horrific and appalling” and said Black Lives Matter mourns with her family. But she said officials must not be allowed to use Avant’s death or recent property crime to push for more policing, cash bail or other tough-on-crime measures that she said have been proved not to work.

“We need to think about what kind of economic desperation actually creates property crime and how do we get people out of that state,” Abdullah said. “How do we create livable wage jobs? How do we create affordable housing?”

Abdullah also warned against accepting claims about crime that may not have a basis in reality — which, as it happens, is something police have warned against in recent days, as concern over crime trends has escalated.

Jacqueline Avant 🕊🙏🏾 pic.twitter.com/fMyCmmmgj9

— Oprah Winfrey (@Oprah) December 2, 2021

For example, while the “follow-home” and “smash-and-grab” trends in L.A., including upticks in robberies in corridors like Melrose Avenue, have caused concern, they are not indicative of a citywide surge in property crime.

According to LAPD data through Nov. 27, property crime this year is up 2.6% over the same period last year but is down 6.6% from 2019. Robbery is up 3.9% over last year but down 13.6% from 2019. Burglaries are down 8.4% from last year and down 7.7% from 2019. Car thefts are a notable outlier, up nearly 53% from 2019.

More concerning is violent crime. Homicides are up 46.7% compared with 2019, while shooting victims are up 51.4%, according to police data. As of the end of November, there had been 359 homicides in L.A. in 2021, compared with 355 in all of 2020. There have not been more homicides in one year since 2008, which ended with 384.

In Beverly Hills, police stress that crime is rare — and killings like Avant’s even more so. Police Chief Mark Stainbrook said that despite recent incidents, Beverly Hills remains one of the safest cities in the nation.

Crime across Beverly Hills this year was down 2% as of the end of October. Violent crime in the past two years is up 23% compared with the two years prior, but the total number of such crimes remains tiny: There were just five robberies in the city in October, and homicides are rare.

It’s not clear what reforms the concerns about crime in the Los Angeles area will lead to — if any.

A crime spike in the 1990s led California to adopt policies that toughened sentences and increased incarceration. The reform movement was an acknowledgment that those policies went too far and caused their own injustices. A poll of L.A. voters released this week showed that public safety is perceived as less of a pressing problem than homelessness, housing affordability, traffic, climate change and air quality.

Jonathan Simon, a criminal justice professor at UC Berkeley’s law school and author of “Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear,” said it is unlikely that crime concerns will completely derail the progressive criminal justice reform movement that began with Floyd’s killing.

However, such concern could slow those reforms, he said — showing once more “how potent the political value of crime is” and how quickly politicians and others can revert to a “crackdown” mentality.

“It’s a powerful trope now for 40 years,” Simon said.

Quite An Experience To Live In Fear Isn't It?

Townhall  |   Third Worldization reflects the asymmetry of law enforcement. Ideology and money, not the law, adjudicate who gets arrested and tried, and who does not.

There were 120 days of continuous looting, arson, and lethal violence during the summer of 2020. Rioters burned courthouses, police precincts, and an iconic church.

And there was also a frightening riot on January 6, when a mob entered Washington D.C.'s Capitol and damaged federal property. Of those arrested during the violence, many have been held in solitary confinement or under harsh jail conditions. That one-day riot is currently the subject of a congressional investigation.

Some of those arrested are still - 10 months later - awaiting trial. The convicted are facing long prison sentences.

In contrast, some 14,000 were arrested in the longer and more violent rioting of 2020. Most were released without bail. The majority had their charges dropped. Very few are still being held awaiting capital charges.

A common denominator to recent controversies at the Justice Department, CIA, FBI, and Pentagon is that all these agencies under dubious pretexts have investigated American citizens with little or no justification - after demonizing their targets as "treasonous," "domestic terrorists," "white supremacists," or "racists."

In the Third World, basic services like power, fuel, transportation, and water are characteristically unreliable: in other words, much like a frequent California brownout.

I've been on five flights in my life where it was announced there was not enough fuel to continue to the scheduled destination. The plane was required either to turn around or land somewhere on the way. One such aborted flight took off from Cairo, another from southern Mexico. The other three were this spring and summer inside the United States.

One of the most memorable scenes that I remember of Ankara, Old Cairo, or Algiers of the early 1970s were legions of beggars and the impoverished sleeping on sidewalks.

But such impoverishment pales in comparison to the encampments of present-day Fresno, Los Angeles, Sacramento, or San Francisco. Tens of thousands live on sidewalks and in open view use them to defecate, urinate, inject drugs, and dispose of refuse.

In the old Third World, extreme wealth and poverty existed in close proximity. It was common to see peasants on horse-drawn wagons a few miles from coastal villas. But there is now far more contiguous wealth and poverty in Silicon Valley. In Redwood City and East Palo Alto, multiple families cram into tiny bungalows and garages, often a few blocks from tony Atherton.

On the main streets outside of Stanford University and the Google campus, the helot classes sleep in decrepit trailers and buses parked on the streets.

Neistat was right in identifying a pandemic of crime in Los Angeles as Third Worldization.

But so was Rogen, though unknowingly so. The actor played the predictable role of the smug, indifferent Third World rich who master ignoring - and navigating around - the misery of others in their midst.

Watch The Black Godfather To Understand Living Memory And What Happened Here...,

NYTimes |  The police on Thursday announced that they had arrested a suspect in the fatal shooting of Jacqueline Avant, a philanthropist and the wife of the music producer Clarence Avant, one day after she was killed at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif.

About an hour after Ms. Avant, 81, was killed, the suspect, Aariel Maynor, 29, of Los Angeles, was arrested when he accidentally shot himself in the foot while burglarizing a home in Hollywood, about 7 miles from Ms. Avant’s home, Chief Mark Stainbrook of the Beverly Hills Police Department said at a news conference on Thursday.

The police found Mr. Maynor in the backyard of the home in Hollywood after they received a report of a shooting there at 3:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Chief Stainbrook said, adding that they also recovered the rifle Mr. Maynor is believed to have used to shoot Ms. Avant. Mr. Maynor was taken to a hospital, where he remains in custody.

Ms. Avant was found with a gunshot wound after the police received a report of a shooting at her home in Beverly Hills at 2:23 a.m. on Wednesday. Mr. Avant and a private security guard were at the home at the time of the shooting, but were unharmed, the police said.

Surveillance videos, including city cameras, showed Mr. Maynor’s vehicle heading eastbound out of Beverly Hills shortly after Ms. Avant was shot, Chief Stainbrook said.

The evidence indicates that Mr. Maynor acted alone in the shooting, and his motive remains under investigation, Chief Stainbrook said. Mr. Maynor has “an extensive criminal record” and was on parole, Chief Stainbrook said.

“Our deepest gratitude to The City of Beverly Hills, the B.H.P.D. and all law enforcement for their diligence on this matter,” Ms. Avant’s family said in a statement on Thursday after the police announced the arrest. “Now, let justice be served.”

The fatal shooting of Ms. Avant prompted an outpouring of grief and condolences from prominent figures in the arts, sports and politics, including former President Bill Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore and the former Los Angeles Lakers star Magic Johnson.

A onetime model who was married to Mr. Avant for more than 50 years, Ms. Avant was a past president of the Neighbors of Watts, a charitable organization that threw star-studded benefits to support child care and other needs. She was also an elementary school tutor and an avid collector of Japanese lacquered boxes.

Mr. Avant started Sussex Records in 1969 and signed Bill Withers, releasing some of his best-known songs, including “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Use Me” and “Lean on Me.” Over the years, he also worked with Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis and Babyface. He helped promote Michael Jackson’s “Bad” world tour in 1987, and was chairman of the board of Motown Records.

Mr. Avant was the subject of a 2019 Netflix documentary, “The Black Godfather,” which featured testimonials from Mr. Clinton, former President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris, who was then a presidential candidate.

The couple’s daughter, Nicole A. Avant, a former U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas, was a producer of “The Black Godfather,” and is married to Ted Sarandos, a co-chief executive of Netflix.

It's One Thing To Loot Louis Vuitton And Nordstroms, But The SwapMeet Too?!?!?!

LATimes |  The spate of smash-and-grab robberies plaguing Los Angeles made its way to Rancho Dominguez this week, where authorities say cash, jewelry and other items were taken from the Del Amo Swap Meet.

The incident occurred around 11:30 a.m. Thursday, according to Deputy Grace Medrano of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Video provided to The Times showed several people making off with goods amid broken glass and blaring alarms.

The witness who took the video said there were several people shopping at the time of the robbery and that the thieves “faked a fight” to distract security guards before breaking the glass and grabbing the items.

“People were scared [and] running away because the glass-smashing sounded like gunshots,” said the witness, who asked to remain anonymous.

Two employees were shoved to the ground, but it was not clear whether they were injured, the witness said, adding that the robbers had multiple cars waiting outside with their engines running.

A representative for the Swap Meet did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

 

I'm Not Who They Say I Am....,

Fist Tap Dale

ecosophia  |  There’s a fond belief among the comfortable classes of our time, and for that matter every other time, that the future can be arranged in advance through reasonable discussions among reasonable people.  Popular though this notion is, it’s quite mistaken. What history shows, rather, is that the future is always born on the irrational fringes of society, bursting forth among outcasts, dreamers, saints, and fools.  It then sweeps inward from there, brushing aside the daydreams of those who thought they could make the world do as they pleased.

Consider the Roman Empire in the days of its power.  While its politicians and bureaucrats laid their plans and built their careers on the presupposition that their empire would endure for all imaginable time, a prisoner on a Mediterranean island—exiled for his membership in a despised religious cult—saw the empire racked with wars, famines, and plagues, ravaged by horsemen galloping out of the east, and finally conquered and fallen into ruin, to be followed by a thousand years of triumph for his faith.  We call him John of Patmos today, and his vision forms the last book of the New Testament. He was a figure of the uttermost fringe in his own era: isolated, powerless, and quite possibly crazy.  He was also right.

Thus it’s important to keep a close eye on the fringes of contemporary culture, the places where the future is being born out of the surging tides of unreason.  One of the things I watch most closely with this in mind is the burgeoning realm of contemporary conspiracy theories. Those reveal far more than the conventionally minded imagine, irrespective of their factual accuracy or lack of same.  As Alain de Botton commented of religions, whether conspiracy theories are true or not is far and away the least interesting question about them.

To begin with, the popularity of conspiracy theories is a sensitive measure of the degree to which people no longer trust the conventional wisdom of their time. That’s an explosive issue just now, and for good reason:  the conventional wisdom of our time is fatally out of step with the facts on the ground.  Look across the whole range of acceptable views presented by qualified pundits, and by and large you’ll find that a randomly chosen fortune cookie will give you better guidance. The debacle in Afghanistan is only one reminder of the extent that a popular joke about economics—“What do you call an economist who makes a prediction?  Wrong.”—can be applied with equal force to most of the experts whose notions guide industrial societies.

What makes the astounding incompetence of today’s expert opinions so toxic is that nobody in the corporate media, and next to nobody in the political sphere, is willing to talk about it.  No matter how disastrous the consequences turn out to be—no matter how often the economic policies that were supposed to yield prosperity result in poverty and misery, no matter how often programs meant to improve the schools make them worse, no matter how many drugs released on the market as safe and effective turn out to be neither, and so on at great length—one rule remains sacrosanct:  no one outside the managerial class is supposed to question the validity of the next round of expert-approved policies, no matter how obviously doomed to fail they are.

Gregory Bateson, in a fascinating series of articles collected in his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind, discussed the way that schizophrenia is created by this kind of suppression of the obvious in a family setting. Insist to a child from infancy onward that something is true that the child can see is obviously not true, punish the child savagely every time it tries to bring up the contradiction, and there’s a fair chance the child will grow up to be schizophrenic. Conspiracy theories in society are the collective equivalent of schizophrenia in the individual, and they have the same cause: the systematic gaslighting of individuals who know that they are being lied to.

Bateson’s analysis goes further than this. He noticed that, bizarre as schizophrenic delusions can be, they always contain a solid core of truth expressed in exaggerated and metaphoric language. Look into the family situation, Bateson suggests, and you can decode the metaphors. Here’s a patient who claims that he’s Jesus Christ.  Observation of the family reveals one of those wretched family dramas, as dysfunctional as it is endlessly repeated, in which the patient was assigned an ill-fitting role from birth. What the patient is saying, in his exaggerated and metaphoric way, is quite accurate: “I’m not who they say I am.”

 

 

American Youth Senses The Darkness Just Around That Signpost Up Ahead...,

hks.harvard  | More than half of young Americans feel democracy in the country is under threat, and over a third think they may see a second U.S. civil war within their lifetimes, according to the 42nd Harvard Youth Poll, released by Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics (IOP) on Wednesday. 

The poll also found approval of President Biden has plummeted, and a majority of respondents are unhappy with how the president and Congress are doing their jobs. In addition, many of the respondents feel strongly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and are worried about the threat of climate change. Half of all respondents also said they struggled with feelings of hopelessness and depression. 

The Harvard Youth Poll—which is conducted twice a year, in fall and spring, and has run for over 20 years—captured responses on these topics and others from 2,109 people between the ages of 18 and 29, from across the country. Students from the Harvard Public Opinion Project (HPOP) organized the survey, under the supervision of John Della Volpe, director of polling at the IOP. 

“After turning out in record numbers in 2020, young Americans are sounding the alarm. When they look at the America they will soon inherit, they see a democracy and climate in peril—and Washington as more interested in confrontation than compromise,” Della Volpe said. “Despite this, they seem as determined as ever to fight for the change they seek.”

Jing-Jing Shen, a Harvard College undergraduate and the HPOP student chair, said, “Right now, young Americans are confronting worries on many fronts. Concerns about our collective future—with regard to democracy, climate change, and mental health—also feel very personal.” Shen noted, however, that “young people have come to even more deeply value their communities and connections with others” in this challenging time.

The survey found a striking lack of confidence in U.S. democracy among young Americans. Only 7% view the United States as a “healthy democracy,” and 52% believe that democracy is either “in trouble” or “failing.” This concern is echoed in the fact that 35% of respondents anticipate a second civil war during their lifetimes, and 25% believe that at least one state will secede.

Death Robots Terrorizing Little Kids Don't Play Well On Cable News

theweek |  Our infamous drone war has largely faded from the headlines. Aside from one strike that went horribly wrong during the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan, there has been vanishingly little coverage of what's going on with the signature American tactic of the war on terror: remote-controlled death robots.

So I was rather taken aback to discover President Biden has almost totally halted drone strikes, and airstrikes in general, around the world. It's a remarkable foreign policy reform, but also a remarkable failure of both government communication and media coverage. A hugely significant change in foreign policy has happened — and almost nobody is paying attention.

Not long ago, the drone war was subject to fierce public debate. It started under former President George W. Bush, then became a favored tactic of former President Barack Obama. He'd come to power on the strength of his record opposing the Iraq War but was, at bottom, a devoted imperial chauvinist. Obama wanted to avoid being bogged down in new overseas occupations (except in Afghanistan, where he idiotically boosted troop levels to no positive effect) but never truly questioned U.S. global imperialism or the military-industrial complex.

The drone strike was thus the perfect tool for his presidency: a cheap, high-tech, and supposedly super-accurate method of fighting terrorism (and extending U.S. military hegemony) at no risk to American soldiers. (U.S. airstrikes with human pilots increasingly operate in similar safety, rarely flying over targets with anti-aircraft defenses.) "Turns out I'm really good at killing people," Obama told aides in 2011. "Didn't know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine."

That was only true if "really good" is measured by quantity, not quality, of the strikes. The intelligence used to pick targets was routinely atrocious, and airstrikes blew up weddings, markets, and random civilian houses. A C-130 gunship annihilated a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan in 2015. Many people in drone-ridden areas, especially children, developed chronic PTSD from the constant buzzing whine of a machine that could and quite often did kill them out of nowhere for no reason.

The Jackpot Is Here Right Now, It's Just Not Evenly Distributed

thebulletin  |   Depending on specifications, drones can be cheap—some quite capable models cost no more than $100—and still theoretically useful in a crude attack on critical infrastructure. Of course, would-be terrorists could acquire much more capable and expensive drones, as well. Controlling the sale of popular and useful tools is difficult. What should the US government, or others, do to reign in the threat drone terror could pose to utilities or other critical infrastructure?

Within the United States, only federal authorities can operate counter-drone systems. The Department of Homeland Security’s 2019 Counter Unmanned Systems Technology Guide, a 33-page booklet about drones and ways to detect and disable them, contains four warnings, in case anyone mistakes the guide’s description of the counter-drone systems for permission to build or acquire them. Counter-drone systems create their own risk to surrounding systems. A drone-jammer does not just jam the signal to the drone, but any signal operating on the same frequency. That could include air traffic control radio, and other critical signals.

But a federal monopoly on these important defenses raises questions about how effective they can be in an emergency.

If a critical infrastructure owner or operator has to call the FBI when they fear a drone attack, any response will mean little, unless counter-drone operators are already on site. A racing drone flying over 100 miles per hour will outrun a federal SUV every time, especially when the drone has a significant head-start.

The Department of Homeland Security has legal authority to protect “covered” facilities and assets, though exactly what types of facilities are protected is unclear from open sources. (And realistically, that information should not be publicly available, because it would provide a clear guide for adversaries on what facilities are unprotected.) Unless the department protects every covered facility, there will be vulnerabilities, because correctly anticipating every terrorist target is impossible/

Growing technology may create opportunities to avoid making tough value trade-offs. The same technology that allows drones to operate remotely or autonomously may be applied to counter-drone systems. A network of remotely-operated or autonomous counter-drone systems stationed at critical infrastructure sites would allow federal authorities to maintain control, while also allowing far more rapid response to drone events. Authorities could manage numerous counter-drone systems dispersed over a whole region from a central location.

Critical infrastructure faces growing risks from drone terrorism. As the stories of Aum, ISIS, and other terror groups show, non-state actors have been using and experimenting with drones since the mid-1990s. At least back then, to obtain them they had to do more than a quick search on Amazon.

What Is Systemically Important Critical Infrastructure?

lawfareblog |  The Colonial Pipeline attack was the most recent reminder of a steadily encroaching wave of cyber threats affecting the nation’s critical infrastructure. Although the ransomware attack was considered to be “relatively unsophisticated” in nature, it was powerful enough to shut down America’s largest refined products pipeline for several days. It took Colonial six days to get the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) any notifications that could then be disseminated to other at-risk industry entities—and even then, acting CISA Director Brandon Wales remarked that he did not think Colonial would have reached out to CISA had the FBI not facilitated the interaction. Much of the discussion around the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack has obscured a key point: The U.S. government does not have a reliable method to identify, support and secure the most “critical of critical” infrastructure.

The U.S. government is not completely aware of what is critical—as in which companies’ disruption could have devastating or cascading consequences for the economy, national security, or public health and safety. Since its inception, the term “critical infrastructure” has grown so large that it has lost any meaningful specificity. Ranking Member of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. John Katko, reaffirmed this evaluation in a recent press release noting that because the United States has diluted what qualifies as critical infrastructure, “the federal government has visibility into a shockingly small sliver of significant cyber incidents across the country.” Underlying this dilution is the fact that no sufficiently granular and legally enforceable designation for “critical infrastructure” exists—consequently, there is no bound that keeps the concept from expanding into obscurity. Previous bills that have attempted to confer benefits or burdens on “critical infrastructure” have been vague and have not provided any clarity on what qualifies as such.

Furthermore, a risk-based approach to national security requires that the U.S. must prioritize its resources in areas where it can have the greatest impact to prevent the worst consequences. The U.S. government’s most capable adversaries, including Russia and China, are constantly looking for opportunities to scale their cyber operations and focus on targets that would have the greatest destructive impact. These past cyberattacks have illustrated that the nation’s adversaries have adopted a clear strategy that targets the “critical of critical” nodes that underlie U.S. national security. Therefore, the United States should respond in kind and reshape its approach to identifying and protecting them. The Cyberspace Solarium Commission’s 2020 report addresses just that.

The commission recommended that the United States codify into law the concept of “systemically important critical infrastructure” (SICI). These entities, responsible for the most important critical systems and assets in the U.S., would be granted special assistance from the federal government as well as assuming increased responsibility for additional security and information security requirements that are vital to their unique status and importance. This proposal answers the increasing need for the identification, partnership, and protection of the most “critical of critical” infrastructure.

American Prison Is Purely Punitive and Exploitative - In No Way Rehabilitative

proteanmag  |  his April, the Iowa Department of Corrections issued a ban on charities, family members, and other outside parties donating books to prisoners. Under the state’s new guidelines, incarcerated people can get books only from a handful of “approved vendors.” Used books are prohibited altogether, and any new reading material is subject to a laundry list of restrictions.

The policy is harsh, but far from unique. In fact, it’s only the latest in a wave of similar bans. In 2018, the Michigan prison system introduced an almost identical set of rules, and Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington have all made attempts to block book donations, which were only rolled back after public outcry. Across the United States, the agencies responsible for mass imprisonment are trying to severely limit incarcerated people’s access to the written word—an alarming trend, and one that bears closer examination.

The official narrative is that donated books could contain “contraband which poses a threat to the security, good order, or discipline of the facility”—the language used in Michigan—and should be banned for everyone’s safety. This is a flimsy justification that begins to fall apart under even the lightest scrutiny. While it’s true that contraband is often smuggled into prisons (cell phones, tobacco, and marijuana being some of the most popular items), it’s not originating from nonprofit groups like the Appalachian Prison Book Project or Philadelphia’s Books Through Bars. In fact, twelve of the seventeen incidents used to justify a book ban in Washington didn’t involve books at all. 

Instead, the bulk of the contraband in today’s prisons is smuggled in by guards themselves, who profit handsomely from their illicit sidelines, sometimes making as much as $300 for a single pack of cigarettes. If prison officials’ concerns were genuine, the appropriate move would be to limit the power and impunity of their officers—not snatch books away from those who are already powerless. The old cartoon scenario of a hollow book with a saw or a gun inside just isn’t realistic, and its invocation is a sign that something else is going on.

That “something else,” predictably enough, is profit. With free books banned, prisoners are forced to rely on the small list of “approved vendors” chosen for them by the prison administration. These retailers directly benefit when states introduce restrictions. In Iowa, the approved sources include Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million, some of America’s largest retail chains—and, notably, ones which charge the full MSRP value for each book, quickly draining prisoners’ accounts. An incarcerated person with, say, $20 to spend can now only get one book, as opposed to three or four used ones; in states where prisoners make as little as 25 cents an hour for their labor, many can’t afford even that. 

With e-books, the situation is even worse, as companies like Global Tel Link supply supposedly “free” tablets which actually charge their users by the minute to read. Even public-domain classics, available on Project Gutenberg, are only available at a price under these systems—and prisons, in turn, receive a 5% commission on every charge. All of this amounts to rampant price-gouging and profiteering on an industrial scale. 

The rise of these private vendors has also been mirrored by the systematic dismantling of the prison library system. In the last ten years, budgets for literacy and educational resources have seen dramatic cuts, reducing funding to almost nothing, and incarcerated people have been deprived as a result. In Illinois, for instance, the Department of Corrections spent just $276 on books across the entire state in 2017, down from an already meager $605 the previous year. (This means, incidentally, that each of the state’s roughly 39,000 prisoners was allotted seven-tenths of a cent.) Oklahoma, meanwhile, has no dedicated budget for books at all, requiring prison librarians to purchase them out-of-pocket. Many books in its small stock are “falling apart, dilapidated and may be missing some pages.” These cuts are part of capitalism’s more general push to privatize or eliminate public goods and services—libraries among them—so massive corporations can receive windfalls. In prisons, the method is especially devastating.

Shellenberger Says Progressives Ruin Cities

michaelshellenberger |  In my new book, San Fransicko, I describe why progressives create and defend what European researchers call “open drug scenes,” which are places in cities where drug dealers and buyers meet, and many addicts live in tents. Progressives call these scenes “homeless encampments,” and not only defend them but have encouraged their growth, which is why the homeless population in California grew 31 percent since 2000. This was mostly a West Coast phenomenon until recently. But now, the newly elected progressive mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, has decided to keep open a drug scene at Mass and Cass avenues, even though it has resulted in several deaths from drug overdoses and homicides.

Progressives defend their approach as compassionate. Not everybody who is homeless is an addict, they say. Many are just down on their luck. Others turn to drugs after living on the street. What they need is our help. We should not ask people living in homeless encampments to go somewhere else. Homeless shelters are often more dangerous than living on the street. We should provide the people living in tents with money, food, clean needles, and whatever else they need to stay alive and comfortable. And we should provide everyone with their own apartment unit if that’s what they want.

But this “harm reduction” approach is obviously failing. Cities already do a good job taking care of temporarily homeless people not addicted to drugs. Drug dealers stab and sometimes murder addicts who don’t pay. Women forced into prostitution to support their addictions are raped. Addicts are dying from overdose and poisoning. The addicts living in the open drug scenes commit many crimes including open drug use, sleeping on sidewalks, and defecating in public. Many steal to maintain their habits. The hands-off approach has meant that addicts do not spend any amount of time in jail or hospital where they can be off of drugs, and seek recovery.

Now, even a growing number of people who have worked or still work within the homeless services sector are speaking out. A longtime San Francisco homeless service provider who read San Fransicko, and said they mostly agreed with it, reached out to me to share their views. At first this person said they wanted to speak on the record. But as the interview went on, and the person criticized their colleagues, they asked to remain anonymous, fearing retribution.

The main progressive approach for addressing homelessness, not just in San Francisco but in progressive cities around the nation, is “Housing First,” which is the notion that taxpayers should give, no questions asked, apartment units to anyone who says they are homeless, and asks for one. What actually works to reduce the addiction that forces many people onto the streets is making housing contingent on abstinence. But Housing First advocates oppose “contingency management,” as it’s called, because, they say, “Housing is a right,” and it should not be conditioned upon behavior change.

But such a policy is absurdly unrealistic, said the San Francisco homeless expert. “To pretend that this city could build enough permanent supportive housing for every homeless person who needs it is ludicrous,” the person said. “I wish it weren’t. I wish I lived in a land where there was plenty of housing. But now people are dying on our streets and it feels like we’re not doing very much about it.”

The underlying problem with Housing First is that it enables addiction. “The National Academies of Sciences review [which showed that giving people apartments did not improve health or other life outcomes] you cited shows that. San Francisco has more permanent supportive housing units per capita than any other city, and we doubled spending on homelessness, but the homeless population rose 13%, even as it went down in the US. And so we doubled our spending and the problem got worse. But if you say that, you get attacked.”

 

Shellenberger Says Crack Down Hard On Addicts And The Homeless

michaelshellenberger |   Drug decriminalization and “Housing First” advocates say that all we should do to help Diane is to give her a free apartment, needles for shooting and foil for smoking fentanyl, and a place where she can safely use fentanyl. That’s the progressive thing to do, according to San Francisco’s Mayor and Supervisors, who are advocating for a place for addicts to smoke and inject fentanyl. But does that seem like the moral thing to do? Of course it’s not. In fact, it could kill her, in the same way that decriminalization and Housing First policies have contributed to the deaths of 712 people in San Francisco last year. 

 The moral thing to do is to arrest Diane. Does that sound mean to you? If it does, then you don’t understand addiction, or you’re in denial about its hold over people. In the comments on Twitter to Adam’s video, Jacqui Berlinn, the mother of a fentanyl street addict in San Francisco, said, “She deserves love and compassion mental care and counseling — not needles and foil.” Someone responded, “She has to chose to do that herself. Nobody can force her.” It’s true that Diane has to decide whether to quit fentanyl. But by enforcing our laws against public drug use, we can give Diane the choice of rehab or jail.

Why don’t we? In a word, victimology. That’s the three part idea that a) Diane is a victim; b) victimhood is not a stage on the road to heroism but rather a permanent state; and c) everything should be given and nothing required of victims. According to the progressive victimologists who run San Francisco, and other progressive cities, the laws against public drug use, public defecation, and shoplifting, should not be enforced against Diane because she’s an addict. As a victim, Diane is sacred, and the system is sinful. As such, it is better to let her die from fentanyl than to enforce the law. It’s part of the Woke religion. 

It is Woke religion, a.k.a., victimology, which leads progressives to grossly misrepresent Diane’s situation. Progressives insist, against what they say are our lying eyes, that Diane is homeless not because she is addicted to fentanyl but rather because rents in San Francisco are too high. Progressives insist that the homeless on the streets are locals who couldn’t afford the rent, not people who moved to San Francisco because they knew the city would allow them to maintain their addiction at low cost without risk of arrest. And progressives insist that the only moral approach is to help Diane maintain her addiction, and not enforce the laws when she breaks them.

In San Fransicko, I debunk the myths that homelessness is a result of high rents, show that Europe saved lives being lost to addiction by arresting addicts and closing open drug scenes, and explain why victimology leads progressives to maintain what is plainly an immoral situation. The title of the book has two meanings. The sickness I describe is the sickness of untreated mental illness and addiction. But the other sickness, San Fransickness, is the sickness of those in the grip of victimology. It is a sickness unto death, one that leads them to deny the fact that the normalization and liberalization of drugs is killing 100,000 of our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, every year.

 

Omicron or Moronic - They Are OPENLY Laughing At You, No?

mubi | Synopsis -An alien takes over the body of an Earthman in order to learn about the planet so his race can take it over.

Let This Motherfucker Lobotomize Pissants Into Streamlined Consensus Reality - And We're Done For...,

FT  |  From December 1, Facebook Inc’s stock ticker FB will be relegated to the dust of time. The world’s largest social media company will instead officially morph into Meta Platforms, to trade under the official ticker MVRS. The move follows Mark Zuckerberg’s bold decision to tie the company’s future evolution with the development of what is loosely described as the metaverse. In coming years, Zuckerberg hopes, people will transition to seeing his empire as primarily a servicer to this new digital realm. 

That means investors in the near $1tn market capitalisation company — and broader society — will have to get a grip on what exactly is the metaverse. It’s not that easy to describe. Today, it exists on many disjointed planes — from gaming universes to virtual conference call systems. Its first and most famous incarnation was probably the Second Life platform, notorious for being a flop although it still boasts some 200,000 active daily users.

Zuckerberg’s vision will benefit from far superior tech. “The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world,” reads the Facebook spiel. But it’s also likely to be an attempt to standardise the metaverse’s consensus reality so that value can be harvested from users in even more creative ways. That may sound alluring to investors, but economists, politicians and activists should take heed. Facebook’s move may also be a jarring acknowledgment that for some tech leaders, the base reality of our world is at risk of losing its investment appeal relative to the metaverse. 

BBC documentary maker Adam Curtis’ once opined that “all of us in the west — not just the politicians and the journalists and the experts, but we ourselves — have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world”. 

The forward march to the metaverse pushes this trend to the extreme. It sends the message that perhaps our true world is so corrupted, so divided and so unfair, that it isn’t worth saving after all. Alternatively, we can photoshop reality to the point we can all pretend everything is as pretty as we experience it in our own heads. Also known as cultivating delusions: don’t worry about your lousy life, come join us in your own dreamworld.

The Elite Anti-Historical Method Is Nearly Identical To The Elite Anti-Scientific Method

WSWS  |  In a highly revealing passage, Silverstein writes that, in “privileging ‘actual fact’ over ‘narrative,’” critics of the 1619 Project “seem to proceed from the premise that history is a fixed thing; that somehow, long ago, the nation’s historians identified the relevant set of facts about our past, and it is the job of subsequent generations to simply protect and disseminate them.” This passage comes after a lengthy discussion of efforts by far-right Republicans who have sought to censor the 1619 Project—efforts which the WSWS opposes. Silverstein’s aim is to conflate scholarly and left-wing criticism of the 1619 Project with the likes of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who have seized on the 1619 Project’s attack on the American Revolution to posture as defenders of democracy, and with earlier efforts by the Republican Party in the 1990s to eliminate what they derided as “revisionist history” from high school textbooks.

That the writing of history involves interpretation of evidence is the most elementary proposition of the profession. To suggest that historians such as Gordon Wood and James McPherson have viewed their task to be to “protect and disseminate” facts reveals far more of Silverstein’s own ignorance than it does these historians’ monumental achievements in researching and writing the histories of the American Revolution and the Civil War.

But it is not really interpretation of the archive that Silverstein has in mind. His brief and reckless foray into historical methodology aims to provide a permission slip for the 1619 Project’s disregarding of facts, whenever these contradict the settled-upon “narrative.” Silverstein gives away the game by his placement within cynical quotations marks the word facts, and by his admission that he does not view history to be “a fixed thing.”

But history is “a fixed thing” in at least one sense. The past actually happened. Generations of people lived, worked, created, struggled, loved, fought and died. They did so under conditions not of their own choosing, but those handed down to them from preceding generations. And they did not do so alone. Out of the development of the productive forces, as Marx long ago explained, classes emerged—lord and vassal, master and slave, capitalist and worker—now in hidden, now in open conflict. On top of all of this culture, law, politics, language, nation—and, with apologies to Hannah-Jones—race developed, always reflecting the ideology of the ruling layers, and always interacting dynamically with the class structure.