Unless You're One Of The 9% Owner/Operators - Trucking Is Now A Shitty Gig Economy Job....,

TIME |  It’s hard to imagine another profession where people don’t get paid for hours they spend at work—unless it’s gig economy jobs where Uber drivers don’t get paid for the time they spend waiting for a passenger to order a car. Some of the problems in trucking arose because the job essentially went from a steady, well-paid job to gig work after the deregulation of the trucking industry in the 1980s, says Steve Viscelli, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the book The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream.

Deregulation essentially changed trucking from a system where a few companies had licenses to take freight on certain routes for certain rates into a system where just about anyone with a motor-carrier authority could move anything anywhere, for whatever the market would pay. As more carriers got into trucking post-deregulation, union rates fell, as did wages. Total employee compensation fell 44% in over-the-road trucking between 1977 and 1987, he says. Today, drivers get paid about 40% less than they did in the late 1970s, Viscelli says, but are twice as productive as they were then.

Now that truck drivers are gig workers, the inefficiencies of the supply chain are making the jobs worse and worse, as Grewal has discovered. “So much of this is about the inefficient use of time. Is there a shortage of truck drivers? Probably not. But they are certainly being used less and less efficiently,” Viscelli says. “That’s the long term consequence of not pricing their time.”

Ironically, the louder the narrative becomes about the “shortage” of truck drivers, the more resources pop up to funnel people into driving. In 1990, the trucking industry figured it needed about 450,000 new drivers and warned of a shortage; in 2018, before the pandemic, the industry said it was short 60,800 drivers.

 

In The 1970's 70%+ Of Truckers Were Owner/Operators And The Rest Were Teamsters..,

history |  At 10:00 p.m. on December 3, 1973, a 37-year old trucker from Overland Park, Kansas named J.W. Edwards stopped his rig suddenly in the middle of Interstate I-80 near Blakeslee, Pennsylvania and picked up his CB radio microphone. The insurrection he was about to start, using his now-famous handle “River Rat,” would give America’s independent truckers their first national voice and, along the way, elevate them to folk-hero status.

Edwards was beyond frustrated and scared for his livelihood. His job hauling meat from the Midwest to New York had become an agonizing slog because an oil embargo—levied by the Middle Eastern petroleum-producing cartel OPEC against the United States for its support of Israel—had dramatically jacked up diesel fuel prices. With rationing imposed, he was stopping at every virtually filling station along his route. Worse still, the federal government was considering a national maximum speed limit of 55 m.p.h. For long-haul drivers, time lost meant money lost, and oil geopolitics had made Edwards’s $12,000-a-year job even more precarious. Near Blakeslee, his tank reached empty. Out of fuel, but full of frustration that truckers were the forgotten little guys in the global fossil-fuel wars, Edwards decided, on the spot, to take to his CB and make some noise.

In the 1970s, truck drivers commonly used Citizens Band (CB) radio to alert their fellow big-rig drivers to traffic conditions, choice fueling spots and lurking police traps. Without proper FCC radio licenses and reluctant to announce their real names over the airwaves, truckers assumed fanciful “handles” and developed colorful slang. They called diesel fuel motion lotion. They dubbed toll booths cash registers. Police became bears: Smokey bears for state troopers who wore campaign hats like Smokey the Bear, bears in the air for police helicopters. Feeding the bears meant paying for a ticket—something more truckers were doing due to new speed restrictions. The OPEC embargo accelerated the CB’s popularity, mostly because it allowed drivers to share places to find motion lotion.

The protest goes national

As other truckers stopped to help Edwards, he broadcast via CB that he was blocking the interstate to protest high gas prices, limited fuel supply and the proposed speed limit. Instantly, he found sympathy. One trucker stated, “If a man is going to be broke, he might as well go broke sitting still.” Others, with handles like Flying Dutchman and Captain Zag, soon joined in. Within an hour, hundreds of rigs came to a halt on I-80. The action paralyzed more than 1,000 vehicles in a jam that extended 12 miles in both directions. 

News of River Rat’s protest spread, and within hours, trucker demonstrations peppered the nation’s highways, with thousands slowing or stopping their vehicles, snarling travel for miles. By December 4, more than 10 states saw demonstrations by angry drivers who demanded to be heard by the federal government—and weren’t afraid to hold up their deliveries to do so. One quipped that he didn’t think Congress would act “until those people run out of toilet paper.”

The vast majority of dissenting truckers were independents who owned and operated their vehicles, unlike unionized Teamsters who typically hauled for large shipping companies. Independents hauled about 70% of the country’s freight, according to Interstate Commerce Commission estimates. Most had their entire lives mortgaged into their expensive rigs and had the most to lose from the embargo. Ironically, River Rat Edwards was not an owner-operator himself. 

 

 

 

Brandon Says "Every Single One Of YOU Chatty Busters Is A Terrorist Threat!"

alexberenson |  The White House has begun an extraordinary assault on free speech in America. It is no longer content merely to force social media companies to suppress dissenting views. It appears to be setting the stage to use federal police powers.

How else to read the “National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin” the Department of Homeland Security issued on Monday? Its first sentence:

SUMMARY OF THE TERRORISM THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES: The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories... [emphasis added]

You read those words right.

The government now says “misleading narratives” are the most dangerous contributor to terrorism against the United States.

The bulletin’s next sentence:

These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence. [emphasis added]

You read those words right too.

A federal agency says that to “undermine public trust in government institutions” is now considered terrorism. Speech doesn’t even have to encourage rebellion or violence generally, much less against anyone specific. It just has to “potentially inspire” violence.

Potentially.

Later, the bulletin explains exactly what speech the government now considers a terrorist danger:

Widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19.

There’s that word misleading again.

Who’s defining “misleading”? Misleading to whom? Misleading how?

DHS February 2022 bulletin

—

I have no doubt whatsoever that I fit as a terrorist threat under these guidelines.

So does Joe Rogan. And Tucker Carlson. After all, we’ve “undermine[d] public trust in government institutions” about Covid and the mRNA shots (I try not to call them vaccines anymore).

This bulletin marks an extraordinary escalation of the war on speech and the First Amendment.

People's Convoy To Washington DC Gathers Steam...,

politico  |  Organizers have dubbed their movement "the People's Convoy" and say they are working with two groups — Freedom Fighter Nation and Restore Liberty — whose founders are closely tied to right wing politics, based on POLITICO's review of social media and online records.

That includes Leigh Dundas, a California lawyer and founder of the Freedom Fighter Nation, who gave a speech on the eve of the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots calling for Trump supporters to kill those whom she claimed had aided foreign governments in undermining the 2020 presidential election, based on a video posted on Twitter.

"A lot of this has worrying parallels to the build-up to the Jan. 6 riots," said Ciaran O'Connor, an analyst for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that tracks online extremism and which has been following the global protests. "It's concerning how this may play out if they get to D.C."

The goal of the U.S. convoy is to push back at vaccine and mask mandates — messages that have been repeated widely by right wing politicians and supporters since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020.

In communication channels on Telegram, an encrypted messaging service, anonymous social media users have railed to tens of thousands of channel members against the alleged Covid-19 oversteps of President Joe Biden's administration and shared videos and other posts from the Canadian truckers' convoy to boost support for similar action in the U.S.

It is unclear if, or when, the U.S. convoy will reach Washington, though within these encrypted messaging channels, supporters routinely offer food, supplies and other logistical support, based on POLITICO's review of the online discussions.

After GoFundMe, the crowdfunding site, removed the fundraising page for the Canadian convoy, far-right influencers like Jack Posobiec shared links via their large social media followings to alternative funding sites. A similar page on GiveSendGo — a rival crowdfunding site frequented by the far right — has so far raised $7.2 million out of a goal of $16 million.

The California-to-Washington protest is not the only anti-mandate convoy that has sprung up to mirror the ongoing mobilization in Canada.

On Feb. 14, similar protests from across the European Union are expected to descend on Brussels — home to the bloc's main political institutions — to rally against mask and vaccine mandates as the region continues to struggle to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

In Canada The World Sees The Internal Weakness Of The Western Empire

SCMP  |  People don’t vote for realities, they vote for dreams, said Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. That’s why democratic politicians usually overpromise but under-deliver. In these populist times, people also vote out of anger.

In the United States, Donald Trump is staging a credible presidential return, and the Republican Party is rallying behind him. In Canada, Justin Trudeau, a classic Canadian liberal moderate, has been blindsided by a bunch of truck drivers. Right-wing politicians understand and know how to exploit voter anger; liberals in North America and social democrats in Europe have no idea why they have become the focus of that same anger.

The never-ending Covid-19 pandemic has one terrible, if not fatal, political consequence for the Western political establishment; that is, its on-again, off-again lockdowns and restrictions have upset everyone from small business owners to homemakers. Such voters tend to be right of centre or conservative.

The virus is not lethal enough to scare or kill off a big chunk of voters, yet is serious enough to disrupt and undermine their livelihoods, and living standards and routines. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that people are angry. And they need to blame someone for their plight. Why is my business failing? Why can’t my kids go to school? They may curse the virus and China, but they blame their politicians.

For more than a week, a long line of big trucks, cargo carriers, pickup vans, recreational vehicles and any number of cars have jammed central Ottawa, the nation’s capital. Ostensibly, the protest is against the federal government’s vaccine mandate for truck drivers entering Canada, first imposed in the middle of last month.

Compared with America, Canada’s angry populism is, to an extent, moderated by a more generous social welfare system and universal health care. But Canadian Medicare, the equivalent of the British National Health Service, is decentralised with each province and territory operating its own system. Outside of rich Ontario, public health care has been overwhelmed by Covid-19. With each passing decade, welfare is more restricted, queues for medical services grow longer and the list of totally free drugs gets shorter. The widespread use of generic drugs, while keeping costs down, has raised serious questions about quality control. Interestingly, it has been a source of national pride to compare them to the high, often unaffordable, costs of brand-name drugs in the US.

Polarised politics now threatens to degenerate into violent civil strife in the US. In Canada, at the very least, consensus politics is becoming a thing of the past. But its politicians are blind to the new emerging reality while its liberal mainstream press remains arrogant and complacent.

 

Pompous, Overweening, Canadian Fascist Elites Have Created A Situation They Can't Control...,

thefederalist  |  News media in both Canada and the United States have worked hard to portray the protesters as far-right conspiracy theorists and white supremacists, despite little evidence that the protests are motivated by anything other than sincere opposition to Covid vaccine mandates. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, taking his cues from the press, last week condemned the protests as an “insult to memory and truth,” and implied they were motivated not by objections to vaccine mandates but by racial animus. Canada’s conservative politicians seem divided and rudderless, unable to provide the protesters a voice or meaningful support, let alone a legitimate democratic outlet for their grievances.

The situation, in short, is a powder keg. There are no clear off-ramps for the protesters, and no one in a position of authority seems to know how to deescalate the situation. Having accepted the Canadian media’s near-uniform portrayal of the protesters as racists and bigots, it’s unlikely Trudeau’s government will be willing to compromise. What happens next is anybody’s guess, but it will likely involve violent clashes between police and protesters.

How did this happen? The idea that the Canadian capital would become the site of such a standoff in 2022 seems frankly unbelievable. But the chaos now unfolding in Ottawa can be traced directly to the harsh treatment of unvaccinated Canadians by their government over the past six months or so.

It’s true that Canadians have largely embraced the Covid vaccines, with a vaccination rate of about 85 percent nationwide, and large majorities also support vaccine passports and say they don’t trust the unvaccinated. But this has given Canadian political and media elites cover to threaten the unvaccinated in what often seems a gleeful tone.

As my friend David Agren has reported, Canada’s federal jobs minister in October stated bluntly — and without a hint of sympathy — that Canadians fired for not getting the vaccine would also lose their unemployment insurance. Indeed, threatening the livelihoods of the unvaccinated, or threatening to tax them, has become commonplace for Canadian government officials at the federal and provincial levels. 

However, a significant minority of Canadians are staunchly opposed to getting the vaccine, and likely won’t get it no matter what the government threatens to do to them. The unwillingness or inability on the part of Trudeau to compromise with these holdouts has arguably precipitated the current stand-off in Ottawa. Some, like Canadian pollster John Wright, have been warning of this outcome for some time now. Over the weekend, Wright noted that even if only one out of 10 Canadians refuse to get the vaccine, that’s still a major problem.

ChiFresh Kitchen - Fresh Food, Living-Wage, Community Solution

bignewsnetwork  |  Owned and operated primarily by Black formerly incarcerated women, ChiFresh prepared healthy, culturally relevant meals with food that is grown or raised at nearby farms. They are 100 percent employee-owned and operated, and all employees are eligible for ownership stake after 18 months on the job, after which they can start paying toward a $2,000 membership share.

Of their first day of operation in May 2020, they made jerk chicken strips and red beans and rice, with onions and peppers, as a practice run for friends and family, and as founding member-owner Edrinna Bryant told NextCity.org that week:

"'We were so excited about the fact we were going to cook our first meal together and people can taste it,' Bryant says. 'That's so exciting to me as a young Black mom who was incarcerated. For my child to know that his mom was in a situation that felt like the end of the world and look at her now Ain't no food going to go wasted here. Each day each of us will pick somewhere on the South Side or West Side and bring some food to people who need it.'"

In addition to providing an alternative food contracting option to local facilities by introducing a locally sourced and prepared food option, they are also providing jobs, agency and ownership stakes to one of the most commonly marginalized groups in the country.

ChiFresh Kitchen is part of a growing BIPOC-led movement, via urban farms, food operators, worker centers, policy advocates and other community organizations in Chicago focused on food sovereignty, racial justice and equitable food access.

While the business planning for ChiFresh began in 2018, the business became operational just prior to the pandemic. They'd initially planned to launch in the summer of 2020, but launched earlier than planned in March 2020 via a contract with the Urban Growers Collective, which had received funding to address pandemic-related food insecurity in their communities. Less than a year into operations they were prepping 500 meals per day.

The demand for what ChiFresh offers has only grown since, and in December of 2020, they bought a 6,000 square-foot building (their current space is about 600 square feet), which they are working to renovate, funded through a series of grants. They plan to move into the new space in the spring of 2022, and expand their capacity so that they are able to prepare 5,000 or more meals per day.

ChiFresh Kitchen founder Camille Kerr-a workplace democracy/worker ownership/solidarity economy consultant-says the project began when a small group of people, herself included, were looking into the ability of worker cooperatives to create a "liberatory, dignified workplace for formerly incarcerated people, and specifically Black women."

April M. Short of the Independent Media Institute spoke with Kerr about ChiFresh Kitchen and future potentials of local, worker-owned food sovereignty projects like this one to bring the food industry up to date with the real, current food needs of communities across the U.S. and beyond.

Civil War: Private Family Capitalism vs. Public Corporatism

dissentmagazine |  At this point we need to ask whether the growing militancy of the Republican right can be adequately explained by the triumph of small over big business, as Tea Partiers and Trump himself would have us believe. Even the most sophisticated commentators have taken the Tea Party at its word on this matter. But as Trump’s example reminds us, what is at stake here is less an alliance of the small against the big than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned. If most family enterprise was confined to the small business sector in the 1980s—when public corporations accounted for the bulk of big business—this shorthand does not apply today, as more large companies go private and dynastic wealth surges to the forefront of the American economy. The historian Steve Fraser has noted that the “resurgence of what might be called dynastic or family capitalism, as opposed to the more impersonal managerial capitalism many of us grew up with, is changing the nation’s political chemistry.” The family-based capitalism that stormed the White House along with Trump stretches from the smallest of family businesses to the most rambling of dynasties, and crucially depends on the alliance between the two. Without its network of subcontracted family businesses, the dynastic enterprise would collapse as a political and economic force. Meanwhile the many small business owners that gravitate toward Trump are convinced that their own fortunes rise and fall along with his.

It is no accident that Trump’s most significant donors hail from the same world of privately held, unincorporated, and family-based capitalism as he does. In 2020, Forbes named Koch Industries as the largest privately held company in the United States. The Mercers, who did so much to underwrite Trump’s rise to power, owe their wealth to Renaissance Technologies, a privately held hedge fund that was subject to the so-called “small business” tax on pass-through income. Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was born into a business dynasty that made its fortune through the privately held Prince Corporation. When she married Dick DeVos in 1979, she sealed an alliance between the Prince family and Amway, still one of the largest private companies in the country. Most of Betsy DeVos’s personal income derives from pass-through entities like LLCs and limited partnerships, which means that the Trump tax cuts would have saved her tens of millions of dollars. Amway itself is structured as an S-corporation, a type of pass-through that also would have qualified for Trump’s 40 percent marginal tax cut to small business.

As the scions of private dynastic capital invest the halls of power, they have also inflated the fortunes of their own trade and political associations. Organizations such as the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council and the theocratic Council for National Policy (the latter with its close connections to the DeVos and Prince dynasties) once existed on the far fringes of the American right. Today their progeny—from Americans for Prosperity to FreedomWorks and the Family Research Council—dictate the form of Republican Party politics, while the once all-powerful Business Roundtable and other corporate trade associations watch from the sidelines. The newly ascendant organizations would like to convince us that theirs is the voice of small family business ranged against the vested power of the corporate and bureaucratic elite. More plausibly, however, they represent a shift in the center of gravity of American capitalism, which has elevated the once marginal figure of the family-owned business to a central place in economic life at every scale. If the large publicly listed corporation was still the uncontested reference point for American business at the turn of the millennium, it is now being increasingly challenged by a style of family-based capitalism whose reach extends from the smallest to the most grandiose household production units. The infrastructural basis of today’s far-right resurgence is neither populist nor elitist in any straightforward sense: it is both. The collapse of the public corporation into a thicket of privately contracted commercial relations has weakened the old union-mediated bonds among workers and created real economic intimacies, however fraught, between the small family-owned business and the dynastic enterprise. To prevent the emergence of some more dangerous version of Trump, we would need to build an alternative set of economic and affective solidarities potent enough to dismantle this clientelist symbiosis of households.

Civil War: America's Local Gentry

patrick-wyman  |  Commercial agriculture is a lucrative industry, at least for those who own the orchards, cold storage units, processing facilities, and the large businesses that cater to them. They have a trusted and reasonably well-paid cadre of managers and specialists in law, finance, and the like - members of the educated professional-managerial class that my close classmates and I have joined - but the vast majority of their employees are lower-wage laborers. The owners are mostly white; the laborers are mostly Latino, a significant portion of them undocumented immigrants. Ownership of the real, core assets is where the region’s wealth comes from, and it doesn’t extend down the social hierarchy. Yet this bounty is enough to produce hilltop mansions, a few high-end restaurants, and a staggering array of expensive vacation homes in Hawaii, Palm Springs, and the San Juan Islands.

This class of people exists all over the United States, not just in Yakima. So do mid-sized metropolitan areas, the places where huge numbers of Americans live but which don’t figure prominently in the country’s popular imagination or its political narratives: San Luis Obispo, California; Odessa, Texas; Bloomington, Illinois; Medford, Oregon; Hilo, Hawaii; Dothan, Alabama; Green Bay, Wisconsin. (As an aside, part of the reason I loved Parks and Recreation was because it accurately portrayed life in a place like this: a city that wasn’t small, which served as the hub for a dispersed rural area, but which wasn’t tightly connected to a major metropolitan area.)

This kind of elite’s wealth derives not from their salary - this is what separates them from even extremely prosperous members of the professional-managerial class, like doctors and lawyers - but from their ownership of assets. Those assets vary depending on where in the country we’re talking about; they could be a bunch of McDonald’s franchises in Jackson, Mississippi, a beef-processing plant in Lubbock, Texas, a construction company in Billings, Montana, commercial properties in Portland, Maine, or a car dealership in western North Carolina. Even the less prosperous parts of the United States generate enough surplus to produce a class of wealthy people. Depending on the political culture and institutions of a locality or region, this elite class might wield more or less political power. In some places, they have an effective stranglehold over what gets done; in others, they’re important but not all-powerful.

Wherever they live, their wealth and connections make them influential forces within local society. In the aggregate, through their political donations and positions within their localities and regions, they wield a great deal of political influence. They’re the local gentry of the United States.

We’re not talking about international oligarchs; these folks’ wealth extends into the millions and tens of millions rather than the billions. There are, however, a lot more of them than the global elite that tends to get all of the attention. They’re not the face of instantly recognizable global brands or the subjects of award-winning New York Times profiles; they own warehouses and Applebee’s franchises, concrete companies and chains of movie theaters, hop fields and apartment complexes.

Because their wealth is rooted in the ownership of physical assets, they tend to be more rooted in their places of origin than the cosmopolitan professionals and entrepreneurs of the major metro areas. Mobility between major metros, the characteristic jumping from Seattle to Los Angeles to New York to Austin that’s possible for younger lawyers and creatives and tech folks, is foreign to them. They might really like heading to a vacation home in Bermuda or Maui. They might plan a relatively early retirement to a wealthy enclave in Palm Springs, Scottsdale, or central Florida. Ultimately, however, their money and importance comes from the businesses they own, and those belong in their localities.

Gentry classes are a common feature of a great many social-economic-political regimes throughout history. Pretty much anywhere you have a hierarchical form of social organization and property ownership, a gentry class of some kind emerges: the local civic elites of the Roman Empire, the landlords of later Han China, the numerous lower nobility of late medieval France, the thegns of Anglo-Saxon England, the Prussian Junkers, or the planter class of the antebellum South. The gentry are generally distinct from the highest levels of a regime’s political and economic elite: They’re usually not resident in the political center, they don’t hold major positions in the central administration of the state (whatever that might consist of) and aren’t counted among the wealthiest people in their polity. New national or imperial elites might emerge over time from a gentry class, even rulers - the boundaries between these groups can be more or less porous - but that’s not usually the case.

Gentry are, by definition, local elites. The extent to which they wield power in their localities, and how they do so, is dependent on the structure of their regime. In the early Roman Empire, for example, local civic elites were essential to the functioning of the state. They collected taxes in their home cities, administered justice, and competed with each other for local political offices and seats on the city councils. Their competition was a driving force behind the provision of benefits to the common folk in the form of festivals, games, public buildings, and more basic support, a practice called civic euergetism.

MeidasTouch

rollingstone  | Last August, in the midst of a presidential battle that would determine the future of America, an upstart liberal group called MeidasTouch sent its supporters an urgent call to action. “Tonight is a huge night,” MeidasTouch declared on Twitter. “We are giving half of our contributions directly and immediately to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. We are proud to have already chipped in 25K to their campaign. RT and chip in here.”

For MeidasTouch, the pro-Biden blitz was part of a rapidly expanding political action committee that turned viral tweets and posts into campaign contributions. Founded by three brothers, the group says it has generated more than a billion views on social media, mocking and humiliating Trump and his enablers. Crowd favorites included “Creepy Trump,” “Bye Ivanka,” and “Bye Don Jr: Love Me, Daddy!” Its podcast has become a popular destination on the anti-Trump circuit, with recent guests including Democratic Reps. Eric Swalwell and Ted Lieu, and Mary Trump, the former president’s estranged niece. All this exposure translated into more than $5 million in contributions from #Resistance donors desperate to oust Trump and his Republican collaborators.

The three brothers who founded MeidasTouch sell themselves as the progressive breakout success of the 2020 election cycle, weaving a narrative of a start-from-scratch operation that — thanks to a gift for creating viral anti-Trump videos and a unique understanding of the digital tides — rapidly blossomed into a behemoth of Democratic politics. “We’ve become the most recognizable and impactful brand name in progressive politics in the 30 days since we launched,” Ben Meiselas, the eldest brother, told Adweek in June. They aren’t, per their own telling, just the top brand, they’re also pioneers of a radical transparency model that the notoriously opaque world of Super PACs could stand to learn from. “I knew that PACs in general, political action committees, have a reputation about them,” Meiselas said on a recent MeidasTouch podcast. “And I wanted this to be so different from every other PAC, starting with the fact that me, who works for this every day, doesn’t get paid. But, two, to have the most ridiculous amount of transparency possible.”

But the full story of MeidasTouch is more complicated. The group spent more than $1 million on an advertising strategy that it calls revolutionary but campaign veterans and independent experts say is nonsensical and a more effective tool for fundraising than for helping Democrats win elections. And despite its promised transparency, MeidasTouch’s financial structure makes a dollar-for-dollar accounting of its spending impossible — and, according to a former Federal Election Commission attorney, raises some of the same legal issues that got the Trump campaign into trouble in 2020.

It’s not hard to find examples of how MeidasTouch’s grandiose self-promotion doesn’t match reality. Take, for example, the fundraising plea blasted out last August. The Super PAC, per its own disclosure forms, didn’t donate $25,000 to the Biden campaign — and indeed, a direct donation from MeidasTouch to Biden would have violated campaign-finance laws. Instead, the donations came from people who clicked on an embedded link in Meidas’ tweet and were given the option to split their donation between the Biden campaign and the Super PAC. Donors gave $31,623 to the Biden campaign, and MeidasTouch received nearly $30,000.

 

Who Y'all Think Is Behind The Attack On Rogan?

patriotone  |  Since you asked, and I love your work, I'll tell you. This is a professional political attack. Three waves one right after the other is not a coincidence. Good spacing, good timing, so it's absolutely professional. But who was it you ask? That takes some digging but...

The video compilation of Rogan saying the n-word was dropped by @patriottakes 6 days ago. You see the video in the tweet in pic 1, and patriottakes takes credit for "republishing" the information in pic 2. That they take credit is important and you'll see why shortly...

As you can see in their bio, @patriottakes is partnered with @MeidasTouch. And this is where it gets interesting. Who is Meidastouch? Well, they are a professional political organization. In fact, they are a Democrat "Super PAC" (more on that in a moment) run by 3 brothers.

Ben, Brett, and Jordan Meisales. All of them have worked in media and have expertise in understanding and manipulating Media. The most important thing for us is that Brett was a social media manager for Ellen Degeneres, and is an expert editor. Which matter because...

@patriottakes works with @MeidasTouch and I'd say it's a safe bet that given their expertise in social media management that the n-word video was created by Meidastouch. BUT WE ARE NOT DONE. MeidasTouch is a Super PAC. Well, what's a super PAC you ask?

A Super PAC is political advocacy group with a special twist: "super PACs may raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations and individuals, then spend unlimited sums to overtly advocate for or against political candidates." (http://opensecrets.org).

Patriottakes is bragging about their millions of views and how they made the video the center of the national conversation. They are bragging about their CLOUT Rogan is the one guy the leftists can't cancel. If a group could cancel Rogan it would be a MASSIVE show of power.

Woke people and legacy media groups have been trying to cancel Rogan for ages because he steals their audience and doesn't play by their rules. Rogan also offers his enormous platform to people like Jordan Peterson that woke progressives in media circles really don't like...

The group that takes out Rogan would gain a lot of clout and a **lot** of power. The group that can say "we cancelled Rogan. If we can get him, we can get you too," would be able to swing a very large stick. And that's what this is ultimately about, it's a play for power.

In short, Meidastouch is a political SuperPAC that is very likely behind the @patriottakes account. They're attempting a viral hit on Joe Rogan so they can take him out both because they don't like him and because they want monetizable clout for having done so...

So @andrewschulz that's whose behind this. The question is, what can we do about it? If every person who Joe helped out said "we are with him and we will tell our audiences to cancel Spotify if they cancel Joe" this would be over in a day. The next thing...

If everyone won't stand up, we need brave people to lead organic pushback. @BretWeinstein has been doing this with his "thanks Joe Rogan" hashtag Finally...

 

 

The First DNC Attack On Joe Rogan Came In 2020

CNN  |  Bernie Sanders is facing a backlash from some Democrats after his campaign trumpeted an endorsement from comedian Joe Rogan, a popular podcast and YouTube talk show host with a history of making racist, homophobic and transphobic comments.

The Sanders campaign touted the endorsement in a tweet on Thursday afternoon, featuring a clip of Rogan's supportive remarks. 

 

"I think I'll probably vote for Bernie. Him as a human being, when I was hanging out with him, I believe in him, I like him, I like him a lot," Rogan said on an earlier episode of his show.

 

"What Bernie stands for is a guy -- look, you could dig up dirt on every single human being that's ever existed if you catch them in their worst moment and you magnify those moments and you cut out everything else and you only display those worst moments. That said, you can't find very many with Bernie. He's been insanely consistent his entire life. He's basically been saying the same thing, been for the same thing his whole life. And that in and of itself is a very powerful structure to operate from."

Rogan, a libertarian-leaning broadcaster with a public persona in the mold of Howard Stern, is a divisive figure who has said the N-word on his show and in 2013 questioned -- using offensive language -- whether a transgender MMA fighter should be able to compete against other women. 

 

"If you want to be a woman in the bedroom and, you know, you want to play house and all of that other sh-t and you feel like you have, your body is really a woman's body trapped inside a man's frame and so you got a operation, that's all good in the hood," Rogan said. "But you can't fight chicks.". 

 

The decision to highlight Rogan's support has divided opinion among Democrats and activists, particularly online, where it has sparked a heated debate over whether Sanders should have aligned himself with Rogan in any form or context. 

 

Sanders' strategic targeting of young, unaffiliated and working class voters often takes him to places, and onto platforms -- like Twitch -- that most Democratic candidates rarely venture. But that practice, when it brings a figure like Rogan into the political spotlight, also carries the risk of alienating parts of a liberal base that, especially in the Trump era, has become increasingly cautious about the company it keeps -- and what that signals to marginalized communities. 

 

On Saturday, the progressive group MoveOn called on Sanders "to apologize and stop elevating this endorsement."

 

"It's one thing for Joe Rogan to endorse a candidate," MoveOn said in a tweet from its official account. "It's another for @BernieSanders' campaign to produce a video bolstering the endorsement of someone known for promoting transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism and misogyny."

Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) January 25, 2020

 

Less than an hour later, former Vice President Joe Biden appeared to enter the fray.

 

"Let's be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time," Biden tweeted. "There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights."

Are Protestors With Semi Tractor Trailers Sufficiently Organized And Funded To Hold Firm And Prevail?

france24  |  An occupation of Canada's capital by truckers opposed to vaccine mandates gained steam as it entered its second week on Saturday, with more demonstrators piling onto the clogged streets of Ottawa, while protests kicked off in several other cities.

In the capital, protesters huddled around campfires in bone-chilling temperatures and erected bouncy castles for kids outside Parliament, while waving Canadian flags and shouting anti-government slogans.

The atmosphere appeared more festive than a week earlier, when several protesters waved Confederate flags and Nazi symbols and clashed with locals.

Police, who were out in force and put up barriers overnight to limit vehicle access to the city center, said they were bracing for up to 2,000 protesters -- as well as 1,000 counterprotesters -- to join hundreds of truckers already jamming Ottawa streets.

But organizers of the so-called Freedom Convoy told AFP they expected their numbers to swell into the tens of thousands.

Similar protests were happening in Toronto, Quebec City and Winnipeg. And in southern Alberta province, truckers blocked a major border crossing to the US state of Montana.

"This remains an increasingly volatile and increasingly dangerous demonstration," Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly told a news conference Friday.

With public anger rising -- thousands of residents have complained of harassment by protesters, and an online petition demanding action has drawn 40,000 signatures -- Sloly vowed to crack down on what he called an "unlawful" occupation of the city.

But he offered no timeline.

Joe Rogan, Call Julie Ponesse And Sign Up For Some Manhood Lessons...,

brownstone |   Dr. Julie Ponesse was a professor of ethics who has taught at Ontario’s Huron University College for 20 years. She was placed on leave and banned from accessing her campus due to the vaccine mandate. This is her speech during the weekend when the Canadian truckers arrived in Ottawa to protest pandemic restrictions and mandates that have been so harmful to so many. Dr. Ponesse has now taken on a role with The Democracy Fund, a registered Canadian charity aimed at advancing civil liberties, where she serves as the pandemic ethics scholar.

But our true moral failure is that we did this to ourselves. We allowed it. And some of us embraced it. We forgot for a while that freedom needs to be lived every day and that, some days, we need to fight for it. We forgot that, as Premier Brian Peckford said, “Even in the best of times we are only a heartbeat away from tyranny.”

We took our freedom for granted and now we are in danger of losing it.

But we are waking up and we won’t so easily be seduced or coerced again.

To our governments, the cracks are showing. The dam is breaking. The facts are not on your side. You can’t keep this up any longer. The pandemic is over. Enough is enough. You are our servants; we are not your subjects.

You have tried to mold us into hateful, terrified, demoralized people. 

But you underestimated the challenge. We aren’t so easily broken. Our strength comes from the bonds of family and friendship, of history, of our home and native land.

You didn’t realize the strength of our doctors and nurses on the front lines in Alberta, our RCMP and provincial police officers, the ferocity of a mother fighting for her child, and my goodness the truckers who rolled courage into Ottawa on 18 wheels.  18 wheels times tens of thousands of trucks.

To the families of those who have lost children, your tears will be a stain on our nation forever. But you can rest now. You have done enough, lost enough. It’s time for us, your fellow citizens, to take up this battle for you. 

To the truckers who drove across Canada, to stand up for all of us, to defend all our rights, I have never felt so much gratitude or pride for perfect strangers. You are electrifying this moment in history, and you are awakening a passion and a love for our country that we thought we had lost. You are the leaders all of Canada has been waiting for.  

Driving from all corners of the country — from Prince Rupert to Charlottetown, on icy roads, past waving flags and under packed overpasses, you are taking all the brokenness, all the hate, all the division, and weaving us back together again. In this one simple, united, powerful action, you are the leaders we so desperately need.

You are giving grandmothers who have been isolated and abandoned a reason to smile again.

You are giving those who have lost their livelihoods reason to hope; the families who have lost loved ones a reason to believe in justice.

Joe Rogan - Just An Entertainer After All....,

businessinsider  |  Vanity Fair, which first reported on the Obamas' dissatisfaction with Spotify, noted that they are most interested in producing shows featuring fresh voices. 

Spotify has spent well over $1 billion to diversify beyond music content and into the broader audio market, scooping up podcast studios like Gimlet Media and The Ringer and signing exclusive deals with talent including Rogan and Dax Shepard. 

A big piece of its strategy has been to ink development deals with bold-faced names like the Obamas and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who have yet to produce a show for Spotify outside of a 2020 holiday special. 

So far, the strategy appears to have worked. Spotify said in October, citing third-party data from Edison Research, that it now ranks ahead of Apple Podcasts as the most popular podcast app in the US. 

But there have also been challenges, including a cultural reckoning within Gimlet Media linked to its popluar"Reply All" podcast as well as the shuttering of Spotify's in-house podcast studio, known internally as Studio 4. More recently, the Rogan controversy has led some Spotify podcasters to call out the company. 

Brené Brown, for instance, said she would take a pause from producing new episodes as she sought to "better understand the organization's misinformation policy," and Wendy Zukerman, host of Gimlet show "Science Vs." said she would stop making new episodes of the show except to counteract misinformation on the platform. 

The Obamas' podcasting deal with Spotify followed their initial move into entertainment one year earlier, when they announced the formation of Higher Ground and its multi-year film and TV deal with Netflix . They are behind the streamer's Oscar-winning documentary "American Factory" and Kevin Hart drama "Fatherhood," among other projects.

QBism - Is Life But A Dream?

scientificamerican |  A newish interpretation of quantum mechanics called QBism (pronounced “Cubism,” like the art movement) makes subjective experience the bedrock of knowledge and reality itself. David Mermin, a prominent theorist, says QBism can dispel the “confusion at the foundations of quantum mechanics.” You just have to accept that all knowledge begins with “individual personal experience.”

According to QBism, each of us constructs a set of beliefs about the world, based on our interactions with it. We constantly, implicitly, update our beliefs when we interact with relatives who refuse to get vaccinated or sensors tracking the swerve of an electron. The big reality in which we all live emerges from the collisions of all our subjective mini-realities.

QBists hedge their mind-centrism, if only so they don’t come across as loons or mystics. They accept that matter exists as well as mind, and they reject solipsism, which holds that no sentient being can really be sure that any other being is sentient. But QBism’s core message, science writer Amanda Gefter says, is that the idea of “a single objective reality is an illusion.” A dream, you might say.

Proponents bicker over definitions, and physicists and philosophers fond of objectivity reject QBism entirely. All this squabbling, ironically, seems to confirm QBism’s premise that there is no absolute objectivity; there are only subjective, first-person viewpoints.

Physicists have more in common than most would like to admit with artists, who try to turn the chaos of things into a meaningful narrative. Some artists thwart our desire for meaning. T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is an anti-narrative, a grab bag of images that pop in and out of the void. The poem resembles a dream, or nightmare. Its meaning is that there is no meaning, no master narrative. Life is a joke, and the joke is on you if you believe otherwise.

If you are a practical person, like one of the finance majors in my freshman humanities class, you might conclude, along with T. S. Eliot, that efforts to comprehend existence are futile. You might urge friends majoring in philosophy to enjoy life rather than fretting over its meaning. You might summarize this advice with a catchy slogan: “Shut up and procreate!” But even those pragmatists must wonder now and then what our communal dream means.

The Quirky, Contingent, And Self-Referential Nature Of Biological Evolution Is Rare

inference-review |  Previous analyses have also looked at the emergence of life in conjunction with the emergence of human-like intelligence.⁹ Motivated by the assumption that four data points are better than two, Snyder-Beattie et al. have extended this earlier work with a Bayesian analysis of not only the timing of abiogenesis and the evolution of intelligence, but also the timing of two other major transitions: eukaryogenesis and the evolution of sexual reproduction. They conclude that intelligent life is rare in the universe because it took humans such a long time to evolve all four of the assumed prerequisites: abiogenesis, eukaryogenesis, sexual reproduction, and intelligence itself. Their Bayesian exploration of this result includes varying the timing of abiogenesis over a relatively wide range—between 4.3 and 3.5 billion years ago—and computing the effect of discovering that life emerged twice on earth.¹⁰ They found that their conclusion no longer holds if life emerged twice; or if abiogenesis occurred earlier, say, within ~10 million years of habitability; or if the habitable lifetime of the earth is 10 times longer than expected.¹¹

Recent exoplanet studies strongly suggest that every star has some kind of planetary system and that earth-like planets are likely common in such systems.¹² The earth may well be representative of a very large group of wet, rocky planets. But what about atmospheric composition, ocean volume, plate tectonics, spin period, orbital period, obliquity, the presence of a large moon, and the timing of large impacts? If the emergence and evolution of life are dependent on some of these additional details, the number of earth-like planets could be quite small.¹³

Once life has emerged from prebiotic chemistry, the strongest selection pressures on the evolution of a species come from other life forms: conspecifics, parasites, predators, diseases, viruses, and ecosystem variability. This self-referential nature of biology makes evolution a historical science characterized by the quirks of contingency. This characterization of evolution remains controversial.¹⁴ Our ability to extrapolate crow–puzzle experiments to crows on other planets depends on the existence of extraterrestrial crows. Similarly, the Snyder-Beattie et al. result depends on the assumption that “intelligent life elsewhere requires analogous evolutionary transitions.” The validity of the Snyder-Beattie et al. result, among others,¹⁵ is dependent on the assumption that the major transitions that characterize our evolution happen elsewhere.¹⁶

There is little evidence in the history of life on earth to support this assumption. Although abiogenesis is a transition shared by the lineages of all known life on earth, diverging lineages over the next four billion years are punctuated by their own evolutionary transitions. After diverging from other life forms, transitions within our own eukaryotic lineage include eukaryogenesis, sexual reproduction, and intelligence. A general feature of these transitions in the tree of life is that the closer a transition is to the end of a branch, the more recent, specific, and uncommon it is.¹⁷ In our lineage, eukaryogenesis occurred about two billion years ago and the transition to sexual reproduction about a billion years ago. The transition to intelligence is much more recent and its timing depends on how intelligence is defined. The transition to human-like intelligence or technological intelligence occurred only about 100,000 years ago and is species-specific. The latter trait is strong evidence we should not expect to find it elsewhere.¹⁸

Why We Don't See Sentient Extraterrestrials

declineoftheempire |  Generally speaking, there are two answers to the question Is There Intelligent Life In The Universe?, where the term "intelligent life" means technologically advanced sentient beings broadly similar to humans. In the first essay I discussed optimistic answers to this question. Optimists imagine a Universe teeming with more advanced versions of ourselves, an answer which coincides (not coincidentally) with their vision of a bright human future.

This week we look at the views of the pessimists, who constitute a small minority of those concerned with astrobiological questions. Pessimists believe that Homo sapiens is alone and unique in the observable Universe, or believe that species broadly similar to Homo sapiens are very rare.

I am a pessimist, a position which follows from prolonged contemplation of the Fermi Paradox, which Paul Davies called "the eerie silence" (see the first essay).  Let me begin with an illuminating quote from Lee Billings, whose book Five Billion Years of Solitude was recently published by the Penguin Group (October, 2013).

The book’s title, Five Billion Years of Solitude, is actually a subtle nod to some things I’ve changed my mind about in the course of my research.

It’s a reference to the longevity of Earth’s biosphere. Earth’s life emerged shortly after the planet itself formed some 4.5 billion years ago, and current estimates suggest our world has a good half-billion years left until its vibrant biosphere of diverse, complex multicellular life begins sliding back to microbial simplicity.

When I first began planning this book, I believed that we would eventually find clear signs of life beyond our solar system, and suspected that contact with other cosmic civilizations was just a matter of time, for they were probably common throughout our galaxy. I believed that humans had a future, a destiny, beyond the Earth, and that our discoveries of other habitable or inhabited worlds would galvanize society to strive to voyage to the stars. I no longer hold these beliefs as foregone conclusions.

My optimism for humanity’s long-term prospects has dimmed.

I now believe that while life may be widespread in the universe, creatures like us are probably uncommon, and technological societies are vanishingly rare, making the likelihood of contact remote at best.

I am less confident than I once was that we will find unequivocal signs of life in other planetary systems within my lifetime. I believe that, when seen in the fullness of planetary time, our modern era will prove to have been the fulcrum about which the future of life turned for, at minimum, our entire solar system.

I believe that we humans are probably the most fortunate species to have ever arisen on Earth, and that those of us now alive are profoundly privileged to live in what can objectively be considered a very special time.

Finally, I would guess that though we possess the unique capacity to extend life and intelligence beyond Earth into unknown new horizons, there is a better-than-even chance that we will fail to do so.

The human story may end as it began — in nasty, brutish, and short isolation on a lonely, solitary planet. The book in part is my attempt to explain and come to terms with these beliefs, beliefs that I would very much like to be proved wrong.

 

 

GoFundme Was Gonna Just Steal Donations To The Anti-Vax Mandate Protestors

medium |  The update we issued earlier (below) enabled all donors to get a refund and outlined a plan to distribute remaining funds to verified charities selected by the Freedom Convoy organizers. However, due to donor feedback, we are simplifying the process. We will automatically refund all contributions directly — donors do not need to submit a request. You can expect to see your refund within 7–10 business days.

GoFundMe Statement on the Freedom Convoy 2022 Fundraiser (2/4/2022)

• GoFundMe supports peaceful protests and we believe that was the intention of the Freedom Convoy 2022 fundraiser when it was first created.
• We now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity.

To ensure GoFundMe remains a trusted platform, we work with local authorities to ensure we have a detailed, factual understanding of events taking place on the ground. Following a review of relevant facts and multiple discussions with local law enforcement and city officials, this fundraiser is now in violation of our Terms of Service (Term 8, which prohibits the promotion of violence and harassment) and has been removed from the platform.

Organizers provided a clear distribution plan for the initial $1M that was released earlier this week and confirmed funds would be used only for participants who traveled to Ottawa to participate in a peaceful protest. Given how this situation has evolved, no further funds will be directly distributed to the Freedom Convoy organizers — we will work with organizers to send all remaining funds to credible and established charities chosen by the Freedom Convoy 2022 organizers and verified by GoFundMe.

All donors may submit a request for a full refund until February 19th, 2022 using this dedicated refund form.

I Fully B'lee Brandon And His MSM Proxies Smear Anybody Who Kwestins Them...,

caitlinjohnstone  |  One thing I’ve been meaning to write about these last few days has been the way mass media pundits have been insinuating or outright asserting that Fox News host Tucker Carlson is literally an agent of the Russian government.

Carlson has been accused of promoting Russian propaganda by mainstream narrative managers for frequently criticizing the Biden administration’s hawkish posture toward Russia regarding the entirely unsubstantiated claim that Moscow is preparing to launch an unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine. We’ve been seeing things like Anderson Cooper innocently musing that “It is striking how neatly Kremlin propaganda seems to dovetail with Carlson’s talking points” and this CNN segment from December with Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter and tinfoil hat Russiagater Julia Ioffe wondering aloud about why Russian state media seem to be so fond of Carlson. By mid-January, Democratic Party operatives were openly demanding that Carlson be investigated for violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

“This isn’t journalism, it’s an ongoing FARA violation. Tucker Carlson needs to be prosecuted as an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation and treason under Article 3, Sec. 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution for aiding an enemy in hybrid warfare against the United States,” tweeted former DNC official Alexandra Chalupa, best known for colluding with the Ukrainian government in 2016 on opposition research against Donald Trump.

This isn’t journalism, it’s an ongoing FARA violation. Tucker Carlson needs to be prosecuted as an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation and treason under Article 3, Sec. 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution for aiding an enemy in hybrid warfare against the United States. https://t.co/5JkLuCKoBn

— Alexandra Chalupa (@AlexandraChalup) January 19, 2022

The accusations and insinuations increased, eventually leading to Carlson outright denying being a Russian agent in a recent interview with The New York Times saying, “I’ve never been to Russia, I don’t speak Russian. Of course I’m not an agent of Russia.”

As you would expect, this denial was then spun by the same demented mainstream pundits who’ve spent the last five years being wrong about Russia as evidence that Carlson is a Russian agent.

“Tucker Carlson told The New York Times he’s not a Russian agent amid controversy over his pro-Kremlin stance,” blares a headline by Business Insider.