Blackmoor Vituperative

Observation: post-apocalypse movies are all adaptations of the 1972 novel “Watership Down” by Richard Adams.

Susan described this to me, and I created it.

We’ve created the cyberpunk dystopia which used to be fiction.

Key points:

• Decline in wages is directly aligned with decline in unions.
• Top 10% larger share of revenue/wages is inversely proportional to declining union membership.
• There isn’t a lack of jobs. There is a lack of full-time, good paying jobs. There are a lot of contract and part time workers who can’t seem to get a fair shot at full time employment. And despite the low unemployment rate, employers aren’t relaxing their strict requirements for the full time jobs, for the most part.

Source: “Almost 80% of US workers live from paycheck to paycheck. Here’s why.” , Robert Reich. The Guardian. 2018-07-29.

From the files of… IT’S THE SAME GUY! We bring you the case of Stewart Moss and Bradford Dillman. We saw ONE of these men playing a Kelvan on the original Star Trek. Which of them was it? YOU make the call!

There are legitimate complaints to be made, and there are genuinely bad people who are the reason for those complaints. But as anyone who has worked in customer service knows, not every complaint is reasonable. Many — perhaps even most, it sometimes seems — are not.

If you need to go 100-200 years back to explain why something is “bad”, it’s not bad — you are just fishing for things to be unhappy about. Focus on what’s bad now. Robber barons, for example, are bad — and you don’t need a history lesson on the origin of the phrase “robber baron” to explain why. Private prisons and the racist impact of Drug Prohibition are both bad — and you don’t need a history lesson on workhouses or the Atlantic slave trade to explain why.

History can provide background to what is bad now. It’s really good for that. What history does not do is make something bad now merely because of events that took place before any of our grandparents were born.

Fun fact! The Earth’s human population has doubled since 1971. So if, hypothetically, someone were to snap their fingers and kill half of the Earth’s population, they would set our inevitable self-destruction back by less than two generations. Hardly seems worth it, really.

Wait, what are you talking about, WE decided!? MY best interest?! How can you know what’s MY best interest is? How can you say what MY best interest is? What are you trying to say, I’M crazy? When I went to YOUR schools, I went to YOUR churches, I went to YOUR institutional learning facilities?! So how can you say I’M crazy?

This week’s “Brain Pickings” features a 1910 speech by Theodore Roosevelt, admonishing people to do something, rather than merely criticize what others do.

“The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt.”

Fun fact! (And somewhat relevant due to yesterday being Cinco de Mayo, celebrating when Mexico helped the United States win the American Civil War). When Roosevelt gave this speech in 1910, there were no border controls between the USA and Mexico. There was no such thing as a Mexican “illegal immigrant” in the USA until the 1920s, when white supremacists in the USA starting imposing quotas on immigrants based on their country of origin. (There were earlier laws regarding immigration, but these did not actually prevent anyone from Mexico from coming to the USA freely. Earlier laws mainly focused on Chinese immigrants, and on preventing the importation of “contract labor”, which is to say, slaves in all but name.)

Fun fact! Increased “security” at the USA-Mexico border in the early 1900s had the perverse effect of increasing the number of permanent Mexican residents in the USA, because it made it more difficult for them to go back home once they got here.

Happy Cinco de Mayo, or as it’s known in Mexico, May 5. This is a day when we Americans celebrate the day that Mexican troops defeated French troops which were on their way to Mexico City. By doing so, they helped the United States win against the Confederacy in the American Civil War. Just one example in a long history of Mexicans and the descendants of Mexicans contributing to make the USA a better place.

¡Viva México!