The psychology of owning a pick up truck

As is often the case, commenters pick up on some aspect of a blog post that was not central to it and an interesting discussion develops around it.

In my post about poor people living on the edge who sincerely believe that Trump is going to act in their interests and not take any action that might harm them, some picked up on an item in the news report that mentioned that they owned a pickup truck or an SUV, and this was taken as a sign that they were willing to expend what little resources they had to purchase what others might consider a frivolous item they did not need. (Commenter flex entered the discussion with a very thoughtful post that I recommend reading.)

There are some things that are definitely true of life in the US. In most places, some kind of motorized vehicle is essential for people to get to work or fulfill other daily life chores. For many people living on the edge of ruin, what drives their vehicle choice is price. Sometimes an old truck may be all that they can afford. Their purchases are also often driven by the affordability of the monthly payment, not even the actual cost of the vehicle, and so can be persuaded to buy something because of its low introductory payment. Not all buyers are financially savvy and being financially savvy sometimes requires being financially solvent and stable. My choice of a compact sedan (Honda Accord) was made on considerations of its reputation for having low maintenance costs and being trouble free and after having it for 11 years, that has turned out to be true. I could definitely have bought a much cheaper car but could afford to weigh long-term factors over up-front cost. Not everyone has that luxury.
[Read more…]

Don’t believe the lies about the minimum wage

State and federal-mandated minimum wages set a floor for what employers can pay their employees. It benefits more than the minimum wage workers because it raises wages up the line. Hence it is should be no surprise that the capitalist class and its supporters hate raises in the mandated minimum wage and try to do everything in their power to keep them from being raised because it lowers their ability to exploit workers and increase their profits. In their mind, the there should be no mandated minimum wage and all wages should be set by the employer and the employee, negotiating freely. Of course they oppose unions as well since those too interfere in the glorious working of the free-market. In this world view, a single employee and a company or massive corporation are equally matched powers and thus the figure they arrive at would reflect the true market value of labor.

Of course this is a fantasy indulged by the capitalist class and has no basis in reality. There is a massive power discrepancy between employer and employee and you need the federal and state governments and unions to at least partially redress that imbalance.
[Read more…]

The true believers

The only good thing for me to personally emerge from the disaster that we are going through is that I have stopped paying too much attention to political news and have used the released time for other things. But I still read some articles and was struck by this one that looked at the reactions of poor people in one area of Pennsylvania about how they viewed the future under a Trump administration that has vowed to cut the federal budget by huge amounts.

The sad thing is that many of them are under the delusion that the cuts will affect other people, not them, that they will be magically spared and even benefited, because they think that Trump really cares about them and that cutting money spent on these other freeloaders will leave more for them.
[Read more…]

Back in the saddle again

This has been a somewhat long hiatus from blogging due to being down with flu. That may have suggested to readers that I was suffering from serious symptoms. But in actual fact, after the first two days, I was almost back to normal. ‘Almost’ in the operative word here. My temperature was back to almost normal but I could not get rid of a low-grade fever and had a residual dry cough. The latter is for me a common consequence to a flu, not to be shaken for a couple of weeks.

But what really kept me from blogging was sense of blahness that left me with no enthusiasm for doing anything, such as everyday chores or even an appetite. In that condition, the enthusiasm to write, which comes usually comes easily to me, deserted me until today. The fact that it took me this long to get back to normal may mean that this was a different flu variant or that as I get older it will take me longer to bounce back.

It is not that these days were totally wasted. I did find that I could enjoy reading and so took the opportunity to read books that I should have read a long time ago and watched some films and TV shows.
[Read more…]

Good move: Biden commutes death sentences of 37 federal inmates

As his term of office winds down, Joe Biden is trying to minimize the damage that Trump can do and one of things is the federal death penalty. The federal death penalty had.not been carried out for 17 years but when Trump took office in 2017, he proceeded to carry them out with vigor. Biden put back the moratorium when he took office in 2021 but there were still 40 people on death row. He has now commuted 37 of those.

Biden has been somewhat of a vacillator on the death penalty, supporting it during the heyday of ‘get tough on crime’ but then evolving as the political climate changed.
[Read more…]

The BRICS challenge to US financial dominance

The US is an imperial power. Unlike other former empires such as Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium, it hides its imperial nature by various ways, as Daniel Immerwahr describes in his book How to Hide an Empire that I reviewed back in 2019 and further discussed here. Rather than exercising direct over control over large countries, the US empire consists of small regions it calls ‘territories’ and bases scattered over all the world, because that enables it to exercise control without having to deal with large local populations. It is what Immerwahr calls a ‘pointillist’ empire.

China is challenging the US on the global stage and is also adopting the pointillist model with its ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ in which China invests heavily in infrastructure and other development projects in countries around the world, cementing economic links. Back in 2019, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping hosted a summit on this and despite heavy lobbying by the US to deter countries, 125 nations signed up and attended.
[Read more…]

Chaos comes early to the US

After Trump was elected and started surrounding himself with weirdos for his cabinet and advisory roles, people like Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kristi Noem, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Elise Stefanik, and Pete Hegseth, I expected that come January 20th when he actually takes office would be when the chaos started.

But it looks like he decided to get an early start and has chosen the budget process to throw his weight around. The current budget authorizes funding only until midnight on Friday and Republican speaker Mike Johnson thought he had worked out a deal to keep the government running. But then Elon Musk waded in and said the bill was not good enough and effectively scuttled it yesterday. Johnson then tried to get another bill that had the main thing that Trump wanted, which was to suspend the debt ceiling for two years so that he could give his wealthy friends a big tax cut. In order to get it passed in the House of Representatives, Trump vowed that any Republican who voted against it would face primary challengers supported by him.
[Read more…]

The rise of the manosphere

There have been many ugly developments following the election victory of Trump. It seems like all the worst elements in society who harbor abhorrent views have been emboldened to think that they are in control.

Christine Fernando writes about one particular area, and that is the rise of what is known as the ‘manosphere’, where men think that they now have even more power over women than they had before and are willing to say so openly.

Isabelle Frances-Wright, director of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focusing on polarization and extremism, said she had seen a “very large uptick in a number of types of misogynistic rhetoric immediately after the election,” including some “extremely violent misogyny.”

“I think many progressive women have been shocked by how quickly and aggressively this rhetoric has gained traction,” she said.

The phrase “Your body, my choice” has been largely attributed to a post on the social platform X from Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist and far-right internet personality who dined at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida two years ago. In statements responding to criticism of that event, Trump said he had “never met and knew nothing about” Fuentes before he arrived.
[Read more…]

Michael Moore responds to the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting

In response to the outpouring of anger at the for-profit health insurance companies for their predatory practices that was unleashed by the killing by Luigi Mangione of the UnitedHealth care CEO, there has been a lot of pearl-clutching by the ruling classes and their pundits and political lackeys in both parties, pleading with people not to think of the shooter as a hero and saying that ‘political violence has no place in America’. The last sentiment is utterly disingenuous. Political violence is as American as apple pie and has been used routinely by the ruling classes and their repressive state apparatuses when their power is challenged by ordinary people. What they are scared of is when their authority is challenged by protestors and when political violence targets them.

Apparently Mangione had issued a hand-written manifesto. Many of the mainstream media have refused to publish it in full even though it is very short and have instead quoted bits of it. They have not given any reasons why they did this even though there are many fake ones circulating. Ken Klippenstein says that he has obtained the genuine one and has published it and it is reproduced here in full.

“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

[Read more…]

Film review: The Name of the Rose (1986)

I saw this film a long time ago, soon after it came out. I did not remember much of the details except that it was dark and moody and set in a remote abbey in the Middle Ages and involved the murder of several monks that a visiting monk William of Baskerville (played by Sean Connery) and his assistant Adso of Melk (a very young Christian Slater) try to solve.

I read the book of the same name by Umberto Eco last month, and disliked it for its tedious and lengthy discussions of esoterica involving theology and heresy and religious and political intrigue of that period. The main redeeming feature of the second edition of the book was that it had a postscript by the author explaining how and why he wrote it the way he did, including his choice of the title. While it did not improve the book’s standing in my opinion, it did shed light on the writing process and what an author seeks to achieve.
[Read more…]