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Celerity
Celerity's Journal
Celerity's Journal
September 9, 2023
On her second album, “Guts,” which flaunts rock brashness and singer-songwriter intimacy, the sudden pop star is showing just how fraught life is at the top.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/arts/music/olivia-rodrigo-guts-review.html
https://archive.ph/DUWg9
One of the fundamental conditions — or is it goals? — of pop stardom is hiding the work. You may see Beyoncé sweat, or note how Taylor Swift’s real-life travails inform her artistic choices, but the music created by the most famous performers in pop rarely refers back to the costs, literal and emotional, of making it. But what if you want to show the work? That’s the novel approach of Olivia Rodrigo, a modern and somewhat signature pop star. At the beginning of 2021, she released “Drivers License,” her first single outside the Disney ecosystem she was creatively raised in, and experienced the kind of supernova ascent that’s impossible to anticipate or recreate. Her jolting debut album, “Sour,” released a few months later, showed her to be a spiky, vivid writer and singer, but one who hadn’t quite seen the world.
Two years later, on her poignantly fraught, spiritually and sonically agitated follow-up album “Guts,” Rodrigo has seen too much. “Guts” is an almost real-time reckoning with the maelstrom of new celebrity, the choices it forces upon you and the compromises you make along the way. As on “Sour,” Rodrigo, who is 20 now, toggles between bratty rock gestures and piano-driven melancholy. But regardless of musical mode, her emotional position is consistent throughout these dozen songs about betrayal, regret and self-flagellation. “I used to think I was smart/But you made me look so naïve,” she howls on the lead single “Vampire” — she’s referring to a toxic ex, but she may as well be singing about the spotlight itself. Or as she puts it on “Making the Bed,” “I got the things I wanted/It’s just not what I imagined.”
Rodrigo is a songwriter of rather astonishing purity — even in her most stylized lyrics, she never wanders far from the unformed gut-kick of a feeling. Sometimes on this album, she triples down. “I loved you truly/Gotta laugh at the stupidity,” she chuckles on “Vampire.” “I look so stupid thinking/Two plus two equals five/and I’m the love of your life,” she croons on “Logical.” “My God, how could I be so stupid,” she sighs on “Love Is Embarrassing.” Don’t mistake Rodrigo’s weakness for weakness, though. Her self-doubt is a powerful animating force. Throughout this album, she kiln-fires her anxieties into lyrics that cut deep. “Pretty Isn’t Pretty” is about the existential struggle of self-love, particularly under an unrelenting public eye. The impudent “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl” captures the essence of outsider awkwardness.
The dreamy — and perhaps “Folklore”-esque — “Lacy” is about being robbed of your illusions: “I despise my rotten mind/and how much it worships you,” Rodrigo sings. From a young star who’s had what appears to be frosty relations with Swift, an idol who was retroactively granted songwriting credit on Rodrigo’s first album, it reads like the bruise from a door slammed shut in her face. Several other songs are about being on the wrong side of a manipulative relationship. “Logical” and “The Grudge” tackle it via self-serious angst. But Rodrigo has more spark when she’s playfully ambivalent about how, or if, to break free. “Bad Idea Right?,” driven by throbbing bass and drizzled with layered, saccharine chanting, is about how holding on can be more fun than letting go. And “Get Him Back!” is a revenge fantasy — “I wanna meet his mom/Just to tell her her son sucks” — that’s maybe, just maybe, leaning in to double entendre.
snip
Olivia Rodrigo Has Seen the World Now, and She's Livid
On her second album, “Guts,” which flaunts rock brashness and singer-songwriter intimacy, the sudden pop star is showing just how fraught life is at the top.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/arts/music/olivia-rodrigo-guts-review.html
https://archive.ph/DUWg9
One of the fundamental conditions — or is it goals? — of pop stardom is hiding the work. You may see Beyoncé sweat, or note how Taylor Swift’s real-life travails inform her artistic choices, but the music created by the most famous performers in pop rarely refers back to the costs, literal and emotional, of making it. But what if you want to show the work? That’s the novel approach of Olivia Rodrigo, a modern and somewhat signature pop star. At the beginning of 2021, she released “Drivers License,” her first single outside the Disney ecosystem she was creatively raised in, and experienced the kind of supernova ascent that’s impossible to anticipate or recreate. Her jolting debut album, “Sour,” released a few months later, showed her to be a spiky, vivid writer and singer, but one who hadn’t quite seen the world.
Two years later, on her poignantly fraught, spiritually and sonically agitated follow-up album “Guts,” Rodrigo has seen too much. “Guts” is an almost real-time reckoning with the maelstrom of new celebrity, the choices it forces upon you and the compromises you make along the way. As on “Sour,” Rodrigo, who is 20 now, toggles between bratty rock gestures and piano-driven melancholy. But regardless of musical mode, her emotional position is consistent throughout these dozen songs about betrayal, regret and self-flagellation. “I used to think I was smart/But you made me look so naïve,” she howls on the lead single “Vampire” — she’s referring to a toxic ex, but she may as well be singing about the spotlight itself. Or as she puts it on “Making the Bed,” “I got the things I wanted/It’s just not what I imagined.”
Rodrigo is a songwriter of rather astonishing purity — even in her most stylized lyrics, she never wanders far from the unformed gut-kick of a feeling. Sometimes on this album, she triples down. “I loved you truly/Gotta laugh at the stupidity,” she chuckles on “Vampire.” “I look so stupid thinking/Two plus two equals five/and I’m the love of your life,” she croons on “Logical.” “My God, how could I be so stupid,” she sighs on “Love Is Embarrassing.” Don’t mistake Rodrigo’s weakness for weakness, though. Her self-doubt is a powerful animating force. Throughout this album, she kiln-fires her anxieties into lyrics that cut deep. “Pretty Isn’t Pretty” is about the existential struggle of self-love, particularly under an unrelenting public eye. The impudent “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl” captures the essence of outsider awkwardness.
The dreamy — and perhaps “Folklore”-esque — “Lacy” is about being robbed of your illusions: “I despise my rotten mind/and how much it worships you,” Rodrigo sings. From a young star who’s had what appears to be frosty relations with Swift, an idol who was retroactively granted songwriting credit on Rodrigo’s first album, it reads like the bruise from a door slammed shut in her face. Several other songs are about being on the wrong side of a manipulative relationship. “Logical” and “The Grudge” tackle it via self-serious angst. But Rodrigo has more spark when she’s playfully ambivalent about how, or if, to break free. “Bad Idea Right?,” driven by throbbing bass and drizzled with layered, saccharine chanting, is about how holding on can be more fun than letting go. And “Get Him Back!” is a revenge fantasy — “I wanna meet his mom/Just to tell her her son sucks” — that’s maybe, just maybe, leaning in to double entendre.
snip
September 9, 2023
Today on TAP: What did we learn from the financial collapse of September 2008? Not enough.
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-09-08-wasted-crisis-2008-financial-collapse/
Fifteen years ago this week, Wall Street was on the verge of the worst collapse since 1929. The cause was regulators’ indulgence of opaque securities that were highly leveraged and thinly capitalized, such as credit default swaps and bonds backed by high-risk subprime mortgages. When bankers’ bets started going bad in 2007, the initial response of the Fed and the Treasury was to prop up the system by merging failed banks into bigger banks or having the government cover losses. In March 2008, when the investment bank Bear Stearns became insolvent, the Federal Reserve guaranteed its bad loans to facilitate its acquisition by J.P. Morgan.
Exactly 15 years ago today, the government took over the biggest players in the secondary mortgage market, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were underwater because the securities backing mortgages had plummeted in market value. But a week later, on September 15, the Fed and the Treasury decided that enough was enough. They decided not to bail out failing Lehman Brothers. And that collapse triggered a full-blown financial crisis. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission later found that most money center banks were literally insolvent. Had government not come to the rescue with even more bailouts, the collapse would have triggered another Great Depression. Yet these bailouts left existing executives in place and did not break up a single large bank.
Presumably, Congress acted to head off another repeat of speculative meltdown when it passed the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. But 13 years later, old abuses are repeating themselves in new forms. Dodd-Frank was supposed to put an end to banks that were “too big to fail.” But today the system is more highly concentrated than ever. The Treasury and the Fed were up to their old tricks when they encouraged the largest of the banks, JPMorgan Chase, to bail out the failed First Republic Bank, making JPMorgan even bigger. The latest banking crisis involves regional banks that are overexposed to commercial real estate that keeps losing value. The Wall Street Journal calls this a “doom loop.” As a recent Journal story explained, banks not only overinvested in real estate loans.
Between 2015 and 2022, banks’ direct lending to commercial real estate doubled, to $3.6 trillion, equal to 20 percent of their deposits. And banks more than doubled their indirect real estate exposure with loans to mortgage companies and to real estate investment trusts as well as mortgage-backed bonds. Now, with the property market in free fall, banks increasingly find that the collateral is worth less than the loans. If this crisis spreads, the cause will be exactly the same as the cause of the 2008 collapse: regulators and examiners failing to look closely at risky fads in bank portfolios and failing to demand that risky investments be backed by more capital. As long as regulators are more concerned about coddling bankers than protecting the public, these periodic financial meltdowns will keep recurring.
snip
The Wasted Crisis
Today on TAP: What did we learn from the financial collapse of September 2008? Not enough.
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-09-08-wasted-crisis-2008-financial-collapse/
Fifteen years ago this week, Wall Street was on the verge of the worst collapse since 1929. The cause was regulators’ indulgence of opaque securities that were highly leveraged and thinly capitalized, such as credit default swaps and bonds backed by high-risk subprime mortgages. When bankers’ bets started going bad in 2007, the initial response of the Fed and the Treasury was to prop up the system by merging failed banks into bigger banks or having the government cover losses. In March 2008, when the investment bank Bear Stearns became insolvent, the Federal Reserve guaranteed its bad loans to facilitate its acquisition by J.P. Morgan.
Exactly 15 years ago today, the government took over the biggest players in the secondary mortgage market, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were underwater because the securities backing mortgages had plummeted in market value. But a week later, on September 15, the Fed and the Treasury decided that enough was enough. They decided not to bail out failing Lehman Brothers. And that collapse triggered a full-blown financial crisis. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission later found that most money center banks were literally insolvent. Had government not come to the rescue with even more bailouts, the collapse would have triggered another Great Depression. Yet these bailouts left existing executives in place and did not break up a single large bank.
Presumably, Congress acted to head off another repeat of speculative meltdown when it passed the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. But 13 years later, old abuses are repeating themselves in new forms. Dodd-Frank was supposed to put an end to banks that were “too big to fail.” But today the system is more highly concentrated than ever. The Treasury and the Fed were up to their old tricks when they encouraged the largest of the banks, JPMorgan Chase, to bail out the failed First Republic Bank, making JPMorgan even bigger. The latest banking crisis involves regional banks that are overexposed to commercial real estate that keeps losing value. The Wall Street Journal calls this a “doom loop.” As a recent Journal story explained, banks not only overinvested in real estate loans.
Between 2015 and 2022, banks’ direct lending to commercial real estate doubled, to $3.6 trillion, equal to 20 percent of their deposits. And banks more than doubled their indirect real estate exposure with loans to mortgage companies and to real estate investment trusts as well as mortgage-backed bonds. Now, with the property market in free fall, banks increasingly find that the collateral is worth less than the loans. If this crisis spreads, the cause will be exactly the same as the cause of the 2008 collapse: regulators and examiners failing to look closely at risky fads in bank portfolios and failing to demand that risky investments be backed by more capital. As long as regulators are more concerned about coddling bankers than protecting the public, these periodic financial meltdowns will keep recurring.
snip
September 8, 2023
https://www.thedailybeast.com/doj-shouldnt-explore-for-crimes-to-indict-hunter-biden
https://archive.ph/XoiNk
The Justice Department’s announcement that Special Counsel David Weiss intends to indict President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, for gun charges by the end of the month reminds me of the iconic opening to the Star Trek series in which Captain James T. Kirk solemnly intones about the “five-year mission” of the starship Enterprise. Weiss—originally appointed by former President Donald Trump to be the U.S. Attorney for Delaware—has been investigating Hunter Biden for five years and counting, with no charges and no convictions. The promised indictment appears to be the latest misstep by the U.S. Department of Justice in a case that can only be described now as a debacle.
Only a little more than a month ago, the DOJ and Hunter Biden’s defense team had reached agreements over Biden’s tax issues and his alleged false statement (denying that he was addicted to drugs) on an application to buy a gun. But that deal spectacularly crashed and burned in open court as under questioning by federal district court Judge Maryellen Noreika—who like Special Counsel Weiss was appointed by Trump—as the two parties could not agree whether the plea agreement over taxes and the diversion agreement over the gun charge would protect Biden from any future charges that might arise. The prosecution insisted the investigation was ongoing, while the defense said these two agreements would put an end to investigations.
At that court hearing, Judge Noreika also questioned whether giving her authority to decide if Biden might be found in breach of the diversion agreement amounted to an unconstitutional delegation of the executive branch’s authority to prosecute—given that most diversion agreement breaches are handled by the prosecution. In the aftermath of this embarrassment, Special Counsel Weiss and Attorney General Merrick Garland decided—despite their mutual insistence that Weiss previously had no limits upon his ability to investigate the case—it had become necessary to appoint Weiss as a special counsel, because Weiss asked to become one and because of what Garland characterized as “extraordinary circumstances related to the matter.”
Special Counsel Weiss’ plan to indict Hunter Biden now over the gun charges is both ill-timed and ill-advised. It’s ill-timed because it comes in the wake of a federal court of appeals striking down as unconstitutional the very gun federal law that Biden may be charged with violating—a decision that was pending at the time of the failed plea deal in July, but which has since been decided. If the deal in July had gone through then the prosecution would likely have been unaffected by the adverse gun decision. Now, however, Biden’s defense team is likely to challenge the constitutionality of the charges. The planned indictment is also ill-advised because the defense has a colorable argument that DOJ cannot renege on the diversion agreement. Biden’s defense attorney Abbe Lowell has already stated that in their view the diversion agreement was already entered into, approved, and that Biden is in full compliance with the terms.
snip
DOJ Shouldn't Explore for Crimes to Indict Hunter Biden
The likely imminent indictment of the president’s son is what happens when prosecutors cast about for something, anything, to charge.https://www.thedailybeast.com/doj-shouldnt-explore-for-crimes-to-indict-hunter-biden
https://archive.ph/XoiNk
The Justice Department’s announcement that Special Counsel David Weiss intends to indict President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, for gun charges by the end of the month reminds me of the iconic opening to the Star Trek series in which Captain James T. Kirk solemnly intones about the “five-year mission” of the starship Enterprise. Weiss—originally appointed by former President Donald Trump to be the U.S. Attorney for Delaware—has been investigating Hunter Biden for five years and counting, with no charges and no convictions. The promised indictment appears to be the latest misstep by the U.S. Department of Justice in a case that can only be described now as a debacle.
Only a little more than a month ago, the DOJ and Hunter Biden’s defense team had reached agreements over Biden’s tax issues and his alleged false statement (denying that he was addicted to drugs) on an application to buy a gun. But that deal spectacularly crashed and burned in open court as under questioning by federal district court Judge Maryellen Noreika—who like Special Counsel Weiss was appointed by Trump—as the two parties could not agree whether the plea agreement over taxes and the diversion agreement over the gun charge would protect Biden from any future charges that might arise. The prosecution insisted the investigation was ongoing, while the defense said these two agreements would put an end to investigations.
At that court hearing, Judge Noreika also questioned whether giving her authority to decide if Biden might be found in breach of the diversion agreement amounted to an unconstitutional delegation of the executive branch’s authority to prosecute—given that most diversion agreement breaches are handled by the prosecution. In the aftermath of this embarrassment, Special Counsel Weiss and Attorney General Merrick Garland decided—despite their mutual insistence that Weiss previously had no limits upon his ability to investigate the case—it had become necessary to appoint Weiss as a special counsel, because Weiss asked to become one and because of what Garland characterized as “extraordinary circumstances related to the matter.”
Special Counsel Weiss’ plan to indict Hunter Biden now over the gun charges is both ill-timed and ill-advised. It’s ill-timed because it comes in the wake of a federal court of appeals striking down as unconstitutional the very gun federal law that Biden may be charged with violating—a decision that was pending at the time of the failed plea deal in July, but which has since been decided. If the deal in July had gone through then the prosecution would likely have been unaffected by the adverse gun decision. Now, however, Biden’s defense team is likely to challenge the constitutionality of the charges. The planned indictment is also ill-advised because the defense has a colorable argument that DOJ cannot renege on the diversion agreement. Biden’s defense attorney Abbe Lowell has already stated that in their view the diversion agreement was already entered into, approved, and that Biden is in full compliance with the terms.
snip
September 8, 2023
https://www.reckon.news/lgbtq/2023/09/ill-bring-a-match-alabama-mayors-texts-ignite-a-war-over-lgbtq-books-at-local-library.html
On the morning of Mar. 21, Mayor of Ozark, Ala. Mark Blankenship sent a private text that would jeopardize the presence of queer books on library shelves at the Ozark Dale County Library. Now, the fate of LGBTQ books is in turmoil. Blankenship’s message was directed to Karen Speck, the Library Director and the Board of Trustee member Monica Carroll. His message to the two included a photo and a text that read: “What do I need to do to have these 61 books removed from our library?”
The photo attached was a series of Young Adult (YA) books from the library, labeled with LGBTQ stickers on the spine. Carroll joined in on Blankenship’s sentiment over wanting to remove LGBTQ books, adding in the group chat, “I’ll bring a match,” implying that she would burn the books herself. Of the 1,600 books being banned in the U.S., 4 in 10 are LGBTQ-related, according to a 2022 study by PEN America. In an interview with the 19th, CEO of LGBTQ+ political advocacy organization Equality Texas noted that “Book bans internalize a sense of shame and isolation within young LGBTQ+ people, especially as many struggle to find self-acceptance and self-love.”
Mayor Blankenship wants to remove queer books he himself has never read
Last Friday, a motion was raised for the LGBTQ books from the YA section to be moved to the adult section of the library. Because it did not get a second, the motion failed to pass. In an interview with Alabama Political Reporter, Blankenship admitted to not having “studied the books” he seeks to ban but has looked through the “general nature of the books,” adding that “I think they’re inappropriate based on what I know about them just from looking at them,” he said. When asked what made the LGBTQ book inappropriate, he said, “I don’t want children exposed to it in our library. Any kind of sexual content at the young age of 12.” Although he admits that not all the LGBTQ-labeled books are sexual and that even the non-LGBTQ ones might be sexual, he feels strongly about the removal regardless.
In another text message to Speck and Carroll, Mayor Blankenship implied that it would be best to remove LGBTQ books for the sake of his city council. He said, “In Ozark, Alabama the large majority of the people don’t want to see this in our library. 100% of my city council will agree. I hate to see the library lose funding over this mess!” Adam Kamerer tells Reckon that he had an issue with Blankenship’s usage of the phrase “100% of my city council” because it was used “as leverage to try to force the library board to comply with his requests,” he said. Kamerer is a resident of Dale County, in which Ozark is located. He is also the person who filed a FOIA request for Mayor Blankenship’s texts to be shared publicly.
snip
'I'll bring a match': Alabama mayor's texts ignite a war over LGBTQ books at local library
https://www.reckon.news/lgbtq/2023/09/ill-bring-a-match-alabama-mayors-texts-ignite-a-war-over-lgbtq-books-at-local-library.html
On the morning of Mar. 21, Mayor of Ozark, Ala. Mark Blankenship sent a private text that would jeopardize the presence of queer books on library shelves at the Ozark Dale County Library. Now, the fate of LGBTQ books is in turmoil. Blankenship’s message was directed to Karen Speck, the Library Director and the Board of Trustee member Monica Carroll. His message to the two included a photo and a text that read: “What do I need to do to have these 61 books removed from our library?”
The photo attached was a series of Young Adult (YA) books from the library, labeled with LGBTQ stickers on the spine. Carroll joined in on Blankenship’s sentiment over wanting to remove LGBTQ books, adding in the group chat, “I’ll bring a match,” implying that she would burn the books herself. Of the 1,600 books being banned in the U.S., 4 in 10 are LGBTQ-related, according to a 2022 study by PEN America. In an interview with the 19th, CEO of LGBTQ+ political advocacy organization Equality Texas noted that “Book bans internalize a sense of shame and isolation within young LGBTQ+ people, especially as many struggle to find self-acceptance and self-love.”
Mayor Blankenship wants to remove queer books he himself has never read
Last Friday, a motion was raised for the LGBTQ books from the YA section to be moved to the adult section of the library. Because it did not get a second, the motion failed to pass. In an interview with Alabama Political Reporter, Blankenship admitted to not having “studied the books” he seeks to ban but has looked through the “general nature of the books,” adding that “I think they’re inappropriate based on what I know about them just from looking at them,” he said. When asked what made the LGBTQ book inappropriate, he said, “I don’t want children exposed to it in our library. Any kind of sexual content at the young age of 12.” Although he admits that not all the LGBTQ-labeled books are sexual and that even the non-LGBTQ ones might be sexual, he feels strongly about the removal regardless.
In another text message to Speck and Carroll, Mayor Blankenship implied that it would be best to remove LGBTQ books for the sake of his city council. He said, “In Ozark, Alabama the large majority of the people don’t want to see this in our library. 100% of my city council will agree. I hate to see the library lose funding over this mess!” Adam Kamerer tells Reckon that he had an issue with Blankenship’s usage of the phrase “100% of my city council” because it was used “as leverage to try to force the library board to comply with his requests,” he said. Kamerer is a resident of Dale County, in which Ozark is located. He is also the person who filed a FOIA request for Mayor Blankenship’s texts to be shared publicly.
snip
September 8, 2023
The politics of pandemic mitigation returned with the new school year
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/09/06/school-mask-mandate-politics/
https://archive.ph/DXgOP
As school gets underway and coronavirus cases rise, masks are returning to some American classrooms — and reviving the country’s fraught political debate over whether face coverings are common sense or an abridgment of freedom. In Maryland this week, an elementary school principal mandated several days of mask-wearing for a class of kindergartners after at least four people tested positive for the virus. New York’s governor announced a plan to distribute free N95 and KN95 masks to schools this fall, although the state is not requiring their use. And in Alabama, a junior high school in Sumter County declared in late August that mask-wearing would begin again for everyone — students, staff and visitors.
Even though these campuses are the exception, as few schools require masks, lawmakers and presidential candidates have seized on the issue. A group of Senate Republicans unveiled legislation this week to prohibit federal mask mandates on domestic air travel, public transit and public schools through the end of 2024. On Wednesday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) shared a warning in response to the Maryland elementary school action: “If you want to voluntarily wear a mask, fine, but leave our kids the hell alone.” (The school, Rosemary Hills in Silver Spring, boosted security and kept recess indoors because of online backlash earlier the same day.)
https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1699466003652939852
Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, suggested in a Fox News interview Wednesday that mandated school mask-wearing is an attack on parental rights, and former president Donald Trump promised last month that, if reelected, he would “use every available authority to cut federal funding to any school” that imposed a mask rule.
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1696980660936671413
School administrators say they are not eager to relive the bitter fights over masks and vaccination that dominated the first two years of the pandemic. Josh Tovar, a high school principal in Texas’s Garland Independent School District, said his campus is seeing a spike in student and staff infections that is depriving some classes of teachers. But, Tovar said, he would never consider requiring masks again, even if he had that power. “There’s just a different mentality here in this state in regard to the mask,” he said. “I literally just left a principals’ meeting where we discussed seeing an uptick, but no one mentioned or thought to bring up requiring masks. It’s not on the radar.”
snip
A few schools mandated masks. Conservatives hit back hard.
The politics of pandemic mitigation returned with the new school year
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/09/06/school-mask-mandate-politics/
https://archive.ph/DXgOP
As school gets underway and coronavirus cases rise, masks are returning to some American classrooms — and reviving the country’s fraught political debate over whether face coverings are common sense or an abridgment of freedom. In Maryland this week, an elementary school principal mandated several days of mask-wearing for a class of kindergartners after at least four people tested positive for the virus. New York’s governor announced a plan to distribute free N95 and KN95 masks to schools this fall, although the state is not requiring their use. And in Alabama, a junior high school in Sumter County declared in late August that mask-wearing would begin again for everyone — students, staff and visitors.
Even though these campuses are the exception, as few schools require masks, lawmakers and presidential candidates have seized on the issue. A group of Senate Republicans unveiled legislation this week to prohibit federal mask mandates on domestic air travel, public transit and public schools through the end of 2024. On Wednesday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) shared a warning in response to the Maryland elementary school action: “If you want to voluntarily wear a mask, fine, but leave our kids the hell alone.” (The school, Rosemary Hills in Silver Spring, boosted security and kept recess indoors because of online backlash earlier the same day.)
https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1699466003652939852
Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, suggested in a Fox News interview Wednesday that mandated school mask-wearing is an attack on parental rights, and former president Donald Trump promised last month that, if reelected, he would “use every available authority to cut federal funding to any school” that imposed a mask rule.
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1696980660936671413
School administrators say they are not eager to relive the bitter fights over masks and vaccination that dominated the first two years of the pandemic. Josh Tovar, a high school principal in Texas’s Garland Independent School District, said his campus is seeing a spike in student and staff infections that is depriving some classes of teachers. But, Tovar said, he would never consider requiring masks again, even if he had that power. “There’s just a different mentality here in this state in regard to the mask,” he said. “I literally just left a principals’ meeting where we discussed seeing an uptick, but no one mentioned or thought to bring up requiring masks. It’s not on the radar.”
snip
September 8, 2023
Laboratories of democracy? NO. Red States have devolved into laboratories of christofascism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy
September 8, 2023
Hours after Rolling Stone published a report claiming The Tonight Show had become “a nightmare” workplace, host Jimmy Fallon assembled his staff via Zoom and offered an apology for his behavior.
He said he’d never intended to “create that type of atmosphere for the show,” two employees who were on the call told Rolling Stone on Thursday evening. “It’s embarrassing and I feel so bad,” Fallon said, according to the workers. “Sorry if I embarrassed you and your family and friends… I feel so bad I can’t even tell you.”
Another source who was on the call told Deadline that Fallon praised the show’s staff as “the best of the best” and at “the top of the game.” Notably, he reportedly added, “There are things I’ve done in the past that are embarrassing but I never mistreated anybody.”
Both outlets reported that the 48-year-old said he wanted The Tonight Show “to be fun,” “inclusive,” and “the best show.” Rolling Stone’s insiders said that the mea culpa “felt pretty earnest.”
Read it at Rolling Stone
Jimmy Fallon Apologizes to Staff After Bombshell Toxic Workplace Claims
https://www.thedailybeast.com/jimmy-fallon-apologizes-to-staff-after-bombshell-toxic-workplace-claimsHours after Rolling Stone published a report claiming The Tonight Show had become “a nightmare” workplace, host Jimmy Fallon assembled his staff via Zoom and offered an apology for his behavior.
He said he’d never intended to “create that type of atmosphere for the show,” two employees who were on the call told Rolling Stone on Thursday evening. “It’s embarrassing and I feel so bad,” Fallon said, according to the workers. “Sorry if I embarrassed you and your family and friends… I feel so bad I can’t even tell you.”
Another source who was on the call told Deadline that Fallon praised the show’s staff as “the best of the best” and at “the top of the game.” Notably, he reportedly added, “There are things I’ve done in the past that are embarrassing but I never mistreated anybody.”
Both outlets reported that the 48-year-old said he wanted The Tonight Show “to be fun,” “inclusive,” and “the best show.” Rolling Stone’s insiders said that the mea culpa “felt pretty earnest.”
Read it at Rolling Stone
September 8, 2023
The search giant objects to a live audio feed of its historic monopolization trial, which begins next week.
https://prospect.org/justice/2023-09-07-google-protect-monopoly-cover-of-darkness/
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Google search engine. It’s also the 25th anniversary of the last major monopoly trial in America, U.S. v. Microsoft, where the government successfully argued in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia that Microsoft illegally bundled its internet browser on its Windows software, giving it a competitive advantage on most personal computers. The Justice Department ordered a breakup, but the case was appealed, and after a changeover in power in Washington, the Bush administration reached a settlement that instituted only minor changes to Microsoft’s business practices.
In that case, the trial itself was the remedy, as many antitrust scholars have since noted. Microsoft was publicly depicted as both ruthless about aggrandizing its power, and evasive about the means by which it did so—Bill Gates’s combative depositions, in which he argued over the definitions of basic words, were exposed to public ridicule and laughter at trial. This adverse publicity actually ensured that new companies, like Google, could rise up, according to Gary Reback, the attorney in the original Microsoft case.
“The only way you could get to Google at the time was to go through the Microsoft browser and type google-dot-com … [Microsoft] could have put up the big screen that said ‘access denied,’” Reback told Yahoo! Finance in 2019. “A strong part of the reason [Microsoft didn’t act] was because they were already under scrutiny. They had gone through this terrible trial, they had all these problems. Did they really need other problems?”
This history is now repeating itself in a landmark case starting next week, in the same D.C. District Court. It’s Google, this time, that stands accused of doing essentially what Microsoft did: paying outside companies to make the Google search engine the preset on iPhones, Android phones, and other devices, thereby preventing competition in the search space. In fact, Judge Amit Mehta cited the Microsoft case in his ruling allowing the lawsuit to go forward.
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Google Tries to Protect Its Monopoly Under Cover of Darkness
The search giant objects to a live audio feed of its historic monopolization trial, which begins next week.
https://prospect.org/justice/2023-09-07-google-protect-monopoly-cover-of-darkness/
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Google search engine. It’s also the 25th anniversary of the last major monopoly trial in America, U.S. v. Microsoft, where the government successfully argued in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia that Microsoft illegally bundled its internet browser on its Windows software, giving it a competitive advantage on most personal computers. The Justice Department ordered a breakup, but the case was appealed, and after a changeover in power in Washington, the Bush administration reached a settlement that instituted only minor changes to Microsoft’s business practices.
In that case, the trial itself was the remedy, as many antitrust scholars have since noted. Microsoft was publicly depicted as both ruthless about aggrandizing its power, and evasive about the means by which it did so—Bill Gates’s combative depositions, in which he argued over the definitions of basic words, were exposed to public ridicule and laughter at trial. This adverse publicity actually ensured that new companies, like Google, could rise up, according to Gary Reback, the attorney in the original Microsoft case.
“The only way you could get to Google at the time was to go through the Microsoft browser and type google-dot-com … [Microsoft] could have put up the big screen that said ‘access denied,’” Reback told Yahoo! Finance in 2019. “A strong part of the reason [Microsoft didn’t act] was because they were already under scrutiny. They had gone through this terrible trial, they had all these problems. Did they really need other problems?”
This history is now repeating itself in a landmark case starting next week, in the same D.C. District Court. It’s Google, this time, that stands accused of doing essentially what Microsoft did: paying outside companies to make the Google search engine the preset on iPhones, Android phones, and other devices, thereby preventing competition in the search space. In fact, Judge Amit Mehta cited the Microsoft case in his ruling allowing the lawsuit to go forward.
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September 8, 2023
Capital flight is playing a major role in the UAW negotiations, with U.S. plants at risk of losing work to Mexico being used as leverage.
https://prospect.org/labor/2023-09-07-auto-workers-contract-talks-stellantis-threatens-move-south/
Patricia Elliston, 54, was laid off two years ago after nearly a decade at the Stellantis auto assembly plant in Belvidere, Illinois, when the company cut the second shift. She took a transfer to Stellantis’s Mopar Parts Distribution Center in Michigan, where she rents a house and rooms with other autoworkers in the Detroit suburb of Warren. Elliston’s husband, a non-union Machinist on disability, remained in Belvidere, caring for his elderly mother. His father retired from what was then named Chrysler in 1999, after decades working as an electrician in the skills trade department.
“We were told that moving out here would only be temporary, and we’d have the option to come back to Belvidere,” Elliston said. “But now that they’ve idled the plant, we don’t know if we can come back.” Last year, Stellantis indefinitely shuttered its assembly plant in Belvidere, laying off more than 1,300 workers. It moved production to a plant in Toluca, in central Mexico, upending the lives of generations of families dating back to the company’s 1965 roots in Illinois.
That plant, and others in the U.S., are being used as bargaining chips in Stellantis’s negotiations with the United Auto Workers (UAW), which has approved a strike authorization if no deal is reached by September 14. Workers involved with the plant believe that the company is holding the plant’s idle status as leverage. “They’re dangling that they can reopen the Belvidere plant if we give up this or that,” Elliston said. “And nobody wants to give up anything—we’ve given up enough!”
“In ongoing contract talks with the Big Three, the union has made Belvidere a centerpiece of its proposals to stop plant closures,” reads a UAW press release. “Those include the right to strike over shutdowns and a Working Family Protection Program that would keep product in the plants and workers on the job.”
snip
As Auto Workers Contract Talks Heat Up, Stellantis (global automaker giant) Threatens to Move South
Capital flight is playing a major role in the UAW negotiations, with U.S. plants at risk of losing work to Mexico being used as leverage.
https://prospect.org/labor/2023-09-07-auto-workers-contract-talks-stellantis-threatens-move-south/
Patricia Elliston, 54, was laid off two years ago after nearly a decade at the Stellantis auto assembly plant in Belvidere, Illinois, when the company cut the second shift. She took a transfer to Stellantis’s Mopar Parts Distribution Center in Michigan, where she rents a house and rooms with other autoworkers in the Detroit suburb of Warren. Elliston’s husband, a non-union Machinist on disability, remained in Belvidere, caring for his elderly mother. His father retired from what was then named Chrysler in 1999, after decades working as an electrician in the skills trade department.
“We were told that moving out here would only be temporary, and we’d have the option to come back to Belvidere,” Elliston said. “But now that they’ve idled the plant, we don’t know if we can come back.” Last year, Stellantis indefinitely shuttered its assembly plant in Belvidere, laying off more than 1,300 workers. It moved production to a plant in Toluca, in central Mexico, upending the lives of generations of families dating back to the company’s 1965 roots in Illinois.
That plant, and others in the U.S., are being used as bargaining chips in Stellantis’s negotiations with the United Auto Workers (UAW), which has approved a strike authorization if no deal is reached by September 14. Workers involved with the plant believe that the company is holding the plant’s idle status as leverage. “They’re dangling that they can reopen the Belvidere plant if we give up this or that,” Elliston said. “And nobody wants to give up anything—we’ve given up enough!”
“In ongoing contract talks with the Big Three, the union has made Belvidere a centerpiece of its proposals to stop plant closures,” reads a UAW press release. “Those include the right to strike over shutdowns and a Working Family Protection Program that would keep product in the plants and workers on the job.”
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September 8, 2023
How one employer used AI against workers even when the technology fell short
https://prospect.org/labor/2023-09-07-artificial-intelligence-union-buster-neda/
Earlier this year, the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) abruptly laid off its entire helpline staff. The announcement came just two weeks after the helpline workers voted to form a union, Helpline Associates United (HLAU). Workers were informed that they were being replaced by an artificial-intelligence chatbot named Tessa. NEDA, the largest nonprofit organization dedicated to providing support to people struggling with eating disorders, launched the helpline in 1999. The organization claimed that the layoffs were unrelated to the success of the union effort—a claim that the workers and the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the union representing them, categorically dismissed. Rather than having a phone helpline staffed by human workers, the association planned to run an online chat helpline operated exclusively by Tessa.
Helpline staff continued their work when NEDA did a soft launch of the bot in late May. But within days, major problems emerged. People shared stories on social media about their disturbing experiences with Tessa; in one case, it dispensed weight loss advice. But shortly before NEDA planned to entirely eliminate the phone helpline and transition to Tessa on June 1, the organization announced that it would shut down both the helpline and the chatbot. NEDA no longer offers any resources by phone or online chat. Many workers have major concerns about AI taking jobs from human employees. But in the case of NEDA, as soon as the organization concluded that the AI chatbot could not handle specific queries or situations, they shut down the helpline altogether rather than rehire their unionized staff—a move that hurt not only the staff members, but also the many callers they served. AI put a 21st-century twist on classic union-busting.
For Abbie Harper, a helpline volunteer since 2019 who eventually became a NEDA staff member, the combination of union-busting and eliminating resources for people with eating disorders was appalling. One of the biggest red flags for Harper was the inability of Tessa to pick up on language that indicated a user was suicidal or in danger of harming themselves. Eating disorders have the second-highest mortality rate of any mental illness; one-quarter of individuals with eating disorders will attempt suicide at some point in their lives. The decision to replace staff with the chatbot was especially galling, Harper said, because of the difficulty helpline staff faced in trying to convince NEDA to provide them with better training especially to handle situations with callers who expressed suicidal thoughts. NEDA knew this was an issue even for empathetic human staff members but still chose to replace them with a chatbot. “AI cannot provide empathy because it has no lived experience,” Harper says.
Other national organizations are attempting to fill the eating disorders resources gap, but meeting the need for treatment was a problem even before the NEDA helpline shut down. During the COVID-19 pandemic, eating disorders surged and wait times for treatment extended to months at a time. Allie Weiser, a licensed psychologist and helpline staff member at the National Alliance for Eating Disorders, said that her organization’s helpline has received a record number of calls this summer, though she could not definitively attribute the growth in calls to the shutdown of NEDA’s helpline. To her, the human element of the helpline is irreplaceable for the many callers who need support and treatment. “As humans we want to connect with other humans, and that’s how we feel heard and seen and understood,” Weiser says. “What creates a better chance of reaching out and getting help is talking to a human who understands and connects you to resources.”
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Artificial Intelligence Emerges as a Union-Buster
How one employer used AI against workers even when the technology fell short
https://prospect.org/labor/2023-09-07-artificial-intelligence-union-buster-neda/
Earlier this year, the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) abruptly laid off its entire helpline staff. The announcement came just two weeks after the helpline workers voted to form a union, Helpline Associates United (HLAU). Workers were informed that they were being replaced by an artificial-intelligence chatbot named Tessa. NEDA, the largest nonprofit organization dedicated to providing support to people struggling with eating disorders, launched the helpline in 1999. The organization claimed that the layoffs were unrelated to the success of the union effort—a claim that the workers and the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the union representing them, categorically dismissed. Rather than having a phone helpline staffed by human workers, the association planned to run an online chat helpline operated exclusively by Tessa.
Helpline staff continued their work when NEDA did a soft launch of the bot in late May. But within days, major problems emerged. People shared stories on social media about their disturbing experiences with Tessa; in one case, it dispensed weight loss advice. But shortly before NEDA planned to entirely eliminate the phone helpline and transition to Tessa on June 1, the organization announced that it would shut down both the helpline and the chatbot. NEDA no longer offers any resources by phone or online chat. Many workers have major concerns about AI taking jobs from human employees. But in the case of NEDA, as soon as the organization concluded that the AI chatbot could not handle specific queries or situations, they shut down the helpline altogether rather than rehire their unionized staff—a move that hurt not only the staff members, but also the many callers they served. AI put a 21st-century twist on classic union-busting.
For Abbie Harper, a helpline volunteer since 2019 who eventually became a NEDA staff member, the combination of union-busting and eliminating resources for people with eating disorders was appalling. One of the biggest red flags for Harper was the inability of Tessa to pick up on language that indicated a user was suicidal or in danger of harming themselves. Eating disorders have the second-highest mortality rate of any mental illness; one-quarter of individuals with eating disorders will attempt suicide at some point in their lives. The decision to replace staff with the chatbot was especially galling, Harper said, because of the difficulty helpline staff faced in trying to convince NEDA to provide them with better training especially to handle situations with callers who expressed suicidal thoughts. NEDA knew this was an issue even for empathetic human staff members but still chose to replace them with a chatbot. “AI cannot provide empathy because it has no lived experience,” Harper says.
Other national organizations are attempting to fill the eating disorders resources gap, but meeting the need for treatment was a problem even before the NEDA helpline shut down. During the COVID-19 pandemic, eating disorders surged and wait times for treatment extended to months at a time. Allie Weiser, a licensed psychologist and helpline staff member at the National Alliance for Eating Disorders, said that her organization’s helpline has received a record number of calls this summer, though she could not definitively attribute the growth in calls to the shutdown of NEDA’s helpline. To her, the human element of the helpline is irreplaceable for the many callers who need support and treatment. “As humans we want to connect with other humans, and that’s how we feel heard and seen and understood,” Weiser says. “What creates a better chance of reaching out and getting help is talking to a human who understands and connects you to resources.”
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