Reblogged
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“On April 11th, I made the first inspiration of pure nitrous oxide” — #onthisday in 1799, Humphry Davy became the first to experience #laughinggas (of which he perhaps became a little too fond). Read more in our essay by @MikeJayNet: https://publicdomainreview.org/product/oh-excellent-air-bag-under-the-influence-of-nitrous-oxide-1799-1920/ #OTD
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This is Freddie Oversteegen. She joined the Dutch Resistance in WWII when she was 14 years old. She, her sister Truus, and their friend Hannie spent years killing Nazis and Nazi collaborators.
Read more at https://www.history.com/articles/dutch-resistance-teenager-killed-nazis-freddie-oversteegen
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The most remarkable thing about antitrust (that no one talks about)
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE. More tour dates here.
It's hard to remember now, but for more than three years under Biden, it was possible to read the headlines every morning and feel excited that your government was taking big, decisive action to tame the corporate behemoths that rip you off, maim you on the job, and undermine our democracy.
The antitrust surge under Biden was and is a truly remarkable thing: a sustained, organized, effective government policy that supported the interests of the majority of people against the interests of a tiny cohort of ultra-wealthy wreckers and looters. According to political scientists, that antitrust surge should have been impossible. In 2014, a pair of political scientists from Northwestern and Princeton published their landmark study, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens":
The paper analyzes 1,779 US policy fights from 1981 to 2002, and conclude that the US only does things that regular people want if those are also things that rich people want:
Ordinary citizens… get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.
When ordinary people want something that rich people don't want, ordinary people lose. Even when 80% of us want something, we only get our way 43% of the time. This is antidemocratic in the most fundamental sense: rich minorities get their way at the expense of working people, nearly all the time.
And then there's antitrust. Ordinary people don't like having their wages stolen. They don't like having their rents jacked up by algorithmic collusion. They don't like having their air and water poisoned. They don't like being mangled or killed on the job. They don't like having to sign noncompetes that bar them from taking a better job if one opens up.
More to the point, working people are not made better off when stuff like this happens. On average, working people own either zero or nearly zero stocks, not even in a 401(k) retirement savings, because 40 years of wage stagnation and the near-abolition of employer based defined-benefits pensions has left most Americans with nearly no retirement savings (hence the panic over Trump and Musk's attempt to kill Social Security):
By contrast, the richest 10% own 94% of all the stocks held by Americans. Even if you, personally, don't want to be locked up by a noncompete or have your water poisoned by frackers, if you're in the top 10%, you probably benefit when this happens. After all, businesses cheat and maim because it's profitable, not because they're sadistic (they may be sadistic, or they may be depraved in their indifference to the harms they visit upon the rest of us, but the reason they do it is money):
Antitrust systematically attacks the sky-high monopoly rents extracted by the largest corporations and redistributes them to working people and small businesses, which, for the most part, are not listed on stock exchanges or traded over the counter. In other words, antitrust is a way to clobber the policy priorities favored by the wealthy in order to benefit the rest of us.
That means that the antitrust surge is amazing. It's one of those things that shouldn't exist at all. It defies political science. What's more, antitrust fervor precedes the Biden administration. Some of the Biden administration's most important antitrust cases (like the Google case) started under Trump. Some were even kicked off by far-right state attorneys general, like Texas's cartoonishly corrupt AG Ken Paxton, who led a coalition of nearly every AG in American in suing Facebook.
It's weird but as bad as things are, I keep feeling hopeful, and I've heard other people say the same thing. Maybe this is why.
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Samuel Delany reviews the first Star Wars movie, 1977, in Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy.
“In the film world of the present, the token woman, the token black, or what-have-you, is clearly propaganda, and even the people who are supposed to like that particular piece of it smile with rather more tightly pursed lips than is comfortable. In a science fiction film, however, the variety of human types should be as fascinating and as luminous in itself as the variety of color in the set designer’s paint box. Not to make use of tht variety, in all possible combinations, seems an imaginative failure of at least the same order as not coming up with as interesting sets as possible.”
How do recent Star Wars movies compare to the first one, along the matrices Delany identifies?
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What the heck, a full color GURPS book? In the ’90s? This seems bizarre. And for such a strange book! GURPS Goblins (1996) is…wild. It almost certainly isn’t what you think.
What we have here is an unflinching social satire of Edwardian London, circa 1830. Except, instead of English humans, everyone is a goblin. Except, they aren’t really goblins in the D&D sense. They’re…if you’re familiar with political cartoons of that era, or even in the Victorian period, the twisted figures whose physical traits so often visually depict their inner failings and moral decay? They’re that. Sort of like the ugliest of people crossed with Joe Dante’s gremlins. A city of millions of sentient deadly sins walking around, being the worst they can possibly be (and brought to a semblance of life through Guy Burwell’s grotesque illustrations).
Players, of course, take the role of goblins from the lowest class strata, the poor, the desperate, the criminal. The point of the game is to get a leg up. The introduction says, “The aim of every goblin should be to gain security and power with improved social level, faster than he degenerates through disease, age and the aforementioned maiming.” I should mention that the text is scathing, unflinching, strident and regularly very funny. I find it hard to find the correct words to convey my awe at this game, that in addition to pillorying Edwardian society of nearly two centuries ago, also somehow sees into the dark heart of 21st century life.
To wit: “The ruins and dungeons are far from uncharted — the only creature who never explores them is the landlord who rents them out.” I mean, damn. That’s some Ambrose Bierce shit right there.
Honestly, the goblins are kind of a red herring — remove their desperate parodying and you basically have an incredibly detailed source book for London in the 1830s, rife with poverty, disease, exploitation, crime and inequity. The goblinoid veneer makes it into something playable (though I would be surprised if something with this tenor found much of an audience in 1996) and brings the laughs, though I suspect they’d be the uncomfortable sort that issue when a gag hits too close to home.
A forgotten classic.
Reblogged pipedreamdragon
A Mermaid by John William Waterhouse (1900)
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Train Station (1971) in Bergen op Zoom, the Netherlands, by Cees Douma
Source: hetutrechtsarchief.nl
Reblogged
The most remarkable thing about antitrust (that no one talks about)
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE. More tour dates here.
It's hard to remember now, but for more than three years under Biden, it was possible to read the headlines every morning and feel excited that your government was taking big, decisive action to tame the corporate behemoths that rip you off, maim you on the job, and undermine our democracy.
The antitrust surge under Biden was and is a truly remarkable thing: a sustained, organized, effective government policy that supported the interests of the majority of people against the interests of a tiny cohort of ultra-wealthy wreckers and looters. According to political scientists, that antitrust surge should have been impossible. In 2014, a pair of political scientists from Northwestern and Princeton published their landmark study, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens":
The paper analyzes 1,779 US policy fights from 1981 to 2002, and conclude that the US only does things that regular people want if those are also things that rich people want:
Ordinary citizens… get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.
When ordinary people want something that rich people don't want, ordinary people lose. Even when 80% of us want something, we only get our way 43% of the time. This is antidemocratic in the most fundamental sense: rich minorities get their way at the expense of working people, nearly all the time.
And then there's antitrust. Ordinary people don't like having their wages stolen. They don't like having their rents jacked up by algorithmic collusion. They don't like having their air and water poisoned. They don't like being mangled or killed on the job. They don't like having to sign noncompetes that bar them from taking a better job if one opens up.
More to the point, working people are not made better off when stuff like this happens. On average, working people own either zero or nearly zero stocks, not even in a 401(k) retirement savings, because 40 years of wage stagnation and the near-abolition of employer based defined-benefits pensions has left most Americans with nearly no retirement savings (hence the panic over Trump and Musk's attempt to kill Social Security):
By contrast, the richest 10% own 94% of all the stocks held by Americans. Even if you, personally, don't want to be locked up by a noncompete or have your water poisoned by frackers, if you're in the top 10%, you probably benefit when this happens. After all, businesses cheat and maim because it's profitable, not because they're sadistic (they may be sadistic, or they may be depraved in their indifference to the harms they visit upon the rest of us, but the reason they do it is money):
Antitrust systematically attacks the sky-high monopoly rents extracted by the largest corporations and redistributes them to working people and small businesses, which, for the most part, are not listed on stock exchanges or traded over the counter. In other words, antitrust is a way to clobber the policy priorities favored by the wealthy in order to benefit the rest of us.
That means that the antitrust surge is amazing. It's one of those things that shouldn't exist at all. It defies political science. What's more, antitrust fervor precedes the Biden administration. Some of the Biden administration's most important antitrust cases (like the Google case) started under Trump. Some were even kicked off by far-right state attorneys general, like Texas's cartoonishly corrupt AG Ken Paxton, who led a coalition of nearly every AG in American in suing Facebook.
It's weird but as bad as things are, I keep feeling hopeful, and I've heard other people say the same thing. Maybe this is why.