dangerousmeta!

Politico: If Sanders does indeed turn out to be the Democrats’ Goldwater, then who will be their Reagan?

Bernie is heir to the New Deal progressive tradition: organized labor, universal public benefits, public investment and limits on concentrated corporate power. I find the term ‘socialist’ needlessly alarming to the rouge section of the electorate.

Sanders echoes the much more broadly shared—though hardly equally available—prosperity of the postwar decades, particularly 1948 to 1973, when productivity and ordinary workers’ compensation rose together. After Reagan, the New Democrats and Bill Clinton argued that accepting neoliberal settlement was the price of remaining nationally competitive. That outlook has defined the Democratic Party’s governing center ever since. Now the party wants the working class back—often without surrendering its comfort with big business and wealthy donors. That queasiness you feel - an example would be the recent Jeffries meeting with Kushner - those rumbles in your gut are real.

Bernie remains apart. His movement and the DSA are not the same thing. But both understand the fundamental difference: Rebuild working-class power, not merely recapture working-class votes. The moderates will snitch Bernie’s rhetoric, lip service his policies. Weigh candidates’ actions, not their words.

Today’s BLS report estimates that payrolls grew by 162,000 in August. That is welcome news and a genuine upside surprise: economists expected about 53,000. But “far above forecast” is not the same as historically extraordinary. Without a timeline, words such as “explosive” and “booming” turn a comparison with one prediction into a judgment about the entire labor market.

Comparisons with the Biden years need honesty too. The enormous gains in 2021 and much of 2022 were more significant because of the reopening of an economy shut down by a pandemic. But that cannot explain everything that followed: payroll employment was already above its pre-pandemic level by August 2022, and revised BLS figures show monthly gains averaging 216,000 in 2023 and 168,000 in 2024. Today’s “explosion” is below the first figure and almost identical to the second. It looks extraordinary only as contrast to the recent slump: the previous twelve months averaged just 31,000.

Remember that 162,000 is not a head count carved in stone, either. It is a preliminary survey estimate with a 90-percent confidence interval of roughly plus or minus 122,000. Of the net gain, 101,000 came from restaurants and bars and local-government education—the latter largely reversing a decline the month before.

None of this makes the report bad. It makes it a data point. A fact stripped of timeline, composition, and uncertainty does not stop being a fact.

It becomes sensational to whoever supplies the adjective.

That is the deeper weakness in so much reporting today: the absence of historical context. Without a recorded and referenced public memory, by what measure can we judge today’s news?

The Gloria Steinem post got me thinking. Every so often, I get to whip out an episode from my past in conversations. I listen to myself, and know that few believe my contentions. I’m more hesitant to do it than ever; my whitening hair and advancing wrinkles just add to the patronization. Every so often, it’s fun to insert some proofs. From left to right … myself (with hat), Al Unser, Sir Stirling Moss, and Bob Bondurant. This was the year before I started professionally covering the Santa Fe Concorso car show (2011). I took many photos of these three over the years, but never with myself included. I even worked with Sir Stirling directly to try to republish his “All But My Life” book. Using this photo here to test a feature on my reconstructed blog.

Don’t worry, Gloria, we’ll slap those manosphere bums around, don’t you twitch a finger. Rest now.

Gloria was an outsize figure in the 60’s/70’s as I grew up. I could link many obits here, but I’ll do something better. She rubbed elbows and influenced Barbara Boggs Sigmund, who ran for various political offices and ended up as my hometown’s mayor (That’s Princeton, NJ, of course). There’s no better way to eulogize Gloria than to show some of her influence. After 73’s ERA was achieved, women rose to significant power for a while; a golden time, now that I look back from today.

A fun fact: Barbara Sigmund was involved in so many things, long before her serious political career. Everyone rubbed elbows with her, myself included. It involved Christmas lights in an old washing machine in her front yard, not unlike Meow Wolf, as I recall. I digress. But the coolest thing is, she lived in the former Queenston (yes, there was a Queenston to match the Princeton and Kingston). And in what house did she live? A remnant of the old Evelyn College for Women.

True story.

But my long-winded point: Let’s get the Equal Rights Amendment ratified, shall we? No better way to honor Gloria, Barbara, and every other woman of our acquaintance. Didn’t know it wasn’t ratified? Read.

Don’t wait. Time to spool up drive-through voting and curbside voting. NOW.

The postal workers ain’t a-gonna save us. Why haven’t you already been gaming this out?

Open Culture: How Leonardo da Vinci’s Procrastination Contributed to His Creativity.

Oh, man. Been there, still do that. Too frequently. But personality is something to continue to construct throughout one’s life. Much better to be interesting, than be perfect. I prefer to call it character. Proof of beauty in imperfection: The oriental art of kintsugi. Broken ≠ useless or ugly.

Can We Still Govern (Substack): “Which stories about academia matter?“

Public education has been under attack by the Republicans since I was a boy in the ‘60s. Higher education hasn’t escaped the same opposition, but it’s never been as assaulted as it is today. This is categorized as a ‘must read’. And a great follow-up to yesterday’s post about authoritarianism/fascism.

Many important subjects here, but I’m focused on one in particular. Scroll down to the official ‘banned words list’ for governmental documents in that above article. You know what I’m going to pull out. The GOPAC memo of 1990, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control“. Those words changed the existing political messaging of the time, weaponizing it exponentially. The extreme language was aped by the Left, and is now the pocket change of every politician and all the media since. We hear/read them daily, even hourly. It was that powerful a shot over the bow. “Mechanism of control”, indeed.

So imagine what this new ‘banned words’ philosophy will do, going forward.

“Woman” and “Women” are on this list.

I am NOT kidding.

MAGA. Democratic Socialists. Notice something? I’ve been banging on about this for years. America’s political machinery has shifted so far right, we no longer recognize the relative normalcy of the 70’s, much less the Right-worshipped 50’s.

Only from an extreme right view could you call any of these Democrats “socialists.” Envision a tall mesa, cliffs on both sides. On the Left the cliff falls to Communism. On the Right, the cliff falls to ultranationalist Fascism.

We’re so close to falling off that rightward cliff. We need a good shove back to center - TRUE center.

Mentioned previously, Nixon considered Universal Basic Income. You see how far Right the Republicans have driven? Feel the breeze off that cliff.

For someone of my vintage, this modern world of ours is cloud cuckoo land. Truly. The fact that none of the older journalists who have reported through these changes are relating this fact, disturbs me greatly.

I love that this is noticed, being discussed and programmed against.

Personally, it was the long fight against acquiring a smartphone. I knew - knew - that switching from plain flip-phone to full smart capabilities, my life would become saturated. Oh, I tried creating boundaries. Smartphones are designed, services are programmed to break those permanently.

I wrote here in my 2011, “What I’ve learned from blogging” page, that our most compelling experiences happen away from the tech. God only knows how much more AI is going to distance us from healthy, unpredictable, uncomfortable and yet often beautifully rewarding realities …

We settled this a long, long time ago in the metacosm … you disclose. Clearly. Either up-front, or on each post. The Mommybloggers got roasted for this, back when. Used to be the leading voices, the community and the service provider would encourage best practice; who does so today? NY Times gift article.

I’m choosing five people, hopefully a few from the past, to kick the tires on what I’ve worked with an AI Bot to create. The search is amazing, everything verified. Let me know if you are interested. I’d love to have a couple of people from the original days poke around.

Say what you will about AI, but it is performing a miracle for ol’ dangerousmeta!

Converting old EE1, Zope/Python, WordPress, Movable Type, Statamic (my cursed obsession with trying every available system) to a friendly, readable, searchable static site is a success. It suggested PageFind for search, and now I have a truly useful full-blog search function. It’s building redirects so none of my other .blog, .rocks permalinks go dead. It even found the original Behind The Curtain site and background work files, including the participants I’d lost in the shuffle (as galleries disappeared in 2001, I removed the inactive ones. In retrospect, these are important historical markers. Restored.).

All archive contents are unchanged, except for design/format. Typos, programming glitches, preserved. I have the original MySQL databases for concrete proof. All email addresses of commenters are stripped, replaced with their blog URLs, if discoverable.

I’m extracting 1.5GB of files (750mb tarball) into a staging site to do a final test. I can’t wait for this to be online.

I let it summarize some paragraphs for me in “About” and “Weblog History”, I’ll have to rewrite those (terribly generic) with my own voice. But I am more than pleased.

I didn’t think I would ever get this all put together, much less in such a useful form.

As when I did the ‘insane thing’ and dove into working on ‘newfangled microcomputers’, or ‘whizzy video graphics’, or ‘writing on a web log’ … (note the antiquated space) … once again, I’m kicking the tires on new tech, AI, seeing what it is good for, and what it is not good for. I maintain, you can’t judge if you don’t torque it. My first reflex with every new technology is to see if I can break it. Take it to the limits.

YMMV. But you’ll have AI to thank for a usable DM! archive.

Who remembers Vertibird? I DO! I DO!

Thank you (insert preferred deity here). We are seeing multiple large thunderstorm cells, proper monsoonal activity with heavy rain and small hail, pass over the Frijoles fire area. After days of relentless heat, fire and smoke … reprieve? Guardedly optimistic.

Heading for Frijoles, yesterday. I observed multiple runs with DC10’s and MD-87s, another smaller jet, prop planes, helicopters. Choreographed full-on aerial assault. It was needed - no clouds in the morning or early afternoon, high heat, variable winds blowing towards populated areas. One could see fire intensifying by the minute. Then the assault started, and the smoke abated. Instead of rising in columns, flattened close to the landscape.

Thanks to air resources, we dodged a bullet yesterday. Thank you to the air crews and ground personnel. And all the firefighters.

Chance of rain/clouds over the fire area, 50% today. Let’s hope.

Excluding Micro.blog, Mastodon, Blue Sky, archival Twitter bits, dangerousmeta (all constructs) total up at 83,814 individual postings. Most prolific posting day, 66 entries. June 3, 2002: www.dangerousmeta.com/posts/02/…

Eclectic? You bet.

I’m in the process of reformatting all of dangerousmeta.com, dangerousmeta.rocks, and other postings to static searchable HTML, so I can break away from the obsolescence of PHP, blog constructs, etc.

Interesting revelations. In too many cases, I’ve recorded history that is no longer verifiable.

Enjoy a chuckle?

2014. Guardian.UK, “Facebook will lose 80% of users by 2017, say Princeton researchers.”

I have to give the Guardian kudos, though. They’ve maintained their permalink structure, whereas many others have not.

Frijoles fire has had no new perimeter since Friday night, with obvious growth that affects nearby communities. I feel this is objectively poor public fire intelligence: nearby residents are being shown an acreage number that plainly no longer describes the active footprint.

A mildly interesting circumstance. Due to smartphone cameras’ wider-angle lenses, my portrait clients now prefer me to use focal lengths shorter than standard ‘portrait’. No 85mm; 50mm and below. They like having their noses pulled out a bit, their faces lengthened.