Uncle Joe's Folksy Foolery

The New York Times did a deep dive into its thesaurus over the weekend, and came up burbling more euphemisms and excuses for Joe Biden's serial lying habit than I ever thought could be contained in just one little "think-piece."

Such infamous whoppers as Biden claiming personal involvement and even arrests in civil rights protests, his house once almost burning to the ground after a lightning strike, his going to college on a full scholarship and graduating at the top of his law school class, his theft of a British politician's hard-luck life story all get explained away by the Times and its sources. The lies are magically transformed into "embellishments," "exaggerations," "folksiness," "yarn-spinning," "grandfatherly," and "relatable story-telling."

Biden's apologists both inside and outside of the White House bizarrely cast his serial prevarications as proof of what a decent, honest man he truly is. What in lesser mortals might be diagnosed as a profound character flaw or a personality disorder becomes empathy gone wild in the president of the United States. Biden tells his self-aggrandizing lies purely out of selfless concern for, and solidarity with, the common man.

 “President Biden has brought honesty and integrity back to the Oval Office,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman. “Like he promised, he gives the American people the truth right from the shoulder and takes pride in being straight with the country about his agenda and his values; including by sharing life experiences that have shaped his outlook and that hardworking people relate to.”

The Times then reverts to formula, covering its own journalistic ass by allowing a contrarian ethicist to briefly weigh in and to actually utter the words "lies" and "falsehoods" as they pertain to Biden. However, this pseudo-balancing act comes only after several paragraphs of defensive bathos,  and only after the obligatory observation that Donald Trump is the undisputed grand champion of presidential lying. He set the bar conveniently low for Biden and for all presidents. Truth and lies - and their importance - now might as well be included in the doctrine of Unitary Executive Power, in which US presidents redefine not only the Constitution, but reality itself, bequeathing their pathologies to their successors and enshrining them as the "new normal" - or, if you will, Normalcy, which Calvin Coolidge effectively decreed would replace the word "normality" in the dictionary. 

Meanwhile, assuming that the Times is wrong, and that you actually do care about Biden's lies as well as about the possible blowback from his bellicose rhetoric, how can you tell when he is, in fact, lying?  Could he possibly be as much a chronic liar as, say, the stereotypical teenager?

Probably not, but there are a few "tells" to help those of you who think that Uncle Joe's folksy warning last week (to a roomful of billionaires with deep donor pockets) about the coming Armageddon could indicate a disturbing cross between Chicken Little and The Boy Who Cried Wolf. 

Whenever Biden moves his mouth, and intersperses a remark or an anecdote or a doomsday warning with the phrases "This is the God's honest truth," "I give you my word as a Biden, " No Joke!," "This Is Not Hyperbole" or "No Lie!" grab the salt shaker off the table pronto, and take it with the requisite grain or two.

The context and the settings in which he says stuff are also important clues. For example, if he reminisces about growing up among Puerto Ricans during a visit to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, your confabulation-detector should start buzzing right away.

This also applies to the luxury setting last week in which he recklessly sounded the alarm about nuclear Armageddon.  According to the press pool report of the private event, Biden meandered through his standard talking points before concluding with Putin:

We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis. Weve got a guy I know fairly well, he said of Putin. Hes not joking (my bold) when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is you might say significantly underperforming. I don't think there's any such thing as the ability to easily (use) a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon. I didnt realize how much serious damage the previous administration did to our foreign policy.

Pool listened to the remarks from a staircase next to the room where the event was taking place and could not see much. Looked like there were large art pieces on every wall around the room. We were ushered out at 7:53 as Sen. Peters took the mic. We came in as James Murdoch was introducing the president. There was a lectern set up but the President moved to the middle of the room.

So... is Biden's assertion that Putin is not "joking" a tacit acknowledgment that it takes a liar to know a liar? What's more, Putin did not so much directly threaten nuclear war in a speech last week as he observed that the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Japan at the end of World War II. Whether this should be interpreted as a veiled threat is up for debate.

It's telling that the press were crammed into a stairwell during the glitzy fundraiser and thus could see neither Biden's facial expression nor those of his audience. Were these wealthy people looking fidgety and bored as the president droned on and on with his standard stump speech? Did Biden sense this, and think he could get them to write bigger checks if he put a little unscripted folksy nuclear fear into the mix?

After all, thanks to the Citizens United ruling, unlimited dollars are weighted votes with a lot more power than the standard human vote. And billionaires are a pretty paranoid bunch to begin with. Just look as Jeff Bezos thinking he can escape the global catastrophes that obscene wealth has wrought by colonizing Mars. Just think about Mark Zuckerberg urging everyone to don one of his reality-denying headsets and join him in an alternate cartoon Metaverse. 

The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them. – Elena Gorokhova

Pity the Poor Congress-Critter

 The 535 high-net-worth Congressional servants of oligarchs, war profiteers and corporations are becoming very rattled by the growing number of threats being leveled against them by a very tiny subset of the electorate.

Two articles in this week's New York Times squarely point the finger of blame at the generic public itself, rather than at the Congress which is theoretically elected to represent the interests of the public.

 The first piece conveniently ignores this year's five-point dive in the already-rock bottom approval ratings and myriad justified reasons for anger against the legislative body, concentrating instead on people having racial and gender-based motives for the mostly verbal, but sometimes physical, threats. This has resulted in several members having to dig deep into their own pockets for security - beyond the $10,000 that they just allocated themselves for that purpose.

Even in the second article, in which the Times explores the "toxic relationship" between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, blame is once again deflected away from the petty and the powerful. and toward regular people. If Pelosi has called McCarthy a moron, among her other pithy insults,  and if McCarthy once quipped that he'd like to beat the Speaker over the head with her own gavel, then it's all the fault of the teeming masses. The paper quotes former Democratic Speaker Dick Gephardt as saying: 

“This disdain is really part and parcel of where we are in the country between the parties and between people. Congress is a reflection of the people. If the people are polarized and divided and hateful, then Congress is going to be the same.”

Gephardt, one of the original architects of the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s and now a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs and the private health insurance cartel - among other antisocial corporate entities - not only shows his own disdain for the electorate with that glib statement, he also pathologizes them.  He essentially claims that "the people" are so diseased that even two of the most powerful politicians on the entire planet are unable to withstand the malignancy of the lower orders. 

 It should thus come as no surprise that Gephardt has also successfully lobbied Congress to protect the patents of the profiteering pharmaceutical industry and block the manufacture of more affordable medicines for those horrible polarized people.

To delve into the rampant, pre-existing corruption that has long been an integral strand of the congressional DNA is obviously more than either Gephardt or the Paper of Record can bear to contemplate. They also have no interest in mentioning the studies which reveal that since the rich and powerful bankroll Congress with their often-dark money, Congress usually gives the rich and powerful whatever they want in the way of legislation and public policy. The exceptions seem to come only once every two or four or six years, at election time. A recent example of this truth is President Biden's own belated and obviously grudging approval of only some education debt forgiveness for only some student borrowers.

The recent kvetching from elites that our "democracy" is so suddenly under attack by a monolithic Trumpism is also disingenuous, given that the aforementioned studies (Gilen and Page) concluded nearly a decade ago that it is the elites themselves who endanger what passes for democracy with their outsize influence, especially with the recent Supreme Court decisions which bestow political speech rights upon the wealth of billionaires and corporations. How can democracy, or rule by the people, possibly be threatened when it already has devolved into an oligarchy? (Hint: it's predatory capitalism itself that is under threat - from a resurgent labor movement to climate activism to the independent journalism running rampant on the Internet despite their best efforts at censorship.)

It's funny how the definitions of "people" and "public" also keep changing according to the evolving needs of the ruling elites themselves. Of course, since everyday Americans (actually, our votes) are now enjoying one of those rare periodic bursts of minimal leverage, it is incumbent upon them to dose us with gaslight even as they allow the electorate their brief turn in the limelight. Their personal fear of violence and loss of power must be coupled with the instillation of fear of certain manufactured enemies of their own choosing.

This cycle, Republican elites are recycling the dog-whistled fear of immigrants and crime in the streets, accusing Democrats of wanting to abolish police departments and to let murderers roam free courtesy of modest bail reform agendas. Democratic elites, who had nearly half a century to codify abortion rights, warn the populace that Republicans want to kill women. These issues, manufactured and enhanced for our voting pleasure and incessantly broadcast in negative attack ads, conveniently blot out any mention of the inflation and the wealth and income inequality and the basic unaffordability of life itself that are foremost on the minds of people. We are voting to avoid something rather than to gain something. Fear is the only way they can get us to the polls next month.

Meanwhile, our politicians can so, so relate to you! These poor vulnerable souls are threatened with even worse things than we are being threatened with. Our rent may be too damned high, but just look at what they have to fork over for bodyguards! They're not threatened because they're corrupt, or because they won't give us nice things, like pandemic relief and a living wage law. According to the Times, they're threatened solely because they are targets of racism and misogyny. If you can't relate, for example, to the fear of Maine Republican Susan Collins when she had a storm window broken at her house in the wake of her vote for anti-choice justice Brett Kavanaugh, then who can you relate to?

After all, she is as human as you are, as human as Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is Black and Muslim and apparently is being attacked purely on the basis of her gender and skin color, and not for her support of Palestine.. Ditto for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who never met a creepy incel Twitter troll she wouldn't feistily engage with, and who considers voters who are justifiably angry over her retreat from Medicare For All legislation to be incipiently "violent" whenever they show up to protest at her district office.

By concentrating on the direct physical and even sometimes-armed physical confrontations with lawmakers, especially with women of color,  and expressly linking these threats to the January 6th Capitol riot, the Times is tacitly warning us to tone down our own legitimate anger at the people we vote to represent us and end up betraying us. You never know when your justifiably angry voice will become a trigger for the nut-job next door, or way across the country, to act out violently and even kill a politician.

But to show how terribly fair that this establishment rendering of a profound social problem is, the article reports that nearly a third of the threats are made by Republicans and almost one quarter are made by Democrats. This little nugget had the result of infuriating not a few party-loyal readers, who accused the Times of "both-siderism," and "false equivalency" - thereby confirming the elite claim that this nation's polarization emanates from the bottom up, that it is not a carefully nourished if not wholly manufactured Divide and Conquer technique and media narrative employed by the powerful to stay in power, ever since the dawn of what passes for civilization.

Given they have chosen to ignore the myriad reasons why citizens might confront or attack elected leaders, the Times measures the intensity of the threats by the dollars that the congress members spend on their own security. Liz Cheney, the neocon pro-war anti-Trump dynastic Republican, must be especially vulnerable, the article implies, because she's spent the most money of anyone in her party for her security detail. That apparently puts her in the same boat as Missouri Democrat Cori Bush, a Black progressive representative who once had to live her car after an eviction. Ditto for Senators Ted Cruz and Raphael Warnock, who have achieved a measure of collegiality and bipartisanship simply by virtue of having spent roughly equal amounts of money to protect their bodies from the ravening mob.

The Times concludes its article by linking the increasing threats with the near- fatal shootings of Democrat Gabrielle Giffords and Republican Steve Scalise in the years before Trump came to power. The paper does not mention that both of these assaults were committed by people with significant psychiatric issues.

The paper also somehow forgot to mention that Giffords was a staunch gun rights advocate before she got shot and changed her mind, and that Scalise voted against gun reform even after he nearly died from a bullet wound in the torso.

And, tellingly, no Democratic politician has yet spoken out against the recent veiled death threat made by Donald Trump against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. It must not fit the narrative, for some reason.

The ultimate inconvenient truth is that the bipartisan Congress has always enthusiastically rubber-stamped weapons sales and trillions of dollars for both direct and proxy wars, and has also approved violent economic sanctions against the poor people in authoritarian regimes that it wants to overthrow - all in the interests of "democracy." 

Since democracy is their buzzword for capitalism, I suppose we should at least give the elites some credit for veracity as they moan, all day and every day, that democracy is now under such unprecedented attack. Something has got to give as the rich no longer hide that they got that way by stealing from the poor, and that they despise and blame the poor for it.

So, it's hard out there for the average high-net-worth individual in Congress. They comprise a living buffer zone between the ultra-high-net worth individuals who bankroll them, and the low/no-net-worth individuals that they use as cover to install themselves in office every two or six years.

 Maybe if we had a multi-party or parliamentary system instead of a de facto House of Lords with two right wings, and they were actually held accountable even in the off-season, they wouldn't be feeling so damned vulnerable right now. 

New York Times Is A-Wastin'

 After enduring almost two weeks of "live updates" on the progress of Queen Elizabeth's corpse, we're now being subjected to the Paper of Record's gimmick of affixing time limits to most of its online articles. Before you click on a story, you're advised how many minutes it should take you to read it.

Taking Friday's digital homepage as an example, don't even bother clicking on a piece about Russian war crimes unless you have three minutes to spare out of your busy day. For those of you wanton enough to have an additional five minutes of time, you are then invited to take a gander at "the markets" having an anxiety attack about the return of trickle-down economics to the U.K.

But Donald Trump's legal woes? They are so rampant and the walls are closing in so fast, that you are allotted seven minutes, which is one whole minute more than the reading time that the Times devoted to the sudden death of celebrated writer Hilary Mantel. The trials and tribulations of actress Constance Wu, however, have been deemed deserving of more than double the time, at 15 minutes. Constance Wu times out at Number One on the Times time-sweepstakes homepage today.

Of course, the Gray Lady is only playing catch-up with myriad other click-bait sites that are starved both for eyeballs and for the lowering attention spans of reading-exhausted consumers of online content, piquantly known as "doom-scrollers" by the Times and other purveyors of doom and fear on the Internet.

Who gets to decide how much time it takes to read an article, anyway? I am forming a picture in my head of 10 or 12 Times employees assigned to the Daily Reading Test Desk. After everybody reports his or her time spent reading a piece, the results are then collated and averaged out and affixed right below the article, in lieu of a byline.

For a country sinking lower and lower in all kinds of metrics, ranging from democracy to human rights to education to health to life expectancy and beyond, a country where the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has just recommended anxiety screenings for all adults under age 65, the imposition of a reading-time challenge to our doom-scrolling habit seems a bit cruel, not to mention anxiety-inducing.

Then again, this is a country whose president just gratuitously announced the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, when at least 400 Americans are still dying from it every single day, and countless thousands or even millions more, world-wide, are suffering from long COVID. They love to count minutes. But mortality and morbidity? Who has the time for it?

Thus, in the grand scheme of things, my pet peeve with the timed-reading craze might seem silly. But it's all of a piece with the relentless rule of neoliberal capitalism. It's sending the subliminal message that you have only so much time to absorb news and information. You might be on an unpaid work break, and have to quickly decide which story you have time to read. Or you may be a deliberative reader who likes to savor and ponder and take your time over what you read, and who feels offended and judged. You may find the suggested reading times on articles to be an unnecessary distraction, or even a bad recurring dream of those timed school exams that you forgot to study for.

You may be so anxious trying to read the timed Times stories that you keep checking the clock after every paragraph, and then you waste more time when you can't find your place and you have to start all over again, checking and re-checking the clock and discovering that a whole half-hour has passed and you still have literally no idea of what you just read.

You may become so obsessed with timing yourself on the Times that you are failing to read carefully and critically and forgetting to question the anonymous sourcing of the story that claims Russian soldiers are raping children as young as four years old.

That seems to be the whole point, doesn't it? Abandon critical thinking and learn to swallow propaganda without a fuss, all the while competing in a race against time and against yourself, the only goal being to cross the finish line before the buzzer. You will feel smugly well-informed at the same time that you enjoy your status as an efficient user of precious time. You will get high for whole minutes at a time on the essential oil of stultifying neoliberal capitalism.

The suggested reading times that are now affixed to Times articles as important as climate change and the pandemic, and as inconsequential as the new cast of Saturday Night Live, seem to be all of a piece with the "surface reading" craze so trenchantly criticized by Robert T. Tally in his new pro-critique book, "For a Ruthless Campaign Against All That Exists."

His criticism is mostly leveled against academics who are choosing to ditch critical theory in college literature studies, in favor of faster, shallower reading of texts - that is, without delving too deeply and without questioning too much, and without running the risk of using one's own imagination to draw conclusions and form new interpretations  Tally writes:

"The critic's enemy is thus any who would attempt to limit that imagination, and in particular, who would undermine literature's capacity for or effectiveness in empowering the imagination. Critique therefore has a fundamentally political vocation: it is called to challenge the forces of the status quo, to oppose the tyranny of 'what is' and to seek out potential alternatives."

It goes for books and it should go for news outlets as well. The practice of the New York Times suddenly appending time limits to articles is a bit on the tyrannical side, wouldn't you say? Not only is the "Paper of Record" relentlessly broadcasting the ruling class's propaganda, it finds it necessary to wield an annoying supplementary cudgel to control and enforce our very ability to read, to know, and to think.

I don't care what they proclaim. There is just no way to fully comprehend a David Brooks or a Tom Friedman or a Paul Krugman column in just the four minutes allotted. For one thing, you'd never have time to click on all the embedded links to their sources to find out just which oligarchic think tank is paying that particular source. The rise in bile lasts at least four minutes before you're not even halfway through the essay.

Your manufactured ignorance as an anxious, hurry-up consumer of the digital word is their bliss. So resist! Take all the perusal time you need. Be self-indulgent, and reread whole paragraphs at your leisure, and at their peril. If needed, take a mental antacid break to ease any symptoms of neoliberal reflux disease, and then re-consume with abandon.

The only clock you'll ever need when reading the New York Times is the alarm kind in your brain that goes off only when you read slowly and carefully enough to sniff out the Gray Lady bullshit, whether it be of the fast-flowing or the constipated variety.

Biden's Dicey Cancer Moonshot

In vowing to "end cancer as we know it" within 25 years, President Biden expressed hope that his utopian medical vision will finally unite and rally all Americans. That's because the country's second leading cause of death affects Democrats and Republicans in roughly equal numbers. Are there any other kind of people besides Democrats and Republicans?

Biden and the courtiers of the corporate press are hoping you won't notice that his "public/private" Cancer Moonshot Initiative effectively puts the immediate interests of capitalist predators above the interests of the cancer patients of the future. Why else would he appoint the vice president of a troubled research lab called Ginkgo Bioworks to run the new research bureau (ARPA-H) at the National Institutes For Health (NIH)? Could it be because Master of the Universe and philanthrocapitalist Bill Gates owns a major stake in Ginkgo as well as enjoying a longstanding major financial "partnership" with the NIH itself? So far, nobody's saying. 

Actually, Gates was one of the first investors in Ginkgo, before Harry Sloan, a former CEO of MGM, took the youngish company public last year with one of those shady SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) public offerings - whereupon smaller, subsequent investors (not Gates, of course) lost a lot of money and are now suing the firm for fraud in a class-action lawsuit. The plaintiff calls it "a colossal scam" and the company "a Frankenstein mash-up of the worst frauds in the past 20 years." If you didn't read or hear about this particular scandal in any mainstream media account of the Biden announcement, it's because the mainstream media didn't mention it. As we all know, if reliable mainstream media sources don't mention something, then it must not exist. At least Google searches haven't suppressed it, yet.

Sloan himself sits on the Board of Directors at Gingko. Not a bad gig for a guy who got his start in Hollywood doing entertainment law.

As a matter of fact, Joe Biden's praise of his own cancer initiative and his choice to lead it are eerily reminiscent of the time he got scammed into praising Elizabeth Holmes and her Theranos lab. You may remember that Holmes hoodwinked politicians and deep-pocketed investors alike with her outlandish claim she'd invented an i-Pod sized device that could analyze just one single drop of blood and diagnose a whole panoply of diseases. Here's what Biden gushed at his Kennedy Center event on Monday:

Imagine a simple blood test during an annual physical that could detect cancer early, where the chance of a cure are best.

Imagine getting a simple shot instead of a grueling chemo or getting a pill from a local pharmacy instead of invasive treatments and long hospital stays.

Imagine treatments beyond cancer. Bold approaches to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity, something Vice President Harris is laser — laser-focused on.

Imagine if more than 800 rural hospitals weren't at risk of closure  because they are "underperforming." Imagine if a recent study hadn't shown that cancer patients living in 160 poor counties weren't dying at 20 times the rate of those in better-off counties. Imagine if there was government-run single payer health insurance. Imagine if Joe Biden hadn't forgotten to implement a public health insurance option the minute he was elected president. Imagine if nobody called you a divisive unicorn whenever you called for a better, more equitable world.

  Meanwhile, I didn't mean to imply that Dr. Renee Wegrzyn herself is an unqualified fraudster like Elizabeth Holmes. In fact, her credentials seem impeccable - a Ph.D. in applied biology as well as previous revolving-door stints at DARPA, the government's Defense Advanced Research Agency and the Intelligence Advanced Research  Projects Agency Activity in the field of biosecurity. It's her current employer and its shadowy funding and shadowy research that deserve more scrutiny. Not that DARPA doesn't deserve a lot more scrutiny itself, come to think of it. 

Gingko's website does have a very Frankenstein-ish vibe, bragging that its aim is to "keep biology weird" by doing things like manufacturing its own cells and DNA. I can see why Bill Gates, who's been described as a "bio-predator" by author and activist Vandana Shiva for his crusade to data-mine plant DNA and alter seeds and patent them, thereby putting small subsistence farmers of the world out of business, is into proprietary human genetic engineering. It's just a hop, skip and a jump from the plant to the animal kingdom and all the glorious patents to be had by those in the know.

Coincidentally, US Bancorp of Delaware (Biden's home state) just  purchased almost 250,000 shares of Ginkgo stock.

But even the MIT Technology Review people have their doubts about the company and its CEO, Jason Kelly, who actually does sound like a clone of Elizabeth Holmes. Reporter Antonio Regolado writes,

Given Kelly’s spiel, it is surprising that 13 years after it was founded, Ginkgo can’t name a single significant product that is manufactured and sold using its organisms. To the company’s fans, that’s no problem. They say Ginkgo embodies the biggest trends in DNA science and surely will become the Intel, Microsoft, or Amazon of biology. Kelly has compared Ginkgo to all three. To skeptics, however, Ginkgo is a company with modest scientific achievements and little revenue, and its greatest talents lie in winning glowing press coverage and raising money.

Thanks a lot, Biden!

Tellingly, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts was absent from the elite scrum at the Cancer Moonshot fest at the Kennedy Center. She recently launched an investigation and issued a scathing report on the "SPAC Hack" empire from which Gingko has achieved its dubious $15 billion valuation based upon zero accomplishments. Warren is sponsoring legislation which would sew up the loopholes that allow SPACs to make outlandish claims that enrich people like Bill Gates while bilking "everyday investors."